Show Me a Hero Page 3

  Byrd knew that his venture must be as far as possible from that sort of stunt, yet it had to capture public attention in the same way: it must make headlines. He determined to be the first man to fly to the North Pole. Today flying over the Pole is so commonplace it does not cause you to look away from the in-flight movie to glance at the void below, but then it represented the ultimate destination, the frozen summit of the world. The two Poles were the most inaccessible spots on earth. A flight to the North and back lay at the extreme edge of aeronautical technology. A historic feat, it was charged with as great a symbolism as, decades later, Man’s first landing on the moon. No question, if Byrd succeeded in getting there he would return a hero.

  Very soon after hitting upon the idea Byrd realised the need to conceal it from possible sponsors. The motivation would be seen as personal and vainglorious and his objective must be masked behind a different plan. He was characteristically pragmatic in the way he approached the new project. To obtain private backing he needed first of all to improve the strength of his hand; only with good cards could he make a pitch for funds. Among the contacts he’d met through old Admiral Peary was Captain Bartlett, who had commanded Peary’s supply ship and subsequently sailed Naval vessels to the Arctic on survey expeditions. To him Byrd outlined his scheme, and did so with a becoming modesty toward the older and more experienced man. He was seeking advice, he explained, tentatively suggesting collaboration in an expedition. They would join forces to sail as far north as possible up the east coast of Canada until the ice halted their progress. From that point they would use the two aircraft they brought with them to fly probes into the two million square miles of unexplored frozen ocean lying to the north-west in search of unknown lands to claim for the US, together with all they might contain.

  Bartlett had acquired a taste for Arctic explorations from his expeditions with Peary, and the idea of blank on the map and an unknown country waiting to be discovered touches a singular spring in the human heart. He was immediately enthused by Byrd’s project. He stood in good odour with the Navy and said he knew where he could get hold of a ship; Byrd showed more confidence than he felt in claiming that he could obtain aircraft from the same service. They began at once to refine their plan. As a team the two were credible. Bartlett’s track record combined with Byrd’s knowledge of flying in Nova Scotia furnished them with the necessary experience. By approaching the new Naval Secretary – no longer the man who had denied Byrd earlier – they stood a good chance of obtaining a ship and aeroplanes for free. What they didn’t have was money.

  Edsel Ford’s office did not much resemble a place of work but looked more like the smoking room of a gentleman’s club – except that there was a strict No Smoking rule throughout the premises. This impression of ease and comfort was rudely shattered when the first-time visitor glanced from the windows, which looked out over the uniform roofs of the River Rouge assembly plant which stretched in parallel lines into the smoke-hazed industrial wilderness of downtown Detroit. The prospect was unmatched in its drabness and ugliness, but it was said that when Edsel’s father Henry looked at it he did not see the view but only the garden shed behind the house in Bagley Avenue where he’d built his first ‘quadricycle’ in 1896.

  Edsel, a lean-faced dark-haired man of thirty-two, sat at the big library table where he held his meetings, which was spread with an open map, listening to his visitor Richard Byrd. It was rare for a stranger to penetrate this sanctum but Byrd’s letter had caused Edsel to receive him with curiosity and interest – as Byrd had been confident that it would. He’d done his research carefully and prepared his pitch to the known nature of the man and his circumstances. And Edsel’s circumstances were blessed. The company started by his father at the turn of the century was now producing more than half of America’s motor vehicles and had factories spread across the world. Ford had revolutionised the whole process of manufacture by the invention of the assembly line. In 1913 it had taken fourteen hours to assemble a car, one year later it took ninety-five minutes. By now in 1925 Ford was turning out a car every ten seconds across the globe. One in seven Americans owned a car; in this year alone twenty million new autos were registered in the US, three-quarters of them bought on the instalment plan. There were more cars in New York than all of Europe, and every other car in the world was a Ford. As a result of this demand Ford’s resources were larger than those of most countries. It owned coal and iron mines, forests, glass-making and steel plants, a railroad, a fleet of cargo ships and an immense rubber plantation in Brazil – all in order to control the supply and transportation of its raw materials; the privately owned corporation governed the entire cycle of manufacture from concept to finished product and had a surplus balance of $700 million ($8 billion in today’s money).

  Edsel had become president of this stupendous kingdom only five years earlier, though he did not rule it absolutely, for Dad still came in to the plant every day. There were sometimes problems with such proximity. Edsel was industrious and capable, but to be born the son of a self-made millionaire, genius and living legend imposes a particular stress upon the psyche; the junior personality must struggle to make its mark.

  Byrd’s pitch was well tuned for his potential sponsor, and he opened up to him a vista Edsel would not have stumbled upon himself. He spoke of the vast unknown, that gigantic two million square mile slab of unexplored territory which lay adjacent to North America and capped the globe in white. This frozen void might contain new lands, even an undiscovered continent, and if it did surely this must be claimed for the US. There was a strategic argument for possessing such adjacent territory as well as commercial. Who knew what gold, minerals and energy deposits might lie buried there? And was that enormous area all frozen. Or might volcanoes exist that warmed the ocean, permitting exposed soil and vegetation? Was life possible in some places? Could there be animal or even near-human creatures which, cut off from the rest of the world for millenia by endless plains of broken ice, had somehow adapted to the hostility of their environment to survive? The unknown is a bewitching concept, for its possibilities are boundless.

  Byrd was a skilful salesman and his project was fitting for the times. Prosperity and optimism oxygenated the air that people breathed, and they enjoyed a higher standard of living than any populace had ever known. They shared a belief that tomorrow would be even better and the future was American. Byrd was a convincing persuader and his manner with Edsel, respectful without being deferential, was well judged. He spoke as man to man, not as a supplicant. Explaining his and Bartlett’s plans, he claimed he’d secured a ship for the expedition (which stretched the truth, though Bartlett had identified one) and that he was promised three aircraft by the Navy (which was an outright lie), but he knew how to paint a dream and make it live and the dream he painted held allure for Edsel. The idea of ‘new lands’ appealed to the spirit of monopolistic acquisition which informed the age. He, like all Americans, had pride in his country, he rejoiced in its can-do ethos; this was a time when patriotism was not a dirty word. Edsel saw honour in Byrd’s plans: prestige for the nation, for the Ford Corporation – not least for himself. So what did Byrd want from him, he asked.

  Hard cash was the answer. Byrd had the props and cast for the production, what he needed was money to mount the show. He could have asked the whole amount he required from Edsel and probably obtained it. In his later writings he is frank about the reason he did not; it would mean sharing control of the expedition with him. Instead he wanted several patrons, all of them men of wealth and influence who would remain his associates in the future. He knew that in a mission like this there could be only one commander. He obtained a contribution of $15,000 from Edsel Ford and hurried back to New York where, a few days later, he acquired a similar sum from John D. Rockefeller, Jnr.

  Byrd was not a man who showed his emotions; he possessed a frequently off-putting aloofness and reserve. On the journey home no doubt he sat quietly in the railcar, dignified and, in appearance, calm. Ye
t surely he must have been brimming over with anticipation and too excited to read the newspaper he held, for his thoughts were soaring in the Arctic. He had every reason to rejoice for he was on his way to the Pole. But the triumph and certainty he felt did not last for long. Only a few days after getting home he received the news that he was not the only contestant in a flight to the North Pole, for another man was planning to fly there before him. He had a rival.

  2.

  CUE THE OLD CONTENDER

  Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy, was Scott Fitzgerald’s claim, which forms the epigraph to this book. I intend to run a true story before you which demonstrates the inevitability of this maxim, and the fatal effects upon that hero and those around him. I wish to show you these events rather than merely relate them and, just now, the device that best serves is to present the tale as a stage play we are watching from the stalls.

  Later, when the action shifts to the Arctic, involving scenes and locations hard to accommodate on stage, we will be obliged to adopt the movie form to convey it. But, at present, the movie form has a particular disadvantage as a medium for the story. Unlike a play, a film provides no intervals during which the audience can gather in the crush bar, where – after struggling to obtain drinks – they can discuss the characters, analyse the drama they are watching and speculate on the future development of the plot. And this tragedy merits analysis. Its dynamics are ambition, chivalry, betrayal, the Devil’s compact, the price of fame… and these are the strands of eternal myth.

  So, to the play. In Scene One the Hero has been introduced on stage and stated his intent. Now the audience returns to their seats, the house lights go down and the rustle of conversation in the auditorium fades to silence as the curtain rises at the start of Scene Two…

  The setting we are looking at is the cabin interior of a passenger liner. The wood panelling on the walls is decorated with Art Deco designs and light fittings, the overall tone is sepia. The living space is rather cramped, it would not do for a couple, and while we are taking in its furnishing and period details we realise a little queasily that it is slowly tilting askew. The scene we’re watching is slanting at an angle, for the ship we’re aboard is at sea. The only figure in sight is that of a grizzled oldster flat on his back on the floor. He’s naked to the waist and below that in grey long johns. Hands clasped behind his head, abruptly he hinges at the waist to sit upright, then lie back. Now he does so again… and again… and again… and again… he’s engaged in doing 500 sit-ups without pause on the slow heave of the cabin’s floor. He has performed the same ritual each morning of the six-day crossing, then followed it by striding for an hour up and down the deserted length of the promenade deck before permitting himself coffee and a frugal breakfast in the dining room. He is one tough disciplined old man.

  The workout takes him seventeen minutes to complete and by its end he’s breathing deeply but still evenly, though there’s a faint sheen of sweat across his shoulders where the sinews show like cords beneath the leathery skin. Today he does not follow with a hike on the promenade deck; this is the morning of the liner’s arrival in New York and 500 squats are enough to set up Roald Amundsen for the hassle he knows awaits him there. Still stripped to the waist, he shaves at the cabin’s basin where, as the cut-throat razor slices soap from his cheeks in broad firm strokes, the mirror reveals a seamed face weathered to the colour and texture of ancient wood, with a nose like a falcon’s beak jutted above the curled flourish of an imperial moustache.

  He is obliged to put on a robe and walk a few paces down the corridor to shower; only six of the ship’s staterooms possess bathrooms en suite and his is not one of them. The Drottningholm is not the largest, the fastest or most glamorous of the liners plying the transatlantic crossing, but she has charm together with a palm court where an orchestra plays in the afternoons, and a certain elegance. Passengers who sail in her – almost all of them Scandinavian or of Scandinavian origin – tend to stay faithful to the ship. ‘Like a mellow old country inn’, somebody described her to Amundsen.

  However, it was not this but a more pragmatic reason which made him choose the Drottningholm for his crossing. Following Congress’s Emergency Quota Act, which cut off the unrestricted flow of immigrants into the US, the liner had been refitted to suit the changing times. Steerage class was eliminated together with third and the ship rebranded as a ‘Cabin Class Liner’. And therein lies the motive for Amundsen’s choice; if he had sailed on the Mauretania or the France he would have been inexorably obliged to go first class. On the Drottningholm he can travel more cheaply without looking cheap on arrival in New York. There will be photographers and reporters at the pier, some may have come to photograph or interview him. That is, if Mr Keedick had done any sort of job for the 25 per cent he was getting on this venture to New York.

  Amundsen has never met Lee Keedick of Keedick Associates Inc., who have set up his coming lecture tour of twenty-five American cities. Arrangements were made by letter, and in the course of the correspondence Mr Keedick was frank in his appraisal of the tour’s success. Amundsen’s credentials as a speaker were excellent, the very best, Mr Keedick assured him, and the subject matter of the proposed talks was both thrilling and inspiring – he himself was frankly awed by the scale of Amundsen’s accomplishments – but there was… no, not a problem, Mr Keedick had been careful to avoid that word, he had described it as ‘a reality we’ve got to take on board’, namely the fact that these triumphs had taken place fifteen or more years ago. In the nicest possible way Mr Keedick hinted at an eternal truth: human memory is short. And perhaps especially so today in the Roaring Twenties when the movies, jazz, dancing and petting offer numerous on-the-spot alternatives to sitting on a hard chair listening to a guttural Nordic pundit droning on for one and a half hours about the past with not a hope in hell of a drink before or after.

  While dressing in his cabin Amundsen feels the vibration of the ship’s turbines slow to a pulse as the Drottningholm reduces speed on entering the Verrazano Narrows. His suitcases are already packed; he insisted on doing so himself, but when the steward comes to take them he tips him $5 for his services during the crossing. Tugs, lumber barges, sandscows and tramp steamers crowd the water. Seagulls wheel and cry above the shipping. The Drottningholm’s siren salutes the Statue of Liberty with a double hoot and the liner slides into relief against the pinnacles and towers of the Manhattan skyline. Its turbines disengage and tugs take control of the ship, shoving it sideways through a slick of splintered crates and rotting vegetables, cans and tide-wrack to butt the vessel alongside Pier 97, with its Customs Shed and quay thronged with a happy crowd to welcome the arriving passengers. Amundsen squares his shoulders, draws in a deep breath of hot polluted air, puts on his bowler hat and marches down the gangway into America. The year is 1924.

  This, he plans, will be his last adventure; the final expedition to redeem his career. Judged by any standard it is quite some career already. He was twenty-five and mate of the Belgica, the first ship to winter in the Antarctic, when she was trapped in the ice for thirteen months while the entire crew became incapacitated by scurvy and two of them went mad. Thirty-one when, oppressed by debt and hounded by creditors, he’d severed his ship’s mooring cable with an axe, slipped out of harbour by night to escape them, and sailed to navigate the North-West Passage around the top of Canada to the Pacific – a voyage men had been attempting, failing, and dying to accomplish for 400 years. But his ambition since adolescence had always been the North Pole. In 1907 he began to set up an expedition to achieve it, borrowing a ship from his mentor Fridtjof Nansen, but his plans were thwarted when in September 1909 he learned that Peary had reached the Pole, claiming it for America. It was a bitter blow, for in that instant Amundsen’s projected book and lecture tour about the journey – and with them any hope of paying off his debts – all went for naught. There was no prize for coming second. Instead, Amundsen decided to go south. He told no one except his brother. Not his backers
, not the ship’s crew, not even Nansen – who later would see it as a betrayal, for he’d nurtured the same dream himself. There was no time for Amundsen to convince them of the rightness of his plan and obtain their agreement; the English explorer Captain Scott had already set out on an expedition with the same aim, to be the first to reach that yet unconquered Pole. Amundsen reached it one month ahead of Scott, winning the prize for Norway, though killing and eating his dogs along the way as they became redundant to pull the sledges with their diminishing loads. His action was pragmatic and necessary but it gained him a bad press afterward, particularly in England where he was branded a callous unsporting foreigner, a rotter. Nevertheless he was the first to get there. But Amundsen’s triumph was eclipsed by the heroic tale of Scott and his party’s death on their return journey from the Pole. When he learned of their stirring end Amundsen’s dismayed reaction was, ‘He’s won!’ And he was correct, for it was Scott’s story which gripped the heart and became history, not his own.