Antarctica: A Biography by David Day

Author:David Day [Day, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Science, Geography, Adventure, Biography
ISBN: 9781741669084
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-07-31T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

‘To people the land’

1939–1941

As the beginning of 1939 saw the world sliding inexorably toward the abyss of another widespread war, officials in Washington and Canberra were beginning to put the colonisation of the Antarctic on their national agendas. While Sir Douglas Mawson was urging his government to support a permanent base in the Australian Antarctic Territory, there were proposals in Washington for the United States to do likewise, but on a much larger scale.

For the past decade, President Roosevelt had taken a close interest in the Antarctic activities of his explorer friend, Richard Byrd. He was keen to establish a basis for the formal annexation by the United States of those parts of the continent that had been discovered or explored by Americans. Although there had long been calls for this in Congress and elsewhere, the increasing Antarctic activities of Nazi Germany and Japan finally provided the compelling strategic reason for the United States to have an Antarctic presence of its own. The last continent to be occupied by humans was about to enter a dramatic new era.

The Interior Department official and former Byrd expeditioner Richard Black had in May 1938 proposed a limited American expedition to the region east of the Ross Dependency. However, the rising crescendo of activities by rival claimants to the continent prompted Roosevelt to propose, in early 1939, a much grander scheme. Rather than a small, possibly private expedition, Roosevelt wanted it to be organised jointly by the Departments of State, War, the Navy and the Interior.

Whereas Black had recommended landing a few men with a dog sledge, later suggesting that the expedition might also include an old aircraft, Roosevelt wanted two ships to establish bases on opposite sides of the continent. One party would be based at Byrd’s Little America and the other on the Enderby coast, to the south of South Africa, where American explorer Lincoln Ellsworth was then operating. Roosevelt proposed that the two bases could be evacuated each winter and reoccupied the following summer.

To Roosevelt, this occupation would have seemed as close to permanent as the Antarctic would allow. He was certainly aware that issuing executive orders and doing occasional surveys of the coastline and flights over the interior, as the British had done, would not suffice to ensure ‘international recognition of American jurisdiction’. Anxious to press on with the expedition, Roosevelt instructed the State Department to consult with Byrd and Ellsworth about the likely annual cost of his plan.1

At the time, Ellsworth was still in the Antarctic, which meant that Byrd was in the box seat to receive any government funding that might be in the offing. When State Department official Hugh Cumming went with the department’s geographer, Samuel Boggs, to Byrd’s Boston home in January 1939 bearing a letter from Roosevelt, the explorer was quick to seize the opportunity. Rather than just advising the officials on the likely cost, Byrd offered to abandon the private expedition he was planning and lead a government one instead. He proposed that

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