The entry calls the radio the hardest instrument at the Advance Base and the only one Little America could read. This piece follows that instrument through the winter: what it was, how often it was used, what went through it to the outside world, and what went through it between the hut and the camp when the man at the key could barely turn the crank.

The set

The hut’s radio ran off a small petrol engine that drove a generator, and that engine was the first of the two things that poisoned its operator. In the description of the station that the Christian Science Monitor printed in May 1934 from the expedition’s plans, “a gasoline motor generates electricity for radio,” and among the daily chores is “keep rime clear of generator.” Murphy’s account in October adds the routine: to start the engine Byrd “had to thaw it out near the stove and then, because of the dangerous fumes, drag it into the tunnel.” The exhaust was known to be a hazard from the start, and the tunnel was the answer; on 17 June, when he cut a conversation short because he felt “rocky,” the explanation he gave was that “the motor supplying electric power for the radio was throwing off fumes.”

Behind the main set was an emergency set, the kind the trail parties carried, powered by a generator turned by hand. When “a pin in the magneto drive shaft was sheared off in the engine,” Byrd fell back on it, “cranking with one hand and keying his transmitter with the other.” After the rescue, Poulter’s party used the same set: “a small trail set used for communication must be cranked and many messages on expedition business have to be passed,” so that “radio conversations with the advance base, 123 miles to the south, are still limited.” Waite, who was the operator on the third tractor trip, sent his first word from the hut on Byrd’s receiver, then went back to the shack “to work on the hand-cranked generator which Admiral Byrd has been using for communications since the gasoline generator failed some time ago.”

Byrd had been “coached in radio communication” before he went, and was candid about the result: “I am no radio operator, so the radio will probably fail.” He worked in Morse. The dispatches speak of him “at the telegraph key” and of messages he “slowly tapped out.”

The schedule

How often the hut and the camp talked depends on who was asked and when. In mid April Little America reported Byrd “in daily radio communication.” The expedition’s dispatch of 9 July speaks of “the bi-weekly radio schedules with the advance base.” Byrd’s own figure, given to Murphy in October, is the one to trust for the winter: “Three times a week I was in touch by radio with Little America and received reports of expedition affairs and, occasionally, news of the outside world.” The schedules had fixed times; on 10 August the tractor party “missed the schedule” at 7.45 in the evening and the camp “called them, without response.”

What went through the schedules, apart from the weather, was the running of the expedition. Byrd kept command by radio. At the end of April he “instructed Dr. Poulter to have full resources ready for an early spring start”; on 8 May he was “perfecting plans for spring operations”; on 15 June he “conferred with Dr. Poulter by radio on his plans for the spring exploration programme”; on 26 June he announced “the broad outline of the programme for geographical exploration and scientific research which the expedition will attempt during the spring and summer months.” On 10 May, the eighth anniversary of his North Pole flight, the camp cleared the mess hall, set up a microphone, sang “Anchors Aweigh” to a collapsible organ, and each man “passed before the microphone, gave his name and voiced greetings to Byrd,” a hundred miles away at his key.

The broadcasts

The expedition also talked to America. The Columbia Broadcasting System carried a weekly two-way programme from Little America, and Byrd’s messages were part of it even from the hut. On 31 March Columbia presented him, by proxy, with a medal “for outstanding service to radio broadcasting.” On 15 April the camp broadcast to England and Byrd’s contribution was the fifteen words about tranquillity. On 30 June there was a special programme for the National Education Association’s convention in Washington: the president of the association opened it from the Washington Auditorium, the controls were switched to Little America, and “a message from Admiral Byrd in his lonely advance base” was read “by Charles J. V. Murphy, expedition communications officer,” before Poulter spoke and Captain Innes-Taylor described the base. For the Independence Day broadcast on 4 July, the arrangement was that Byrd “will flash a signal to Independence Hall,” where the engineers of a Philadelphia station had “arranged to ‘feed’ the electrical impulse to a hammer which will strike the Liberty Bell.” That was the fortnight in which, by his own later account, he had been counting his time in minutes.

The broadcasts were Murphy’s, and so were the dispatches that went out under the Little America dateline to the newspapers. Murphy’s position in the story is therefore a double one. He was the man who turned Byrd’s messages into the news the world read, in which all was well; and he was the man at Little America who, as he wrote in October, “became suspicious and kept hammering at him for a report on his health.”

The silence

The silence began in the second week of July. On 19 July Little America announced that Byrd had “re-established radio contact … after a nine days’ silence, due to a broken radio set.” The United Press’s later summary gives different dates, “lost on July 20 and finally restored on July 27, when the Admiral wirelessed saying that his receiver was not functioning,” and the Associated Press on 23 July said the main set had been “out of commission for several days” and that he was using “a set cranked by hand.” Whatever the exact dates, the camp knew in July that the hut’s main set was dead, that its operator was cranking a generator by hand to reach them, and that in the conversation of 20 July he had mentioned “a bad arm” without saying what was wrong with it.

Murphy’s October account says what the silence was like from inside the hut: “Sometimes he lacked the strength to crank the hand generator and at other times the set, with which he was unfamiliar, gave him much difficulty. He dreaded losing contact with us for fear that his silence would reveal his distress. Sometimes, he said, he could hear Little America calling when he could not reply.” And it says what went through the set when he could crank it: “without giving our camp the slightest indication of his distress, he managed to clear several messages to dietetic authorities in the United States, obtaining information about foods likely to yield the most benefit.” The channel that was supposed to carry the station’s data carried, in July, a man’s questions about what he could keep down, addressed past the camp to specialists in America, and the camp passed them on.

The night of 10 August

The Associated Press’s account of the radio room on the night the third tractor party reached the hut is the best record of what a schedule was. At 3.45 in the afternoon the party reported from eighty-one miles. At 7.45 they did not come up, and the camp called and got nothing. At eight o’clock Little America broadcast blind: “They are at 81. They are at 81. If nothing stops them, if they can keep up their present rate of progress, they may be there at midnight. Keep the light burning.” At 11.45 Dyer called again. “The men in the radio room could hear programs broadcast in the United States and elsewhere, but nothing from the men 123 miles away. Midnight dragged by and Dyer kept on trying. At 12.15 Dyer suddenly exclaimed, ‘There he comes!’” It was Waite, on Byrd’s receiver. “Somebody in the radio room said, ‘Thank God!’” The party had seen the light on the pole from ten miles and had driven straight for it, which is why they had missed the schedule.

Then Byrd took the key, and the sending itself became the news: “‘Tell my friends not to worry,’ was the message he slowly tapped out.”

Reading the hand

Three people at Little America are on record about what the winter’s messages had meant. Murphy suspected and could not prove, and in October asked Byrd why, in July, he had let the first tractor party turn back “in compliance with his instructions” without telling them his state. “‘How could I?’ he asked. ‘Would you?’” Poulter, six days after reaching the hut, radioed: “As I think back I see things in his messages that were put there to keep us from realizing his condition, fearing that the trip in an attempt to reach him would risk the lives of others.” And Byrd himself, asked by the Australian press in October to describe the winter, gave the account the camp had not had: “Unknown to me I was gradually being poisoned by the fumes from the kerosene stove … I was all but helpless. The first two weeks of June were really hell.”

The messages themselves survive. The expedition’s papers at Ohio State University hold, in Box 148 of the second expedition’s records, a folder of “Advance Base, radiograms: 1934,” and beside it the folders for “Advance Base, rescue of Byrd: 1934” and for the message Byrd sent his wife before he went. They were not consulted for this entry, which is built on what the newspapers printed of them at the time; whoever reads them will be able to set the words against the dates in the Weather Bureau’s table, and see which schedules were kept and which were missed.

Sources

• Evening Star, Washington, 20 June 1934, p. 32 (the National Education Association broadcast announced), 30 June, p. 14 (the programme), 1 July, p. 46 (the Liberty Bell), 9 July, p. 3 (the bi-weekly schedules), 23 July, p. 1 (the hand-cranked set, the “bad arm”), 13 August, p. 2 (the radio room on the night of 10 August, Waite on Byrd’s receiver, the hand-cranked generator), 17 August, pp. 1 and 3 (Poulter on the messages; the trail set after the rescue), 28 October, p. 2 (Murphy’s interview: the engine in the tunnel, the magneto pin, three schedules a week, the dietetic messages, “Would you?”). 20 June, 30 June, 1 July, 9 July, 23 July, 13 August, 17 August, 28 October
• Evening Post, Wellington, 29 March 1934 (coached in radio, “I am no radio operator”), 2 April (the Columbia medal), 17 April (the broadcast to England), 19 April (daily communication), 30 April and 11 May (orders by radio), 12 May (the anniversary broadcast), 3 May (the Christian Science Monitor on the generator), 18 and 25 June (the conference of 15 June; the conversation of 17 June), 28 June (the spring programme), 21 July (the nine days’ silence), 6 August (contact lost 20 July and restored 27 July), 14 August (Byrd at the key), 27 October (Byrd’s account for the Australian Press Association). 29 March, 2 April, 17 April, 19 April, 30 April, 3 May, 11 May, 12 May, 18 June, 25 June, 28 June, 21 July, 6 August, 14 August, 27 October
• Ohio State University, Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center Archival Program, “Byrd Antarctic Expedition II, 1933–35 (A–B),” finding aid, Box 148, folders 5447 to 5470. library.osu.edu