II: The Byrd Expedition

Gould of the Antarctic.
The privately-financed Byrd expedition of 1928-30 was the first American exploration of the southern continent in ninety years, and Gould was the expedition's chief scientist -- the first geologist to reach the interior of the Antarctic continent.

Enroute, 1928.
They set sail aboard The City of New York from Newport, Virginia in September 1928. Here, Gould is shown aboard ship with another member of the expedition, aerial photographer Ashley McKinley.

Second-in-Command to Byrd.
As the voyage south neared its end Byrd recorded the following decision in his journal: "My mind as to the men is now made up. Gould I have made Second in Command. A splendid fellow, competent, a brilliant geologist and popular with men. He has proper respect for the seriousness of the job... He will do well I am sure and I am fortunate to have him."

Arrival.
In late December Byrd's flagship reached the Bay of Whales, the inlet on the Pacific side of Antarctica where in 1911 Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian discoverer of the South Pole, had established his base camp, Framheim.

Little America.
A few miles inland, on the outer edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, Gould supervised construction of the barracks and workrooms of the base they called "Little America." Eventually the camp included such amenities as a small gymnasium, a fairly well-stocked library, a "maternity ward" for the sled dogs, and a machine shop and storehouse made out of airplane crates.

"On a continent as large as the United States and Mexico combined we were the sole inhabitants."

McKinley, Byrd, and Gould.
Byrd never had cause to regret his choice of Gould as his second-in- command. "If any man was liked by all, it was he," Byrd wrote in Little America (Putnam, 1930), his personal account of the expedition. "Larry was a blend of coolness and warmth. His friendly ways and his fairness endeared him...Larry mingled, and yet was always respected... When arguments waxed and flamed and drew to no conclusion, Larry was resorted to as the seat of judgment. His mind seemed to have held every fact that came into it."

Hazardous science.
While making his first aerial explorations in late January, Byrd discovered the Rockefeller mountain range some 140 miles east from Little America, and a few weeks later Gould and two others flew to the area to conduct geological investigations. He collected his samples, but before the group could return to base, they were caught by a fierce blizzard which destroyed their Fokker monoplane. The party had fought to anchor the plane in the face of tremendous winds -- at one point Dr. Gould was observed by one of his companions "hanging onto a rope attached to one of the wing tips [and being] blown straight out, like a flag" -- but to no avail. The party's two radios also ceased to function, and the men were marooned until a search plane from Little America rescued them several days later.

As the accompanying newspaper clippings make clear, the world was kept abreast of the entire drama as it transpired. Gould later claimed to be annoyed by all the publicity about the party "lost in the mountains," insisting that they never were lost; they knew exactly where they were the entire time.

Remains of the wrecked Fokker.
Re-discovered near the Rockefeller Mountains in the 1980s.

The long dark night of the South.
Now the expedition settled into Little America to last out the long Antarctic winter and make plans and preparations for spring work.

Antarctic winter, 1929.
Here, Gould is photographed with a frost-covered theodolite.

Sledging south, late 1929.
On November 4, 1929 Gould and five companions set out on what was to be an epic 2 1/2 month, 1500 mile dog-sledge journey south into the Queen Maud Mountains and back. The party's primary mission was to provide ground support and possible emergency assistance for Byrd's historic flight over the Pole, but it also was an opportunity to conduct the first geological and glaciological survey of an area described by Gould as "a veritable paradise for a geologist."

Frost-covered Gould.
The dog-sledge journey, described in detail in Gould's book Cold: the Record of an Antarctic Sledge Journey (Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1931), was a grueling trek featuring snow bridges that collapsed into deep crevasses, blinding blizzards, and weather so cold that it nearly froze their eyelids shut.

Liv Glacier,aerial photo taken
on Byrd's flight to the Pole, November 1929.
Toward the end of November Byrd's historic flight over the Pole was accomplished, following favorable weather reports radioed back to Little America by Gould. A few days later Gould's geological party was encamped at the foot of Liv Glacier, in the shadow of Mt. Fridthof Nansen.

Gould's party camped before Mt. Nansen.

Two books bearing bookplates of the Byrd Expedition.
This is a New Testament and the Discourses of Epictetus, both belonging to Larry Gould. Gould recalled in later writings that he believed the expedition's library was "the most important single source of recreation," and that "As for myself, had the winter night given me opportunity for no other reading than Romain Rolland's "Jean Christophe" and Galsworthy's "Forsyte Saga" in its entirety I should still have considered it well spent."

Aerial photograph; Mt. Nansen in the background.

Reaching the rocks.
On December 7 Gould led his team up the mountain's steep southern slope. "We roped to climb and 'herringboned' and 'sidebilled' our way up on our skis," he wrote in his journal for that day. "Had to climb even steeper slopes beyond these first crevasses to reach the coveted rocks -- a bit hazardous this, for we were climbing along a steep side hill, and some 200 feet below us, paralleling our course, was a great yawning chasm. The snow was crusted over, and it was hard to make our skis stick, but we finally reached our rocks, the very rocks I wanted most to find in the Antarctic."
Gould hoped to confirm a suspicion that Mt. Nansen and the Queen Maud Mountains were part of a great uplifted fault system that stretched across the continent for more than 1,000 miles, and to find evidence that Antarctica was linked geologically to the Earth's other great land masses. The rock formations on the peak -- a series of sandstones with impure coaly material in the top seams -- proved that Gould's supposition was correct. "No symphony I have ever heard, no work of art before which I have stood in awe ever gave me quite the thrill that I had when I reached out after that strenuous climb and picked up a piece of rock to find it sandstone. It was just the rock I had come all the way to the Antarctic to find," Gould wrote in a radiogram to Commander Byrd.

From Mt. Nansen the sledgers proceded east along the mountains past the 150th meridian, which put them into land unclaimed by any other nation. There, in a cairn on a low peak, they left a note claiming this land as "a dependency or possession of the United States of America."

The Amundsen cairn.
The geological party had traversed much of the same ground followed by Roald Amundsen in his historic trek to the Pole in 1911-12, and on Christmas Day they were elated to locate on Mt. Betty, near the Axel Heiberg glacier, a cairn that had been left by Amundsen. As Gould described it, "We couldn't help standing at attention, with hats off, in admiring respect for the memory of this remarkable man before we touched a rock of the cairn. It was one of the most exciting moments of the summer when I pried the lid off the tin can in the cairn and took out a bit of paper which had formerly been a page in Amundsen's notebook, and on which he had briefly recorded the discovery of the South Pole."

The Amundsen note.
See the New York Times article reproduced nearby for an English translation.

Commander Byrd termed the Gould sledge journey "the outstanding personal achievement of the expedition." Its scientific harvest was great, but it was also an unrivalled adventure; the last episode of the era of dog-sled exploration.

Gould's sense of the adventure is evident in the following passage from Cold: "I think man has found no means of pioneering by land or sea or air, that reaches the high conception of polar sledging with dogs. I think no other method of travel can be as fascinating in its entirety and I know of no other activity that makes such complete demands on all that there is in a man. It demands the most rigid self-discipline or self-control; it calls for the utmost resourcefulness and it taxes the endurance of the hardiest."

Souvenirs and Medals.
In 1930 Byrd, Gould, and the entire expedition returned to a hero's welcome. On view here are some additional souvenirs of that experience, and honors received as a result of it. (An additional souvenir, a stuffed Emperor penguin named Oscar, is on display elsewhere in this exhibit.) The honors include:

1) Congressional Gold Medal
"presented to the officers and men of the Byrd Antarctic Expedition to express the high admiration in which the Congress and the American people hold their heroic and undaunted services in connection with the scientific investigations and extraordinary aerial exploration of the Antarctic continent." (Yes, it says all that on the reverse.)

2) Medal of the Mayor's Committee of the City of New York
"presented to the crew of the Byrd Antarctic Expedition . . . June 19, 1930"

3) 1930 David Livingstone Gold Medal of the American Geographical Society
"for scientific achievement in the field of Geography in the Southern Hemisphere"

4) 1931 Gold Medal of the Geographic Society of Chicago
"awarded to Laurence M. Gould for significant service to geography in the Byrd Antarctic Exploration of 1928-30"

5) Honorary Degree from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute,
17 June 1931 - the first of what would eventually be 26 honorary degrees given to Dr. Gould over the next half-century.

1930.
Gould returned from Antarctica to find that he was something of a public figure. Here he poses with his own portrait in the summer of 1930.

Publicity: "With Byrd to the Bottom of the World."
Armed with slides and motion picture footage of the expedition, Gould took to the lecture circuit in 1930-31, impressing audiences all over the country with the tale of his adventures. Note that on Oct. 17 he made his first visit to Carleton College in this context.

In the early 1930s Gould authored a number of articles arising out of the scientific work of the Byrd expedition.

Cold.
He also, in 1931, came out with a more popular work, the book Cold, which is a riveting account of Gould's expeditions to the Rockefeller and Queen Maud Mountains.

Peg.
Cold was dedicated: "To M.R.G. and G.P.P. who have done so much for me that I have written this book for them. "G.P.P." was George Palmer Putnam, who had taken Gould with him to Baffin Island in 1927. "M.R.G." was Margaret ("Peg") Rice Gould, who had taken Larry with her to the altar in 1930.

Peg Rice, the tall attractive daughter of an investment banker, was described in newspaper accounts of the match as "prominent in Ann Arbor and Detroit society." Earlier in the 1920s she had enrolled in young Professor Gould's elementary geology class at Michigan, and then, as she liked to say afterwards, had "lingered to marry the course."

Peg Rice growing up, date uncertain.
Peg's brother Jack, on the right, later became a State Senator in New Mexico.

Larry and Peg at the Rice home in Barton Hills, Mich., 1928.
The couple's romance had begun well before Larry went to Antarctica. During Gould's service with the Byrd expedition, Peg completed her degree at Michigan. Peg was 23 when this picture was taken; Larry 31. In the middle of this photo is Peg's younger sister Jean (Carleton Class of '35).

A romance continued by Antarctic post.
The 21 month separation necessitated by Gould's southern sojourn could not have been easy for the young pair, but it did allow for the exchange of letters with some rather exotic addresses and postmarks.

A wedding in the public eye, 1930.
Gould arrived back in New York with the main body of the Antarctic expedition on June 19, 1930. Exactly one week later, he and Peg made application in Ann Arbor for a marriage license. They wed August 2, in a garden ceremony.

The young couple shortly after their marriage?

New York City, 1931.
Larry posing for a bust sculpted by Nancy Cox McCormack, his bride in the foreground.

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