Little America

In Newport News, Virginia, two ships, the Jacob Ruppert and the Bear of Oakland are loaded with 600 tons of supplies, including four airplanes, tractors, 150 Eskimo huskies, supplies for two years, and over a hundred men. The ships then depart for the 15,000 mile trek to the South Pole. Leading this second Great Antarctic Expedition into "Little America, Capital of the Unknown," is Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd. During the trip, a storm breaks and the huge Condor plane is almost lost. As they near Little America, the first iceberg is sighted. The Bear of Oakland rams the ice floe for days and finally forces a passage through it. The immense, seventy-foot high Ross Ice Barrier, the glacial bulwark of Antarctica over which the crew must fly to reach Little America is then sighted. The team is happy to see that the radio towers set up by Byrd on his first expedition are still standing. The ships then traverse the Bay of Whales, and the supplies are discharged on the Antarctic continent as killer whales sound. The two ships head for New Zealand, and the expedition prepares to penetrate the Edsel Ford Range and to conduct a geological reconnaissance to the South Polar Plateau. The Condor plane makes its first flight across the Ross Barrier and over the Ross Sea. Meanwhile, the tractor expedition pushes forward to set up Byrd's Advance Weather Base, 123 miles south of Little America, where he will live in isolation during "Winter Night," a five-month period when the sun does not rise. At the base camp, Byrd's men pull a trimotor plane lost in the first expedition from the ice and find it completely intact. Byrd's outpost will consist of a nine-by-thirteen-foot portable house, built in a deep pit to protect it from the blizzards of the Ross Ice Barrier, and will be the world's southernmost weather station. Before he leaves the base camp, Byrd orders his men not to come after him under any circumstances, but after five months pass and no word from the admiral is received, a rescue team led by Dr. Thomas C. Poulter, second in command, sets out on a thirty-day trek to find him. During the rescue, temperatures reach seventy-five degrees below zero, the coldest day of the year. When the men finally locate Byrd, he is thin, weak, and delirious, but insists he is all right. Before returning to Little America, Byrd puts on thirty pounds in two months. Then, the team of more than one hundred men travels back to North America. Two hundred thousand square miles of territory have been claimed by the United States. Significant deposits of coal have been uncovered on the continent, and numerous branches of science will conduct ongoing investigations there.