Q: How did Byrd use of the promise of scientific discovery to sell
his expedition? How real was that science?
ER: Science has played a major role in Antarctic exploration. And Byrd truly
wanted to contribute to science. Antarctica was virgin territory. It still is
in many ways. Virgin territory for scientists. Glaciologists had to study how
much ice was there and how it moved. The weathermen had to study the air
patterns, the geologists had to study the rocks down there. So gathering
scientific knowledge about Antarctica was very important at the time. And Byrd
truly wanted to make scientific contributions. So he gathered scientists and
did scientific work down there. And it was truly important to obtaining the
global picture of things. The Antarctic portion of the earth is huge, look at
a globe, it's a huge portion of the earth. And at the time, especially in the
1920s, very little was known about it. So what data Byrd was able to gather,
and his men were able to gather, enabled weather forecasters to make better
predictions even for the United States, oceanographers to understand currents
better and so forth. Scientifically although Byrd didn't do a lot of science
in that first expedition, what science he did was very good and very
worthwhile.
Q: He didn't just kind of use it as a carrot, as a way to sell the
expedition, he really had a genuine interest in it.
ER: At the time Byrd mounted his first Antarctic expedition, science was a
very important part of expeditions. But it was also a way to raise money
because scientists and science were very popular at the time. People were
interested in educating themselves. They loved to read anything about science
in the 1920s. So Byrd used science, not only as a means of contributing to
humanity which he truly wanted to do, but also as a way of gaining attention to
his expedition. So he hyped the expedition by claiming he would do great
scientific things. He stretched the truth a little bit. He talked about
possibly finding enclaves with maybe people like Eskimos and weird plants and
animals, maybe something prehistoric. He was hinting that they might find
dinosaurs down there. And there was, I suppose some possibility this might
happen although scientists didn't think they'd find anything like that and in
fact they didn't. They found rather routine things, but very important things
to scientists. Byrd's expeditions contributed greatly to our scientific
understanding of the polar regions.
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