South Pole 11. The first to fly across Antarctica: Lincoln Ellsworth and his lost aviator.

Join us on South Pole as we explore the adventures of Lincoln Ellsworth, the first person to fly across Antarctica. Author Jeff Maynard shares insights from his book, "Antarctica's Lost Aviator," revealing Ellsworth's pioneering spirit, personal challenges, and the significant yet overlooked contributions to antarctic exploration. Discover the fascinating interplay of adventure, historical context, and queer history in this captivating episode. Listen in as we delve into the life of an extraordinary explorer who pushed the boundaries of human and aeronautical capability. Tune in to learn about Ellsworth's journey, his achievements, and his lasting impact on the history of Antarctica.

Episode Guest: Jeff Maynard

Visit Jeff Maynard’s website

Find Jeff Maynard’s book, Antarctica’s Lost Aviator

Find Jeff Maynard’s other books 

Episode Transcript  and more information on the Pine Forest Media Website

Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia

Hosted, produced, written, and edited by Clark Marchese 

Cover art and PFM logo by Laurel Wong. 

Theme music by Nela Ruiz

Transcript:

[00:00:09.320] - Clark Marchese

Hello, and welcome to another episode of South Pole, the podcast that explores everything Antarctica. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and today we are talking about exploration, lost airplanes, getting stuck in the snow, and even a bit of queer history, which we love. In this episode, we are joined by author Jeff Maynard to discuss a historical adventure story through his book, Antarctica's Lost Aviator. The book delves into the life and expeditions of Lincoln Ellsworth, an extraordinary but overlooked figure in the annals of antarctic exploration. Ellsworth holds the historic achievement of being the first person to fly across the antarctic continent, a feat that pushed the boundaries of human and aeronautical capability at the time. But today, we're not only talking about this antarctic achievement, we'll also get a close look at Ellsworth, the person, how his relationship with Antarctica began, and a lot of personal and technical challenges he faced on the way to accomplishing his dream. Although he never left the closet, Ellsworth was also one of the lgbts. So we get some queer history today on this queer podcast. So settle in, because our guest for today, Jeff Maynard, is a wonderful storyteller, and he's got a wonderful story to tell.

[00:01:32.300] - Clark Marchese

And with that, let's get started. All right, welcome to the show. The first question for you is if you could just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your work.

[00:01:54.770] - Jeff Maynard

Sure. I'm Jeff Maynard. I'm an author. I'm based in Melbourne, Australia, and I research and write about historical subjects, and I generally look for obscure historical subjects relating to either exploration or travel. So that generally leads me to either the Arctic, the Antarctic, or underwater.

[00:02:19.840] - Clark Marchese

All right, perfect. And now, you've written a couple of books about Antarctica so far, one of which we'll cover in great detail today. But I'm curious, and I like to ask my guests this. Did the process of researching for this book ever take you to Antarctica?

[00:02:34.520] - Jeff Maynard

No, it hasn't yet, but I've got two trips planned in the near future. My research took me, funnily enough, it took me everywhere but Antarctica. It took me to America four times, England, a couple of places in Europe, but not yet Antarctica. So that's a bit of an irony, I suppose.

[00:02:56.400] - Clark Marchese

Now, the story that we're going to spend most of our time talking about today is the lost aviator and a man named Lincoln Ellsworth. Can you give listeners a quick pitch about what this story is about?

[00:03:08.760] - Jeff Maynard

Lincoln Ellsworth was a wealthy American who set out in the 1930s to become the first person to cross Antarctica from one side to the other. And after a number of setbacks, obstacles both personal and physical. He became the first person to do it. He was the first person to cross Antarctica. And I always found that fascinating. And this story is about that and how he did it.

[00:03:35.110] - Clark Marchese

What drew you to Lincoln Ellsworth?

[00:03:37.710] - Jeff Maynard

I came to Lincoln Ellsworth. I came in a side door, really. For many years, I've been researching the australian polar explorer, Sir Hubert Wilkins. He had many expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica, and he was the person who organized the four expeditions to Antarctica IV on behalf of Lincoln Ellsworth. And when I was researching Wilkins and his records were, or still are in America. When I was going through all Wilkins records, I kept finding all these boxes and boxes of information about Lincoln Ellsworth. Wilkins had kept everything, every receipt for things they had purchased. He had kept log books, he'd kept navigational instructions, lots of correspondence. And I kept reading all this and thinking, you know, what's this story about? Lincoln Ellsworth himself didn't really keep very much. He didn't keep many journals, he didn't write many letters, but it was all in Wilkins records. And so I started looking up and learning about Lincoln Ellsworth, and I found that even things like online entries, they either didn't say very much about the man, or when they did, it was often wrong. And I thought, well, this is a bit odd. You know, he's a man who's achieved an amazing first in exploration, and we don't really know much about him.

[00:04:58.210] - Jeff Maynard

So that's. That intrigued me.

[00:05:01.050] - Clark Marchese

Yes. So Wilkins is one of the more famous names in antarctic exploration, and we'll most probably have an episode on him at some point. But today it's Lincoln Ellsworth, and people have been exploring or researching or visiting or interacting with Antarctica since a very long time. But maybe for a bit of historical context, you mentioned that this story takes place in the 1930s, so can you tell us a bit about what was happening both in the world at large or the world of antarctic exploration at the time that can sort of help enhance our understanding of this story?

[00:05:32.620] - Jeff Maynard

Sure. Pretty much before World War one, antarctic exploration was individuals going down there on a. On a wooden sailing ship and taking lots of dogs and sleds and things like that. World War one interrupted all that. And by the time people turned back to exploring Antarctica in the 1920s, airplanes had developed. So people started flying in Antarctica, but there was still a great deal of problems, the logistics of getting airplanes down there, the logistics of having an airplane with the range to fly very far. So there wasn't a great deal of antarctic exploration that brought out anything new during the 1920s. Then, of course, you had the Great Depression, and the world went into a, you know, struggle through the Great Depression. And so private individuals raising money to go and explore Antarctica was pretty much out of the question. And it was in this period, in the 1930s, when there wasn't a lot of attention on Antarctica, that Lincoln Ellsworth decided to get a modern airplane, go down there, and fly across the continent. So I would say he didn't get as much attention for what he did, mainly because, in a sense, the world was looking elsewhere.

[00:06:44.330] - Clark Marchese

All right, then, so who is Lincoln Ellsworth? The man. And when did his relationship with Antarctica begin?

[00:06:51.290] - Jeff Maynard

He was born in 1880, an american, as I said. And he was a very frail child. He wasn't very physically strong. He was looked after by his mother, who he loved dearly, and she died when he was eight years old, and that left him in the care of his father. Now, his father was a wealthy businessman, also a very strong, domineering person. And I think Lincoln Ellsworth's spirit, in a sense, was crushed by his father. Ellsworth, from an early age, realized he was also a homosexual. And that didn't go down very well with his father either.

[00:07:33.570] - Jeff Maynard

What the hell is even that? So he grew up really trying to prove his manhood and prove himself to his father. In the 1920s, after he finished college, he looked for work. Couldn't really get it, couldn't stick at things. He was a daydreamer. And then in the 1925, he was in New York, and he heard that the polar explorer Rola Munson was in New York trying to raise money to get an airplane to fly to the North Pole. Ellsworth looked him up and said, you know, I might be able to get some money and help you and sponsor you to fly to the North Pole, which Umundsen was pretty pleased about. Ellsworth then went to his father and said, give me some money. I want to sponsor this polar explorer. And his father was very sick and dying at the time, and I eventually his father relented. So Lincoln Ellsworth and Roland Wundsen, in 1925, attempted to fly to the North Pole. They didn't. Never made it. They landed on the ice. They struggled for a number of weeks, came back. When they got back, Ellsworth's father had died, and that meant Ellsworth had inherited a fortune, what today would be billions of dollars.

[00:08:43.090] - Jeff Maynard

His father was extremely wealthy. He owned castles in Europe and chalets in Italy, and just. He owned. His father owned Rembrandt paintings and everything. And at this stage, Ellsworth inherited all that. So Ellsworth went back to roller Munson and said, you know, I've got a lot of money now let's. Let's do something else. So they got an italian airship, and the two of them, along with a crew and an italian, flew over the North Pole in 1926. And Ellsworth, at the end of that, didn't really feel he got the credit that he deserved. Rolla Munson got all the credit. The italian airship commander got a lot of credit. So Ellsworth also suffered a great deal from depression. And two years later, Roller Monson, who was Ellsworth's hero at this time, died. And that depressed him either further. Friends were actually concerned about his welfare. And the australian explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins was trying to get to the North Pole, this time by going under the arctic ice in a submarine. And friends encouraged Ellsworth to get involved, give him something to do, something he could focus on to get him out of his depression. So Ellsworth sponsored Wilkins submarine attempt on the North Pole.

[00:09:58.860] - Jeff Maynard

That also failed because the submarine didn't get very far. Ellsworth didn't actually go on the submarine. He just wrote out a check and gave it to, handed it over. By this time, it was 1931, and Ellsworth still wanted to do something, something that wasn't a failure. So he looked around and thought, well, what can I do that hasn't been done? And there was only one thing really left in polar exploration. No one had crossed Antarctica. People had been to the North Pole, they'd been to the South Pole, but no one had gone from one side of Antarctica to the other. Now, see, Hubert Wilkins had already tried to, had already actually flown in Antarctica, and he was an experienced antarctic explorer. So, Lincoln Ellsworth said to him, you know, I sponsored your submarine. It's payback time. You know, you helped me. You organize an expedition. I want to fly across Antarctica. So Wilkins said, basically, yes, I will. Wilkins organized a plane, a ship, a crew, and they. They went to Antarctica. Now, they actually did it three trips before they got it right. The first time was 1933. They went to New Zealand. They went.

[00:11:05.350] - Jeff Maynard

They unloaded their airplane on the ros ice shelf. The ice shelf broke up. The plane was damaged, and so they packed it back on the ship and said, well, that didn't work. And they went back to New Zealand. They went down a year later, 1934. This time, they went to the other side. They went to deception island on the Antarctic peninsula. Again, they unloaded the plane, they had a couple of problems. They were delayed because of mechanical problems. And then Lincoln Ellsworth, by the way, couldn't fly an airplane, so he had to hire a pilot. And they had a pilot called Bernd Balkan, who was an experienced polar pilot. So he and Ellsworth got in the plane and they took off. And by this time, Balkan realized that there was another problem with Ellsworth. He couldn't navigate. He didn't know how to use a sextant, and he was supposed to navigate them two and a half thousand miles across an unexplored continent.

[00:12:05.770] - Jeff Maynard

But Balkan's contract was, you know, we try, unless the weather's bad. So Balkan went a couple hundred miles, turned around, flew back and said, no, the weather's bad, we're not going. And that annoyed Ellsworth even more. So the second expedition had failed as well. They went down again, 1935, and they had a different pilot, this time, a Canadian called Herbert Hollack Kenyon, and this time Ellsworth and Herbert Hollock Kenyon took off in November 1935, and started this first flight into the unknown.

[00:12:38.120] - Clark Marchese

Did he ever actually learn to fly or navigate?

[00:12:41.280] - Jeff Maynard

No, they, Herbert Oleck Canyon and Ellsworth, they took off in the end or late November. They flew for 14 hours down the Antarctic peninsula, and then sort of did a right hand turn and started crossing the continent. After 14 hours of flying, they landed in the antarctic highlands, and they were stuck there for a couple of days while they sort of tried to figure out where they were. And they got airborne again a few days later and only flew for less than an hour. They had to land again. They waited for a few days again, they took off, and they landed a third time. And according to all their logs and things like that, Ellsworth admitted that he didn't know how to navigate. So you had these two fellows in the middle of a continent admitting they had no idea where they were, which was sort of interesting, and they stayed there for, I think, about nine or ten days. They were snowbound. They finally dug the airplane out and said, well, we're just going to head towards where we're heading, which is the Ross ice shelf. We'll head in that direction until we run out of fuel and see what happens.

[00:13:44.120] - Jeff Maynard

And that's exactly what they did. And I don't really know if it was just by the, you know, good luck or what. But they actually got very close to where they were going. They ran out of fuel. The plane landed on the Rosae shelf. They were trying to get to reach an abandoned american base and they said, well, we think the base is in that direction. So they started walking. They walked for about two weeks. They had a sled that had been packed in the plane, got all their supplies, started walking. They ended up walking about 150, over 100 miles, walking around in circles until they found this base. And it been about nearly a month since I'd left. And they found the base. They went inside the abandoned buildings and then they waited to be rescued. So then success, they had done it. They'd gone from Deception island down to the wettle sea, flown 2500 miles and then walked the last hundred miles and got to where they were going. So that was the attempt. And then they waited at the abandoned base about a month for a ship to come and get them off the Ross ice shelf.

[00:14:53.100] - Clark Marchese

Okay, so I've been dying to ask. We mentioned that Ellsworth is queer. Did he have any sort of special relationship with anyone? A bestie perhaps, someone that historians might call a very close friend?

[00:15:05.100] - Jeff Maynard

No. It was strange. In the letters I found various people talk about him. He certainly didn't have a relationship with Sir Hubert Wilkins. Sir Hubert Wilkins was a ladies man. He was very much a ladies man. Lincoln Ellsworth kept his, you have to remember this was a time when homosexuality was illegal. You know, you could be get all sorts of terrible things done and not just ostracized, but it could be punished. And. And so he kept a secret. I only found out through other correspondence. Lincoln Ellsworth actually married a lady in 1932. But the correspondence showed, you know, they always lived separately or slept in separate rooms when they're in hotels. And it was a sort of a marriage of show, I suppose you'd say in the correspondence. In the things I found, there's talk of him, you know, wanting to bring his boyfriend on the boat kind of thing and the crew not being very happy about that at all. He did stay in the closet and I think he very. I think it affected him a great deal. He really couldn't express himself very well and it must have been incredibly difficult for him to deal with people.

[00:16:18.830] - Clark Marchese

Did his life change in any meaningful way after he completed his mission?

[00:16:23.390] - Jeff Maynard

Not really. And I think that was something that also upset him a great deal. He went back to America. Previous explorers had been given awards, american explorers, and got things like the Congressional Medal of Honor. He seemed to miss out on that. I think he was. He became quite bitter about it. In fact, he actually sank back into depression and friends became worried again. They encouraged him again. He went to Antarctica one more time in 1938. Again, Sir Hubert Wilkins organized it all on his behalf. They didn't really achieve very much, and so he used his money to sponsor expeditions to South America. In fact, he went on one of those and injured himself and really couldn't do very much. But he spent probably the last decade of his life living alone. His wife had moved out, was living elsewhere. He lived on his own. And I think he became a very sad man. You know, I find quite sad for him for everything he tried to do. And his big obstacles he had to overcome were his own personal obstacles. You know, the fact that he. He wasn't really a navigator and he wasn't a pilot, but he was trying to push himself and get recognition for what he'd done for exploration.

[00:17:40.110] - Clark Marchese

How did he die?

[00:17:41.990] - Jeff Maynard

He died from complicate? Well, he died at 71 years of age, but his family had always suffered from pneumonia. And after one, he went on one expedition to South America, had a fall and injured himself. And I think he just either a heart attack or in the end, at what it was a relatively young age. I think his last decade of his life was very sad and very lonely.

[00:18:07.990] - Clark Marchese

Switching gears a little bit, I want to ask you about your process because I imagine that this takes hours and hours of spending time in a library or an archive, sorting through boxes and papers. I'm wondering, what is it that you love so much about archival research?

[00:18:24.750] - Jeff Maynard

I think it's the discovery in a sense. It's a kind of exploring in itself, because the world itself is a globe. The 20th century, we reached the North Pole, we reached the south Pole. We crossed every ocean. We got to the bottom of. We got the top of the highest mountain and all those kind of things. And so we pretty much mapped the whole globe. So where do you go to discover? And for me, it's kind of like going back in time and finding a story. So it is incredibly time consuming to be going through, you know, lots of things, thinking I might find a little bit of a nugget of information. But it's also a lot of fun because you are, in a sense, going into that unknown. You don't know. Every time you turn the page and go to the next page of someone's grandfather's diary or next page of some file, you really don't know what you can find. And that's sort of the exciting part. So while it's time consuming, it's also intensely satisfying and enjoyable.

[00:19:26.970] - Clark Marchese

What would you say was the impact of Ellsworth journeys on the future of Antarctica or exploration?

[00:19:33.290] - Jeff Maynard

Funnily, not a great deal, because he knew he discovered the highlands in the middle of Antarctica. People know they were there. Of course, today there's a section called the Ellsworth Highlands. But by the time he'd done that and got back, and World War two was really brewing, by this time and the world again had sort of turned away from antarctic exploration, it was really only after World War two. And by then, you had much more powerful radios, long distance airplanes, much better equipment on so many levels that when they went down and started in the 19, early 1950, started mapping Antarctica, they did it quite thoroughly. It was one of those things where Lincoln Ellsworth, in a sense, had just sort of. He'd been forgotten.

[00:20:23.480] - Clark Marchese

What do you hope that readers take away from your telling of Ellsworth's story?

[00:20:28.120] - Jeff Maynard

One of the things I always find about Antarctica and that is that people enjoy the history of it. Everyone likes to read. Well, not everyone, but, of course, a lot of people like to read about Shackleton and Scott and Amundsen and the race to the South Pole. Ellsworth's story, in many ways, is equally dramatic. And the obstacles he overcame, the problems he had, I'd really just like to put the story out there and let people see what a dramatic story it is, had it, find it interesting, and just, I guess, in a sense, just give the guy some credit for what he did.

[00:21:02.110] - Clark Marchese

Well, that leads me right into my final question, which is, where can people find you and follow your work?

[00:21:07.390] - Jeff Maynard

My website is jeff maynardhood.net dot. And that's, I should point out, people listening. That's a Jeff with a J eff. There's a couple of videos there. I've actually started putting up some of the film of Lincoln Ellsworth's expedition on that, on my website and on my YouTube channel. That's probably the best place. The book Antarctica's lost Aviator, that's available book shops across America, around the world, really. And also on all the online sources. And I'm constantly putting up sort of bits of film and trying to tell these sort of forgotten stories.

[00:21:42.940] - Clark Marchese

All right, I will put links to all of that in the episode description. And at this point, I want to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today and for sharing this story with us.

[00:21:50.530] - Jeff Maynard

Thank you, Clark. It was great to talk to you.

[00:21:59.220] - Clark Marchese

Even listening to South Pole. You can find more information about this week's guest and links to their work in the episode description. Cover art for the show was done by Laurel Wong, and the music you're listening to was done by Neela Ruiz. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and this episode was produced and engineered by me. So if you found it interesting, send it to someone you know. South Pole is part of a larger network of sciency podcasts called Pine Forest Media. We've got one on plastic, one on drinking water, and a couple new ones coming out soon. You can find more information about us in the episode description as well, or@pineforestpods.com dot. We are also on Instagram at TikTok. I enforced media, and if you love the show and you want to support science, communication like this, five star rating across platforms and a review on Apple Podcasts is one of the best things you can do to help us reach more people and for the entire network to grow. All right, thank you to all of you who have made it this far, and we'll talk soon.