Littlewood Transcript

Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project
Interview with William H. Littlewood

conducted on January 5, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger

DOB: Today is January 5th, 1999. This is Dian Belanger. I'm speaking with Bill Littlewood
about his experiences as an oceanographer in Operation Deep Freeze in the 1950s.

Good morning, Bill, and thanks for talking with me.

WL: Good morning, Dian.

DOB: Tell me just very briefly something about your background: where you grew up, where you
went to school, what you decided to do with your life and why. And I'm looking
particularly for hints that might suggest you would end up in a place as exotic as Antarctica.

WL: Well, I grew up in suburban Detroit in a little town called Wyandotte, which is very inbred
and really didn't know much about the outside world, but I started to collect stamps and
stamps opened up the world to me. And I learned about the world and I decided I
wanted to go see where my stamps came from.

Another contributing factor was a lecture series by explorers called the World Adventure
Series in Detroit that my parents took me to, my mother particularly, and I just ate up all
these old explorer club personagesRoy Chapman Andrews, William Beebe and such.

DOB: How old were you then?

WL: This would be inI started collecting stamps about age seven or eight, so this would be the
period between that and when I left that area at age sixteen to go to college.

DOB: And where did you go to college?

WL: The University of Florida at that point, and of course World War IIPearl Harbor
happened on December 7 of '41, and I was a freshman. I finished the year and then I
went into the Army in the autumn for three years and came out, as I said, three years later.
The war was over and I went back to school. I had picked up a year of schooling in the
Army so I came back as a sophomore and finished at the University of Florida, I went back
there.

And then to the University of Michigan for my graduate work, and this was all in zoology
because I thought that the opportunity to go on expeditions would be into jungles and
things like that into Africa and South America, up-the-Amazon type of thing, and so my
degrees are in zoology, actually.

DOB: So how did you get into oceanography?
WL: How did I get into oceanography? Well, I had a friend who was in the same specialty I
was, herpetology, snakes. One of the lecturers had been Raymond L. Ditmars. He was
a herpetologist and I was fascinated by his stories. And I had taught one year, after
William Littlewood Interview, January 5, 1999 2

coming out of college, as an instructor in a small school. And then I corresponded,
however, with a colleague from the university, and he suddenly was an oceanographer
down in the Navy Hydrographic Office in Washington and traveling on the ocean to many
strange places. And I thought, if George can get that job, so can I, because our
backgrounds were identical.

What was happening was that the Navy suddenly was hiring anybody with a science degree
to become an oceanographer because they neededthis would be 1949, and they were
taking anybody with a science degree (including zoology) to become a physical
oceanographer by just training on the job during field work.

And the reason was the importance of knowing more about the ocean with the
development of sonar at the end of the war, because sonar is affected greatly by the
different salinities and temperatures in water which both affect the density. That is what
bends the sonar ping just like the pencil appears to be bent in a fishbowl due to the
difference of density between the water and the air.

With the sonar ping, it becomes deadly serious in wartime because the submarine may
actually sit on a density layer and you don't hear it, whereas if you're looking for it with a
"ping," you may get false data in the sense, just like it's false data that your eye received from
the bent pencil. It isn't really bent. So that when you drop your depth charges, if you're
on the ship surface side of this picture, you are dropping it at the wrong depth and at the
wrong location. And just like if you're trying to spear a fish in shallow water and you aim
at the fish and you think you've got it but you don't because you're getting false information.

So they were taking anybody, and oceanography was hardly heard of then. People didn't
knowhadn't heard the word. And this was just a new field and only a couple of schools
were training in this at that timeScripps and Woods Hole particularly.

DOB: And so how did you get into cold-water oceanography?

WL: I applied for this job, and I got it and moved into it and immediately went out traveling on
a three-and-a-half-month expedition. We went to Trinidad and then up to Argentia,
Newfoundland, then to the Azoresthese are ports, our work was in betweenand then to
England, that is Plymouth, and then to Madeira and then to Dakar and then back to
Philadelphia Navy Yard where the shipsthere were two ships that ran in tandemwere
berthed.

And so this was great and I continued. The second trip I took was to the Arctic. I guess
in learning the job during that three-and-a-half months, my boss said, "We have two
icebreakers going up to the Arctic and would you like to go up there in July-August?" The
other trip was January to Aprilwell, late January to April, that is late winter-early spring.

And so I went up there and we had an oceanographic team on each icebreaker. They
had laboratories built on the icebreakers, deck laboratories, and winches for oceanographic

work. And I was in charge. We had two oceanographers, one on each ship, and each
oceanographer had a chief petty officer and four sailors assigned to him. As they were
actually Navythey also had a naval boss, but from the scientific viewpoint, it's kind of like
the Antarctic stations, they had two bosses there.

So then I did that for ten yearssorry, I did that for four years and then went to
Copenhagen on a Fulbright scholarship; I took leave without pay for a year. And I came
back, and I came back with a Danish wife, the wife I still have. I didn't go to sea for a year,
was put into another job, and I was very unhappy in it because really sea work was my plan.
I wanted to travel to different areas of the world.

At that point the development of the Antarctic program was occurring, and they decided to
do oceanography and ice work as part of that since the International Geophysical Year was
going to be covering all phases of geophysical science, and that meant sciences broadly
around the world. Certainly oceanography is included since the greater part of the world
is covered by the oceans.

And so I was asked whether I would like to go down with the Antarctic expeditions, and I
said yes. And that, however, was not the usual two- or three-month expedition, it was six
months at a time for us.

DOB: Where did you prepare for going to the Antarctic?

WL: Well, much of our preparations would be at the Hydrographic Office, which then was at
Suitland, Maryland. The Hydrographic Office is now called the U.S. Naval
Oceanographic Office because the former Division of Oceanography expanded greatly and
the name took over the entire institution later.

DOB: And how did you get ready?

WL: Getting ready was just preparing withthinking what we needed and what kind of work we
could do down there. I had some experience now from the Arctic.

DOB: So were you in charge of making those preparations?

WL: I was partially in charge at that time. We had a Dr. Willis Tressler who had gone on an
advance expedition before Deep Freeze I; the Atka went down, A-t-k-a, an icebreaker, that
did a circumnavigation, just looking over the broader picture as to where stations might be
set up. And Willis Tressler went on that one. He was in charge of oceanography on
that Atka trip. In Deep Freeze I, he was on one ship and had partial charge, and I was
sort of the lead oceanographer on another. And in Deep Freeze II, he was ashore at that
point and he didn't work other than those two years. And I was in charge of the team,
some four icebreakers that were operated in those Deep Freeze I, II, III, and IV, as senior
oceanographer. We had one team in eachone oceanographer and with his chief petty
officer and four sailors in each icebreaker.

DOB: When you headed down this would've been in late 1956 or '55

WL: Fifty-five-'56, Deep Freeze I.

DOB: My first question for you has to do with the Antarctic Convergence. Tell me what this is
and how you know you've crossed it.

WL: The Antarctic Convergence is where the colder waters of the Antarctic meet the warmer
waters of the South Pacific and the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. And because
they're colder, they're denser and they sort of dive down under the warmer waters to the
north. Remember, you're in the south looking north. And actually that cold water
travels all the way down to the bottom of the ocean, and as you go further towards the
equator, that water, because it is colder, stays on the bottom and it spreads through the
ocean so even at the equator, if you go down very deep, there is cold water at the bottom.
That cold originatedor loss of heat really is what cold isoriginated from the Antarctic.
And of course some of the deep cold water is from the Northern Hemisphere, that is, it is
from the Arctic.

DOB: There is an Arctic convergence as well?

WL: Not as pronounced, because there are different currents. What you have around the
Antarctic is a band of bad weather that goes from west to east, almost always. It's where
these stories about the, what is it, "fighting forties," "furious fifties," and "shrieking sixties"
come from.

And rounding Cape Horn, for example, there are tremendous stories, and true stories,
about the terrible winds and waves, which drive the currents. And that gives you a kind of
a barrier there, whereas in the Arctic you have a lot of breakup with land, Greenland and
such, and you don't have a continent there to produce that cold weather. The cold
weather is produced by the high Antarctic continent and that huge ice sheet that covers it.

DOB: Can you see the Antarctic Convergence?
WL: You can't see it particularly, but you find it in a sudden change of surface temperature.
The colder water is diving below the warmer water.

DOB: And is it constant, more or less, from year to year?

WL: Well, it fluctuates in its band. It's relatively constant, but it's not going to be in the exact
mile and inch or whatever there is. The winds are blowing it back and forth, and different
micro-atmospheric conditions will change it.

The reason that the warm water can't spread furtherwell, this cold water is cold in the
Antarctic all the way from the surface to the bottom. Remember, it's all the same
temperature, more or less. It's just above freezing. The freezing point of salt water is

just below the freezing point of fresh water, so it's about twenty-nine or thirty degrees.
And otherwise it becomes ice and floats to the top. You have a constant temperature
there, whereas to the north, more and more you'll get a variation as further north the
surface water gets heated by solar radiation.

DOB: And then as you go farther south, you start encountering ice.

WL: As you go further south you encounter ice, but if you're going south from South America,
then of course the Antarctic Peninsula deflects a lot of the ice and water northward so that
the ice is closer to the convergence in between South America and the north end of the
Antarctic Peninsula than it would be, say, between the Pacific Ocean and the Ross Sea
area.

DOB: Okay. Tell me about the various kinds of ice that you encounter as you go south and how
these various types affect the ship's travel and the ship itself.

WL: Of course the effect on the ship itself depends on what kind of ship it is. We were on
icebreakers that are shaped to ride up on the ice, and they also have very thick steel prows.
And the part that takes the brunt of the ice when they hit the ice is well protected, and the
ribs in the ships are very close together. All of those factors are what make an icebreaker,
the major points for an icebreaker. Other ships are ice strengthened so they may have
some of those factors but not as much as an icebreaker.

When you come into the ice, you first get a frazzle ice. It's just a little skim ice, and
sometimes if it becomes solidified enough and then breaks up into pieces, and then the
winds come and push them against each other, the edges make little frills around what they
call pancake ice because it looks like a bunch of pancakes out there. And then you can
get into thicker ice, and then the ship finally gets into ice that is three or four feet thick.
That slows it down considerably, and eventually you have to hit the ice and back up and hit
it again and break it that way.

Remember, we're talking about frozen seawater here. We're not talking about icebergs
which are a different animal. They come from the continent, they're from glaciers, they're
from the ice cap, they're fresh water in the form of snow, and then compacted snow.

The ice that is out in the ocean, the "pack ice," is moving around following the currents, and
more so according to the winds. The winds have a great effect on its movement. And
when it's under pressure, you have more difficulties in moving the ship, so it's just not
thickness, it's as much pressure as it is thickness.

If you get a lot of pressure, it doubles its thickness because you get pressure ridges where
the different plates of ice, one driven by the wind, maybe another one backed up against
the continent, and they come into each other and they double up and triple up sometimes.
And suddenly instead of having eight feet of ice, you have sixteen feet and everything in
between, and that is very difficult to get through.

DOB: And they up-end against each other?

WL: They may end up asthey buckle as they hit each other.

DOB: Does pack iceis it like a donut that surrounds the continent with some open water
forming an inner ring next to the land in the shelf ice?

WL: It's not a donut that's all around the Antarctic. It would be different in every case, just like
looking at the coastlines of the United States. They're going to be different in different
areas, different seasons. And remember, the Antarctic is the size of the United States and
western Europe together, or another viewpoint, Mexico which is a pretty large country and
the United States, about equal area, and so you have a lot of differentiation.

However, when the winds come off the continent, and if there isn't already a huge amount
of ice out there, the winds can push that ice away from the continent as it breaks off. Now
there still will be the ice that forms against the continent, called "fast ice"it's fast to the
continent. It's not moving fast, it's just not moving at all.

So when you hit thatsuch as when you approach McMurdo Sound and the site of our
main base, McMurdo Sound in the winter freezes over solidly and that fast ice breaks out
slowly from its northern edges. And the icebreaker has to find the spot where it can
break throughfirst of all where they want to go, and then to check how they would goif
they see a crack or something like that.

Or on occasion the different currents and the different changing winds and such may
separate some of the pack ice and you have a polynya, that is, an open spot in an ice pack
area. It's a Russian word, p-o-l-y-n-y-a, polynya, and when you're in that, you can do an
oceanographic station, for example.
DOB: So you would look for those for your own reasons.

WL: We would look for those and also leads; however, the ship is looking to make headway, so
when it sees those polynyas, it's "Hey, could we steam through here at full speed?"

DOB: You had already spent, as you said, some time doing Arctic oceanography, and now you're
approaching the Antarctic continentthere is no continent in the north. What did you
see? Were you surprised at anything?

WL: No, I pretty well knew what was going to be there. There were enough records from
other expeditions, and I did a little reading about earlier expeditions that had gone there,
seen photographs and such. So I don't think that I was surprised by anything. I was
pleased by the new experience.

As you say, the pack ice looks like pack ice once you're away from the continent itself, so
the pack ice in the Arctic is very similar to the pack ice in the Antarctic. It's just that the

sudden rise of all the ice shelves are really unique to the Antarctic. There's a little tiny
one in the Arctic on Ellesmere Island, but not anything like the big ice shelves in the Ross
Sea and the Weddell Sea area.

DOB: What do they look like?

WL: There, suddenly, you have this continental ice which will become eventually, as it breaks
off, tabular icebergs. These huge sheets slowly, at "glacial speed," move out from the
center of the continent towards the edges, just gravity flow, in a way. And there constantly
is behind them the pressure of having more snow, even though it's very light snow in the
Antarctic. However, after many thousands or millions of years, it does accumulate. The
South Pole, for example, is roughly ten thousand feet high, and almost all of that is ice
since the land underneath is not very high. That pressure produces glacial movement of
the ice sheet as it slowly moves outward, eventually floating on the ocean, such as the Ross
and Weddell Seas. The water currents eat at the bottoms as the ice floats out over the
ocean. The different stresses in the ice sheet will break large pieces off at different points.
As it moves over the land, which is irregular underneath it, it's developed crevasses, those
big cracks in the icewe're talking about the continental ice, not sea ice.

So if you think of an ice cube in your water glass, or cocktail glass, you see it is floating
mostly under water and just roughly a tenth of it is sticking above. So when you see an
iceberg that is a hundred feet high above sea level, you've got nine hundred feet below.
That's a one-thousand-foot-thick piece of freshwater ice as compared to the average of
eight-to-ten-feet-thick pack ice, that is saltwater ice in the Weddell Sea, for example.

So you're looking suddenly at a big barrier. In fact the earlier term that Admiral Byrd and
other early explorers used was "barrier ice," because it was a barrier to them for sailing any
further south. They knew that that was not going to melt out in the summer, they couldn't
break it, and they were simply looking at a big face of ice.

At one point in my experiences at the western end of the Ronne Ice Shelf, it was so high
that we couldn't offload onto the ice. Our booms did not reach up to the top of that part
that was sticking above the water.

DOB: How did you solve that problem?

WL: We didn't. We didn't put the base there. We had to go somewhere else. That was the
Ellsworth Station, in early 1957.

DOB: Okay. Now when you were participating in Deep Freeze as a chief oceanographer, were
you a civilian at that time?

WL: I was a civilian all the time. This was a civilian job with the Navy Hydrographic Office.

DOB: What's the difference between oceanography and hydrography?

WL: "Oceanography" is the term we use for knowledge of the ocean. Actually "graphy" means
more like mapping and such. "Oceanology," if one used that word, would literally mean
knowledge of the ocean, whereas "oceanography" literally means graphing. "Hydrography"
is generally graphing the ocean bottom, its topography, and its depths. The hydrographic
charts are the charts with the ocean bottom depths up to the shorelines. "Oceanography"
is the accepted broader term, dealing with all aspects of the ocean. In fact, there once was
an effort to change "oceanography" to "oceanology." But like the fact that the word
"astrology" does not really connote a full technical knowledge of the stars in common usage,
we instead use "astronomy." Yet "astronomy" technically means only measuring the stars.
However, "astrology" had such a niche in history that in no way could they get people to
change that to mean what we now think of as "astronomy." So it's somewhat a misnomer
in both cases, "astronomy" instead of "astrology," and "oceanography" instead of
"oceanology," but it's understood.

"Oceanography" includes the study of the ocean bottom itself and the characteristics of it,
not only the depth of it. "Hydrography" would be the depths, visually showing the
Mid-Atlantic Ridge, for example. "Oceanography" would include the study of the
sediments on the bottom and what they're made up of, such as the microscopic remains of
animals and things like that. And it would also include the physical characteristics of the
ocean itself, which would be the densities, the currents, etc. It would also include marine
biology and the interface with the atmosphere, for example waves. We also study the
temperatures above water, as influenced by marine meteorology. For example, the Gulf
Stream heats the air and such, you're looking at the air. But then the other way is looking
at the effect of the air on the ocean itself, such as cold Arctic air forming ocean ice. So it's
that interface, interactions. We are looking at the bottom part of the marine atmosphere
more, and historically we have been looking more at the upper part, the atmospheric part.

So you're covering biology, the chemistry of the ocean, and the physics of the ocean. I
had forgotten earlier to mention chemistrythat would be the amount of salt and oxygen
and many other chemicals in the oceans. So "oceanography" covers everything, just
"knowledge of the ocean."

DOB: How did you go about gathering the information that you were looking for?

WL: We had a variety of tools, and of course nowadays they look pretty archaic because
electronics were not around very much in those days back in the '50s.

We used something called the old "Nansen bottle" for taking water samples and
concurrently water temperatures at various depths. It's named after Fridtjof Nansen who
was a very famous Norwegian personage, not only in science and exploration, but also in
his humanitarian work. He was very involved in the problems of Russia back in the
famines they had many decades ago.


The other instruments that we had were instruments for sampling the bottom, instruments
for trawling, and instruments for wave estimates. I did ice observations, remember that's
frozen seawater, and the amount of ice and the thickness of it. So that was part of our
jobs, to make records, ice maps. We recorded what kind of pack ice we ran into, what
the thickness of the ice was, its nature, and the coverage of ice, whether it was 50 percent
ice 50 percent water or 10 percent ice and 90 percent water or 100 percent ice. We
also took bathythermograph measurements.

DOB: What's a bathythermograph?

WL: A bathythermograph is an underway instrument, a very clever instrument, but again
physicalnot an electronic instrument. You know that if you have a bellows type of
container and you have greater pressure, it squeezes together. And also if you have a
spiral tube with a gas inside of it and then expand that gas due to warmer temperature, that
spiral will open out, and so the end of that spiral will move in another direction.

So the bathythermograph was shaped like sort of a long cylindrical bomb with fins in the
tail and with a fine tube wound around the fins. The tube would end in a stylus inside the
larger body tube, that is the bathythermograph itself. The smaller one is just a sixteenth of
an inch diameter, and it would move the stylus right and left according to the temperature,
because those fins in the back, with that tube wound around them, would contain a gas that
would expand. And then a little bellows was fastened to a plate, a smoked-glass plate in
those days, in the forepart of the bathythermograph. And as it went deeper, the bellows
would compress and that would move the plate in the opposite direction that the stylus of
the temperature coil was moving.

So what you got was a combinationas the bathythermograph was moved through different
water, deeper water, the bellows would compress, giving you the depth from one direction
of the stylus moving on the glass plate, and you'd get the temperature changes from the
stylus moving in the other direction. So you had a composite of these two functions, and
this was all wrapped up in this one instrument.

So if you threw the instrument overboardand of course it would be attached to a wire and
the wire attached to a winchand you threw a lot of wire overboard, you know, and
spooled it out rapidly, the instrument would sink straight down. As it sank, the stylus
would record on the smoked-glass plate that was moving one direction from the bellows
compression and the stylus was also moving ninety degrees the other way, make a graph of
the temperature of the water as the instrument sunk.

The advantage of this bathythermograph was that you didn't need to stop the ship. You
could play the wire out rapidly and let it sink down; eventually one would come to the end
of the wire at the depth the bathythermograph was designed for, and you would reel it back.
So every hour around the clock of our entire voyage, down and back, the whole six
months, we would have records of seawater temperatures at various depths. Of course
you'd get the position of the ship at each drop; you would record the time and then later

you'd get the position of the ship from the navigator. So you had a record of the water
temperature changes from the surface to about four hundred fifty feet, which was the usual
depth we measured. We did have one bathythermograph designed for nine hundred feet
which we would drop now and then, but the major temperature changes are at shallower
depths.

So that's how that worked, and it worked very well and was in use for many years. Now I
believe it's all done electronically, and they also have disposable bathythermographs.
They just throw them out and they record and radio back the data. They're more
expensive but very effective.

DOB: And they're not recovered.

WL: They're not recovered.

DOB: What did you learn about the southern ocean that was surprising or new in light of then
current understanding?

WL: There were so little data from the ocean that almost everything was new. As far as ice
observations, there had been casual ones in reports but they're not done scientifically.
You know, they'd record that "we went through a lot of ice today." You may read those
annals of the earlier expeditions, but you cannot derive a study of the pattern of the ice, nor
can you record the characteristics of the ocean.

We could surmise certain things, like we knew there wouldn't be great changes in
temperature versus depth in the southern ocean areas because of what I explained before,
the water is more or less the same temperature down there. But they wouldn't have had
any way of recording whether there were any salt changes. And actually there shouldn't be
because the sparse temperature changes mean the water is moving vertically as easily as
horizontally, whereas in the major oceans, as opposed to the polar areas, the water is
moving basically horizontally and not much vertically. The Gulf Stream, for example, is
moving sort of four or five miles an hour along the surface, but not much is sinking from
the top to bottom.

DOB: Well, doing oceanography in the high latitudes must be a very different thing from doing it
in the tropics where you started.

WL: That is because of the weatherit's much harsher, of course, in the Antarctic. You may
see pictures of ice on the ships down there, from spray in freezing temperatures. Well,
our instruments, our platforms sticking out over the side of the ship and our big
oceanographic winch, were sometimes all covered with that same ice. We had to chip it
off of everything when we went through a bad ice storm like that, but we never had that
problem in the warmer climes.


So there was a new set of problems, and all new data. Of course there have been spots
recorded earlier here and there, but we're talking about such a large area that earlier data
didn't have much meaning scientifically, with just a few temperatures recorded here and
there. We were just starting oceanographic studies then. Now, after so many years,
oceanographers must have masses of data.

DOB: So your contribution to the Deep Freeze mission would have been that pioneering, earliest
attempt to record what was . . . .

WL: Yes, we weren't of course the earliest. The British had the research ship Challenger that
worked down in southern areas, and that were very new data they recorded. But they
generally made only one track line, of thousands of miles at one time of year.

I remember measuring the depths, for example. In the old days to take a depth
measurement, they had to use lead lines, and that was so laborious that even a research
ship like the Challenger didn't make very many of them, whereas we now used echo
sounders, "fathometers."

If you looked at our hydrographic charts of the '50s for the southern Pacificfor example,
you could follow tracks of ships and say, "Oh, here's the Challenger track," because every
hundred miles there was a sounding or something like that. Whereas we're taking
soundings every matter of seconds with the echo sounders. I remember looking at a chart
of the South Pacific and seeing that there was a thousand miles straight line without everif
you took a certain angle, you know, finding any soundings, except maybe running across
one or two made by the Challenger or another early ship that had made a sounding.

The main reason is, of course, that when you are south of the shipping lanes, you don't
have any reason to be down there except for scientific reasons. So the commercial ships
that sometimes do soundings would not have done them down there because they simply
weren't there.

DOB: When did the Challenger operate in that area?

WL: Oh, I don't remember the exact date, but that was in the latter part of the last century, way
back. I could find it in my references for you.

DOB: That's okay.

WL: But it's one of the famous "around-the-world" type of things. Of course Cook was down
there, too.

DOB: How did the fact that your ships had other missions to perform, like getting construction
crews and so on where they were going, how did that affect your oceanographic studies?


WL: That's a good question. Very often it affected us in the sense that we were competitive.
We wanted to stop the ship and do our work. It took two hours to do an oceanographic
station where we sent special sampling bottles, called Nansen bottles in those days, as I
mentioned earlier, to sample the water at various depths and also record the temperatures
at various depths. And we could go down right to the bottom. We had enough wire to
go five thousand fathoms down, or four thousand fathoms perhaps. I don't remember the
exact figure. A fathom is six feet. Five thousand fathoms is roughly the deepest parts of
the ocean, so we could actually do that.

However, it takes time to let that much wire out and strap these bottles on the wire every so
often and then bring them back up with their samples and their records of the temperature
from various depths. So that was a two-hour job usually. And that meant the ship is two
hours later getting wherever it was going. Our success was the more stations we could take
in this unknown area, the better, but their job was to get down there to the Antarctic.

And on the way back, it was particularly difficult to get the ships to stop because of the
horse-to-the-barn factor [laughs] especially when it's a six-month trip, composed of a
month-and-a-half getting down there, particularly with our stops and the slow progress of
these icebreakers, and a month-and-a-half back, plus the three months operating down
there.

DOB: Let's talk about "Operation Deep Freeze" now and the various ships that you were on. In
late 1955 you sailed south on the Edisto in Deep Freeze I. That must've been a very
crowded ship. Who all and what all was on it?

WL: It was. It seemed everybody was on it. The ship was familiar to me because that was the
one that I had gone on to the Arctic in 1950 for two months. It was a Navy ship, then their
own. It later became a Coast Guard ship. In fact, all the icebreakers became Coast
Guard. At that time, part of them were Coast Guard and part of them were Navy, and
they all acted under the Navy at that point.

The ship was full of its regular crew, and then in addition to that it had all these other
complementsSeabees to build things, had helicopters galore . . . well, "galore" is an
exaggeration, usually two or maybe three on the Glacier. So you had an aviation crew.
Then you had the scientific people, both those working on ships and those people that
were going to be ashore, some temporarily and most staying at the new stations. You also
had some old, experienced Antarctic hands, as advisers. For example, on Deep Freeze I
we had . . . let's see now, I was about to say Captain . . . yes, Captain Richard B. Black
was on that. We had a lot ofI'd have to look over the names of theI kind of get mixed
up with some of them as I was on four different ships during Deep Freeze I, II, III, and
IV.

DOB: Was Admiral Byrd on your ship?


WL: Admiral Byrd was not on my ship. He was on another one and I did meet himI had
met him earlierand he seemed a little senile at that point. Only because of his political
power was he on the expedition, really. He broke his leg on the ship and he died the next
year. So that was the only Deep Freeze trip he made. He certainly was a famous name
there.

DOB: There must've been a sense of pioneering and history and all of that aboard. Is that true?

WL: Oh absolutely. Sure. And that was the exciting part of it. And of course that was true
of all my oceanographic trips, at least for me. The great thing was getting out, "going
abroad"of course it became second nature. It was a job just doing the work, but then
you'd come into the ports for fuel, supplies and "R&R"that was the highlight. As I
explained, I wanted to see the world and see those ports, and I couldn't get to them
normally, not being wealthy, and here I was getting paid for it, and actually earning
overtime because we worked seven days a week around the clock.
DOB: Where did you go in Antarctica on the Edisto? Tell me about your ports of call.

WL: We went through the Panama Canal and across to New Zealand. It was great to come
into Port Lyttelton there, the port for Christchurch, because they had a history of Antarctic
expeditions leaving from that area and we were very warmly welcomed by the
New Zealanderswonderful people.

We then went south and arrived December 20, 1955, off Cape Bird. We hit the pack
ice finally, but not anything difficult. We got into Cape Bird, B-i-r-d, which is the north
end of Ross Island, and there was an Adelie penguin colony there.

[End Side A, Tape 1]

[Begin Side B, Tape 1]

DOB: We'll continue. We're on Deep Freeze I. We are heading for McMurdo, I believe.

WL: We're approaching Cape Bird, and we had come in there. And then as we came up to
the fast ice off Cape Bird, we got a chance to go onto the ice after being at sea for a long
time, and looked at our first penguin colony and walked around on the fast ice. ["Fast ice"
means it's sea ice fast to the shore, not "pack ice," which is broken ice, moving about on the
water.]

It was probably a little more dangerous at times than people realized. They didn't pay
much attention in the Navy preparations about safety down there. I guess people weren't
very conscious of it not knowing what they should or shouldn't do, not having read the old
polar stories, and sometimes old stories are exaggerated anyway.

So I remember standing on a piece of floating ice on the edge of this fast ice broken off
when the ship came up there, and I just stepped onto it and I stepped back off. But it

actually sunk a bit and it could've floated away. I would've been seen and rescued, but at a
lot of trouble. And at Byrd Station people stepped into crevasses right away, and then we
did lose a man the next day in McMurdo Sound there.

But the other icebreakers were there also. And then we could talk to our colleagues on
the other icebreakers that were on that side of the Antarctic, and it was a good experience.
And then we started trying to punch our way further into the Sound. We wanted to get
the base as far south as we could go.

DOB: And how close did you get?

WL: We had a lot of problems. The fast ice in McMurdo Sound had not broken up very far
by December 20. Later, if it were, say by late February, probably all the ice in McMurdo
Sound, or almost all of it, would normally be out. Just natural melting as the summer
progresses, and breaking off and floating out to sea, with further melting there.

We had to punch the ice, back up and punch again and back up and punch again. We
had several icebreakers working together trying to get through, and it was very slow. So
rather than wait longer, they sent tractor trains across the ice with supplies, and we had a set
of dogsthat's another story. With Admiral Byrd's influence we had dogs along.
Admiral Dufek, who was in charge, did not want dogs. We were turning to tractors and
helicopters and such.

So Jack Tuck, a young ensign who was in charge of that, took the dog team in over the ice
with no problems. But one of the tractorsthere was a crack in the fast ice and they put a
bridge across it, an aluminum bridge, and the tractor went across this bridge. But the
stresses were such that the ice broke at the end of the bridge and dumped the tractor and
cargo and driver into the Sound, and he was lost.

DOB: Who was it?

WL: Williams. And they named Williams AirOpFac, Air Operating Facility, after him.

DOB: Was he alone?

WL: He was alone in his cab. But because it was cold and windy he was buttoned up there,
and if he had been open, perhapsas he went across that, he should've been outside the
cab so that he could jump if the tractor went down, and would be fished out of the ice
perhaps, or at least have a better chance. He had no chance at all. There was no way he
could be rescued.

DOB: There was an airplane crash there also, yes?

WL: That's right. We had a little Otter which had been carried aboard one of the
shipsperhaps the Glacier, I don't remember which, one of the icebreakersand they

attached the wings and got it readied and everybody piled aboard. Not everybody literally,
but figuratively. They were overloaded is what I want to say, I guess. This is the story I
heard. And they also didn't have their weight distributed correctly in the planeI believe
that was part of the investigation results laterand they took off and then nosed down and
crashed. And other than the pilot who had a banged-up knee, no one was hurt. I have a
friend who knows more about this aspect and I hope you interview him. He's an aviation
specialist down there.

[Interruption]

DOB: You were talking about the Otter.
WL: Al Raithel is the aviator, and he lives in the area here and I'll introduce you to him. He's
an aviation historian, among other things, and he has all the references and loves to look up
all the details. He would be a great asset to you. He didn't make it out to our Denver
Deep Freeze reunion, but will come to the next. He wasn't on Deep Freeze I or II, but
he was on several of the later ones, in charge of the helicopter programs. He's a Navy
captain, retired.

DOB: What did the Edisto do to provide service for the aftermath of this crash?

WL: Well, the Edisto itself didn'tthe Glacier, the command ship, was there at that time so the
Edisto was not involved. The authorities just did their investigations and such, and
everybody continued on with their work. The crash lost that airplane, but nobody was
killed in that one, fortunately.

DOB: So the icebreakers, there were two of them there?

WL: I think there were four icebreakers operating. I can't remember whether we were all four
there at that exact time. I'd have to go back and research that one.

DOB: Did they work like teams?

WL: No, we were quite independent. And other than some communications back and forth
now and then with problems or questions or to change our plans going here and there,
each person really ran his own show. Each oceanographer ran his particular program on
his own because we were coming from different ports in the United States and going on
different tracks down south, and we wouldn't want to be all together from an oceanographic
viewpoint. We'd want to get four different tracks from different areas and fill in more
void areas and knowledge about the southern oceans, rather than repeating oceanographic
investigations right behind each other.

DOB: One of the Edisto's assignments in February of 1956 was to scout a location for a scientific
base at Cape Adare, and that effort failed and the station was finally set up at Cape Hallett.
Tell me about that.


WL: The Edisto was sent to look for a site for this Cape Adare station, which would be the
second one built after McMurdo in that area, and it was supposed to be obviously at Cape
Adare. I don't have a chart in front of me but you can see where that is. And it had a
base built by Borchgrevink, a Norwegian, in 1899. He was the first person to have
wintered over on the Antarctic continent. (The Belgica crew, of course, had also wintered
over, but on a ship, in 1898.) And so Deep Freeze planners knew Cape Adare was a
place where there would be ruins. I suspect whalers had visited it in the meantime.

However, when we got there, there were tremendous winds coming down the mountains
and through the bayI believe it was Robertson Bayat Cape Adare. And these were
hundred-mile-an-hour winds, and as soon as that wind hits the water, you get waves, but we
were close to the shoreline, with mountains in the background of the bay. And these are
katabatic winds that come down from these high mountains. These density winds were
just thatcold air shooting down there and concentrating in the bay and then spilling out of
the mouth of the bay. That's where this spit of land was and where Borchgrevink spent
1899.

They finally decided to fly a helicopter insorry, they first took a landing craftwe had old
World War II landing craft, "LCPs," Landing Craft Personnel, aboard, and the C.O. took
about, I don't remember exactly, but approximately eight people or ten people in the LCP
to survey the situation ashore. They could see Borchgrevink's hut; it was still there.
They got ashore, but the landing craft was turned over in the heavy surf on the gravel shore,
and they then needed to be rescued. Finally the Edisto decided to send a helicopter over,
very dangerous in those high winds to get it off, but they did get off and they brought the
people back.

And the decision was, if it's this bad in this case, it's going to be this bad in other cases, and
it will be too difficult, too unprotected to build a base there.

So we went further westward for a couple of days looking for another site along the
northern coast, the coast that's facing towards Australia.

We didn't find anything that seemed to be suitable. One usually finds rock faces, that is a
"vertical" shoreline, around the Antarctic. So the sites for bases are determined not where
you'd just like to put themlike in the United States you'd say, "I'll put one here and one
there" for scientific reasonsand to have them in different areas, but instead where you can
actually put a base, because otherwise you're looking at an ice shelf or you're looking at a
face of rocks that just plunge right into the ocean. And with not many suitable sites to
land, those sites are where penguins want to nest, too, and where seals come up to rest, and
so a lot of them are pretty well occupied ahead of you.

So we then turned back eastward, and went around that point called Cape Adare and
turned southwards, stopping at some offshore islands, seeking a base site. We had
problems there. I was doing an oceanographic station while the landing craft went ashore,
and that one turned over in the surf at the beach.

We had lost two landing crafts then, Cape Adare and here. I had an oceanographic wire
down. The Task Group Commander, Captain Thomas, a good friend of mine, Captain
Thomas, was very much in favor of oceanography, so I was doing very well in this
oceanography versus logistics. But he told me I'd better pull up my wire because they
seemed to be in trouble over on the beach. So I cut my station short, and we steamed
back. We had been rapidly drifting away from the shore party due to the strong current
around these islands. It was then decided that this site also was not suitable because of the
surf and its general exposure to the sea.

Then we went southwards again along the coast towards McMurdo Sound. We then
found a bay there which was a beautiful bay, well protectedMoubray Bayand we went
into that and found a spit of land

DOB: What's the bay?

WL: Moubray. If I'm correct, M-o-u-b-r-a-y, Moubray Bay. And it was on the charts but it
had not been particularly surveyed or examined. Just been seen by some earlier explorer
that there's an indentation there with the bay behind that. And we found this spit of land,
and that seemed to be suitable. It was very well protected.

We're now late in the season and we had to do this rather quickly. I went ashore in the
landing craft in this case. I wasn't the first one to step off but was in the first landing craft
in there. The spit of land was covered by snow, but not deep snow at that time.

There were a few penguins on it, perhaps about fifteen molting Adelie penguins that
looked like they were waiting to finish their molts to go to sea and such. I guess we didn't
realize that that was the only site for the penguins around there, too. So really the snow
covered the guano that would've marked it as a penguin colony.

So we wentreliving this in my mindwe went back and decided that was the site. It was
called Cape Hallett where we found this spit of land. That was the base that became the
joint U.S.-New Zealand base for later years.

DOB: So the penguins got moved.

WL: The penguins! When they built the base the following year, they discovered it was a
full-size Adelie penguin rookery. Some of the penguins got moved and the penguins
didn't like to be moved. There was no big problem except penguins return to their same
spot, and they wanted to come into the base and that's "Hey, you've built this hut on my
spot!"

You may have seen pictures of Cape Hallett with a ring of fifty-five-gallon oil drums as a
barrier to the penguins because they had a hard time hopping up on the fifty-five-gallon
drums from the flat ground. Now if they swim out, they can jump that high when they

come back out with a head start from speeding in the water and popping up and getting on
the fast ice there, but not over those drums.

DOB: Nobody worried too much about displacing the penguins?

WL: Well, the base was necessary, and so much investment had already been made there, and
we couldn't find any other site. It didn't really hurt them any. They survived, and of
course now they have it all back. [The station is closed.]

DOB: I read in the Deep Freeze report of the ship that, and this is a quote, "The commanding
officer cleaned the area for subdivision into lots for all present. Ample evidence of the
claim was left." Was this serious?

WL: Yes, yes. I have a lot there, and I'll show you my certificate. I think these were made up
in New Zealand when we got back there, and the captain gave us all a lot. I have a
shoreline piece there. You can see it.

DOB: Okay.

WL: I can get it now. We can talk

DOB: No, that's okay. [Laughs] So much for the United States not making claims.

WL: Well, that was just a little fun thing.

DOB: Sure. Let's talk about Deep Freeze II. You were on the Staten Island and going to an
entirely different ocean, accompanying the Wyandot to the Weddell Sea, and it turned out
to be an incredible voyage. Tell me about that.

WL: That's right. The Staten Island was the name of the icebreaker, and the Wyandot was the
cargo ship that had worked in the polar areas as an ice-strengthened cargo ship. Captain
Gambacorta was the captain of the Wyandot, I remember that. Our objective was to
establish a base as "Ellsworth Station" but it was to be on Cape Adams, which was at the
southwest corner of the Weddell Sea area. In other words, the southeastern corner of the
Antarctic Peninsula where it meets the Ronne Ice Shelf. This area was something that
Finn Ronne had mapped, I believe, in his early expeditions. Anyway, it was certainly
observed by aerial surveys that there was a site there that would be good for a station. So
our objective was to get there.

We got down to Punta Arenas, where we had some heavy weather in the strait. I didn't
know the Magellan Strait could be that rough, but it can. I went back to Punta Arenas
later and it's really changed. It was just a little cow town then, but now, after oil discovery
down there, it has changed its nature.


Then we went further south from Punta Arenas with the two ships, and we ran across a
Norwegian whaling fleet. One of the catchers came over by us to see what we were doing.
We identified ourselves and we asked them where the edge of the ice was, and they told
us where the edge of the pack ice was.
So we steamed southeast. We finally penetrated down to the coast and then went along a
lead of more or less open wateroften there is a lead along the eastern side of the Weddell
Sea, or the southern side too, depending on the winds. The winds come off the continent
and blow the ice out, away from the shore, and you can go along that lead which will be
open water mixed with ice now and then, but easier going than in solid pack ice.

Finally we stopped at Halley Bay Base off Halley Bay. That was a base built up on the ice
cap by the British, an early IGY station, and they were very happy to see us. Their relief
ship had not come in yet, and they were very happy to see human beings again.

I did an oceanographic station in the "polynya" that we stopped in, that is a pool of open
water, while the helicopter went in with our senior people aboardFinn Ronne and the two
captains and suchand they had an enjoyable time there. I've seen pictures. [Laughs]
The British had a nice little bar there.

We were around there a little longer than usual because we had a dentist aboard. The
icebreakers had both a dentist and a doctor because they were often isolated, and at sea a
long time. And Halley Bay Station had somebody with a severe dental problem,
toothache or something, and so the helicopter brought him aboard for dental treatment
and back so we hung around there a little more.

Then we went south, and finally hit the corner and then went westward along the Filchner
Ice Shelf. We stopped at Belgrano Station

DOB: The Argentinean . . . ?

WL: Yes, the Argentineans had one station down there, and that's their furthest penetration at
that point. They had their own icebreaker, the San Martin.

And then we went along the ice shelf, and we found a little low spot in the ice shelf edge
where we could just offload directly from the deck of the ship onto the icewe wouldn't
have to use any booms. Maybe a slant to the gangway, but nothing serious.

We made note of that, but we wanted to get further to this Cape Adams, which meant
going across the whole southern side of the Weddell Sea. Facing us was a big iceberg,
about twelve miles long, that had broken off the shelf but it was still right there at the shelf.
It hadn't really floated out into the Weddell Sea because the ice moves very slowly in the
Weddell Sea. It moves in a big gyre.

We finally got around that, with a lot of difficulties, and continued westward along the shelf,
now the Ronne Ice Shelf. And then the winds changed, blowing south, which gave us

more difficulties because it caused pressure ice and pressure ridges. The Wyandot had
one screw, and they broke the tips of the blades off all four of their blades of that screw.
So they were handicapped as far as making speed, and with a lot of vibration, as that ship
had also been caught in the pressure ice. Their hull did not withstand that pressure, and
they suffered a big crack near their water line.

So we had to stop while they put booms out from the Wyandot, with the booms on the
opposite side to the damaged side, and lift tractors and everything else out there so that
they would cant the shiptilt the ship enough so that that split was out of water, and then
weld in steel plates.

And the hold that faced the crack filled with water, of course, from the leak but was sealed
off and pumped out later. It had pallets of fifty-five-gallon drums of diesel fuel. And I've
always thought that that must've been a dangerous job welding, because even though the
drums were on pallets sealed up, I would think there would be fumes in the hold. But
maybe they were able to blow enough air into it to clear the fumes. I don't know, nothing
happened.

All that delayed us, so now we were getting later in the season and making such slow
progress.

DOB: Did you worry that you would just

WL: Well, Captain Gambacorta, I understood later, was very worried he was going to lose his
ship. He had a crippled ship and it was getting late in the season. But Finn Ronne was
determined we should go to Cape Adams. The commanding officer for the two ships was
really the number two person. Admiral Dufek was the Deep Freeze leader, and Captain
McDonald, "Mac," as we called him, was the number two person for the entire Operation
Deep Freeze, but he was the number one person for this Weddell Sea operation. So
only Dufek could override him, and he wasn't so anxious.

But we did continue, and finally we got down close enough to Cape Adams to check it out.
A helicopter went in to look at the site. It wasn't so much site problems, but the ice shelf
where we then were, was so high that our booms could not reach the top of it, so we
couldn't offload onto the ice shelf. Even then they'd have to tractor-haul it all to the base,
which would've been okay, but it'd be another delay, and again we're into February and we
hadn't even started to build the base.

The decision was made to turn back, and go back to that low spot on the ice. And it turns
out that there is an island behind that that was covered by the glacier and that's probably
why it was a low spot. Just like at Little America is a low spot in the shelf there because I
think when the Ross Ice Shelf goes over Roosevelt Island, which is buried in the ice shelf
behind Little America, the physics of the ice movement creates a low spot, which makes it
very convenient to unload from a ship. That's why Byrd put Little America at that low
spot, and why we also went back to a low spot.

So again, it's not so much where you want to put the base, it's where you are able to put the
base. And so we went back to build the base on the shelfon February 2, I believe it was,
we started building the base there. I may be mixed up with that date.

DOB: Well, it is late in the season and the plan was to have fifty days to construct the camp, and it
was accomplished at least in bare form in

WL: Fourteen days or something like that?

DOB: in two weeks. Yes. It sounded like everyone pitched in and was part of that effort.

WL: Everybody pitched in, even the oceanographersincluding me; I pounded some nails.
And so we got everything ashore there. And so my chief petty officer and the four sailors
were given back to the ship to help in that work. It's what made sense.

The only thing for oceanography that I could doas the ship came along the shelf, my
winch was on the outside. So there was enough open water there where I could take an
oceanographic station at the shelf edge, and then take a bottom sample and such. But
that was all I needed to do, really, was to take one

DOB: So otherwise you were a carpenter.

WL: so we were free.

DOB: And got it done and got out.

WL: They got it done.

DOB: Did you have problems getting out?

WL: I don't recall that we had any great problems. The problems were mainly behind us at
that point. Captain Gambacorta, I heard, was really worried if we had not had that
decision. We could never resupply that proposed Cape Adams base, is what it would
amount to. Even the Belgrano Base, they knew that they may be unable to resupply.
They always had enough provisions there to stay two winters if they needed to.

DOB: And it was not accessible by air?

WL: Well, in winter, of course, it's very difficult by air.

DOB: But you can't get a ship in the winter either.

WL: And you can't get a ship in there, no, so you'd have to wait for the next season. And if it
can't get it in there in the summer, that's what we're talking about here, and that did happen

to the Argentineans one time, so they asked their base personnel to stay. Nobody comes
around for two seasons!

DOB: Deep Freeze III then would have been 1958-59.

WL: Fifty-seven-'58. Fifty-eight-'59 was Deep Freeze IV.

DOB: Right. Fifty-seven-'58. So this would've been the year of IGY officially beginning.

WL: That's right.

DOB: And you were on the Glacier

WL: I was on the Glacier then as chief scientist. I went on the lead ship for the IGY, and we
had some very famous people on the ship. Jimmy Van Allen was one of themthe
"Van Allen radiation belts" are named after himand he was sending up rockoons to study
the extremely high altitude radiation that they had found earlier at high latitudes, and to see
what happened at the equator. So we went along the equatorthis icebreaker went along
the equator all the way to Christmas Island of the "Line Islands" and Gilbert and Ellice
Islandsthat's all the same thing. In fact it's even got a new name.

That was quite a long stretch in the Pacific along the equator, and it was a very hot voyage.
We had Russian observers with us and other guest observers, for the Little America base,
for example. And there was a meteorologist, for example, from Russia. As you know,
in the IGY they had many exchange scientists, back and forth.

DOB: This is now the third icebreaker you've been on.

WL: That's the third one. That was the biggest one and the newest one.

DOB: Was this like the flagship of the

WL: That was the flagship of the group, and so "the Flag" always rode in that unless there was
some special occasion that took him elsewhere as a visitor.

DOB: How would you compare it with the others?

WL: It was much newer. The others came from World War II. In fact, a couple of our
icebreakers were loaned to the Soviets under the lend-lease program in World War II.
And though they were pretty old, they were still going, and the Glacier was quite new and a
lot of new features.
DOB: Like what?

WL: Well, the Glacier just had different shapes. The wind-class icebreakers were all the same
shape and facilities and such, but this one had more and nicer cabins for passengers and

such, whereas the Edisto and Staten Island and Atka and such had a "TOQ," Temporary
Officers Quarters, which are a bunch of bunks in one big compartment for the visiting
officers and scientists.

DOB: Now you wrote that during Deep Freeze III that you spent three days living in Shackleton's
hut. This would've been . . . ?

WL: That was about perhaps two, two or three days. It was at Christmas. I was with Steve
Wilson, who was the operations officer on the Glacier, a very capable and bright fellow. I
said that I was to collect some penguins for the Smithsonian. I had visited by helicopter
Cape Royds where the Shackleton hut is in Deep Freeze I. I knew about the penguin
colony there, and I said that's going to be a very convenient place to get a few chicks, and,
as a zoologist, I knew how to kill the birds humanely. I wasn't going to "prepare" them as
museum specimens because we could deep-freeze them immediately in the ship's deep
freeze, and I could get them to the Smithsonian in a frozen condition. So that was the
primary purpose of our going over there.

We did this during Christmas when nothing else was happening other than Christmas
dinner and such, so Christmas Eve we went over by helicopter. We had at least one
sailor with us, I believe. The helicopter dropped us off and was supposed to pick us up
the next day. And it didn't, which was Christmas, I guess, and it didn't arrive. They were
having too much fun back aboard ship, I guess.

Well, we were getting a little worried. We really had planned on a one-day visit and one
night. And we didn't have a radio because the ship was out in the Sound parked up on
the fast ice, and we knew that they knew we were there and we had their ship's operations
officer. They could forget about me; they couldn't forget about him. And finally we had
eaten the little food we had taken with us just for that one day because we were there at
least two days. We were really opening some of the old food that Shackleton had left
there. I remember I rather foolishly tried some sardines. [Laughs]

DOB: What did you find?

WL: Well, we opened the can, and they looked just like you would expect, packed in there like
sardines. However, when you would dip into them, they were like mush. That's
because they'd been frozen and thawed in the summer, frozen and thawed, frozen and
thawed, and that reduces the flesh just like boiling does. So it had become a mush.
They had this solid shape, but they didn't have anyonce you touched them, there was no
solid substance. I ate a little bit, and I wasn't sure whether I'd get sick, because as I say, it
was kind of foolish. And I didn't get sick so they were preserved in there.

DOB: But you weren't that hungry.


WL: No. Then about that time we could hear the blades of a helicopter, the "chop-chop-chop"
coming in, and they picked us up. And they apologized for not coming out the other day
but there were too many things going on and such. It was kind of a nice experience.

DOB: What was it like to be in the presence of Shackleton?

WL: Well, his picture was still on the wall. I was there two years ago and I still thinksorry, it's
not his picture, it's a picture of King Edward and Queen Alexandra.

We also got veryit got very cold, and we had some sleeping bags with us. Of course
Shackleton's bags were in there, but they were so hard and cruddy, you didn't want to crawl
into them.

Everything in the hut was just strewn about as it was two years earlier when I was there.
The people didn't pay much attention to neatness or cleanliness or such because there
were no ladies around, and nobody worried about where the garbage went and things like
that. The same thing with Scott at his hut in McMurdo Sound at that time. Not now, I
presume, because it's all been straightened out and cleaned up. But there was a huge
trash pile that went up to the window. When you open a can and throw anything or
empty a box, you just toss it out the window. No reason to go outside and carry it further
away, nobody was expected around for years, and certainly not wives. [Laughs]

And so we did get cold, and with some reluctanceSteve wanted to start a fire in
Shackleton's stove, and I said, "Boy, if we burn this down . . . !" Well, the stove
wouldn't burn anything down, but I was worried about a spark on the roof. And so Steve
climbed up on the roof. There were plenty of boxes around to use to climb up on the
roof. Then we started a small fire in the stove. A lot of broken crates and leftover things
like that, trash around, that could be burned. And he said, "No, no sparks at all coming
out." I said, "Are you sure?" He watched quite a while and decided it was safe, so we
went and built a proper stove fire and warmed up the hut. The stove drew like mad! It
was just great. They had a good stovea big iron stove, of course, 1907.

DOB: Tell me about discovering the "Littlewood Nunataks" and identifying the "Littlewood
Volcanics." Was that on this trip or was that on Deep Freeze IV?

WL: That was Deep Freeze IV, when I was again on the Weddell Sea side. So that was not on
Deep Freeze III.

DOB: Okay.

WL: On Deep Freeze IV I went back to the Weddell Sea area. I was once again on the
Edisto. So that was my third trip on the Edisto and that meant six months each year
roughly and two months in 1950 in the Arctic. I therefore had been well over a year
aboard that ship as a civilian, out at sea all that time.


John Behrendt was one of the scientists that had gone down with a group of young
scientists that went with Finn Ronne on Deep Freeze II to put in Ellsworth Station. The
purpose of this trip was to go down and remove the fellows from Deep Freeze III, the
scientists and support team there, and to turn the base over to the Argentineans. We
were giving the base to the Argentineans. The cost of resupplying that small base where it
was, was not worth it for us to continue beyond the IGY. I remember things were
supposed to wind down at the end of the IGY.

The Antarctic Treaty was a thought at that time but hadn't occurred. Of course the
Antarctic Treaty makes a lot of sense because all that investment, all that time, and all the
accomplishments during the IGY and the accomplishments to be accomplished made it
worthwhile to continue Antarctic research work.

So the Argentineans, with their old Belgrano Station close by, could use their ship to
resupply both stations. And eventually they could move the Belgrano Station, which they
did, to the Bertrab Nunatak. A nunatak is a rock outcropping in a glaciated or ice cap
area. And at that area, there were only two nunataks on the map, the Bertrab and another
one, the Moltke Nunatak, M-o-l-t-k-e. That one is more vertical than it is flat. So there's
this Moltke rock outcropping there, sometimes observable and other times covered by
snow, but very difficult to land on because it's at a sharp incline and not suitable for a base
and not always clear of snow.

The Bertrab Nunatak had been discovered by the Germans in earlier decades. I'm not
sure they visited it, but it was on their charts and named by them. That's where the
Belgrano base now is, because the ice shelf, remember, slowly moves out to sea and breaks
off. And so eventually had Little America disappeared and gone out in an iceberg, melted,
and sunk to the bottom. The same with Ellsworth Station now and Belgrano Station,
both of which were also on ice shelves.

One of the scientists, a geologist from the U.S. Geological Survey, that had been on the
Weddell Sea expedition in Deep Freeze II, came back in Deep Freeze IV. And that
was John Behrendt, B-e-h-r-e-n-d-t. John and I had become friends on the first one, but I
didn't get to know him as well as I did on the second one, because on the first one he was
riding on the Wyandot, except when the two ships were together for New Year's Eve or
something like that where we tied together and celebrated and visited back and
forthmaybe Christmas and New Year's. And when we were caught in the ice sometimes
and couldn't really move, we got the ships together. At least we could have some
connection there.

So on Deep Freeze IV, we were coming down the coast of Coats Land, which was the
eastern side of the Weddell Sea, but we weren't sure just where we were along that coast.
We had overcast skies and we had only "sun lines" taken with the sextant to determine
position. The overcast skies meant you couldn't get a sun line, so we didn't really know
what our latitude was. We didn't know how far south we had gone along the coast
because the ship hits ice, backs up, changes course, hits ice, backs up, and then goes

straight, so you can't really do "dead reckoning," where you have to be in sort of a straight
line in clear water and the speed of advance is known and you can figure out how far you've
gone.

This is in the ice pack there; there are no features to see. So I was looking for this one
feature that was on the map, the Bertrab Nunatak. We knew it was by two big glaciers, at
the Luitpold Coast of Coats Land. We came down to these glaciers, and I was on the
bridge looking with field glasses up at these glaciers that blend together and come out as an
ice tongue a ways into the Weddell Sea.

[End Side B, Tape 1]

[Begin Side A, Tape 2]

WL: So these two glaciers, the Lerchenfeld and the Schweitzer glaciers, come together as one.
I saw up the glacier some black spots or spot through field glasses, looking from the bridge.
However, they weren't where the Bertrab Nunatak was supposed to be, an estimated
twenty miles inland. As so few people had ever been there, the charted location was
uncertain. Maybe the Bertrab Nunatak was misplaced on the chartwe weren't sure.

And here we had this geologist aboard, plus we had a two-man Bell helicopter, in fact two
of them. So we talked to the captain, the commanding officer, Captain Elliott, and he
said that John Behrendt could go in and do the geology there while I did an oceanographic
station. This was a good reason to do two scientific things, which was what the whole
expedition was aboutscienceat the same time and not impede our progress unduly.

So John did that and I did my bit, and he came back and he brought back some rock
samples of which I have a piece. I think he gave me more at the time, but I probably lost
some somewhere.

Later he wrote a scientific paper in the Journal of Geology on this find because it wasn't
Bertrab Nunatak; it was a new group of smallI'm not sure exactly how big these are, but
I'm saying like about four city blocks. They would be unimportant anywhere in the world
except in an isolated situation. Then they become the only thing you can put on a map.
It's like a very small island out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or somewhere else.
Out east of Brazil is something called St. Peter and Paul Rocks, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
They're really small, like about the size of a few houses. But they're on the maps and
have been there for centuries because they were foundI was about to say run into, maybe
they werebut they were found and put on maps so people wouldn't run into them because
of their isolation.

So the paper was about this, and he named the nunataks after me, and he named the rock
type "Littlewood Volcanics." It has become of note recently because in the Scientific
American of January '95, there is a feature article about "Pangaea," the original continental
mass. There is a photo of Littlewood Nunataks in that article.

[Interruption]

WL: So the Pangaea was the original continental mass that billions of years ago started spreading
apart into various positions where they're still moving tectonic plates, as you well know.

The theory isand it seems to be pretty well accepted, as there have been about fifteen
papers that I know of now that talk about this since that time, since '95East Antarctica, at
Coats Land there, in the Pangaea was once up against North America. And in fact the
proof of that is the rock type, Littlewood Volcanics, are about the same type of rock as in
Austin, Texasthat's the Texas coastand they have the same magnetic properties and the
same age, about a billion years. Their origin was the same. They can, as you know, date
rocks now. So it's fairly well accepted, and these little isolated meaningless rocks sticking
up have suddenly become the basis of a major geological theory.

DOB: How nice to be part of that.

By this time in Deep Freeze, you were the chief oceanographer in charge of the
oceanography on all of the ships?

WL: Yes. The other ships were working in the Ross Sea and going around their areas.

DOB: How did you keep touch with them?

WL: Only by a cable now and then to see how they're doing. As I said earlier, they're pretty
much on their own when you're down there because you're operating far off from each
other. The major job in being the leader is to plan the program for the next yearwho's
going to go on what ship, and to determine where the ships were going, and what we
wanted to do in those areas. Maybe we would get them to divert their plans to go to an
area that hadn't been explored oceanographically before. We would generally follow,
however, their tracks, and we would hopefully get them to change some of their tracks if we
had a scientific reason to do so and the other things fitted in.

DOB: So for you this work by now, and this is at least four years in Antarctica

WL: Four different trips in four years, yes.

DOB: It's not getting old and cold for you?

WL: Not getting old and cold? Well, I'm getting old [laughs] seventy-five in April.

DOB: Well, no, I mean at the time that

WL: At the time, no, no.


DOB: You were still excited.

WL: I would have liked to haveI was still excited. And then the Antarctic Treaty was being
formed at that time in Deep Freeze V, which by then they had changed the names to
follow the year. Now since a Deep Freeze season is two years, it'd be the following year.
That is, January '60 of '59-60, instead of being called Deep Freeze V, would be called
Deep Freeze '60, and from there on, '61, '62, '63 and such.

So I did go on part of the Deep Freeze '60 just for training the
oceanographic/bathythermograph team, and we only had three oceanographers then on
the other three icebreakers. We decided to drop down to three, and I think at times we
may have had only three icebreakers, too.

I'm not sure because I took on a new job, with the State Department, to go to Stockholm,
Sweden as Deputy Science Attach for Scandinavia, posted at the U.S. Embassy in
Stockholm, Sweden but covering all of the Nordic countries. So then I started a new
career as a science officer in the Department of State and then later in AID, my career for
the next twenty years.

DOB: So how much did your Antarctic experience fit in to support those later efforts?

WL: It helped that I had been in a leadership position and that I had a Fulbright scholarship in
Scandinavia. They had an opening and I apparently qualified to fill it, so I was very
fortunate and I enjoyed that work very much.

The big problem with my new Danish wife had occurred before I went on these Deep
Freeze expeditions. Just a year before, I told her that I was a sailor in a way, and that I
was at sea 50 percent of my time but that it was for three months or two months and then
back a couple of months and such, so she knew she could live with that.

But now I was gone six months, four years in a row, and I had said, "This is just to the IGY
end, and so I'll go back to the other kind of life." And what happened with the treaty
coming up was that we had no "end" in sight. And so she said that her doctor said when
she was complaining about thisbecause I couldn't really quit, as I planned the expeditions,
I'm really supposed to go on themand the doctor said, "Why don't you tell him to get a
new job or a new wife?" So my story is I flipped a coin and it came up a "new job." I was
told by a friend that this U.S. Foreign Service job was opening in Scandinavia, and so I
changed careers. And that solved everything.

It was very nice for her, of course. As an only child it was great to be able to be so close
to Copenhagen, where she's from, to visit her family. We had one child, and I hardly
knew this baby, of course. I'm home six months and gone six months! When my wife
said she didn't want any more children until I stopped this Antarctic business, I told her
that that would be the end, and it was.


DOB: Just a couple more questions about your work in the south in the high latitudes. You
were on a number of ships in very difficult seas, in ice packs and whatever. What did you
think of the skippering of the ships you were on?

WL: I had no problem with the skippering of the ships. I thought they were all very good
skippers. I did have a problem with this one navigator, although in a way maybe it was a
cause of my having found the Littlewood Nunataks because I wouldn't have been up on the
ship's bridge looking to try to find out where we were. I'd just asked him, and he didn't
know where we were on that coast and he didn't think of looking for this landmark. And
later on hewell, that's another story. He made some bad mistakes.

And he also lost all of our charts. We lost a lot of our data from that trip because heI
left the ship early. We got delayed on Deep Freeze IV coming home, and we were very
late. I got off en route and we were stopped in Uruguay to help rescue flood victims.
We had helicopters, and they needed them to rescue people. They had huge floods and
that went on and on, and so my office said(I had queried them)I said, "Shall I stay
aboard till we get back to Norfolk or fly back now?" We normally traveled about twelve
miles an hour, and I needed to get my report worked up for this trip and to plan the next
one.

So I flew back from Montevideo and I took my station data with me, but I didn't take the
nautical charts that tie in with the stations and tell you where the data was actually taken,
very important, especially the locality. The charts would be carried back aboard, and
they'd be sent down from the ship's home port up in Rhode Island, I believe it was, to the
Hydrographic Office by mail.

The ship came in and we waited for the charts, but they never came. We called them up
and they said, "Well, we can't find any charts." And I went up there to find out, making
my own investigation, and they apparently had thrown them out. This navigator probably
thought, "Well, I'm not going to go down there again. Get rid of that stuff." And they
were thrown away so we lost all theall this work was lost because of this person.

DOB: Well, were there leaders on any of these expeditions that particularly impressed you?

WL: Do you mean favorably or unfavorably or either way?

DOB: Well, either. I guess I was looking for the contrast. Someone that you thought was
particularly fine.

WL: Well, I think it's public knowledge that Finn Ronne had a lot of problems. We had been
friends for a long time, but I don't think I'd want to work under Finn. I was quite happy
to be a colleague.

DOB: How about positive leaders?


WL: Positive leaders, I think they were all quite good. I really had no problems.

DOB: What did it take to be a leader in a situation like that?

WL: Well initially I think the Navy and scientific program leaders looked for some of their new
leaders among those with earlier polar roles or experience, such as those that had been
involved in Operation Highjump or the Ronne expedition, for example, or with Admiral
Byrd. They were looking forI think some of them were along as advisers, such as Dick
Black. Captain Black didn't have any particular job other than use his experience to help
them because they didn't know.

And I found I was using my experience to help on the second trip to the Weddell Seathe
skipper aboard had never been in there before. I and John Behrendt were the only ones
that had been in there, and I had worked in the area and I was able to advise him on some
of the ice-related things. I was not a key adviser, as that was not my job, but there were a
few things that I did recommend, one of which didn't turn out that well.

DOB: Do you want to tell me about it?

WL: Well, once before we had come up to an ice shelf trying to find a berthing space, and we
actually shaved off a little space there. In this case, I said, "We can probably do this.
We did it over in the Ross Sea, and we could just go along the edge there and make a
smooth-it-up place where we can get our gangplanks and such offloaded," because it
naturally breaks irregularlyit's not a smooth line. It may look like that in a long distance,
but you get close up and it's got its irregular edges.

And so we came up along the Filchner Ice Shelf there, and what happened was that the
shelf was a little higher there and it dumped a lot of snow on the ship's deck. And some
of the snow that came down was compact enough to bend the railings, so there was a lot of
cleanup work which they didn't appreciate. It was nothing serious.

DOB: Was there someone that you met in the Antarctic that you were just particularly glad to
have there?

WL: Oh, there are a lot of people that were very good people. John Behrendt was a great guy,
and I didn't have any problems with any of the people really. I can't think of any.

On one of the Weddell trips we hadby the way I didn't mention beforewe had two
Japanese observers. And we all shared this TOQ, Transient Officers Quarters, so we
became close friends. I just got a Christmas card from Professor Koreo Kinosita who was
the Japanese scientific observer for that trip, and he later became Rector of the Gakushuin
University in Tokyo, and one of the leading scientists in Japan. Really a great person.

DOB: The work you did in the Antarctic was all in the austral summer.


WL: That's correct. I didn't winter over because the ice observations at sea are not possible in
the black winter when it's all just simply frozen. And I can't do any oceanography really
without any great strain. I suppose one can go out in the dark and drill a hole through the
pack ice and maybe do something like that, but it's not cost effective.

DOB: What effect did the long summer day have on the kind of work that you could do and the
way you did it?

WL: It didn't have much effect because we worked around the clock in oceanography anyway.
Our stations normally in the mid-Atlantic, for example, were a two-hour station, every four
hours.

DOB: But you could see better.

WL: Yes, well we could seeyes, we'd see better in the Antarctic, right, twenty-four hours.
That's a big difference, of course, and it was generally warm, although I had been in various
huge storms in North Atlantic, because we worked in the winter in my earlier experiences,
as well as summer.

The Navy wanted to know what the conditions of the waters were in winter. Submarines
operate all seasonsit's submarine versus a surface ship submarine hunter, each hunting
each other so the water conditions affect both of them. The submarine may hide if it
knows more than the surface ship knows. If it knows where the thermocline is, where the
density change is, it can go under it and be safer. If the surface ship doesn't know a
density change, e.g., a major change four hundred feet down instead of three hundred feet
down as it usually is, they mistakenly set their charges for three hundred feet, and their
depth charge fails. They may not even find the submarine because their sonar ping may
reflect off that density layer.

DOB: Did you find that you would stay up longer and just sort of create an artificially longer day?

WL: They're so cut up, you didn't really stay up because you've had broken sleep all the whole
time for the six months at sea. It didn't make that much difference. But I understand
that those who were in Antarctic stations where they may not have had things that they had
to do every four hours, that they would get what they call the "big eye," and that they would
go to sleep later and later and later.

DOB: What's the most dangerous or scariest part of doing oceanography in the southern oceans?

WL: Well, the weather and the conditions if you go overboard.

DOB: Did you ever?

WL: No, but we came close to it one night in the southern Pacific down in the sub-Antarctic
waters, in the bad weather belt there. I think this was on Deep Freeze I, and I mentioned

earlier that we'd do bathythermograph "drops" every hour, around the clock. Anyway, the
weather got very bad, and we had lifelines strung around the ship. We were heaving and
rolling considerably, and the ship often would change its heading to take the waves in the
most favorable direction.

Our chief woke me up that night and said the bathythermograph cable had broken, but it
jammed in the pulley block, so we could possibly recover the bathythermograph now
trailing behind the ship. We would have to recover that cable with a hook or something,
pull it over to the railing, and then put a clamp on the wire and hook that temporarily to
the ship. In the morning and calmer weather, we finally would reclamp the wire together
through a new pulley, with the wire left on the winch, and pull in the "BT," putting a whole
new spool of wire on the next day. We were up in darkness at that point. We were that
far north, and the season had progressed that far, too, on the way north.

So I went out there to supervise our plan to save the BT and to be with the chief. He had
a little twenty-five-cent wire clamp in his hand. The bridge knew that we were back there
working on the fantail where the winch was, but nevertheless they changed course. That
was a mistake because we suddenly got a wall of green water coming across the fantail
towards us, and I yelled to the chief to grab the lifelinea big line at shoulder height. I
wrapped my arms around it so that even if the water hit, I knew it would take your feet off
the deck, but if you held onto that line you are maybe horizontal, but you're still there.
And he grabbed it with one hand because he had this clamp in the other hand, and both of
us went more or less horizontal. I was afraid that he would be pulled off, but it was all so
quick, and then the wave went through us and such, and he managed to hold on, by one
hand!

Because if he'd gone overboard in that temperature, in the dark, by the time they'd get to
the bridge and they'd make a turn to try to come back to the same spot, it was so much
time thatin cold water you can only live a short timeit depends a lot on your body weight
and your activity. If you're unconscious you'll die fasterbut it's something like twenty
minutes, and it would take us that much time to get back and to find him with lights and
everything and then to rescue him, he would've been gone. This disadvantage in the high
latitudes is one that you wouldn't have in the tropical areas where you're not going to die
from cold.

So that experience shook him up. He had had a whole career in the Navy. I don't
remember the years, but maybe twenty-eight years or thirty years or something like that,
and he had never had such a close experience. He was so shaken up by that. I think the
bathythermograph was saved, but we just stopped BT operations for a day. But I woke
up the ship's doctor that night and he had some medicinal alcohol for the chief, some
"Methusalem" rum or something like that. It was an exciting experience.

I earlier had had a similar experience when I was in the Arctic in 1950. I was alone in the
stern of a rolling icebreaker, and a wave of water caught me and threw me to the other side

of the ship where I hit the railings and held on. It didn't go through the railings, so I
didn't go overboard. I'll never forget the lesson.

DOB: That's pretty scary.

WL: Otherwise, I can't think of anything that was especially scary happening in my program.

DOB: How much were you aware of what was going on in the rest of the world when you were
down on the ice?

WL: Not much, and we had no communications to speak of then. We could have official
communications. I could cable through the ship's communication systemradio, of
course, not cableto my home office if I needed something urgently, such as to send me
the replacements for this or that equipment, we're coming in to a certain port and have the
replacements waiting there; that type of thing.

But we could not radio personal communications, and we didn't have any letters or
anything in the Antarctic. We'd get mail at the last port, then nothing more till we came
back to the first port in the returning trip. So we had about three month's lag in the mail,
and no contact, except at Ellsworth Station on the second time, where I was able to use the
Ellsworth Station ham radio to call my mother. My wife was in Denmark at that point;
she was visiting her family while I was in the Antarctic.

DOB: One of the things that we heard a lot about at the American Polar Society symposium in
Columbus was on the issue of tourism in the Antarctic. What do you think about that?

WL: I'm in favor of controlled tourism in the Antarctic. In fact, I introduced this subject at a
preparatory international meeting in Tokyo when I was Deputy Science Attach at our
Tokyo Embassy. I was the only Antarctic experienced person there. Then followed an
international conference for Antarctic logistics hosted by the Japanese. Tourism was on
the agenda.

I had earlier received input on the American position from, of course, the National Science
Foundation and other bodies in the States, but I also put in something that I promoted,
which I'd got ten approved before I did thatI didn't do it out of clear air. I said, "Is there
any objection to this?" And I said that Antarctic tourism would make more people aware
of the Antarctic and that in turn would help support the Antarctic scientific program,
provided tourism were controlled and people behaved properly. It's all worked out that
way since then.

There are many thousands of tourists that go each year. They're there a relatively short
time in a controlled situation, in the sense they're taught not to do this and not to do that
and how to treat the penguins. I don't think they're disturbed much as long as you don't
do anything stupid.


Penguins are certainly disturbed by helicopters. If a helicopter goes over a penguin
rookery, they go wild and that's because the skua gull, which is a predator when penguins
are nesting, for example Adelie penguins, and any eggs that are exposed or any sick or
exposed chicks are targets. And so when they hear the helicopter, that is like Godzilla or
King Kong coming down. "This superbird is up in the air, this is the enemy, I've never
seen one that big or that noisy," and then they really panic.

Otherwise, you can walk through a penguin rookery and they generally won't leave their
nests. You wouldn't want to run through or anything like that. Tourists don't even walk
through them in that sense. They're taught to stay at a distance and move very slowly and
don't bother anybody.

DOB: What concerns were there in the '50s about penguins?

WL: We never even thought about it in the '50s. Well, not very much. Just common sense.
As a zoologist, I of course knew what to do and not to do, but I think generally people
respected them.

And in a New Year's party on the ice by the ship one time, the penguins came around and
some of the sailors chased after them and were playing football on the ice and such and the
penguins seemed to want to join the team. They were more curious than anything else.
They didn't know what to do with us.

But there's no overall damage to the penguins. The ratio of things are like lightning or
something similar. There are people killed by lightning, but if you live your life worrying
about being hit by lightning, you can ruin your life, too. So you have to have some
balance of things. I'm a middle-of-the-road guy.

DOB: In 1959, the Antarctic Treaty was signed and it basically set aside the Antarctic continent
for peaceful purposes and particularly for science. Do you think it's possible that such
peaceful and scientific pursuits can continue indefinitely?

WL: I think it is very possible and very probable. That was the one treaty where we actually
had a treaty with the Soviet Union during the cold war. We were very proud of that and
very concerned that it continue. It set a precedent for what could be done by cooperation
even among nations that were not getting along otherwise.

And the task there is still immense when you consider the area, and the international
cooperation has been great there and I hope continues, and I don't see any reason for it
not to. Problems like Libya and Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein, they're not going to go to
the Antarctic. They just can't afford that, and I don't think they have any effect one way or
the other.

DOB: What if some valuable resource were discovered there?


WL: I've heard that one for a long time, and Admiral Byrd used to say that we could use the
Antarctic for a deep freeze to keep the world's food excess stored down there, then when
there are times of famine we can take it out.

What he neglected to point out was that the cost of taking it down and taking it back is
overwhelming, because most of the population of the world is north of the equator. It's
like if the moon were gold, it wouldn't matter because the cost of bringing it back is greater
than the value of the gold we could carry. And if you want to bury food in a nice ice cap,
use the Greenland Ice Cap. That's also cold and closer to trade routes. It didn't make
sense and it still doesn't make sense.

The cost of extracting anything down therefirst of all, less than 1 percent is visible,
including Littlewood Nunataks. [Laughs] I'm sure that's about a millionth of a percent
or more. Even if you find it has ore in the surface there, it's too costly to take it out.
There are so many easier places in the world.

And if you find oil there, the weight of the ice actually pushes the continental shelf down
about a hundred percent more than the usual continental shelf, and so you can't have
offshore oil rigs like the offshore rigs in Alaska. That's shallow water and they can just
build up a barrier around the site to make a little artificial island, and by putting a rig on it,
they get out some offshore oil there.

But with the deep continental shelf and the icebergs, you can't do any offshore drilling in
the Antarctic, because first of all, it's I think, say, four hundred feet down, secondly, any
rigs you put down to that depth, if you can do that, but what if an iceberg comes along?
It'll just tear everything away. That's massive ice. You only see the 10 percent; you don't
see the 90 percent. Titanic all over.

DOB: Have you been back?

WL: I've been back once in '91 as a lecturer on the M/S Society Explorer, the old Lindblad
Explorer, a very nice ship. I used to know Lars-Eric Lindblad.

DOB: What's your favorite story from all of your experiences in Antarctica?

WL: I'm not sure. I haven't thought of it. I enjoy all the experiences and I had lots of other
experiences in life and I've enjoyed them all. A great life in the foreign service as a
science officerfive years in Indonesia and three in Japan, five in Sweden, and the rest in
Washington, but traveling to other lands.

DOB: If you were an artist and you could paint on one canvas the essence of your Antarctic
experience, what would it look like?

WL: I haven't the vaguest idea. [Laughs] Any suggestions? As an oceanographer or just as a
human being?

DOB: Answer it how it's meaningful for you.

WL: Well, I think the most beautiful area to go to and the one which I recommend to people
when they ask me is the Antarctic Peninsula. It's fortunately the most attainable, and
along the western side there are just some beautiful vistas. You've got ice, you've got
whales, you've got beautiful mountains and glaciers. If the weather is as clear as it is
oftenwhere you are just below the bad weather belt, but you could still have your off-days,
fogs and things like that, but generally you've got a good chance of getting ashore in places
and it's beautiful, especially Lemaire Channel. You perhaps have heard about that, and
you can read about it in the brochures anyway, but it is true.

If you go around to the other areas, you see a lot of the same. If you go from South
America, let's say, on the ships that leave South America and go to McMurdo Sound,
you're just "sailing through"particularly since they can't go too far in the pack ice, they're in
a lot of bad weather, and you can't see anything. And if you do see something, it's going to
be a white strip which is going to be about thirty miles away, "that's the ice shelf you're
seeing there, that's the edge of the continent." Depending on the weather you've got a
shelf in sight or not, and you aren't going to see too much of it anyway, and once you've
seen it, it's going to be a lot of the same.

DOB: In your painting would you have a ship in it with oceanographers at work?

WL: Well, I'd probably havethe painting would be of the mountains and the snow and the
glaciers, so the ship would be pretty small, and you could say there's an oceanographer on
it, but I don't think you'd see him. That would be kind of specializedit wouldn't be a big
place.

DOB: Paul Siple wrote that "the Antarctic generally wields a profound effect on personality and
character" and that practically nobody who goes there comes away the same. Would you
agree with that?

WL: I think I would. Paul was a very close friend of mine for many, many, many years from
1955 till his death, and his wife, Ruth, is still a very close friend. We were really close and
a wonderful fellow, and it was a great loss when he died.

DOB: Were you changed by your experience?

WL: How do we know? I guess so. I mean I certainly agree with what he's saying that you
certainly have an understanding of that area. And life is quite different than the Arctic.
In one sense, it's the same in the sense of "pack ice is pack ice," but different in the sense
that you have these vistas in the Antarctic that you don't have in the Arctic, although once
you get up in Greenland and Spitsbergen or other similar places, there are a few spots
there.


DOB: Well, I need to go, but what haven't I asked you that you really think needs to be included?

WL: I think we pretty well covered the water front, ice front.

DOB: Well, in that case thank you very much, Bill. I really appreciated talking with you. It's
been a very interesting time.

WL: Thank you. It's been fun and a chance to relive in your mind memories and particular
scenes that will stay with you forever, and that's part of the experience of it.

DOB: Thank you.

[End of interview]

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Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project

Interview with William H. Littlewood

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