April 9, 2012 • 26 mins
When gold mine heiress Louise Boyd staged her first Arctic expedition in the 1920s, she hunted polar bears with aristocrats. Yet she also met other explorers who encouraged her in more scientific pursuits. Listen in and learn more about her expeditions.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Down and I'm Debla to Charker, Bording and Delin. Know,
we've really been on a roll of the past few
weeks discussing daring women in history. Well, it is March,
(00:22):
after all, it is March. It might be April by
the time it's comes out. But you know, we've been
keeping up the tradition of covering women's History Month with
Bell Starr, Bessie Coleman, the Brontes, who are daring in
their own way free to callo. But we haven't really
ventured into one of our favorite topics of discussion yet,
which is, of course exploration. We love to talk about explorers,
(00:43):
whether male or female, we do, and that's why today
we're going to cover polar explorer Louise arn Our Boyd,
who took adventurous trips to the North, made real scientific
and geographical contributions in the form of thousands of photos
and films, and performed under of her wartime work for
the US government. No less, Boyd commissioned and organized a
(01:05):
whopping seven Arctic expeditions. Was the first person to charter
a plane over the North Pole, and earned herself numerous
international honors and medals. But what's maybe most surprising about
Boyd is the very same reason that she was able
to become an explorer in the first place. She was
a San Francisco socialite and incredibly wealthy eRASS, and that
(01:28):
station in life really allowed her a lot more freedom
in the nineteen twenties and thirties than most women had.
She had the ability to go out and explore the
Arctic because she had the money to do so. But
when she wasn't busy scaling glacier, she was patronizing the
symphony back at home, patronizing the ballet, hosting these grand
parties at her estate, tending to her famous Camelia collection,
(01:51):
doing the sort of things that are maybe considered more
traditional for a socialite of her era. It's unlikely, however,
that Boyd would have had so much freedom and so
much money if her youth had been less marked by tragedy.
So we're gonna start off by telling you a little
bit about that. She was born September six, eighteen eighty seven.
Her father had made a fortune in the body gold mine,
(02:13):
Banansa of eighteen seventy seven and later on and investing.
Her mother was also a bodie heiress, and the couple
raised their family in her San Raphael mansion Maple Lawn,
and also a ranch east of the San Francisco Bay Now.
Louise grew up horseback riding with her two brothers. They
would pack supplies and spend entire days on the trail,
so kind of a tomboy. But in nineteen o one,
(02:35):
her seventeen year old brother Seth died suddenly of heart disease.
Only eight months after that, her sixteen year old brother
John died to also of heart disease, leaving Louise and
her parents, who were kind of in poor health themselves
almost inseparable, and the three of them would travel across
the US. They'd visit Europe from time to time, and
(02:55):
Louise was brought into her father's business to picking up skills,
perhaps made her later such the confident expedition leader she became.
She also got into photography and one of those European trips,
which was the hobby of her parents really supported. They
hired a professional tutor for her, got her the equipment
she needed really embraced the new interest of their daughters.
(03:18):
Soon she kind of lost that parental support though. In
nineteen nineteen, Boyd's mother died. When year later her father
died too, leaving her millions of dollars and making her
president of the Boyd Investment Company. She was only thirty
two at the time. According to Elizabeth Olds and Women
of the Four Winds, Boyd's huge inheritance allowed her to
choose anything quote from a morbid retreat to an unbridled
(03:42):
plunge into the reckless self indulgence and profligacy of the
nineteen twenties. Instead, though, she chose something very different. She
chose travel. Yeah, and at first her trips were semi
conventional for a well off woman. She took a friend,
Sadie Pratt, who was the widow of General conger Rat,
and together they visited war torn France and Belgium. She
(04:04):
took a lot of pictures documenting the ruins, and then
the next year they did a second European trip, this
time to Scandinavia and Italy, Portugal in Spain. Kind of
the things you might expect, but in Boyd branched out
a little bit and booked a cruise to Iceland, Greenland
and lapland definitely spots that are kind of outside of
(04:24):
the Grand tour territory. I'd say the cruise that really
turned out to be a life changing experience. Boyd was
just enchanted by the Arctic and quickly started planning a
return trip, although this time she really wanted to go
on her own terms, you know, be in charge of
what she got to see after a year off during
what she was presented at the British court, Boyd hired
(04:45):
Arctic expert Francis di Guibert to advise her planning. She
then charted a ship which was appropriately named Hobby and
which also, according to Jocelyn Moss for the Murn County
Historical Society magazine, had been rolled amindson supply ship when
he flew over the North Pole in a dirigible, so
it had a little bit of a pedigree to it.
(05:06):
It did, and she hired a crew of fourteen. But
ever the lady, she also brought along her maid and
a few friends, including a Spanish count and countess. We
were going to have a good time, so they set
out in summer nineteen to Franz Joseph Land and um,
even though the captain had described her as quote some
American woman who wants to see ice, kind of dismiss
(05:29):
at the trip was essentially an opportunity to hunt polar bears,
and newspapers were really smitten by the entire concept that, uh,
this woman would charter the trip in the first place,
taking account and count as along with her, and go
to hunt polar bears of all things. So the New
York Times it ran headlines like American girl shot eleven
(05:50):
bears in the Arctic. And one of the most famous
photos of Boyd actually has her wrapped up in a
dead bear hanging from a hook. If your animal lover,
it's kind of of a horrifying picture. It does sound
very comfortable either, I mean, even if you know the
animals did, I mean, it just sounds kind of alarming
to be wrapped up in a dead bear. Yeah, not
a skin either, the whole dead bear. But it's actually
(06:11):
interesting to note that after such big game hunting trips
kind of became unpopular, you know, a few decades later
in the century, Boyd claimed that the numbers had been
really exaggerated by the press. You know, she was credited
with shooting about I think eleven bears personally, um, but
she kind of revised that and said they really only
(06:31):
shot a few bears. The bears they did hunt were
just for food, trying to make everybody calm down a
little bit. Also reported were the quantities of film shot
of twenty one feet plus seven hundred still photos. Boyd
would document far off landscape studies of cliffs, glaciers, inlets, animals, plants,
and of course the ice. Though she wasn't into scientific work,
(06:55):
Boyd's early photography skills were still good enough to make
these photos really useful, so provided new information about different
types of Arctic ice. For example, yea, she had the
scientific eye even though she didn't have the scientific intentions yet,
And sure enough she caught that polar bug that's so
common in many of these exploration episodes that we do.
She wrote, quote, I understand for the first time what
(07:18):
an old seaman meant when he told me that once
you had been in the Arctic and in the ice,
you could never forget it and always wanted to go back.
Fortunately she had the resources to do that, so in
n Boyd rebooked the hobby and made plans to take
a second big game hunting trip combined with a little
botanical research this time. But just as she got to Norway,
(07:40):
which was going to be her Arctic departure point, she
learned that Roald Almondson had gone missing while searching for
the dar Digibil pilot amberto Nobili and his crew, who
had crashed themselves somewhere in the Arctic. So Boyd immediately
turned over her ship to the Norwegian and French search effort, saying, quote,
how could I go on a pleasure trip when those
(08:01):
twenty two lives were at stake? But she also kind
of contributed extra to the effort. She hired pilots to
aid the hunt for the missing men, and she joined
in herself. She wasn't going to loan her ship and
its crew, which she had all paid for and everything,
and just sit back in Norway and watch the whole
thing happened. She was on the Hobby as it conducted
(08:22):
a ten week, ten thousand mile thirch for the missing men,
taking thousands of photos along the way and twenty thousand
feet of film too. Perhaps because the situation was so serious,
this also seemed to have been Boyd's first taste of
the madness inducing side of the Arctic. She wrote about
how the landscape could play tricks with your head, how
they constantly spot tents that actually turned out to just
(08:45):
be ice formations, and though Almondson was never located, no
Balay and his men were ultimately found alive by another crew.
According to Women in World History Encyclopedia, Boyd was honored
for her efforts by being awarded the Order of St
Law first Class and becoming a Chevalier of the French
Legion of Honor. And when she learned that she'd be
(09:05):
receiving that sat a lawf award and she was going
to only be the third woman to have earned this,
she dashed off to Paris first to buy an appropriately
grand outfit for the audience before the King, having nothing
else but her stealskin and boots with her to wear.
So I think it's worth noting here that Boyd always
really carefully emphasized her femininity, and perhaps it was because
(09:27):
at the time the very fact that she wore pants,
you know, sealskin pants, that sort of thing on her
expeditions was newsworthy. But she often had to justify doing
things that were considered masculine, like exploring, and she basically
respond to these questions. But I think she saw no
problem between being a feminine woman and doing adventurous things.
(09:51):
She reportedly said that quote at see I didn't bother
with my hands except to keep them from being frozen,
but I powdered my nose before going on deck. No
matter how rough the sea was, there's no reason why
a woman can't rough it and still remain feminine. So
I'm curious to know how much of this was her
personality and how much was just trying to represent herself
correctly in the news. Almost either way, that trip was
(10:14):
important for one other major reason though. During the search
she met countless polar scientists and experts who were also
looking for Noble and Almondson. Nearly all of them stressed
the importance of a good photographer on research missions. So
this kind of got her to thinking a little bit. Yeah.
So for Boyd's next trip, which was conducted during the
summer of nine, she decided to get into real geographic
(10:37):
research and survey the Fiords on Greenland's east coast before
between the seventieth and seventy four parallels. I should say,
and this trip really seemed like a bridge, a real
bridge between earlier and later missions in a way. Yeah,
she chartered a different ship this time. She outfitted it
again with a hand picked crew, but she still brought
along her maid, her secretary, some and so it had
(11:00):
a pleasurable aspect to it aside from the scientific one. Um.
But you know, she branched out too. She turned a
stop at a recently settled Inuit settlement into an anthropological
and social opportunity. She was a real social woman. She
made friends with the local people who lived in turf
and wood houses. She hosted a party for them on
(11:22):
board the ship. We're going to talk a little bit
more about her her parties later on, but she she
went out of her way to be the social person
she seemed to be even in the Arctic. She also
took thousands of photos because that's what she was so
good at, and because she used high tech equipment and
had become really a depth at something called photography tree,
which is um taking photos which can in turn be
(11:45):
studied and you can draw like really precise measurements and
maps from them. Um. Because she became so good at
this type of photography. Dr Walter A. Wood, who was
a surveyor for the American Geographical Society was later able
to use only two hundred of these photos and put
together a whole new map illustrating this area, and it
(12:05):
turned out the party had discovered a new glacier and
a new valley. She also had another lucky meeting on
the trip home from Norway. She met a g S
director Isaiah Bowman. Both parties realized a partnership would be beneficial.
With the American Geographical Society as a sponsor, on one hand,
Boyd would have access to top scientists in different fields
(12:26):
and some credibility. On the other hand, with Boyd's money
and organizational experience, she had, after all, planned three of
these trips by now, so she she did have a
lot under her belt. The American Geographical Society would be
able to launch missions that they wouldn't have otherwise been
able to, so it was a win win, definitely. So
the first a GS sponsored Boyd expedition a launst June
(12:49):
ninety three, and Boyd was again the leader of the
expedition and its chief photographer, but this time there was
also a geologist and a physiographer and two surveyors. I
think there was going to be a botanist but he
came down with appendicitis right before, so I guess Louise
again had to fulfill that job. But there was also
(13:10):
really high tech equipment this time too, that Boyd had
picked out herself, like ultrasonic depth measuring equipment for um map,
mapping out the sea floor and figuring out all its
contours and everything. And the plan this time was to
study glaciers in the Franz Joseph and King Oscar Fiords
and chart the northeast coast of Greenland, which we've talked
(13:31):
about the eastern coast of Greenland a little bit before
in our Nonsen episode, and we know that that is
the very remote side, the side that has all of
the inlets and the rugged terrain and it is really
hard to land on and to survive on, but they
traversed it anyway. According to Jacqueline McLean and Women and Adventure,
the party spent most of August exploring on foot, carrying
(13:54):
all of their gear on their backs and working almost
constantly to take advantage of the light. So does sound
very socialite right there. But they even had a close
call on the way home when the ship ran aground
with no one else around to help and the Arctic
winner approaching. The captain had to have a cable throne
around an iceberg to give the ship enough leverage to
(14:16):
get out of that situation and tow it out of
the up almost exactly. And by the time they left,
a fifty five mile per hour snowstorm had come, so
they kind of left justice in the end of time.
And really Boyd noted that too. She wrote that quote
nature was closing her doors on us, which I really
like that quote. She she leaves behind some interesting quotes,
(14:37):
but I like that one because it is so hostess,
like the Arctic is saying goodbye. Time to go home.
There is the snowstorm and the fifty per hour win,
and they took the hint they did. They got out
of there just in time. The result of the and
thirty three missions was a book called the Fiord Region
of East Greenland, and it included maps and three d
(14:58):
and fifty of Boyd's photos and parts of the sea floor.
She also had a few word named after her, Louise
Boyd Land appropriately enough. So over the next few years,
Boyd made two more trips with the American Geographical Society,
taking photos, collecting data and spending much of her time
at home analyzing at all. She always said that that
(15:18):
was a really major part of the job. It wasn't
just the trips that was the easy part, almost it
was looking at all the work they had they had
brought home. But she'd also returned to her life as
a social grandam too. She served on the boards of
the San Francisco Symphony. She worked with the Garden Club
in the California Botanical Society. She managed a staff of
(15:40):
nine at her estate, Maple Lawn. By all accounts though,
she was considered to be a fantastic hostess, and she
would stage these elaborate parties at Maple Lawn, which was
decorated with items from her travels and antique Swedish murals,
but the grounds there were especially famous, featuring many Japanese maples,
but other also other exotic plants. Boyd herself gardened in
(16:03):
a special wool suit with matching hat, occasionally having full
grown trees, moved about the property to complement new construction projects,
and tending to her hothouse chamelea collection which I can't
even imagine how you do that move the entire fully
grown trees. She would apparently build some new feature of
the garden or an outbuilding or something, and not want
(16:25):
to have that tacky, you know, just built kind of look,
and so she'd move full grown trees to make it
look like it had been there for a while. What
I really can't imagine is gardening in a wool suit.
But maybe that's because we live in Georgia and if
you if you tried doing that, you'd probably die within
about thirty minutes. Yeah, there weren'to many occasions around here
(16:45):
to wear a wool suit. She almost always along with
her suits or whatever she was wearing, were a camelia too,
or at least some kind of flower, even when in
the Arctic. According to Women World History, she said quote,
I don't feel dressed unless I'm wearing hours. Even in Greenland,
i'd find something and were it with a safety pin.
She was also a little bit of a foodie too,
(17:06):
which I think is interesting because I don't when I
think of Arctic explorers, I think of some of the
worst food imagine and lawfish well in in cans that
have botuli is um and all sorts of bad things.
And I'm sure she wasn't eating that well on her troops.
But back at home she was quite a foodie and
she had a very extensive, very international cookbook collection. From
(17:29):
all of her travels, she'd try to bring home recipes,
although her favorite cuisine was apparently Southern cuisine. Boyd's last
a g S sponsored expedition was in ninety eight, and
the next year World War Two began, which made the
Arctic pretty much a Noga region of the world as
far as exploration was concerned. Yeah, especially hobbyist explorer. So
(17:50):
Greenland was a particular point of concern though for the
United States, and there are a few reasons for that. One,
Greenland was a colony of Denmark, which Germany of occupied
during the war. Geographically, it was right below where American
pilots would be flying to Great Britain. I mean, if
you've ever flown there, you usually do fly over Greenland
you can kind of see it on a clear flight.
(18:12):
And also for meteorological reasons, it's a really great place
to gather information that's really useful for forecasting the weather
in Western Europe. It would be a powerful place to control.
Unfortunately for the US government, though most of the experts
on Greenland, you know, people who could kind of give
them a leg up on that part of the world
were behind lines. Louise Boyd, however, was safe at home,
(18:36):
so in the summer of nineteen forty the State Department
contacted her about helping out, and so the first thing
she did was canceled the publication of her book on Greenland,
her latest book on Greenland, which would contain all of
these brand new maps and photos and all sorts of
information that she and the government didn't want falling into
enemy hands. And then in nineteen forty one she went
(18:58):
a step further and can organizing a trip to western
Greenland and eastern Arctic Canada for the National Bureau of Standards.
So this trip wasn't top secret, but it wasn't exactly
public either. According to the National Archives, a confidential document
explained that the goal of the trip was to quote
elucidate the anomalies of radio communication on the US europe
(19:21):
transmission path, which was quote worthwhile from the National Defense viewpoint.
Only the Captain Bob Bartlett knew the true nature of
this mission. The crew, which Boyd had again hired herself,
just thought that she was some lady on a photography trip,
and for some strange reason she was the boss of
the captain, and that her history doing these missions in
(19:43):
the first place did give them a little bit of cover.
It was entirely plausible that Louise Boyd would go on
another Arctic trip, even in the middle of a war
to crazy she was interested in, you know, And so
they had that cover for actual government work that was
being done. But Boyd also had her own super top
secret mission from the War Department, and that was to
(20:05):
investigate possible landing sites for US planes. And she in
the area she was looking at, she documented the food
and water conditions, you know, if people had to be
there for a while, calculated wind speeds, calculated longitude and latitude,
and of course she took her her classic complete photo
sets to let people know what the area really looked like.
(20:27):
And the wartime trip ultimately ended up being Boyd's last
expedition to the Arctic, even though she did, at the
age of sixty seven and nine, charter a plane to
fly over the North Pole, which she had of course,
as any polar explorer probably wants to see the North
Pole over her whole life. And when she made that flight,
(20:48):
she was carrying the flag of the Society of women
geographers and wrote about it pretty poignantly. She said, as
I saw the ocean change to massive fields of solid white,
my leaped up. Then, in a moment of happiness which
I shall never forget, our instruments told me we were there,
for directly below us, nine thousand feet down lay the
(21:10):
North Pole. We crossed the pole, then circled it, flying
around the world in a matter of minutes. And as
we already mentioned, she was the first person to charter
such a flight, and I think she also made comments
realizing how how much flight was going to change the
world of polar exploration and make it so much easier
to get to some of these places. Um. She didn't
(21:32):
stop traveling though, just because she didn't make further Arctic expedition.
She traveled throughout Asia, throughout the Middle East, well into
her seventies, well still maintaining this vigorous schedule of charity work,
society work, all of that type of thing, until late
in life her money ran out and friends ended up
supporting her on a nursing home until her death in
(21:53):
nineteen seventy two. I think she asked for her ashes
to be scattered over Louise Boyd land that proved logistically difficult,
so instead they were scattered over Arctic Alaska, which was
the last place she had really been in the Arctic.
We want to be sure to give a special thanks
to the Marine History Museum for directing us towards some
(22:13):
accounts and really fantastic photos of Boyd to use to
research this podcast. The museum is actually in the Boyd
gate House, a guesthouse of Maple Lawn, which was donated
to the city along with a park by Mr and
Mrs Boyd after their son's deaths. Also, one final note
for any of you research enthusiasts out there. In nineteen
seventy four, the Center for Polar Archives at the National
(22:36):
Archives got one hundred and fifty reels of Louise Boyd's
film from the Elks Lodge in San Rafael and by
eighty you know, these were all on those nitrate reels
which can ignite very easily. Um, they had all been
copied to say, for stock And according to Audrey Amadon,
who wrote about the films for the National Archives, it's
(22:57):
really interesting to watch the progression, but that shows Boyd's
transformation from a hobbyist to an actual geographer. As she
starts to focus less on this almost contrived story of adventure,
you know, pasting together the the best, most exciting high
points of the trip, to recording things in a true
to life, scientific sort of way, taking a little of
(23:19):
the drama out of it, but focusing more on things
that could help people better understand the Arctic. I think
that's really neat. You can actually see a few of
her clips too. I watched a few minutes on YouTube,
so you can see the ship and the Greenland coast
and how it all looked really interesting again, with so many,
like so many of these subjects to see someone who
(23:40):
turned a passion into I don't want to say a
career because it's not like she really made a living
at it, I guess, but spend her money. Yeah, she
spent her money actually, but but a lifetime's work. Absolutely,
So I think on that note, we'd like to leave
with a with a quote from Boyd that kind of
expresses her love for the Arctic, and she said it
goes quote cold, yes, of course, but there's an unearthly
(24:04):
grander about it all and I love it. So that's
pretty perfect. You're right to blena a good time to
transition to listener mail. So this email is from Megan
and she wrote in to say that she loves the podcast,
but yesterday was the online qualifying test to get a
tryout for Jeopardy. I was killing time waiting for the
(24:27):
test by catching up on Stufhi Misston History Class podcast.
I listened to the one about the Lone Ranger and
then finished the one about Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
just a minute or two before the test started. Part
of the way through the Jeopardy test, there was a
question asking quote what poet wrote sonnets from the Portuguese
for her boyfriend Robert or something like that. Uh, and
(24:51):
she goes on to write, whoa Elizabeth Barrett on the
Jeopardy test? I never would have known the answer to
that question if I hadn't just listened to your pie cast.
If I get on Jeopardy, I'll have you guys and
You're awesome podcast to thank for it. So cool, yeah,
very cool? And how she makes it how lucky too?
I know. I mean, Megan, maybe if maybe you could
(25:12):
get on Jeopardy, you can say hi to us but
love a shout out. Yeah, definitely, So thank you Megan
and um we do really like hearing about you know,
times when the podcast is debut from a a close
scrape for something, whether that's your AP test or something
like a Jeopardy test, So it's always fend to hear
(25:32):
from you guys. We are at History Podcast at Discovery
dot com. We're also on Twitter at Miston History, and
we are on Facebook. And if you want to learn
a little bit more about some of the stuff we
mentioned on this podcast, we have an awesome article called
how polar Bears Work on our website. You can look
it up by visiting our homepage at www dot how
Stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
(25:58):
new video podcast, Up from the Future. Join Housta Works
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Download it today on iTunes
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Down and I'm Debla to Charker, Bording and Delin. Know,
we've really been on a roll of the past few
weeks discussing daring women in history. Well, it is March,
(00:22):
after all, it is March. It might be April by
the time it's comes out. But you know, we've been
keeping up the tradition of covering women's History Month with
Bell Starr, Bessie Coleman, the Brontes, who are daring in
their own way free to callo. But we haven't really
ventured into one of our favorite topics of discussion yet,
which is, of course exploration. We love to talk about explorers,
(00:43):
whether male or female, we do, and that's why today
we're going to cover polar explorer Louise arn Our Boyd,
who took adventurous trips to the North, made real scientific
and geographical contributions in the form of thousands of photos
and films, and performed under of her wartime work for
the US government. No less, Boyd commissioned and organized a
(01:05):
whopping seven Arctic expeditions. Was the first person to charter
a plane over the North Pole, and earned herself numerous
international honors and medals. But what's maybe most surprising about
Boyd is the very same reason that she was able
to become an explorer in the first place. She was
a San Francisco socialite and incredibly wealthy eRASS, and that
(01:28):
station in life really allowed her a lot more freedom
in the nineteen twenties and thirties than most women had.
She had the ability to go out and explore the
Arctic because she had the money to do so. But
when she wasn't busy scaling glacier, she was patronizing the
symphony back at home, patronizing the ballet, hosting these grand
parties at her estate, tending to her famous Camelia collection,
(01:51):
doing the sort of things that are maybe considered more
traditional for a socialite of her era. It's unlikely, however,
that Boyd would have had so much freedom and so
much money if her youth had been less marked by tragedy.
So we're gonna start off by telling you a little
bit about that. She was born September six, eighteen eighty seven.
Her father had made a fortune in the body gold mine,
(02:13):
Banansa of eighteen seventy seven and later on and investing.
Her mother was also a bodie heiress, and the couple
raised their family in her San Raphael mansion Maple Lawn,
and also a ranch east of the San Francisco Bay Now.
Louise grew up horseback riding with her two brothers. They
would pack supplies and spend entire days on the trail,
so kind of a tomboy. But in nineteen o one,
(02:35):
her seventeen year old brother Seth died suddenly of heart disease.
Only eight months after that, her sixteen year old brother
John died to also of heart disease, leaving Louise and
her parents, who were kind of in poor health themselves
almost inseparable, and the three of them would travel across
the US. They'd visit Europe from time to time, and
(02:55):
Louise was brought into her father's business to picking up skills,
perhaps made her later such the confident expedition leader she became.
She also got into photography and one of those European trips,
which was the hobby of her parents really supported. They
hired a professional tutor for her, got her the equipment
she needed really embraced the new interest of their daughters.
(03:18):
Soon she kind of lost that parental support though. In
nineteen nineteen, Boyd's mother died. When year later her father
died too, leaving her millions of dollars and making her
president of the Boyd Investment Company. She was only thirty
two at the time. According to Elizabeth Olds and Women
of the Four Winds, Boyd's huge inheritance allowed her to
choose anything quote from a morbid retreat to an unbridled
(03:42):
plunge into the reckless self indulgence and profligacy of the
nineteen twenties. Instead, though, she chose something very different. She
chose travel. Yeah, and at first her trips were semi
conventional for a well off woman. She took a friend,
Sadie Pratt, who was the widow of General conger Rat,
and together they visited war torn France and Belgium. She
(04:04):
took a lot of pictures documenting the ruins, and then
the next year they did a second European trip, this
time to Scandinavia and Italy, Portugal in Spain. Kind of
the things you might expect, but in Boyd branched out
a little bit and booked a cruise to Iceland, Greenland
and lapland definitely spots that are kind of outside of
(04:24):
the Grand tour territory. I'd say the cruise that really
turned out to be a life changing experience. Boyd was
just enchanted by the Arctic and quickly started planning a
return trip, although this time she really wanted to go
on her own terms, you know, be in charge of
what she got to see after a year off during
what she was presented at the British court, Boyd hired
(04:45):
Arctic expert Francis di Guibert to advise her planning. She
then charted a ship which was appropriately named Hobby and
which also, according to Jocelyn Moss for the Murn County
Historical Society magazine, had been rolled amindson supply ship when
he flew over the North Pole in a dirigible, so
it had a little bit of a pedigree to it.
(05:06):
It did, and she hired a crew of fourteen. But
ever the lady, she also brought along her maid and
a few friends, including a Spanish count and countess. We
were going to have a good time, so they set
out in summer nineteen to Franz Joseph Land and um,
even though the captain had described her as quote some
American woman who wants to see ice, kind of dismiss
(05:29):
at the trip was essentially an opportunity to hunt polar bears,
and newspapers were really smitten by the entire concept that, uh,
this woman would charter the trip in the first place,
taking account and count as along with her, and go
to hunt polar bears of all things. So the New
York Times it ran headlines like American girl shot eleven
(05:50):
bears in the Arctic. And one of the most famous
photos of Boyd actually has her wrapped up in a
dead bear hanging from a hook. If your animal lover,
it's kind of of a horrifying picture. It does sound
very comfortable either, I mean, even if you know the
animals did, I mean, it just sounds kind of alarming
to be wrapped up in a dead bear. Yeah, not
a skin either, the whole dead bear. But it's actually
(06:11):
interesting to note that after such big game hunting trips
kind of became unpopular, you know, a few decades later
in the century, Boyd claimed that the numbers had been
really exaggerated by the press. You know, she was credited
with shooting about I think eleven bears personally, um, but
she kind of revised that and said they really only
(06:31):
shot a few bears. The bears they did hunt were
just for food, trying to make everybody calm down a
little bit. Also reported were the quantities of film shot
of twenty one feet plus seven hundred still photos. Boyd
would document far off landscape studies of cliffs, glaciers, inlets, animals, plants,
and of course the ice. Though she wasn't into scientific work,
(06:55):
Boyd's early photography skills were still good enough to make
these photos really useful, so provided new information about different
types of Arctic ice. For example, yea, she had the
scientific eye even though she didn't have the scientific intentions yet,
And sure enough she caught that polar bug that's so
common in many of these exploration episodes that we do.
She wrote, quote, I understand for the first time what
(07:18):
an old seaman meant when he told me that once
you had been in the Arctic and in the ice,
you could never forget it and always wanted to go back.
Fortunately she had the resources to do that, so in
n Boyd rebooked the hobby and made plans to take
a second big game hunting trip combined with a little
botanical research this time. But just as she got to Norway,
(07:40):
which was going to be her Arctic departure point, she
learned that Roald Almondson had gone missing while searching for
the dar Digibil pilot amberto Nobili and his crew, who
had crashed themselves somewhere in the Arctic. So Boyd immediately
turned over her ship to the Norwegian and French search effort, saying, quote,
how could I go on a pleasure trip when those
(08:01):
twenty two lives were at stake? But she also kind
of contributed extra to the effort. She hired pilots to
aid the hunt for the missing men, and she joined
in herself. She wasn't going to loan her ship and
its crew, which she had all paid for and everything,
and just sit back in Norway and watch the whole
thing happened. She was on the Hobby as it conducted
(08:22):
a ten week, ten thousand mile thirch for the missing men,
taking thousands of photos along the way and twenty thousand
feet of film too. Perhaps because the situation was so serious,
this also seemed to have been Boyd's first taste of
the madness inducing side of the Arctic. She wrote about
how the landscape could play tricks with your head, how
they constantly spot tents that actually turned out to just
(08:45):
be ice formations, and though Almondson was never located, no
Balay and his men were ultimately found alive by another crew.
According to Women in World History Encyclopedia, Boyd was honored
for her efforts by being awarded the Order of St
Law first Class and becoming a Chevalier of the French
Legion of Honor. And when she learned that she'd be
(09:05):
receiving that sat a lawf award and she was going
to only be the third woman to have earned this,
she dashed off to Paris first to buy an appropriately
grand outfit for the audience before the King, having nothing
else but her stealskin and boots with her to wear.
So I think it's worth noting here that Boyd always
really carefully emphasized her femininity, and perhaps it was because
(09:27):
at the time the very fact that she wore pants,
you know, sealskin pants, that sort of thing on her
expeditions was newsworthy. But she often had to justify doing
things that were considered masculine, like exploring, and she basically
respond to these questions. But I think she saw no
problem between being a feminine woman and doing adventurous things.
(09:51):
She reportedly said that quote at see I didn't bother
with my hands except to keep them from being frozen,
but I powdered my nose before going on deck. No
matter how rough the sea was, there's no reason why
a woman can't rough it and still remain feminine. So
I'm curious to know how much of this was her
personality and how much was just trying to represent herself
correctly in the news. Almost either way, that trip was
(10:14):
important for one other major reason though. During the search
she met countless polar scientists and experts who were also
looking for Noble and Almondson. Nearly all of them stressed
the importance of a good photographer on research missions. So
this kind of got her to thinking a little bit. Yeah.
So for Boyd's next trip, which was conducted during the
summer of nine, she decided to get into real geographic
(10:37):
research and survey the Fiords on Greenland's east coast before
between the seventieth and seventy four parallels. I should say,
and this trip really seemed like a bridge, a real
bridge between earlier and later missions in a way. Yeah,
she chartered a different ship this time. She outfitted it
again with a hand picked crew, but she still brought
along her maid, her secretary, some and so it had
(11:00):
a pleasurable aspect to it aside from the scientific one. Um.
But you know, she branched out too. She turned a
stop at a recently settled Inuit settlement into an anthropological
and social opportunity. She was a real social woman. She
made friends with the local people who lived in turf
and wood houses. She hosted a party for them on
(11:22):
board the ship. We're going to talk a little bit
more about her her parties later on, but she she
went out of her way to be the social person
she seemed to be even in the Arctic. She also
took thousands of photos because that's what she was so
good at, and because she used high tech equipment and
had become really a depth at something called photography tree,
which is um taking photos which can in turn be
(11:45):
studied and you can draw like really precise measurements and
maps from them. Um. Because she became so good at
this type of photography. Dr Walter A. Wood, who was
a surveyor for the American Geographical Society was later able
to use only two hundred of these photos and put
together a whole new map illustrating this area, and it
(12:05):
turned out the party had discovered a new glacier and
a new valley. She also had another lucky meeting on
the trip home from Norway. She met a g S
director Isaiah Bowman. Both parties realized a partnership would be beneficial.
With the American Geographical Society as a sponsor, on one hand,
Boyd would have access to top scientists in different fields
(12:26):
and some credibility. On the other hand, with Boyd's money
and organizational experience, she had, after all, planned three of
these trips by now, so she she did have a
lot under her belt. The American Geographical Society would be
able to launch missions that they wouldn't have otherwise been
able to, so it was a win win, definitely. So
the first a GS sponsored Boyd expedition a launst June
(12:49):
ninety three, and Boyd was again the leader of the
expedition and its chief photographer, but this time there was
also a geologist and a physiographer and two surveyors. I
think there was going to be a botanist but he
came down with appendicitis right before, so I guess Louise
again had to fulfill that job. But there was also
(13:10):
really high tech equipment this time too, that Boyd had
picked out herself, like ultrasonic depth measuring equipment for um map,
mapping out the sea floor and figuring out all its
contours and everything. And the plan this time was to
study glaciers in the Franz Joseph and King Oscar Fiords
and chart the northeast coast of Greenland, which we've talked
(13:31):
about the eastern coast of Greenland a little bit before
in our Nonsen episode, and we know that that is
the very remote side, the side that has all of
the inlets and the rugged terrain and it is really
hard to land on and to survive on, but they
traversed it anyway. According to Jacqueline McLean and Women and Adventure,
the party spent most of August exploring on foot, carrying
(13:54):
all of their gear on their backs and working almost
constantly to take advantage of the light. So does sound
very socialite right there. But they even had a close
call on the way home when the ship ran aground
with no one else around to help and the Arctic
winner approaching. The captain had to have a cable throne
around an iceberg to give the ship enough leverage to
(14:16):
get out of that situation and tow it out of
the up almost exactly. And by the time they left,
a fifty five mile per hour snowstorm had come, so
they kind of left justice in the end of time.
And really Boyd noted that too. She wrote that quote
nature was closing her doors on us, which I really
like that quote. She she leaves behind some interesting quotes,
(14:37):
but I like that one because it is so hostess,
like the Arctic is saying goodbye. Time to go home.
There is the snowstorm and the fifty per hour win,
and they took the hint they did. They got out
of there just in time. The result of the and
thirty three missions was a book called the Fiord Region
of East Greenland, and it included maps and three d
(14:58):
and fifty of Boyd's photos and parts of the sea floor.
She also had a few word named after her, Louise
Boyd Land appropriately enough. So over the next few years,
Boyd made two more trips with the American Geographical Society,
taking photos, collecting data and spending much of her time
at home analyzing at all. She always said that that
(15:18):
was a really major part of the job. It wasn't
just the trips that was the easy part, almost it
was looking at all the work they had they had
brought home. But she'd also returned to her life as
a social grandam too. She served on the boards of
the San Francisco Symphony. She worked with the Garden Club
in the California Botanical Society. She managed a staff of
(15:40):
nine at her estate, Maple Lawn. By all accounts though,
she was considered to be a fantastic hostess, and she
would stage these elaborate parties at Maple Lawn, which was
decorated with items from her travels and antique Swedish murals,
but the grounds there were especially famous, featuring many Japanese maples,
but other also other exotic plants. Boyd herself gardened in
(16:03):
a special wool suit with matching hat, occasionally having full
grown trees, moved about the property to complement new construction projects,
and tending to her hothouse chamelea collection which I can't
even imagine how you do that move the entire fully
grown trees. She would apparently build some new feature of
the garden or an outbuilding or something, and not want
(16:25):
to have that tacky, you know, just built kind of look,
and so she'd move full grown trees to make it
look like it had been there for a while. What
I really can't imagine is gardening in a wool suit.
But maybe that's because we live in Georgia and if
you if you tried doing that, you'd probably die within
about thirty minutes. Yeah, there weren'to many occasions around here
(16:45):
to wear a wool suit. She almost always along with
her suits or whatever she was wearing, were a camelia too,
or at least some kind of flower, even when in
the Arctic. According to Women World History, she said quote,
I don't feel dressed unless I'm wearing hours. Even in Greenland,
i'd find something and were it with a safety pin.
She was also a little bit of a foodie too,
(17:06):
which I think is interesting because I don't when I
think of Arctic explorers, I think of some of the
worst food imagine and lawfish well in in cans that
have botuli is um and all sorts of bad things.
And I'm sure she wasn't eating that well on her troops.
But back at home she was quite a foodie and
she had a very extensive, very international cookbook collection. From
(17:29):
all of her travels, she'd try to bring home recipes,
although her favorite cuisine was apparently Southern cuisine. Boyd's last
a g S sponsored expedition was in ninety eight, and
the next year World War Two began, which made the
Arctic pretty much a Noga region of the world as
far as exploration was concerned. Yeah, especially hobbyist explorer. So
(17:50):
Greenland was a particular point of concern though for the
United States, and there are a few reasons for that. One,
Greenland was a colony of Denmark, which Germany of occupied
during the war. Geographically, it was right below where American
pilots would be flying to Great Britain. I mean, if
you've ever flown there, you usually do fly over Greenland
you can kind of see it on a clear flight.
(18:12):
And also for meteorological reasons, it's a really great place
to gather information that's really useful for forecasting the weather
in Western Europe. It would be a powerful place to control.
Unfortunately for the US government, though most of the experts
on Greenland, you know, people who could kind of give
them a leg up on that part of the world
were behind lines. Louise Boyd, however, was safe at home,
(18:36):
so in the summer of nineteen forty the State Department
contacted her about helping out, and so the first thing
she did was canceled the publication of her book on Greenland,
her latest book on Greenland, which would contain all of
these brand new maps and photos and all sorts of
information that she and the government didn't want falling into
enemy hands. And then in nineteen forty one she went
(18:58):
a step further and can organizing a trip to western
Greenland and eastern Arctic Canada for the National Bureau of Standards.
So this trip wasn't top secret, but it wasn't exactly
public either. According to the National Archives, a confidential document
explained that the goal of the trip was to quote
elucidate the anomalies of radio communication on the US europe
(19:21):
transmission path, which was quote worthwhile from the National Defense viewpoint.
Only the Captain Bob Bartlett knew the true nature of
this mission. The crew, which Boyd had again hired herself,
just thought that she was some lady on a photography trip,
and for some strange reason she was the boss of
the captain, and that her history doing these missions in
(19:43):
the first place did give them a little bit of cover.
It was entirely plausible that Louise Boyd would go on
another Arctic trip, even in the middle of a war
to crazy she was interested in, you know, And so
they had that cover for actual government work that was
being done. But Boyd also had her own super top
secret mission from the War Department, and that was to
(20:05):
investigate possible landing sites for US planes. And she in
the area she was looking at, she documented the food
and water conditions, you know, if people had to be
there for a while, calculated wind speeds, calculated longitude and latitude,
and of course she took her her classic complete photo
sets to let people know what the area really looked like.
(20:27):
And the wartime trip ultimately ended up being Boyd's last
expedition to the Arctic, even though she did, at the
age of sixty seven and nine, charter a plane to
fly over the North Pole, which she had of course,
as any polar explorer probably wants to see the North
Pole over her whole life. And when she made that flight,
(20:48):
she was carrying the flag of the Society of women
geographers and wrote about it pretty poignantly. She said, as
I saw the ocean change to massive fields of solid white,
my leaped up. Then, in a moment of happiness which
I shall never forget, our instruments told me we were there,
for directly below us, nine thousand feet down lay the
(21:10):
North Pole. We crossed the pole, then circled it, flying
around the world in a matter of minutes. And as
we already mentioned, she was the first person to charter
such a flight, and I think she also made comments
realizing how how much flight was going to change the
world of polar exploration and make it so much easier
to get to some of these places. Um. She didn't
(21:32):
stop traveling though, just because she didn't make further Arctic expedition.
She traveled throughout Asia, throughout the Middle East, well into
her seventies, well still maintaining this vigorous schedule of charity work,
society work, all of that type of thing, until late
in life her money ran out and friends ended up
supporting her on a nursing home until her death in
(21:53):
nineteen seventy two. I think she asked for her ashes
to be scattered over Louise Boyd land that proved logistically difficult,
so instead they were scattered over Arctic Alaska, which was
the last place she had really been in the Arctic.
We want to be sure to give a special thanks
to the Marine History Museum for directing us towards some
(22:13):
accounts and really fantastic photos of Boyd to use to
research this podcast. The museum is actually in the Boyd
gate House, a guesthouse of Maple Lawn, which was donated
to the city along with a park by Mr and
Mrs Boyd after their son's deaths. Also, one final note
for any of you research enthusiasts out there. In nineteen
seventy four, the Center for Polar Archives at the National
(22:36):
Archives got one hundred and fifty reels of Louise Boyd's
film from the Elks Lodge in San Rafael and by
eighty you know, these were all on those nitrate reels
which can ignite very easily. Um, they had all been
copied to say, for stock And according to Audrey Amadon,
who wrote about the films for the National Archives, it's
(22:57):
really interesting to watch the progression, but that shows Boyd's
transformation from a hobbyist to an actual geographer. As she
starts to focus less on this almost contrived story of adventure,
you know, pasting together the the best, most exciting high
points of the trip, to recording things in a true
to life, scientific sort of way, taking a little of
(23:19):
the drama out of it, but focusing more on things
that could help people better understand the Arctic. I think
that's really neat. You can actually see a few of
her clips too. I watched a few minutes on YouTube,
so you can see the ship and the Greenland coast
and how it all looked really interesting again, with so many,
like so many of these subjects to see someone who
(23:40):
turned a passion into I don't want to say a
career because it's not like she really made a living
at it, I guess, but spend her money. Yeah, she
spent her money actually, but but a lifetime's work. Absolutely,
So I think on that note, we'd like to leave
with a with a quote from Boyd that kind of
expresses her love for the Arctic, and she said it
goes quote cold, yes, of course, but there's an unearthly
(24:04):
grander about it all and I love it. So that's
pretty perfect. You're right to blena a good time to
transition to listener mail. So this email is from Megan
and she wrote in to say that she loves the podcast,
but yesterday was the online qualifying test to get a
tryout for Jeopardy. I was killing time waiting for the
(24:27):
test by catching up on Stufhi Misston History Class podcast.
I listened to the one about the Lone Ranger and
then finished the one about Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
just a minute or two before the test started. Part
of the way through the Jeopardy test, there was a
question asking quote what poet wrote sonnets from the Portuguese
for her boyfriend Robert or something like that. Uh, and
(24:51):
she goes on to write, whoa Elizabeth Barrett on the
Jeopardy test? I never would have known the answer to
that question if I hadn't just listened to your pie cast.
If I get on Jeopardy, I'll have you guys and
You're awesome podcast to thank for it. So cool, yeah,
very cool? And how she makes it how lucky too?
I know. I mean, Megan, maybe if maybe you could
(25:12):
get on Jeopardy, you can say hi to us but
love a shout out. Yeah, definitely, So thank you Megan
and um we do really like hearing about you know,
times when the podcast is debut from a a close
scrape for something, whether that's your AP test or something
like a Jeopardy test, So it's always fend to hear
(25:32):
from you guys. We are at History Podcast at Discovery
dot com. We're also on Twitter at Miston History, and
we are on Facebook. And if you want to learn
a little bit more about some of the stuff we
mentioned on this podcast, we have an awesome article called
how polar Bears Work on our website. You can look
it up by visiting our homepage at www dot how
Stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
(25:58):
new video podcast, Up from the Future. Join Housta Works
staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities
of tomorrow. The houstep Works iPhone app has a ride.
Download it today on iTunes
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