Wkly Mtg: Sheldon Bart

Promoting Wilderness Research
Sheldon Bart is president and founder of Wilderness Research Foundation (WRF), a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to mount scientific expeditions for university-based researchers and to bring authentic science from the ends of the earth to K-12 classrooms. He was the leader of the 1996 American Expedition to Baffin Island in the Canadian Eastern Arctic.
 

 

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RICHARD BYRD: High Adventure at the Dawn of Aerospace

Admiral Richard E. Byrd (1888 - 1957) was an energetic and determined man who carried the fire at the beginning of aerospace. He mastered aviation technology in its infancy and moved it several important steps forward through his own creativity, resourcefulness and courage. He faced daunting challenges, perfected the art of command in high-risk situations, triumphed where several predecessors had failed and in doing so expanded our knowledge and extended our possibilities. His epic adventures occupy a special place in what a contemporary poet called “man’s eternal flight,” the on-going saga that led to the technological triumphs of our own lifetime beginning with the early forays into space.

Byrd developed one of the first sets of instruments for aerial navigation out of sight of land. He was the first person to make successful long-distance flights in the polar regions when the sea ice was massive and the Arctic and Antarctica were considered as remote as outer space. He demonstrated the effectiveness of the air-cooled engine, radio navigation and the multi-engine aircraft under the most hazardous conditions, and spurred the popular acceptance of the airplane. He commanded the first multi-engine transport plane to cross the Atlantic non-stop and was very likely the first aviator to navigate an aircraft by radio bearings over the middle of the ocean. Two years later, he conducted the first aerial surveys in the Antarctic to make use of modern photographic mapping techniques. He brought back vast data bases compiled by the scientists who accompanied him and captured the imagination of millions of American men, women and children.

Byrd was a Navy officer, but his expeditions of the 1920s and 1930s were privately organized. They were all-American outings featuring a rag-tag conglomeration of volunteers from every strata of society: millionaires and roustabouts, ongwriters and PhD’s. Byrd conceived the projects, recruited the personnel, raised the money and exercised command. He was the Babe Ruth, the Beatles of exploration, a one-man NASA. No one before him operated on the scale he did. No one accomplished as much. He believed in planning for the unexpected as well as the expected and never lost a man on the ice.

At the Rotary Club of New York, on June 11th, I will bring to life three hair-raising moments from his career to illustrate why Byrd matters and should be honored and remembered today.

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Biographical Note

Writer-explorer Sheldon Bart was the leader of the 1996 American Expedition to Baffin Island in the Canadian Eastern Arctic. The American Expedition returned to the Putnam Highland, a strange, remote and desolate location first surveyed in 1927 by the New York publisher George Palmer Putnam, the man who later married Amelia Earhart. The 1996 expedition rediscovered certain picturesque, geographical features in an area abounding with the fossilized remains of marine animals that lived hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs. Those features were named by G. P. Putnam for celebrated explorers of his era but are not identified on the standard topographic maps.

Bart has extensively researched the era of exploration between the world wars and has lectured at the National Archives, the Explorers Club, the Geographical Society of Philadelphia, the Virginia Historical Society, the Elisha Kent Kane Historical Society, Hunter College of the City University of New York, and the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University.

He is a senior associate of LAPA/Laurence A. Pagnoni & Associates, a fundraising firm based in New York City; a member of the Board of Governors of the American Polar Society; and president and founder of Wilderness Research Foundation (www.wildernessresearch.org), a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to create more opportunities for scientific exploration beyond the limited regime of government funding. Wilderness Research Foundation launched its initial project in January 2010, with a team from the University of Maryland conducting an investigation of the decomposition of ancient organic carbon on King George Island, just off the Antarctic Peninsula. Bart served as project manager. He returned to the Arctic in the summer of 2011 as a historian/lecturer aboard the MS Expedition.

Sheldon has a graduate degree in political science and has contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Book Review.

Of his novel, Ruby Sweetwater and the Ringo Kid, Donald E. Westlake wrote: “It’s a pub crawl through the saloons of Old New York with a terrific batch of drinking companions. The history is right and the comedy is right on.” Pete Hamill said: “Sheldon Bart has taken us back to a wild, vanished New York, and it’s a delicious, hilarious experience. Don’t miss it.”

Booklist called his work of creative of non-fiction, Beatrice: The Untold Story of a Legendary Woman of Mystery, “A small gem of a book.” The New York Times said: “Part journal, part chronicle of Newport’s ‘Gilded Age,’ part psychobiography drawn from Ms. Turner’s surviving diaries. Her wit, cultural interests and poetic spirit emerge.”

His most recent book, Race to the Top of the World: Richard Byrd and the First Flight to the North Pole, was published by Regnery History. Captain Alfred S. McLaren, USN (Ret.), PhD, president of the American Polar Society, calls the book “a major contribution to polar history.” Captain R.M. “Zip” Rausa, USNR (Ret.) of the Association of Naval Aviation, describes it as an “exciting, carefully researched and detailed account of Byrd’s controversial 1926 claim to be the first to fly over the North Pole,” and adds, “There is new information in Bart’s account, some never-before-seen evidence…convincing evidence that he did, indeed, achieve this goal.”

He is currently writing a novel based on his own polar adventures.