The Stowaway: A Young Man's Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica by Laurie Gwen ShapiroMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Pretty interesting life from an era when explorers like Byrd were rockstars and stowaways were a thing. The subject himself did the stowaway thing three (or four?) times to reach Byrd and was a subset of something like eight such cases just for Byrd's ventures.
Billy succeeded and became legit and played a real role:
Billy helped construct: Little America's administrative headquarters and the mess hall, which was not large enough for the men to eat in all at once. There would be shifts. It wasn't long before the shacks were covered with snow, with only the stovepipes peeking out. Long tunnels hollowed out of ice were lined with food and instruments and kennels, and connected the two implausibly located buildings built two hundred yards apart. Once completed, it would be unnecessary to go outside. The men chosen to winter over would live like moles under the snow in houses built from highly insulating ceiba tree pods that had traveled from America.
Even back then, they had to deal with flat earthers:
Imagine the laughter in the New York Times editorial room the very next day when they decided to publish an angry letter from multimillionaire Wilbur Glenn Voliva, an evangelist priest and radio broadcaster, and a forceful proponent of the flat-earth theory. Voliva-based in Zion, Illinois...
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