The stowaway A young man's extraordinary adventure to Antarctica

Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Book - 2018

The spectacular, true story of a scrappy teenager from New York's Lower East Side who stowed away on the Roaring Twenties' most remarkable feat of science and daring: an expedition to Antarctica. It was 1928: a time of illicit booze, of Gatsby and Babe Ruth, of freewheeling fun. The Great War was over and American optimism was higher than the stock market. What better moment to launch an expedition to Antarctica, the planet's final frontier? This was the moon landing before the 1960s. Everyone wanted to join the adventure. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts begged to be taken along as mess boys, and newspapers across the globe covered the planning's every stage. The night before the expedition's flagship launched, Billy G...awronski--a skinny, first generation New York City high schooler desperate to escape a dreary future in the family upholstery business--jumped into the Hudson River and snuck aboard. Could he get away with it? From the grimy streets of New York's Lower East Side to the rowdy dance halls of sultry Francophone Tahiti, all the way to Antarctica's blinding white and deadly freeze, Laurie Gwen Shapiro's The Stowaway takes you on the unforgettable voyage of a gutsy young stowaway who became an international celebrity, a mascot for an up-by-your bootstraps age.

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Subjects
Genres
Travel writing
Biographies
True adventure stories
Published
New York : Simon & Schuster 2018.
Language
English
Main Author
Laurie Gwen Shapiro (author)
Edition
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition
Physical Description
239 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 23 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [207]-224) and index.
ISBN
9781476753867
  • Prologue
  • 1. The Golden Door
  • 2. Good Men Should Apply
  • 3. The City of New York
  • 4. The Triumph of the Century
  • 5. South Pole or Bust
  • 6. First Ice
  • 7. The Stowaway Report
  • 8. Fine Enough
  • 9. Great Depression
  • Epilogue
  • Author's Note
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Photo Credits
  • Index
Review by New York Times Review

I HAVE AN ACTIVE FANTASY that kicks in around tax time - don't we all? - of smuggling myself out of my own life. In this fantasy, I set up a cardboard replica of myself in the kitchen, with a soundtrack that repeats the question, How would you like your eggs cooked today, kids? - and then send my actual self in a crate to a South Pacific island, where many adventures ensue, catalyzed by umbreila drinks. The idea of stowing away must be as ancient as the first human hitching a ride on a seafaring vessel out of old Mesopotamia, but in the covfefe clatter of our times, I find myself more and more fixated on such stories: The 23-year-old in the wheel well of a plane ride from New Delhi to London whose body temperature dropped, causing him to pass out until he regained consciousness on the ground at Heathrow. Or the Illinois woman who in 2016 sneaked onto a flight from Chicago to London, without a ticket or passport. Or the bizarre case of the young Chinese man several years back who disguised himself as an old man, with a wrinkled mask, and took a flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver, pleading for asylum after being discovered. Stowing away - whether driven by evil regimes, longing, mental illness or a deep desire for adventure - has always been a means for transformation. And if the stowaway's story essentially begins as an escape fantasy, there's something aspirational in such desperation. The audacity of stripping yourself bare and stage-diving into unknown hands, in an unknown land, is heady tonic. Which is what makes the real-life, wouldbe gate-crasher in Laurie Gwen Shapiro's "The Stowaway" - 17-year-old Billy Gawronski - such an incorrigible if symbolic character, a first-generation American living in 1920s New York City who wants to join the famous polar explorer Richard Byrd on his journey to Antarctica. (While Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the South Pole in 1911, Byrd's stated purpose, 17 years later, was to be the first to haul a plane there to fly over the pole.) The only problem is that Billy has zero experience with anything but his father's budding upholstery business in Brooklyn. Seeing his future in damask brocade and mohair, he wants nothing to do with it. Zilch. Meanwhile, his Polish grandmother has gazed into her actual crystal ball and seen Billy cavorting with Admiral Byrd. The backdrop for Billy's bildungsroman is that moment when America, too, is finding itself amid great social upheaval: Consumer culture, mass entertainment and the Industrial Age are all on the rise, while Jazz Age journalism (in some ways not so different from our modern iteration of infotainment) is hungry for new heroes. Stowing away, then, becomes a means to celebrity as well, and is a bit of a cottage industry unto itself. And so Billy leaps into the Hudson River in a night move to get on board one of the three ships headed south. All goes well until Billy finds two other stowaways squirreled in the same front berth. Their eventual squabbling draws the attention of crew members who unceremoniously remove all three. Only when the press gets wind of it does Byrd himself, always looking for publicity and funding, seem to realize there might be a payoff in this stowaway game. Still, Billy's father eventually arrives to drag his son home. Here Shapiro's story, which is a bit slow to take hold, might have dead-ended, if not for Billy's determination. After trying to board the second ship, and getting caught again, Billy hitchhikes to Norfolk, Va., the next port of call, in time to wave in the party from the dock. Shapiro tells us the ship's cook is "tickled by the city kid's pluck," and puts him to work in the kitchen. Byrd approves the move, and with a New York Times reporter on board to chronicle every hiccup of the expedition, including the doings of the Polish-American stowaway, they're off to see the penguins. The tale that follows doesn't raise Billy above what he is, a bit player who in the end isn't chosen to winter with Byrd on the frozen continent, but he's not without his moments of heroism, and besides, to the consuming public at home, substance here matters less than the quixotic journey. For this brief moment, Shapiro's Billy is our Bachelor, our YouTtibe star. He's the kid who frees himself from destiny to forge his own, leapfrogging class, symbolizing our wanderlust and the power of imagination over expectation. Ultimately, the stumbles in "The Stowaway" - including the skimming quality of the prose (Billy's first wife is "a spicy gal" and wears "tantalizing clothes that soon came off" while the ship deck smells of "masculine adventure") - are overshadowed by Shapiro's hustle in resurrecting Billy, and a number of side characters, including my favorite, an African-American stowaway named Bob Lanier, who chases the expedition all the way to New Zealand. In an author's note at the end of this book, Shapiro points us to her own discovery of Billy's second wife, whom she found alive and ready to tell Billy's story. "The Stowaway," then, is like an intriguing photo album brought out from the bottom drawer: If the gaps between images sometimes frustrate, the granular detail can fascinate. It shows us who we are, and what we're trying to escape. Michael paterniti is a contributing writer at The Times Magazine and a correspondent at GQ. He is at work on his latest book of nonfiction, "Ninety or Nothing," about the discovery of the North Pole.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

In the late 1920s, New York City teenager Billy Gawronski was headed toward a very dull future. His father had built a successful upholstering business and slated Billy as his future partner. Billy had other plans. Entranced by adventurous tales of the great expeditioners of his time, Billy heard of Commander Byrd's intention to mount an expedition to Antarctica and saw his way out. But with thousands already clamoring to join Byrd, and Billy needing parental consent, the odds were against him. Thus, with only the clothes on his back, Billy swam out and boarded one of Byrd's ships in the wee morning hours as a stowaway. Exposed to new ports and places on his journey, Gawronski became the unexpected darling of the press and returned home with his true calling. Novelist and filmmaker Shapiro (The Anglophile, 2005) has revived the history of a once-celebrated stowaway to Antarctica in this well-wrought true tale of a young man who captured the hearts of millions and found adventure at sea.--Shaw, Stacy Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this true-life adventure yarn, filmmaker Shapiro reconstructs the story of Billy Gawronski, who captured the boundless optimism of the American national psyche in the lead up to the Great Depression when, in 1928, he attempted to stow away on a ship headed to the Antarctic. The enthusiastic 18-year-old was caught trying to sneak onboard three times before he could finally convince his hero, commander Richard Byrd, to let him join as a mess boy aboard the Eleanor Bolling en route to the South Pole. Shapiro interweaves snippets of Russell Owen's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the expedition for the New York Times into the main narrative, which tracks Billy's progression from being a reckless stowaway to commanding a ship in WWII. In the characters of Billy and his shipmates, Shapiro finds a "microcosm of American barriers and dreams." This coming-of-age story about a strong-willed boy with an insatiable appetite for adventure is evocative of the Hardy Boys and will appeal to both adult and young adult readers. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Shapiro, in her first full-length work of nonfiction, deftly tells the story of Billy -Gawronski, a young boy determined to seek adventure. Through reading novels and following the events of real-life explorers, Gawronski cultivated a knowledge of and insatiable desire for risk-taking. In 1928, at the age of 17, Gawronski's ambition was fulfilled. During the height of the Jazz Age, Richard Byrd, a famous American explorer and idol to Gawronski, led an expedition to Antarctica. Byrd intended to be the first person to fly over the South Pole. At this point, the United States had largely been absent from Antarctic exploration. Byrd was already a household name and the country was excited. One night, Gawronski swam across New York's Hudson River and climbed on board Byrd's ship. He was found with two other stowaways and sent home. After several more of these kinds of attempts, Gawronski won the respect of Byrd and was hired on as part of the crew. VERDICT This fascinating and exciting story contrasts the optimism and sense of progress of the 1920s with the devastation of the 1930s. Readers of popular history and biographies will find much to delight in here.-Timothy Berge, SUNY Oswego Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The story of an adventurous boy who captured America's imagination in an age of significant exploration.During the 1920s, when the spirit of adventure surged through the country, nobody felt it more strongly than Billy Gawronski, the first-generation son of Polish immigrants. Even in high school, he appeared fated for a life in his father's business, but Billy not only had other plans, he had the determination to see them through. He idolized Cmdr. Richard Byrd and ached to join what was heralded as a historic voyage to Antarctica during a time when America's appetite for such adventure had been whetted by the exploits of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. Billy collected news stories about Byrd's expedition, of which there were many, for this was as much a public relations campaign as it was an exploring expedition, with the Byrd camp feeding reporters what their readers wanted. "Was anyone more determined than Billy to hitch a ride on the most famous rig in America?" asks journalist and documentary filmmaker Shapiro's book debut. "It was the bold, he was certain, who won the right to adventure." Billy was bold, but he was by no means alone, as he discovered on his first stowaway attempt that others had had the same idea. All of them were discovered, captured, and taken off the ship. But Billy persisted, following the ship from its New York launch down the coast to Virginia, far from his home, where he continued to try to join the expedition and continued to be rejected. He was remanded to police custody on his third attempt, but his persistence ultimately paid off, as Byrd and the newspapers caught wind of his story and decided to make it a highlight. So Billy joined the crew, and his determination changed the course of his life. This book isn't so much a seafaring adventure as a getting-to-sea adventure, but it ultimately reveals as much about a country's changing values as it does about one boy's pluck.Thoroughly researched, but the narrative reads like a yarn from that era. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The Stowaway PROLOGUE With his back against the sunset, a seventeen-year-old boy lingered on the docks along the Hudson River. By his calculations, it was a ten-minute swim from where he stood to the ship. The new high school graduate waited, his soft grey eyes fixed on the City of New York, moored and heavily guarded on the Hoboken piers. The sun went down at six forty-five this day--August 24, 1928--but still he fought back his adrenaline. He wanted true darkness before carrying out his plan. At noon the next day, the ship would leave New York Harbor and sail nine thousand miles to the frozen continent of Antarctica, the last frontier on Earth left to explore. He intended to be aboard. That summer, baby-faced Billy Gawronski was three inches short of his eventual height of five foot eleven, and his voice still squeaked. " You are a late bloomer," his doting immigrant mother told him in thickly accented English. Yet the ambitious dreamer, born and raised in the gritty tenement streets of the Lower East Side, was as familiar with Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd's flagship as any reporter assigned to cover its launch. The Antarctica-bound barquentine was an old-fashioned multi-masted ship that suggested the previous century, with enchanting square sails arranged against an almost impenetrable maze of ropes. The 161-foot wooden vessel spanned half a city block, her 27-foot beam taller than a three-story building. Sail- and steam-powered and weighing 200 tons, with sturdy wooden sides 34 inches thick, she had seen duty as an Arctic icebreaker for Norwegian seal hunters starting in 1885. On one run in icy waters in 1912, her captain had been the last to see the Titanic; just ten miles away, he'd been afraid to help the sinking ship, as he was hunting illegally in territorial waters. Like so many immigrants, the ship once known as Samson found her name changed when she arrived in America in 1928, becoming the City of New York. She was the most romantic of the four boats in Byrd's cobbled-together flotilla, and the one leaving first--with the greatest fanfare--early the next afternoon. Several times in his mind that evening, Billy dove into the Hudson and started swimming, only to find his feet firmly on land. But he had been on board the SS New York before. Nine days earlier, he and two thousand other New Yorkers had taken the Fourteenth Street Ferry to Hoboken, New Jersey, and gaped at the City of New York, moored next to the grand Dutch ocean liner the SS Veendam. The crowd was wowed with anticipation. Just past noon, the ship's captain, Frederick Melville--second cousin of the nineteenth-century author Herman Melville--gave the okay, waving the first sweaty guests up the gangway, their dollar admission supporting the Byrd Antarctica expedition's fund-raising drive. Several members of Melville's crew, including the chief engineer, Thomas "Mac" Mulroy, and sixty-year-old veteran sailmaker John Jacobson, joined him in greeting the adoring public. No, he told them, Byrd was not aboard. Everyone still wanted to gawk. When it had been Billy's turn to board, he'd wandered the wooden decks, still cargo free to accommodate guests. The poop aft (rear deck) was elevated, housing Commander Byrd's cabin, an elegant wood-paneled chart room, and a state-of-the-art radio room with technology that would let the explorers be heard no matter how far they sailed. Under the poop deck were spaces for the machine room and the radio generator. One level down were seven cabins--the cramped quarters where the men would sleep--as well as several storerooms, and lockers for holding mops and paint. He stood in the machine room with other tourists--men and women content to admire all the nifty gadgets. Also aft were the ship's engine and oppressively hot boiler room. None of these places had been right for a hiding spot. Forward proved more promising, with its large fo'c'sle (forecastle, a front deck), and a second, smaller fo'c'sle in the peak: a narrow hollow under the bowsprit (a thick pole projecting from the upper end of a sailing vessel) of the boat's prow (the part of the bow above the water). Here, under this second hidden fo'c'sle, Billy had spied a good-sized space in a shelf. The exposed top fo'c'sle would be visible to anyone on the ship during the departure ceremonies, but the second fo'c'sle would remain dark. Satisfied with his investigation, the lad grabbed one of the commemorative paper cups set aside as a souvenir before heading for the ramp. Afterward, still on a high, Billy had walked the New Jersey shoreline until he'd scouted the lookout site he was in now, a long distance from the ship but not out of reach for a superior swimmer like himself. Another ocean liner had taken the Veendam's place next to the expedition ship in Hoboken's busy Pier 1: the SS Leviathan, headed overseas the next day, too. The Leviathan dwarfed its famous ice-bound companion vessel in dock. With the twilight not yet dissipated, Billy still had an excellent view of the many ships going up and down the brackish southern-flowing Hudson. Could a ship hit him as he swam? He ate what little food he'd brought: an apple and an egg salad sandwich. As for what he would eat after that? He hadn't bothered to think about it. Even under the dimming sky, Billy could make out the shadowed bodies of stationed watchmen, but he was unsure if they were Byrd's crew or borrowed Coast Guards keeping vigil. There would be no sneaking up the gangway, the narrow metal plank for boarding. He would have to swim out to the unprotected side of the ship, the side facing the water. Who would think to guard the edges of the ship away from the pier? Once aboard, he did not have a sure grasp on how he would reveal himself to Commander Byrd or justify his presence on the expedition, but he trusted he could wing it. In Byrd, Americans like Billy now had a superexplorer of their own--someone who could stand proudly beside England's legendary Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott, not to mention Norway's Roald Amundsen, the crafty strategist who in 1911 had been the first to reach the South Pole, just five weeks ahead of Scott's team. The thirty-nine-year-old blueblood Virginian "Dick" Byrd was a slight but strong man with a chiseled, smooth-shaven face. He looked the part of a hero and acted like one, too, admired already for the responsible, safety-first ethics he had demonstrated exploring the North Pole by ship and plane in 1926. Now he had set his eye on the South. Byrd's team would be the first American expedition to Antarctica since Lieutenant Charles Wilkes and his exploring party poked around the coast eighty-eight years before, in February 1840. And Wilkes had not even set foot on the continent itself. When the commander's four ships reached Antarctica, the coldest, windiest outpost imaginable, he would unload a specially designed Ford trimotor three-propeller transport plane with a seventy-foot wingspan--the first commercial aircraft sturdy enough to weather a 120-mile-per-hour flight over the South Pole; only 199 of the planes were manufactured. The wings and fuselage were constructed from corrugated duralumin, a light, strong alloy of aluminum, copper, manganese, and magnesium, while the landing gear and bracing were all steel. Byrd's underlings would assemble it on the ice barrier that guarded the continent of Antarctica, and, with the aid of a pilot, he would fly over the polar plateau, proudly dropping the Stars and Stripes from the sky. Two more monoplanes (a plane with only one set of wings) were sailing on other ships farther southbound to 90 degrees south: a small Fokker and an even smaller Fairchild. With the introduction of airplanes to Antarctica, Byrd and his pilots would have the first bird's-eye views of its great mysterious interior, and no doubt add to the fragmentary maps of the south polar region, a landmass Byrd believed to be greater than that of the United States and Mexico combined--at least five million miles. But as Billy told his family and friends, no one was sure. Breathless articles in prominent publications such as Scientific American and Popular Mechanics heralded the dawn of the mechanical age of exploration and asked readers with the sketchiest knowledge of Antarctica to imagine a pilot seeing the United States from the air for the first time, spotting a Grand Canyon here, a buffalo herd there. Was Antarctica home to animals that had never been seen? Indigenous people? Lost dinosaurs? Even Billy's Polish grandmother, with her rudimentary English, agreed that it was marvelous to be living in an age when man could do such things as fly over a frozen continent. So why did everyone except his babcia scoff whenever Billy said he wanted to have a life as adventurous as Byrd's? In the rags-to-riches decade of the 1920s, everyone in the papers seemed to be living big, meaningful lives, from slugger Babe Ruth, to fashionable Coco Chanel, to comic genius Charlie Chaplin. Jews and blacks had broken through: the Marx Brothers achieved overnight fame after their Broadway debut, and provocative entertainer Josephine Baker packed them in at Paris's Folies Bergère. New York City in 1928 was the rolling-in-the-dough town immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose smash 1920 debut novel, This Side of Paradise, was assigned to English classes at Billy's alma mater, Manhattan's progressive Textile High School. Adults, or at least city dwellers, were having a grand old time; only the most sober investors knew that the stock market was not on a permanent high. Even once-penniless immigrants were doing better for themselves. Billy knew he would inherit the one-man interior decorating business his father had established after arriving in New York as a destitute young man. Now that his boy would graduate in four short years from Cooper Union, a prestigious, free college in Greenwich Village, Rudy Gawronski was ready to add "and Son" to his sign. Billy's application to Cooper Union had been decent; he supposed he had a knack for art as well as history and languages, but who wanted to study history when you could make history? The thought of a humdrum future stuffing furniture mortified him. *  *  * By nearly nine o'clock on that August night, darkness draped the sky, and lights began to sparkle on in the new downtown skyscrapers--young, electric edifices from a decade of big money. From where he crouched, Billy could see the pyramid atop the Bankers Trust Company Building on Wall Street; the wedding-cake-shaped thirty-story Standard Oil Building on lower Broadway; the forty-story Ritz Tower on Park Avenue; and the first of the city's Art Deco towers, such as the New York Telephone Building on West Street, completed just months before. Great buildings that proved great things were possible. Billy stayed awake hours into the night, guessing and second-guessing the right moment to jump off the pier. Glory was not for the skittish, he told himself. Still, he was scared about low visibility under blackened skies; afraid that he might lose his way and drown, although he'd easily managed dozens of river swims with his athletic father and with his downtown friends. But was anyone more determined than Billy to hitch a ride on the most famous rig in America? It was the bold, he was certain, who won the right to adventure. A few minutes past four in the morning, he'd had enough waiting. The young man took a breath and plunged. Excerpted from The Stowaway: A Young Man's Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica by Laurie Gwen Shapiro All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.