The 1933 Second Byrd Expedition drama
When Richard Byrd returned to Antarctica to establish the base Little America II in 1934, he brought fifty-six people, including pilots, biologists, meteorologists, radio operators, a physician, and... a postal clerk?
You see, the postal clerk was how the whole thing would be paid for, and it's all thanks to Franklin Roosevelt being a stamp collector.
The Great Depression had just kicked off, and nobody wanted to pay for another Antarctic Expedition. Private and corporation donations came in, but Roosevelt suggested an untapped market: Stamp collectors. A fee would be assessed and you can get your mail right from Antarctica. He even scribbled a rough sketch for a custom stamp.
And so among its scientific pursuits, the Little America II base would include a post office with the express purpose of receiving collectors' mail, cancelling it (marking the stamp used), and sending it back. The custom stamp had a 3 cent face value, and you needed to add another fifty cents of postage, which is nearly eight dollars today.
Okay, so the guy in charge of the mail wasn't really a full-time postal clerk. He was just a crewmember who was deputized for the job by the postmaster, who wouldn't go himself.
The expedition got underway and a dedicated tent was set up as the post office with an initial batch of 56,000 postal covers to go through. But he really wasn't taking Antarctica well and it started to show in the commemorative covers he was stamping. He'd get the date wrong and wasn't getting them stamped fast enough! The mail piled up in the tent so badly that some of it got buried in the snow.
This would not do, because stamp collectors are absolutely insane and wouldn't accept souvenir covers with anything wrong.
The original clerk was replaced, and a new postal clerk was found. This time, they went with an expert: Charles Anderson, who'd been working the mail for 43 years and whose specialty was cancelling letters by the thousand at special events. He brought with him a custom workshop with everything needed to fix the situation.
Anderson spent sixteen days straight working through the colossal mound of mail, only getting sixteen hours of sleep. But it paid off: The covers were finally sorted, and the mailbags could go on the ship to return to the United States. In all, Little America II saw over 150,000 pieces of mail.
The second Byrd expedition was a scientific feat in mapping the coastline, discovering fossils, and undertaking geological research.
One final note is that you can still get an Antarctica-marked cover today! For the cost of a domestic first-class stamp and a self-addressed envelope, your mail will go all the way to the Scott-Amundsen Station and back to you. Just two per year though, because nobody wants to go through the 1934 mess again.
