Boyd Coffee Blend

Louise Arner Boyd

(September 16, 1887 – September 14, 1972)

Louise Arner Boyd was an American explorer of Greenland and the Arctic, who wrote extensively of her explorations, and in 1955 became the first woman to fly over the North Pole privately chartering a DC-4 and crew that included aviation pioneer Thor Solberg.

She began to travel in the early 1920s, and on a trip to Norway in 1924 she cruised out to sea and saw the Polar Ice Pack for the first time. This experience proved instrumental in her life and she immediately began planning her own Arctic adventure. In 1925, she was presented to the King and Queen of the United Kingdom and soon after, in 1926, she chartered the supply ship Hobby which had been used by famous explorer Roald Amundsen, for a hunting and filming trip to the Arctic accompanied by her friends the Count & Countess Ribadavia. She gained international notoriety for her exploits (and hunting of polar bears) and was dubbed by newspapers around the world, as the, “Arctic Diana” and “The Girl Who Tamed the Arctic”. The Count of Ribadavia published a book with photographs by Louise in 1927 titled, Chasses Et Aventures Dans Les Regions Polaires.

In 1928, Boyd was planning a second pleasure trip aboard the Hobby when it was learned that the famous Norwegianexplorer Roald Amundsen had recently disappeared in his own attempt to find and rescue the Italian explorer Umberto Nobile. Louise offered her services and the ship to the Norwegian government to search for Amundsen, saying, “How could I go on a pleasure trip when those 22 lives were at stake?” Although she traveled about 10,000 miles (16,100 km) across the Arctic Ocean she found no trace of him. Nevertheless, the Norwegian government awarded her the Chevalier Cross of the Order of Saint Olav. “She was the first American woman to receive the order and the third woman in the world to be so honored.”

Boyd is primarily known for leading a series of scientific expeditions to the east and north coast of Greenland in the 1930s. Louise photographed, surveyed and collected hundreds of botanical specimens, having corresponded and learned from her good friend, Alice Eastwood of the California Academy of Sciences. The American Geographical Society published her findings and photographs from the 1933 and 1935 expeditions in a book titled The Fiord Region of East Greenland. An area near the Gerard de Geer Glacier was later named Louise Boyd Land.

With the outbreak of World War II, the knowledge she had gained in the course of her six previous expeditions to Greenland and the Arctic became of strategic significance and sensitivity. The United States government requested that she not publish the book she was writing about her later 1937 and 1938 expeditions and asked her to lead, for the Department of Commerce National Bureau of Standards, a geophysical expedition along the west coast of Greenland and down the coast of Baffin Island and Labrador. She was appointed as the Bureau’s consulting expert on a dollar a year basis. At her own expense, she chartered and outfitted the schooner Effie M. Morrissey. This schooner, owned and commanded by captain Robert Bartlett, had been successfully running yearly scientific expeditions to the Arctic since 1926. The principal purpose of the 1941 Bureau of Standards expedition was to obtain data on radio-wave transmission in the Arctic regions traversed. The ionosphere, geomagnetism and aurorae were studied. The Effie M. Morrissey sailed from Washington DC on June 11, 1941, with Louise Boyd leading a scientific party of four men (including a physician) and a crew of eleven under the command of Capt. Bartlett. The expedition returned to Washington DC on November 3, 1941 with valuable data.

Her earlier book that had been held from publication, The Coast of Northeast Greenland, was published after the war, in 1948