At approximately the 1:00 mark of the video linked below, when describing the “South Pole,” Admiral Richard Byrd stated that “[t]here’s no life whatever beyond the edge of the world. There are no Eskimos. It is too cold for human beings to live there permanently. When we left on this expedition we were to put it very mildly extremely anxious to find out if it existed, would we be able to find it, and that was a great question.”
What was the “it” that he was concerned they might not find because it might not exist? The subject of his discourse was the South Pole.