by Stephen Bown
During the early twentieth century, Amundsen was a towering public figure. In an era before the Internet, television, radio and easy travel, he excelled at selling excitement and adventure to the public. A casual search of the New York Times archives between 1903 and 1928 reveals over four hundred articles about Amundsen. These articles include gushing tributes to his accomplishments, notifications of his honours, decorations and citations, notices of his upcoming lectures, news of his opinions on global events and details of his future plans. Some of the pieces read like the society pages, announcing which prestigious prize Amundsen would receive in Paris, what President Theodore Roosevelt had written in a public letter read aloud at a dinner in Amundsen’s honour in New York, or which German scientific medal the Norwegian explorer had renounced during the war. Even the auctions of his manuscripts to publishers made the papers.
Amundsen wrote about his exploits with a wry, self-deprecating sense of humour free of the nationalist bombast and pedantic cereal-box philosophy, the fake moralizing and shallow introspection, that was so common in the pronouncements of many other explorers of the era. Much of his own writing is tongue-in-cheek and deliberately lurid; he was a natural story-teller chuckling at his own tales. “I tried to work up a little poetry,” he wrote just before setting off on skis for the South Pole, “the ever-restless spirit of man, the mysterious, awe-inspiring wilderness of ice—but it was no good; I suppose it was too early in the morning.” After surviving a dangerous situation in the Arctic, he observed that “my nerve-wracking strain of the last three weeks was over. And with its passing, my appetite returned. I was ravenous. Hanging from the shrouds were carcasses of caribou. I rushed up the rigging, knife in hand. Furiously I slashed off slice after slice of the raw meat, thrusting it down my throat in chunks and ribbons, like a famished animal, until I could contain no more.” On another occasion, quoting the novelist Rex Beach, he mused that “‘the deity of success is a woman, and she insists on being won, not courted. . . . [Y]ou’ve got to seize her and bear her off, instead of standing under her window with a mandolin.’”
Amundsen was an entertainer of the highest order, and his geographical conquests were his art, executed with simplicity and grace. People sought out his opinions, snapped up his books and lined up to attend his lectures. Yet for much of his professional career he teetered on the cusp of bankruptcy, pursued by debt collectors even at public venues and ceremonies. He was indifferent, if not incompetent, when it came to dealing with the business aspect of his adventures, pouring all his earnings and borrowings into his next great adventure. At one point he was even involved in a lawsuit over debts to his own brother. Ellsworth, his friend and adventuring partner, remembered that in the 1920s, “In his room at the Waldorf, I frequently heard a mysterious rustling of paper on the floor—another court summons for Amundsen being slid under the door.” It speaks to his character, however, that he always paid off his creditors as soon as he was flush with cash from his latest book or tour.
Like all larger-than-life characters, Amundsen had several nicknames: “Last of the Vikings” invoked his national heritage for bold undertakings, “Napoleon of the Polar Regions” referenced his style of operation and the planning of his geographical conquests, and “White Eagle” was a concession to his striking appearance. Like his Viking ancestors, he was an imposing figure. His stride was confident and his stance defiant, his great beak of a nose a cartoonist’s delight, his bald head dominated by the white tufts of his imperial mustache. His face was weathered and prematurely aged from ploughing his way through blizzards on skis and dog sleds and from endless fretting over the state of his foundering finances. The skin around his piercing blue-grey eyes was crinkled from a lifetime of squinting into the sparkling ice and vast, frozen seas. These eyes, one friend noted, bored “through one as their gaze passed on into infinite distances.”
Amundsen lived with verve and enthusiasm. According to Ellsworth, who knew him for four years in the 1920s and joined him on two polar adventures, he inherited “from those half-wild ancestors who voyaged to America centuries before Columbus . . . a heroic physical appetite that matched the strength of his restless spirit.” He could eat almost anything, from multiple hard-boiled eggs to a succession of greasy meatballs. He seemed to thrive on a monotonous diet of pemmican and oat biscuits, but was never averse to hunting and eating unfamiliar animals such as dolphins, seals and penguins, which he proclaimed made for excellent eating, “not unlike beef.” He even ate his own sled dogs once. “His throat seemed to be lined with asbestos,” Ellsworth recalled, “and his digestion was that of an ostrich.” Amundsen was known to gulp burning hot chocolate, place his empty mug on the ground and proclaim “That is good” while others patiently waited for their drinks to cool. Never a routinely heavy drinker, Amundsen nevertheless poured himself a glass of aquavit or other liquor, eyeing his watch to await the precise moment of 5 p.m. each afternoon before drinking it.
The Last Viking was stubborn and intractable. He had many strong opinions, many friends and many enemies. It was nearly impossible to compel him to do anything he didn’t want to do—even to deliver a speech if he wasn’t in the mood—yet when he disappeared it was while dashing to the rescue of a man he hated. Ever restless and on the move, to the very end Amundsen was out to prove that he still had what it took to be a leader, that his glory days did not lie in the past. He shied away from the role of elder statesman, from becoming an object of morbid curiosity while fading away on his remote property. Unlike his mentor and countryman Fridtjof Nansen, the celebrated Norwegian patriot famous for the first recorded crossing of Greenland, Amundsen was not a scientist or an academic—he did not crave comfortable respectability but, rather, sought continued acclaim for daring exploits. He was a professional with a lifelong dedication to his skills and craft, and he had no other career to fall back on.
Amundsen was loved by his men, commanding a devotion of which others could only dream. He repaid loyalty with loyalty, even at considerable cost to his reputation, as was the case with the disgraced American explorer Dr. Frederick Cook. Revealing his own leadership style, Amundsen once admitted in a rare critique that “Nansen is too kingly. He will not hobnob with the common herd.” Some of Amundsen’s men even claimed they would sacrifice themselves for him. “If we were in want of food,” claimed Oscar Wisting, who was with Amundsen at the South Pole, in the Northeast Passage and at the North Pole, “and he said one must sacrifice himself for the others, I would gladly go quietly out into the snowdrift and die.”
Amundsen himself had a few qualities he demanded of his men, in addition to physical strength and quiet competence: “courage and dauntlessness, without boasting or big words, and then, amid joking and chaff—out into the blizzard.” Ever the optimist, who often counted on luck and always came out ahead, one of his favourite maxims was “When it is darkest there is always light ahead.” Yet he could share the complaints of his men in a down-to-earth way even while remaining the indomitable commander—he somehow was both leader and comrade. “There are two times a man is happy up here,” he claimed about the North Pole. “When his belly is full of hot liquid, and when he is in his sleeping bag.” Once, on a small ship that was bucking and corkscrewing in an ocean storm, a companion remarked that he didn’t like the sea. Amundsen, pale from seasickness himself, replied, “I don’t either. It is something we have to put up with.”
But as with any public figure, there was more to the explorer than the press revealed. An intensely private and secretive man, Amundsen rarely discussed things that were not part of his public persona—the elaborate façade of invincibility and determination that captivated the public for decades. He was as guarded and circumspect in his private life as he was flamboyant in his public exploits. Never, in any public documents or lectures, did he mention his three complicated affairs, all with married women, nor his quarrels with his family, until his strangely imprecise and erratic autobiography was published, barely a year and a half before his
death.
Perhaps it was a chance to redeem his reputation, a gambit to claim the limelight, that propelled Amundsen on his final dangerous and hastily planned flight in a French biplane. Perhaps he feared the arrival of his American fiancée. Whatever his reasons, on June 18, 1928, the Last Viking set off on his last great polar adventure. The twin-propeller biplane, with a Norwegian co-pilot and four French crew, soared into the blue northern sky from Tromsø, in northern Norway, toward Spitsbergen.
Oddly, many observers had premonitions of Amundsen’s fate in the days before takeoff. One even noted tears on Amundsen’s cheek the day he belatedly boarded the train north to Bergen, twenty-five years to the day since he had set sail on his first great conquest, of the Northwest Passage. “Ah, if you only knew how splendid it is up there in the North,” he said to an Italian reporter at his home in Uranienborg, on the coast outside Oslo. “That’s where I want to die, and I wish only that death would come to me chivalrously, that it will find me during the execution of some great deed, quickly and without suffering.” His last hours, spent with his friend Fritz Zapffe, were also notable for unusual musings. Amundsen handed his broken lighter to his friend, and when Zapffe said he would have it repaired, Amundsen replied that he shouldn’t bother: “I’ll have no more use for it.”
It was almost as if there were warring factions within him: a nostalgic melancholy in his final days at home, pushed aside by a sense of duty that was propelling him to fulfill the expectations of his public. Even the sailing from New York of his bride-to-be did not deter him from his quest for yet more acclaim in the polar regions, which had for two and a half decades served as the set for his grandiose life. We will never know his thoughts about the imminent arrival of his Alaskan paramour who planned to marry him in Norway, because Amundsen was never seen again. A few weeks after the biplane lifted off from Tromsø, a seven-foot-long blue pontoon and other detritus were spied floating in the choppy waters of the Barents Sea. The pontoon had clearly been used as a life raft.
Amundsen’s final bow on the international stage was an oddly fitting conclusion to the life and career of the most enigmatic and dynamic of the pioneers of the golden age of polar exploration. His disappearance was a neat conclusion to his adventure-novel life. Yet it was also somewhat anticlimactic. With Amundsen, the way he died is far less intriguing than the way he lived.
The Boy from the Mountain Kingdom
This is the greatest factor: the way in which the expedition is equipped, the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it.
ON JUNE 16 , 1903, the single-masted fishing smack Gjøa was moored to the pier in Christiania Fjord. The deck of the small ship was pounded by a “perfect deluge of rain” as a terrific storm whipped the waves into dangerous cross-currents. The captain of the ship was an exhausted, worry-worn thirty-one-year-old dreamer and schemer named Roald Amundsen. So far in his life he had dabbled in medicine at university, worked as a sailor and an officer on fishing and merchant ships, and overwintered in the Antarctic on a poorly organized Belgian expedition. Most importantly, he had come into a considerable inheritance, which he had spent on his ship and a crew of six experienced young mariners in preparation for his grand adventure, one that had animated his dreams since boyhood: the navigation of the unconquered Arctic waterway known as the Northwest Passage.
Unfortunately, his inheritance was insufficient to fund the ambitious voyage. He had begged for money from many “learned societies and private patrons of science,” but to little avail. The remainder of the financing was to be credit. He had not yet paid for the years of supplies and equipment he had stowed aboard, and his creditors had been hounding him for months. The previous day, his principal creditor had demanded payment within twenty-four hours. He had threatened to seize the Gjøa and to have Amundsen arrested for fraud. In a desperate move, the explorer had called a meeting with his crew, laid bare the sorry state of his finances and urged his men to a bold scheme.
Just before midnight, while the storm heaved the Gjøa and the rains pelted down, the first mate leaped aboard, yelling the news: the creditor was on the wharf, along with the bailiff and officers, waiting for the storm to pass before impounding the ship. Amundsen “seized an ax, dashed out into the cloudburst and cut the mooring hawsers,” and the ship plunged into the storm, steering south through the fjord into the Skagger Rack and North Sea—out of the jurisdiction of the bankruptcy courts and toward the deadly Northwest Passage. “When dawn arose on our truculent creditor,” Amundsen gleefully recounted later in his life, “we were safely out on the open main, seven as light-hearted pirates as ever flew the black flag, disappearing upon a quest that should take us three years and on which we were destined to succeed in an enterprise that had baffled our predecessors for four centuries.”
The young man who conquered the Northwest Passage could easily have been destined for a life of sailing and adventure. Born Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen on July 16, 1872, he was the fourth and final son of Jens Engebreth Amundsen and Hanna Henrikke Gustava Sahlquist. His mother was the daughter of a middle-class government official, and his father was a successful business owner and sea captain sixteen years her senior. At the time of their marriage, Jens was prosperous and well travelled. In 1854 he and a partner had purchased an old hulk at a scrap auction, refurbished it in a small shipyard and rechristened it Phoenix, displaying a sense of the symbolic power of words and prophecy that would later be shared by Roald.
The Phoenix voyaged to the Black Sea the following year, when the Crimean War pitted Turkey, France and England against Russia. By good fortune the ship, moored near Sebastapol, was eagerly received by the British and converted into winter quarters for their officers. Afterward it serviced the British cavalry, hauling forage and straw throughout the war. Jens returned to Norway with the foundation of a fortune in 1856, the beginning of his commercial empire. His business enterprise flourished with freer maritime trade in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Britain repealed its Navigation Act, opening the world of commercial shipping to ambitious but poor maritime people from commercial backwaters like Norway. Jens was a shrewd and uncompromising captain, business minded if unscrupulous by modern standards: among other cargoes, he shipped Chinese indentured labourers around the world—a practice little better than the slave trade. When he met Gustava Sahlquist he was a respected member of the commercial elite, the owner or co-owner at one time of thirty ships that circled the world. In the Norwegian tradition, ship owners were usually the captains of their own vessels, so marriage didn’t change his life much. Jens and Gustava’s first child was born in China.
Gustava—after many years of living aboard world-girdling merchant ships; several more years of living at Hvidsten, their secluded home on the mainland coast near the shipping centre of Sarpsbord; and the births of three more boys—persuaded her husband to move the family to Christiania, as Oslo was then called. Although more urban than Sarpsbord, Christiania was still dominated by sprawling wooden structures built along a fjord surrounded by pine-clad mountains and snowy peaks. The Amundsens’ new home was located near the city centre, had two stories and was staffed by several servants, yet it also backed onto forested backcountry. It was as urban as anything then in Norway yet still under the spell of the hinterland, a good place for children to experience the blending of urban and rural worlds. For the boys—Jens, Gustav, Leon and Roald—it was undoubtedly an idyllic place to grow up: They learned skiing and skating at an early age in the forest behind their home and had great latitude in outdoor play. They learned knot tying and wood carving, and forestry and boating skills, yet they also had the city to explore.
Jens Sr. was a good but stern father, respected by his family and larger community, and also well liked. He regaled his children with tales of his adventures at sea and in exotic foreign lands. When he was not on a voyage he was involved in the boys’ lives, dispensing practical wisdom such as his comment on their fighting:
“I don’t want you to get into any fights. But if you must, get in the first blow—and see that it’s enough.” Roald seems later to have taken this to heart as a general philosophy: if you start something, go in strong and finish it. But although he inherited his father’s sense of adventure, he certainly did not inherit his father’s superior business sense, a lack that would haunt him for most of his life.
Gustava appears to have been unhappy. During school holidays and Christmas, she did not often travel with her sons to visit their cousins at Hvidsten. She either remained at home in Christiania or visited her own relatives. It is tempting to attribute Amundsen’s later wanderlust and international ambitions to his father and the family’s international shipping business, but it was Gustava who encouraged the boys’ formal education, which gave them a different window into the world, one that was less pragmatic and more intellectual, than their father’s outlook. It was she who urged the family to move to Christiania, where Amundsen was undoubtedly exposed to ideas and attitudes not commonly held in smaller, rural places. None of the Amundsen brothers was held back by the provincialism, feelings of inferiority or insularity that can come from growing up in remote places. Gustava saw to it that her sons were not disconnected from the larger intellectual and cultural currents of the wider world.