The Last Viking

by Stephen Bown

  In the capital, the Amundsen brothers attended private school, but only Gustav, the second-oldest, had completed his studies before their father died in 1886 at the age of sixty-six. “It is hard to lose such a father,” wrote the fourteen-year-old Roald, “but it was God’s will, and the will of God must be fulfilled.” Some have suggested that this and similar writings over the years are evidence of Amundsen’s religious beliefs, but it seems just as likely that these platitudes skirt the desolation of a teenager’s feelings upon losing his beloved father: they are the words of someone who knows he needs to say something but is unable to convey the enormity of it. Amundsen’s three older brothers left home soon after their father’s death. Amundsen himself, according to his cheeky retelling in his autobiography, “passed without incident through the usual educational routine of Norway.”

  With her three oldest sons gone to sea, Gustava pinned her desire for one of her children to pursue a career in medicine on Roald. “This ambition, however—which originated with her and for which I never shared her enthusiasm—was never to be realized.” But his mother’s respect for higher education was likely why Roald first came to read books in English about events outside Norway. And while he continued his education to please his mother, he developed an interest in British history, particularly in the tragic fate of John Franklin and his quest to locate the fabled Northwest Passage, but also Franklin’s earlier expeditions in arctic North America. “I read them with a fervid fascination which has shaped the whole course of my life,” Amundsen recalled.

  His description of the return from one of his expeditions thrilled me as nothing I had ever read before. He told how for three weeks he and his little band had battled with the ice and storms, with no food to eat except a few bones found at a deserted Indian camp, and how before they finally returned to the outpost of civilization they were reduced to eating their own boot leather to keep themselves alive. Strangely enough the thing in Sir John’s narrative that appealed to me most strongly was the sufferings he and his men endured. A strange ambition burned within me to endure those same sufferings. Secretly . . . I irretrievably decided to be an Arctic explorer.

  “Roald” means “the glorious” in Norwegian. As a youth, Amundsen dreamt of a glorious future for himself, one in which he would live up to his name and perhaps his father’s legacy. He had visions of vanquishing, against great odds, geographical chimeras, enduring incredible suffering in the process and emerging a hero.

  Amundsen plodded on through his studies, passing each year with grades that reflected indifference and muted enthusiasm, barely good enough to keep his mother pleased. Meanwhile he continued to dream and to train in the outdoors during every possible break from school. “From November to April,” he recalled, “I went out in the open, exploring the hills and mountains which rise in every direction around Oslo, increasing my skill in traversing ice and snow and hardening my muscles for the coming great adventure.” He loved skiing but had little interest in football, the other sport then popular in Norway. He joined football teams anyway, just for the physical challenge. Amundsen slept with his window wide open at night even in the winter, claiming to his mother that he loved fresh air, but really “it was a part of my hardening process.” He organized small expeditions for himself and a few friends, such as overnight treks on skis under a star-studded sky, enlivened by the otherworldly swirling of the aurora borealis, into the winter wilds to improve his toughness.

  If one were looking for a challenge in late-nineteenth-century Norway, there were two ever-present opportunities: the sea and the mountain wilderness that constituted much of the country. Amundsen’s dream of suffering and endurance was given a substantive boost in the summer of 1889. That summer, Fridtjof Nansen returned to Christiania to a hero’s welcome after skiing across the frozen expanse of Greenland. Nansen sailed up the fjord toward Christiania surrounded by a mob of small boats proudly waving the national flag while bands played on the decks of larger ships, “his tall form,” Amundsen remembered, “glowing with the admiration of a whole world for the deed he had accomplished.” The whole city joined the celebration; on shore, the streets were lined with cheering crowds as Nansen and his hardy companions snaked their way through the city in a festive parade. Nansen and five other Norwegians had seized a geographic prize that had eluded many international teams before, including that of British mountaineer Edward Whimper, who had scaled the Matterhorn; American naval officer Robert Peary, who would later lead a dash to the North Pole; and Swedish explorer and aristocrat A. E. Nordenskiöld, who achieved fame for being the first to navigate the Northeast Passage.

  Norway was not yet an independent nation, but was under the dominion of Sweden and eager for international recognition for its nascent independence movement. For succeeding where others had failed, and for giving Norway its first international recognition, Nansen was now a big man in a small country. Amundsen hoped to emulate this new national hero in terms of bold vision as well as technique; the seventeen year old remembered vividly that “with beating heart I walked that day among the banners and cheers and all the dreams of my boyhood woke to storming life. And for the first time I heard, in my secret thoughts, the whisper clear and insistent: If you could do the North-West Passage!” Amundsen was maturing at the dawn of the golden age of Norwegian exploration, when national pride spurred heroic exploits not seen for nearly a thousand years. Norwegians fondly recalled the time when Viking raiders plundered the coasts of Europe as far as the Mediterranean and pushed their dragon-headed knarrs west through the unexplored Atlantic as far as North America.

  Modern Norway’s coming of age was a period of optimism, of expanding horizons and ambitions for the tough, individualist people. A sparsely populated country on the fringes of Europe (it had fewer than two million inhabitants in the late nineteenth century, about one tenth the population of Britain and one thirtieth of the United States), Norway could be an insular society. It was a place where merchants looked elsewhere for profits and where dreamers could view the greater world as a legitimate theatre for their ambitions; to succeed at endeavours other than the traditional industries one would have to leave. A Norwegian could achieve recognition at home simply by being recognized elsewhere.

  The teenaged Amundsen barely passed his school exams. But in those days a pass was sufficient, and in 1890 he dutifully enrolled in the Royal Norwegian Frederick University of Christiania. He planned to study medicine, according to his mother’s wishes. “Like all fond mothers, mine believed that I was a paragon of industry,” he reminisced, “but the truth was that I was a worse than indifferent student.” Not recognizing her son’s shortcomings, she paid for a private apartment in the city for him. But he continued to pursue his outdoors training and dreaming, all the while pretending to be making headway in his medical studies.

  During these years Amundsen continued his extensive ski touring in the rugged hills around the city, growing in skill and stamina. He mastered touring while the sport and its equipment were rapidly evolving, from the use of a single stick to the development of more effective methods of waxing that involved pine sap, candle tallow or even soft, fatty cheese, depending on the conditions. The skis then in use were heavy wooden planks, and the bindings were a cumbersome system of straps.

  In early February 1893, Amundsen attended a lecture given by the Norwegian explorer Eivind Astrup, who regaled his eager audience with tales of his adventures in the Arctic with the American explorer Peary. Astrup spoke about the superiority of skis over snowshoes in this environment, the benefits of using dogs to pull sleds (the standard method of travel in the Arctic) and the wealth of knowledge possessed by local peoples. It was a revelation to the young Amundsen that “civilization” did not always provide superior methods and technologies. That people who had for generations survived in the Arctic could be relied upon to have better knowledge regarding how to survive there, that native peoples were not in fact benighted savages but rather should be emulated, was an eyeopener to
the young Norwegian.

  Amundsen was a serious and principled young man who had a small group of friends and led a quiet social life. But he seldom attended classes and was on his way to expulsion from university. In fact, he had recently failed his exams, but he kept the secret from his mother—he must have been nervous about telling her. The only thing that saved him from embarrassment and family discord was that his mother died in the fall of 1893, when he was twenty-one. Her unexpected death “saved her from the sad discovery which she otherwise would have made, that my own ambitions lay in another direction and that I had made but poor progress in realizing hers.” Later that year, Amundsen left the university with “enormous relief.” Although he had stayed in school only to please his mother, during these years he had enjoyed a great deal of latitude in how he spent his time. His mother had provided him not only with an apartment but also a housekeeper, as well as a stipend that allowed him to live without worry. Despite his poor grades, university life provided him with access to the intellectual and cultural currents of Europe and a great deal of free time in which to pursue his true interests.

  Freed from the responsibility of maintaining the charade of actively pursuing a medical degree, the young Amundsen now inherited a substantial sum of money from his parents’ estate. Counterbalancing his grief, throughout the spring of 1893 there was excited talk in Christiania about the imminent departure of another expedition led by the famous Nansen. This time, Nansen enjoyed considerable support for his plans from the Norwegian government and had a doctorate to bolster his scientific claims. He had designed and built a special ship with a tougher and rounder hull to better resist the pressure of pack ice. He planned to sail his new ship into the Arctic, deliberately wedge it into the ice, and observe where the ship was taken, in an effort to follow and better understand the polar currents. That was the scientific goal of the voyage; the excitement in Christiania sprang from the fact that it was a daring undertaking.

  The expedition was launched to great fanfare in June, further galvanizing the young Amundsen’s plan of becoming an explorer. He saw and felt the excitement of the crowds and wanted the thrill of that attention for himself. Although he had no direct experience of what life would be like for the men aboard the ship during the actual voyage, he continued working toward this goal. Fortunately for him, a large number of North and South polar expeditions were being planned and undertaken, not just in Norway but in the United States and Britain. The North and South Poles were the least explored and least understood lands on the planet, and polar exploration was in the air, so to speak.

  A few months later, in October, Amundsen wrote a letter to Martin Eckroll, the leader of a planned Norwegian expedition to Spitsbergen, outlining his credentials and requesting a position on the expedition, which was being planned for the following summer. “I have long been possessed of a great desire to join one of these interesting Arctic adventures,” he wrote, “but various circumstances have prevented me. First and foremost, my parents wanted me to study. . . .” The young man then outlined his family history, mentioning that he was now free from familial obligation because his mother had recently died. He noted to Eckroll that he planned to spend the winter “in the study of Meteorology, mapmaking, surveying” and other practical vocations that he believed might be valuable on an expedition. The would-be explorer indicated that he wanted no pay and would be “willing to submit to anything whatsoever.” He sent out similar applications to other expeditions being planned for various remote locations, but his lack of experience limited his prospects.

  Without waiting for replies—which, in any event, were not favourable, owing to his lack of experience in wilderness exploration and not having spent any time at sea—Amundsen launched himself into further training in mountain wilderness skiing. He organized a ski trip across the vast, uninhabited plateau of Hardangervidda to the sparsely inhabited western mountain ranges. It was a dangerous and difficult trek over windswept terrain, and it had never been completed in winter. His two companions were Laurentius Urdahl, an experienced mountain skier and a brother-in-law of his brother Gustav, and his friend Villhelm Holst, a medical student. After long planning sessions in the fall of 1893, the eager trio departed on Christmas Day by train to the trailhead, commemorating what they evidently believed would be their assured success with a now-amusing studio portrait: three skiers in fake gear and large packs, looking jaunty and well groomed, skiing purposefully onwards against a painted background of snow and pine trees.

  But with youth can come the underestimation of difficulties or the overestimation of one’s abilities. After many months of having “smoked perfumed cigarettes,” according to Urdahl in his reminiscences, the trio started out “sluggish and completely out of the habit of taking exercise.” Amundsen’s equipment proved inadequate, causing him to frequently slide and sink into deep snowdrifts, which exhausted him but provided some amusement to his companions. His bindings did not fit his boots, which resulted in his tumbling forward on downhill sections. An unseasonal thaw and a temperate blizzard made good skiing nearly impossible, and several days into the trip the thaw was followed by plummeting temperatures approaching –40°C, which nearly froze them at night in their specially constructed reindeer-fur sleeping bags. Then there was another blizzard. Despite a great deal of preparation, the three young men did not reach even the farm at the eastern edge of the plateau before they were forced to turn back. It was a humiliating defeat. They had skied barely fifty kilometres. Wilderness exploration was even harder than it had seemed.

  Amundsen, however, was not deterred by one setback. A few months later, in the summer of 1894, he signed onto a commercial sealing ship bound for Norway’s northern waters. He wanted to accustom himself to polar weather and gain some practical skills and experience as a sailor. This might also help cover his expenses, since his only income came from his inheritance. His plan was to work toward his master’s certificate, a qualification required to become a ship’s officer. This career path required years of sea time, performing many tasks as a ship’s crew member and passing a series of written tests. This was a profession he could happily throw himself into, and he spent the next several years working on ships mostly in the waters around Iceland and Greenland, where he reported that, “concerning life in the Arctic Ocean, I like it a lot. Its bad reputation is as usual an exaggeration.”

  Next on the young explorer’s agenda was fulfilling his military service. This was a duty of all young men in Norway, but also an experience that Amundsen thought would help develop some of his practical and wilderness skills. For several years he harboured the fear that he might be disqualified from military service due to a physical imperfection: his eyesight. Although he assured the readers of his autobiography that his eyesight was “especially powerful,” he admitted that he never wore the glasses that had been prescribed for him, concealing his near-sightedness. Fortunately, according to his own later account, his physique distracted the military physician from examining his eyes and pronouncing the humiliating disqualification. “The old doctor looked me over and at once burst into loud exclamations over my physical development. Evidently my eight years of conscientious exercise had been not without their effect,” Amundsen fondly reminisced. “He said to me ‘Young man, how in the world did you ever develop such a splendid set of muscles?’ . . . So delighted was the old gentleman at his discovery, which he appeared to regard as extraordinary, that he called to a group of officers in the adjoining room to come in and view the novelty. Needless to say, I was embarrassed almost to extinction by this exhibition of my person in the altogether.” He was admitted to the army, which required only seven months of service and left him plenty of time to work on the skills he would need for his dream.

  Despite his lack of interest in formal schooling, Amundsen began reading “all the books on the subject [of polar exploration] I could lay my hands on.” The conclusion he reached after his study of several explorers’ journals was that there was a “fatal weak
ness common to many of the preceding Arctic expeditions”: the leaders of these expeditions were not ship’s captains.

  They had almost invariably relied for the navigation of their vessels upon the services of experienced skippers. The fatal defect of this practice had been in every case that, once embarked at sea, the expedition had not one leader but two. Invariably this resulted in a division of responsibility between the commander and the skipper, incessant friction, divided counsels, and a lowered morale for the subordinate members of the expedition. Always two factions developed—one comprising the commander and the scientific staff, the other comprising the captain and the crew. I was resolved, therefore, that I should never lead an expedition until I was prepared to remedy this defect. The only way to remedy it was to equip myself with experience as a skipper and actually qualify as a ship’s captain.

  Only then could he lead an expedition as both a navigator and an explorer and “avoid this division into two factions.” This lesson served him well for many years and many expeditions. On the one occasion when he didn’t follow this rule, he experienced problems exactly as he had imagined, dealing with two semi-hostile factions who did not work well together, causing years of frustration and quarrelling.

  Though he was only in his early twenties and had no direct experience in leading expeditions, Amundsen was already imagining himself as the leader rather than just as a member of one. He wrote to an official in the Norwegian government about the national status of the island of Spitsbergen, inquiring whether an expedition there might be in the nation’s interests. But then his attention turned to the Antarctic, and he wrote more letters to government officials inquiring about snow and ski conditions there, as well as the number of seals there that could be used as food for dogs.