by Stephen Bown
In the end, however, he must have realized that he was still too inexperienced to be considering these ventures. He returned to putting in his hours working toward his captain’s certification instead of pestering government officials. He sailed on merchant ships owned by members of his extended family to destinations as far south as the west coast of Africa, but mostly in the mid-Atlantic from Europe to the Americas. His interest in a voyage quickly waned when it had no northern destination. Nevertheless he held to his studies, and on May 1, 1895, he was awarded his mate’s certificate, an important stepping-stone toward acquiring the leadership and practical skills needed to lead an expedition.
During the winter of 1896, Amundsen began planning another ski adventure across Hardangervidda, starting from “the mountain farm Mogen on the east to the farm called Garen on the west coast.” It was similar to the trip that had defeated him years earlier, and still “there was no record of any person having ever crossed the plateau in winter. There were no tourists in those days in any season of the year.” Years later, he recalled that the adventure “nearly wrote ‘finis’ to my life, and involved dangers and hardships fully as severe as any I was destined ever to encounter in the polar regions.” Indeed, the plateau in winter is very like the polar regions in its wind-lashed barrenness, unpredictable storms and erratic temperatures.
Amundsen’s companion this time was his brother Leon, then on holiday from his work as a wine merchant in Europe. But the weather again wreaked havoc on Amundsen’s carefully laid plans. He and Leon had barely started before they were forced to spend a week holed up in a tiny farmhouse with six peasant farmers, waiting for a ferocious blizzard to peter out. Knowing the dangers of the plateau in winter, the farmers argued with Roald and Leon not to attempt the crossing before bidding the two young men a sad farewell. “Of course we were lighthearted about the enterprise,” the younger Amundsen recalled. The plateau was only 115 kilometres across and, at their speed of skiing, should have taken only two days to traverse. Two days didn’t seem like such a long time, so they packed only meagre supplies.
At the end of an exhausting day, the two brothers made it to the halfway hut to find that the door was nailed shut. Exhausted and chilled, they broke in and quickly kindled a fire, the hearth having been conveniently stacked with wood. After eating a warm meal, they fell quickly asleep. That night a storm rolled in, so severe that “it would be folly to venture out in it.” For two days the brothers huddled in the hut with warmth but little food. Without food, remaining in the hut was not an option, so they set off in the semidarkness of winter in the north, navigating by compass. Soon it was snowing again; they could not reach the western edge of the plateau before full darkness was upon them. They settled down to a cold, miserable night, sleeping in the open because they had not brought a tent in order to save weight.
Visibility remained poor due to fog and snow, and the trekkers became disoriented, wandering in circles without food for two more days. The skiing was exhausting them. On their fourth night out they again slept in the open, digging little pits to avoid the wind. They climbed into the pits as the snow piled up around them. Roald was covered completely. When he awoke in the morning, he was immobilized in ice. The warm snow around him had frozen when the temperature dropped. When he opened his mouth to yell for help, powdery snow filled his mouth, partially blocking his airway. He forced himself not to panic and breathed slowly around the snow. He could not move or yell, and felt like he was locked in an icy tomb. When Leon woke up, he was perplexed: he couldn’t see his brother. After a while, searching where he remembered Roald lay down to sleep, Leon noticed a few hairs of a reindeer fur poking through the snow. It was the fringe of a sleeping bag. It took him an hour to chip his brother out of the icy pit.
After a few more hours of travel, they found themselves at the edge of the plateau. They descended to the farm hut where they had started out from a week earlier; the men were carving wood and the women were spinning yarn. When the residents looked up to greet the newcomers, they did not recognize the brothers as the same two who had stayed with them the week before. When the Amundsens said they had stayed in the cabin a week earlier, they were not believed. “Our scraggly beards had grown,” Roald wrote, “our eyes were gaunt and hollow, our cheeks were sunken, and the ruddy glow of colour had changed to a ghastly greenish yellow. We were a truly awful spectacle.” He later learned that a farmer on the far western side of the plateau had seen mysterious ski tracks one morning a few metres from his doorway, coming from the east. The Amundsens had no idea they’d been close to a dwelling. Roald recognized that the journey was a near disaster, but he did not try to place the adventure in any sort of heroic light. Nor did he shy away from taking the blame for many of the trek’s problems, such as scant provisions. Despite the hunger and the frostbite that had nearly caused the amputation of fingers and toes, he shrugged off the dangers. It was, he claimed, “a part of my preliminary training for my polar career. The training proved severer than the experience for which it was a preparation.” Certainly Amundsen learned to expect the unexpected and to plan for all eventualities, however unlikely they seemed. Many decades later, looking back on his career, he wrote, “I may say that 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.” No other expedition led by Amundsen could ever be said to be underprovisioned or unprepared.
He obviously learned a great deal from these amateur forays, undertaken with bravado and the light-hearted anticipation of easy success, but which turned almost deadly when he made the wrong decisions. It was not an accident that Amundsen became the leading explorer of his age. Late in life he claimed—and the claim has the feel of truth to it—that “my career has been a steady progress toward a definite goal since I was fifteen years of age. Whatever I have accomplished in exploration has been the result of lifelong planning, painstaking preparation, and the hardest kind of conscientious work.” Certainly that is how he remembered it years afterward, and the meteoric trajectory of his life events seems to confirm it. Of course, a little good luck is always welcome in any story. For Amundsen, the luck came soon after this nearly fatal adventure.
Polar Apprentice
Snow and wind are forgotten, and one could not be happier in a royal palace. . . . These excursions are wonderful, and I hope to have frequent opportunities for more.
ON AUGUST 13, 1896, Fridtjof Nansen returned from his three-year expedition in search of the North Pole. He had, as planned, driven his ship Fram into the pack ice and drifted with the polar currents. In doing so, he had attracted condemnation and sneers from many within the scientific establishment. During the risky voyage he and a comrade, Hjalmar Johansen, left the Fram and with dog sleds skied across the windswept expanse of frozen ice and snow toward the North Pole. They reached 86 degrees, 14 minutes, before turning back—a new record that was 270 kilometres closer than any other recorded approach to the pole. Returning was a struggle, an 800-kilometre trek of endurance over shifting pack ice, futilely chasing their ship as it drifted away from them. The two men overwintered on an uninhabited island near Franz Josef Land before being rescued by a passing British ship. The Fram and the rest of its crew returned home to Norway a week after the duo arrived.
Nansen and Johansen were acclaimed as heroes. Tens of thousands thronged the Christiania Fjord to greet the victorious explorers and hear their patriotic speeches. This time, Nansen garnered even more international fame and recognition than when he had returned from Greenland, boosting enthusiasm for Norway’s independence from Sweden and feeding a public demand for tales of adventure and danger in an era before the Internet, television or even radio. Tall, blond and muscular, Nansen fit the bill for an idealized Nordic hero figure, braving danger and hardship in a struggle to acquire valuable information for his people. Stereotypes generate easy stories for time-pressed or lazy journalists, and Nansen quickly became part of the endless
parade of stock characters that formed the news. He essentially began what has become known as the heroic age of polar exploration, in which a pantheon of larger-than-life individuals competed for the glory of being the first to attain particular, although somewhat arbitrary, geographical milestones.
Around this time, in 1895, the Sixth International Geographical Congress passed a resolution at its meeting in London that “the exploration of the Antarctic regions is the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken; it should be undertaken before the close of the century.” The polar explorer was becoming a standard fanciful ideal, but one that nonetheless mirrored the young Amundsen’s natural characteristics in both personality and appearance. A month before Nansen returned to Norway to international acclaim, Amundsen, now twenty-four years old, had just completed another commercial voyage, this time a sealing voyage in the polar seas off Norway’s northern coast. Sealing was an undertaking that he had little liking for—he was never a sport hunter, and large-scale butchering of marine animals disgusted him. Nevertheless, the voyage gave him enough sea time to obtain his master’s papers, which permitted him to command a ship in waters around Norway.
With his new certification in hand, he applied for a position with the latest exciting voyage of exploration: a Belgian expedition to Antarctica, under the command of Adrien de Gerlache. Amundsen’s application stood out from the hundreds of others that arrived from around the world. The expedition was grossly underfinanced, and Amundsen’s offer to serve without pay undoubtedly was an advantage. But so too was the fact that Amundsen was countryman to the now-famous Nansen. He also had experience skiing and sailing. “The trip will last two years and will be most interesting as, of course, it is the first of its kind,” he wrote his brother Leon.
The Belgian expedition was an international affair and stood out not only for being the first of its kind but also for being somewhat peculiar for a country without a significant maritime tradition. The crew included members from Norway, Belgium, Poland, Romania and the United States—among them the Brooklyn physician Frederick A. Cook, who had ventured to northern Greenland a few years earlier with Peary. While de Gerlache wintered in Norway to learn Norwegian and how to ski, Amundsen spent the winter in Antwerp learning French and taking a private course in navigation. In March he hastily returned to Norway, fleeing Antwerp after the suicide of his Flemish landlady. She had apparently died from carbon monoxide poisoning, and Amundsen had found her body when he came down for breakfast. His Norwegian biographer, Tor Bomann-Larsen, contends that she and Amundsen had become lovers and that her death had so shaken him that he could not continue with his studies: “The lady and I were good friends so I know the circumstances,” he wrote to his brother. “If I were to start on this story I’m afraid I would never finish it.”
The Belgica sailed for the Antarctic from Antwerp on August 16, 1897, for a two-and-a-half-year adventure with Amundsen aboard as second mate. The small ship, a converted Norwegian whaling ship, cruised south toward Cape Horn, reaching the Strait of Magellan in late December. Cook had joined the ship at Rio de Janeiro, and he and Amundsen soon became friends. The young Amundsen was eager to hear stories about Cook’s trip to the north.
The crew of the Belgica spent several weeks exploring Tierra del Fuego. “In those days, little was known of this region scientifically, and our commander was so taken with the possibilities of discovery there that we lingered for several weeks, gathering specimens of its natural history, mapping its shores, and taking meteorological observations.” They pushed south, past the South Shetland Islands and encountered icebergs. They were now in the uncharted waters north of the Antarctic Peninsula, and Amundsen noted that they “soon had an adventure that came near to ending the career of all of us.” He came onto the bridge to take the afternoon watch and found the ship entering a terrific gale. In the driving sleet and snow, the ship was surrounded by deadly ice. The captain, who had been steering the ship in the lee of an enormous iceberg, instructed Amundsen to keep the course to shelter the ship from the worst of the storm. In doing so, one sailor was washed overboard, screaming as he plunged into the fog and ice. The men rushed to save him. One grabbed the sailor’s arm and nearly pulled him back onto the ship, but his grip slipped and the sailor slid away and soon sank from view. Amundsen felt responsible because he was the officer on watch, although the mishap had little directly to do with him. He passed the remainder of his watch without incident and relayed the captain’s instructions to the next officer on duty before turning in for the night. Then he “could feel the ship rolling in response to the swell,” he recalled; the movement “was not the tremendous heave of the main Pacific, but was a modified rolling of the current which came around the iceberg to us,” and Amundsen was gently lulled to sleep.
In the morning the water was calm, and Amundsen quickly dressed and rushed on deck with the others. They stared in awe, finding the ship in a small basin, “icelocked on every side by a complete circle of towering icebergs.” The young man who had steered the ship into the enclosure had no idea how they came to be encircled. It had probably happened during the storm, when the ship might have been “lifted on one of the mighty Pacific swells through an opening between two icebergs and had landed us in the becalmed basin. . . . [N]othing short of a miracle of coincidence had saved us from being dashed to pieces by the bergs that formed the shallow entrance we had hurdled on the back of that swelling wave.” The crew carefully eased the ship out again, with flags at half mast for the drowned mariner and with their fear growing stronger. It was around this time that Amundsen finally realized that this expedition was not a well-organized scientific foray into the unknown but an underfunded, poorly planned dash into danger. “I can only admire his audacity,” Amundsen wrote of de Gerlache. “Onwards or bust. I will follow all the way, cheerful and smiling.”
The Belgica wound its way along the coast of Graham Land, the northern portion of the Antarctic Peninsula, and slipped into an unknown channel between the mainland and a series of islands. De Gerlache named it after his ship, but now it is called De Gerlache Strait and is considered the great geographical discovery of the expedition. The ship toured the strait for several weeks, stopping often to collect rock samples, inspect glaciers and launch ski expeditions. Amundsen set off on several ski expeditions and joined the first Antarctic sledging expedition. De Gerlache, Cook, Amundsen and two others landed two great sledges and a week of supplies near Brabant Island and then slogged to the height of land for a better view of the strait to gain perspective when drawing up their map of the region. They man-hauled their sledges over the rough, frozen terrain, around “uncounted” crevasses and up slippery slopes. The South Pole expert Roland Huntford points out quite colourfully that to Amundsen this experience was game-changing in that it forever steered him away from man-hauling sledges on his own expeditions: “[M]an-hauling was vividly shown to be neither glorious nor heroic, but unpleasant, sweaty, toilsome and stupid.”
It took a great and exhausting effort for the sledge party to reach the height of land on January 31, 1898. When the men stood on the promontory they beheld a desolate, wind-lashed plain of icy expanses broken by jutting black rock formations that were separated from the land by an ice-infested channel. Here they set up a historic Antarctic camp, the first ever. “The snow was very close,” Amundsen wrote in his journal, “and we were compelled to dig out a place for the tent.” The duties were split between setting up their camp and preparing the communal meal in the “lee of a sledge. . . . [I]t is not long before our little tent raises its ridge against the snow and wind. Our necessities for the night, sleeping bags and dry stockings, are put into the tent; the rest is left on the sledge, well protected by covers.” The five companions settled in for a meal of pea soup and soon “snow and wind [were] forgotten, and one could not be happier in a royal palace. . . . These excursions are wonderful,” Amundsen enthused, “and I hope to have frequent opportunities for more.”
During
the outing he took special care to observe and learn from “[t]he Doctor [Cook], the experienced Polar explorer,” who was calm and competent, and a willing teacher. Amundsen observed that the doctor wore sealskin clothes rather than wool and praised “the practical and calm manner in which this man works.” He went on, under Cook’s tutelage, to evaluate the expedition’s equipment, noting deficiencies such as the type of tent, which “presents too great a surface to the wind,” and preparing a list of necessities for polar travel that included snow goggles, light wool clothing and a waterproof tin for matches. Amundsen devoted many pages to these seemingly mundane practical observations and assessments. As a result, his journal of the Belgica voyage is somewhat lacking in the lurid descriptions and semi-mocking musings of the entertaining accounts of his later expeditions, when he was the leader and his writing was both a marketing tool and a source of income. In 1898, however, Amundsen was a serious student of the practical aspects of organizing an expedition, and he knew he was not writing for an audience.
By late February, the Belgica had ploughed south into the pack ice in search of more geographical mysteries to solve, and de Gerlache was hoping to break through to the Weddell Sea (which proved to be impossible) and perhaps be the first to overwinter in Antarctica. He wanted to wedge the Belgica in the ice and float with the Antarctic currents, repeating at the bottom of the world what Nansen had so recently done at the top. The crew, even the scientific contingent, showed little interest in this speculative and highly dangerous plan. They were not equipped for an overwintering. The original plan was to proceed to the region of the magnetic South Pole on South Victoria Land and leave a four-person team for the winter while the rest of the crew sailed to Australia. Amundsen, who would gladly have supported de Gerlache’s scheme if it had been made public, wrote that “unfortunately, the scientists are openly showing their fear. They are reluctant to go any further into the ice. Why, I ask, did we come here? Is it not to explore the unknown regions? That is impossible if you stay outside the ice.”