by Stephen Bown
Amundsen still hoped to cruise west as far as Herschel Island near the Alaska-Yukon border and then, if ice conditions permitted, push further west along the Alaskan coast before turning south through the Bering Strait. But it was not to be. The little ship was iced in for a third winter about 65 kilometres east of Herschel Island at King Point in the Yukon. Nearby there was a wrecked schooner and its Norwegian second mate, some American crew and a cluster of Inuit. Several whaling ships were also iced in within sight of Herschel Island. The Gjøa’s crew began hammering together an on-shore shed to provide shelter for the winter and making the Gjøa ready to do some more magnetic measurements during the frozen months ahead. By September 7, 1905, the ice was thick enough to cross, and the small community of ship-bound men could visit each other and exchange news. It didn’t take long before they all knew about Amundsen’s historic feat.
Amundsen was filled with frustration and impatience—if he didn’t get out the news himself, he would risk losing the money to be earned from the first publication of his story. In late October, when two Inuit and a whaling captain said they would set off for a distant Alaskan outpost, Amundsen decided to go with them through the trackless wilderness of the Yukon and Alaska. The small community of Eagle City, about 800 kilometres south over a mountain range, was a fur-trading settlement along the Yukon River that boasted a telegraph link. Amundsen was bursting with excitement to relay his historic news to the world and let his family and the families of his crew know that they had succeeded and were safe.
Amundsen and Captain William Mogg brought one sled and five dogs, while the Inuit travellers, Jimmy and Kappa (husband and wife), worked a second sled with seven dogs. Mogg brought along supplies such as pork and beans, buns, butter, sugar, tea, chocolate, dried milk and raisins. “It was certainly a much richer list of stores than I was accustomed to, but I had my doubts as to whether in solidity this variety would compare with the simpler stores used for our sledge trips,” Amundsen fretted. He had proposed pemmican as the natural and best food for the journey but was rebuffed by Mogg, and he could barely conceal his contempt: “Even the most unskilled dweller in the Temperate Zone can imagine how much needless waste of water content in the beans we should be dragging over the weary miles of snow.”
The four travellers journeyed through a landscape that “suddenly appeared like a piece of genuine Norwegian scenery, timbered and rocky.” This brought on a bout of homesickness in the young captain, who hadn’t seen a tree since leaving Norway. As they reached increasingly more populated territory, they stopped each night in small cabins and “road-houses” that were spaced out along the shores of the Yukon River every 30 kilometres or so. Amundsen later related an incident that reveals a great deal about his character. The provisions they carried were inadequate for all but Mogg, who “sat on one of the sleds all day” while Amundsen “grew hungrier and thinner with every mile.” By then they had split up with their two Inuit companions, and Mogg informed Amundsen that they would now travel all day without stopping for lunch. Amundsen protested, pointing out the difference in their levels of exertion and his own greater need for food. “The captain angrily dismissed my protest and pointed out that as he was the commander of the expedition, and had all the money, his orders would prevail.” Amundsen said nothing, but “like the Irishman’s parrot, ‘I kept up a devil of a thinking.’” The next day about lunchtime, Amundsen stopped and told Mogg that he would continue only if he had three meals a day. He would hike back to the previous shelter on foot and let Mogg continue on by himself. The terrified Mogg, who was in no physical shape to do anything so strenuous and had no idea how to handle dogs, “piteously claimed that I was leaving him to perish in the wilderness.” Amundsen coolly informed him that his survival was his own responsibility and agreed to accompany the captain only after they had agreed on the increased food allotment.
On December 5 Amundsen and Mogg arrived at Eagle City, its rude log houses fronting the frozen river and “its blue smoke standing out darkly against the bright sky.” The gold mining town had sprung up in the wake of the Klondike gold rush a few years earlier. Amundsen went straight to the telegraph office and sent his famous telegraph announcing that the Northwest Passage had finally been navigated after centuries of fatal striving. As he had no money, he sent off his lengthy telegram collect, to Nansen in Norway. His rambling telegram cost Nansen a small fortune, the equivalent of thousands of dollars today, but Amundsen hoped to recoup the expense from the exclusive sale of the story to newspapers, including The Times of London. Unfortunately, the story was leaked to the press. The information passed through Seattle on its way to Norway, and by the time Nansen read the note, the news was already several days old in the United States and was no longer a scoop. Many American papers pirated the story, and The Times refused to pay—a severe financial blow to the indebted Amundsen. The theft of his intellectual property contributed to Amundsen’s penchant for secrecy and distrust of the press, as well as the realization that news was a commodity to be handled and sold like any other. He would not make this mistake again.
Nansen was nevertheless delighted with the news, and responded a few days later, informing Amundsen that Norway had achieved independence from Sweden. He offered Amundsen some advice on how to handle the politics of the situation, for Amundsen’s feat had become intertwined with Norway’s independence celebrations: Amundsen was the first hero of the newly independent nation.
The penniless but now famous explorer spent the next several months in Eagle City as the guest of Frank Smith and his family. Smith was the resident manager of the Alaska Commercial Company, and Amundsen wrote that “I shall ever be grateful for his hospitality.” So began Amundsen’s lifelong association with and love of Alaska: these months in Eagle City gave him “every opportunity to become acquainted with the generous hospitality of Alaska” while waiting for mail to arrive from Europe so that he could bring it back to his men, before the final push out of the Arctic. On February 3, 1906, Amundsen put on his skis again and set out on an uneventful return to the Gjøa at King Point. An encounter on the return journey is revealing of Amundsen’s character. Heading north, he encountered a solitary traveller hauling a toboggan without any dogs. It turned out to be Mr. Darrell, a Scot, who was hauling the mail alone through the wilderness “with not a soul to aid him in case of illness or accident, cheerfully trudging through the Arctic winter across an unblazed wilderness, and thinking nothing at all of his exploit. I was lost in admiration of this hearty and cheerful Scotsman.” Amundsen had a genuine respect for remarkable individuals who were quiet and unpretentious, and he was generous in acknowledging the skills and talents that he admired in others. Darrell and Amundsen became friends and kept in touch, and only Darrell’s accidental death prevented him from joining Amundsen’s South Pole expedition years later.
Amundsen arrived on March 12, having skied over 1,500 kilometres, to a “heartfelt welcome.” He was a hero again, delivering mail and news to his “splendid lads.” In a letter to his brother Leon, Amundsen commented with understatement that “I walked every inch of the way, so I am quite fit at the moment.” Then misfortune struck. Gustav Wiik, the young magnetic measurer, began to feel ill. He soon was stricken with severe abdominal pain. By the end of March, he was confined to bed with an erratic and racing pulse and soaring temperature. He died before Amundsen could transport him to Herschel Island. Perhaps it was a burst appendix; it happened so quickly and without any apparent reason that it stunned everyone. “Death must always be a gruesome guest, but to us, in our position far away from friends and relations, it was if possible, more depressing than it would otherwise have been,” Amundsen wrote. Some writers have implied that Wiik’s death was somehow Amundsen’s fault, because his medical skills were inferior and there was no physician on board. But it is hard to see what anyone could have done about a burst appendix in the isolated channels of the Northwest Passage, even if they had been able to diagnose the problem.
Its crew ea
ger to move on, the Gjøa broke free of the ice on July 11, 1906, and slowly cruised the final stretch of coastline of the Northwest Passage. The ship passed Point Barrow, the northernmost part of Alaska, on August 21, when the coast was hemmed in by pack ice to the north, sailing through the Bering Strait during a storm on August 30. “I thought to celebrate our passage through the Bering Strait rather formally—but all we managed was to raise a quick glass on the deck; a flag up the mast was out of the question. . . . It was with great joy that we drained our cup. Whatever we might now encounter—we have carried the Norwegian flag through the North West Passage, on one boat.” On August 31, the ship slid silently into Nome, Alaska, a gold rush town that housed many Norwegian expatriates. The crew were received with enthusiastic cheers and the singing of the Norwegian anthem, followed by a raucous party. Before the Gjøa departed for the south, Amundsen had already received his first invitation for a speaking engagement—from the Geographical Society of Philadelphia. But Nansen urged him to return to Norway.
“I Resolved Upon a Coup”
You cannot pick up a bag and start for the North Pole as you would go to Philadelphia. . . . It will take all of two years to get ready. . . . [T]he food has to be especially carefully prepared, otherwise the men get scurvy, and it is no use to be an explorer unless you live to come back.
AFTER A FEW DAYS celebrating in Nome and a tour of the nearby gold mines, the company of Norwegian adventurers split up. Amundsen boarded the steamship Victoria on September 5, 1906, bound south for San Francisco, while first lieutenant Godfred Hansen took command of the battered Gjøa and prepared to follow. When Amundsen arrived in the city, San Francisco was a mess of crumbled, burned buildings and sprawling tent communities. It had been devastated by its now-famous earthquake in April, and the sounds of frenetic construction rose from the ruins. Understandably, its residents were preoccupied with their task, and Amundsen was not met by cheering crowds, nor indeed by anyone but a small contingent from the local Norwegian community. Nevertheless he remained in San Francisco, speaking and touring around the region, until the Gjøa arrived.
When Amundsen and his crew were reunited, second lieutenant Helmer Hanssen noted that “there were celebrations one after the other, both given by Norwegians and Americans, until finally we could not distinguish night from day . . . ladies, dancing, good food, and quite a lot of good drinks, too.” In mid-October the crew made arrangements to return home and to leave the ship in the hands of the Norwegian American community in California. The Gjøa was unable to sail home in its worn-out condition, and Amundsen couldn’t afford to keep the crew on salary any longer.1
Amundsen was now a famous man, and he was in great demand as a speaker in the United States. He spent most of October and November riding the train east across the country, lecturing and presenting his story, photographs and artefacts. In the early twentieth century, before the invention of radio, Americans went out to seek entertainment. All their forms of entertainment—theatre, musical performances, circuses and lectures—were live. Amundsen’s hastily organized lecture tour was highly anticipated, and halls were sold out in cities across the country. He made stops in Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cambridge, Philadelphia and New York, among countless others. But the novelty of celebrity wore off quickly. By November he was tired of the daily grind, the rounds of public speaking in a language in which he was not yet fully fluent. In a letter to his brother, he complained of being exhausted from the endless celebrations and the constant retelling of his story: “I’ll be glad when the 8th arrives and we can turn our back on it all and leave with the Hellig Olav [a Norwegian luxury liner departing from New York].” Many years later, his friend Harald Sverdrup wrote of Amundsen’s dislike of the lecture circuit. “He hated the lecture trips on which he had to place himself in the hands of a manager and sell his freedom of action to a person whose publicity schemes he disliked but could not avoid.” But speaking engagements were a vital source of income for a man destined not to enjoy stable government funding or institutional support, yet possessed of an expansive imagination and a determination to explore the remotest frozen regions of the globe.
The final stop on Amundsen’s first whirlwind American lecture tour was at the Norwegian Club in New York, where the tables were festooned with Norwegian and American flags and he and his crew were placed at tables of honour. After a toast was proposed to President Theodore Roosevelt and Norway’s newly elected King Haakon VII, the president’s letter of compliments was read aloud, congratulating Amundsen “on the notable feat he has accomplished.” Amundsen stood to begin his speech, starting in English and then with a sigh pushing on in Norwegian, a language understood by most of his audience that night. A giant map of the Arctic hung on the wall behind him. He turned to highlight the route of the Gjøa, but could not seem to locate it. Finally he turned and announced, “I found the Northwest Passage, but I cannot find it on this map!” Evidently this was taken as a joke, since it was met with “roars of laughter.” Later that night, the explorer and his crew boarded the Hellig Olav, bound for Norway.
The adventurers were met by a Norwegian battleship and escorted into Christiania, where they were feted with banquets and public ceremonies. It must have been strange for them to return as the first internationally recognized heroes of a newly independent nation. On May 17, the Norwegian national day, Amundsen delivered the keynote speech from the balcony of the National Hotel in Christiania. Then, after a brief tour of the larger Norwegian towns, he began preparing for something he had long dreamed of: presenting a paper to the venerable Royal Geographical Society in London. He had been exchanging letters with the society’s secretary, J. Scott Keltie, about the particulars of the prestigious invitation: the length and content of his paper, the issue of his lack of proficiency in English and the support of his compatriot Fridtjof Nansen, now the Norwegian ambassador to Britain. The first letter from Keltie, sent before Amundsen sailed into San Francisco, had been waiting for him when he arrived there. Keltie heartily congratulated Amundsen on his “great feat” and then advised him on how to manage his financial affairs to obtain the most money from his exploits, having been in close discussions with Nansen: “I am sure that you will be careful not to give away any information about your work, and about your adventures to Newspaper Interviewers for nothing. If things are properly managed you ought to make a considerable sum out of Articles for Newspapers, out of Lectures, and also out of the book which I have no doubt you will publish as soon as possible.” Keltie recommended that Amundsen get all agreements in writing and even suggested the amounts Amundsen should receive for his lectures. But he also wanted to ensure that Amundsen, then on the west coast of the United States, would sail directly to England, preferably around South America: “there is no doubt that if you came home round Cape Horn with your ship, and so practically circumnavigated America and then came straight across the Atlantic and came up the River Thames to London, it would produce a very great effect upon the British Public”—and thereby increase his earnings. Come to London first, before the United States, Keltie urged him, “and give your account of the Expedition to our Society.” He suggested that “in order to please the Americans,” Amundsen might have to give a talk to one or two of their societies, but that he should make his arrangements to tour America after his triumphant presentation in London.
Britain and the Northwest Passage had been linked for centuries. There are countless stories of British mariners who struggled and perished in their search for incremental pieces of the geographical puzzle, and in the post-Napoleonic world the quest for the Northwest Passage had become a playing field for displaying the talents and perseverance of the Royal Navy. That quest was the source of more than a few of Britain’s national myths. If a Norwegian was fated to be the one who claimed the laurels of victory in the epic struggle, then at least the celebrations should take place in London, rather than in the United States. “Hoping to see you soon,” Keltie signed off. He was disappointed tha
t Amundsen spent so much time in the United States and then followed that with a brief tour of Norway, thereby preventing the Royal Geographical Society from hosting the premiere of the explorer’s publicity tour. Nevertheless, a date was set for Amundsen’s lecture—February 11, 1907—and Keltie offered to “be of any service to you with regard to the English Edition of your book, or for Articles in English Papers.” Keltie planned the address to be a prominent affair, featuring not only Amundsen but a roster of additional speakers, including distinguished politicians, admirals and scientists, blowups of up to one hundred photographs, to be “mounted on screens in the Reception Room,” and a giant map, specially made for the occasion. He urged Amundsen to wait until after his lecture before signing any book, article or lecture deals, because he was sure the publicity would “attract a great deal of attention” and elevate Amundsen’s fees.
Keltie also addressed the concern that Amundsen didn’t speak English fluently enough for such an august congregation. “If you find that you could not make yourself quite intelligible, perhaps you could read a portion of the paper at the meeting, and allow Dr. Nansen if he is willing, to read the remainder.” Nansen acted as Amundsen’s spokesman and gave a speech at his lecture, which fell within his professional duties as ambassador; Amundsen was, after all, the unofficial representative of his new nation. The sombre lecture, followed by serious questions and discussion, was not the casual affair that would have suited Amundsen, who was not really familiar with or comfortable in these class-dominated British surroundings. He was more at ease with the Inuit or the working-class society of his crew, even though he always remained the first among equals. And Nansen, with his aristocratic air, was “too kingly, he will not hobnob with the common herd.” But in Britain Nansen was accorded a great deal of respect, more than Amundsen would ever receive. Keltie was even concerned that Amundsen’s “secretary”—his brother Leon, who planned to stay with Amundsen in the Royal Society’s Club—would not be up to the social standards of the establishment. He sent Amundsen a note that contained a barely disguised warning: “I have no doubt he would be a quite suitable person for the Club, I shall be glad to arrange a room for him there.” It would be Amundsen’s job to make sure that his secretary was, in fact, “quite suitable.”