The Last Viking

by Stephen Bown

  Despite Amundsen’s misgivings, the lecture was a great success. But even though Amundsen had hired Nansen’s lecture agent to organize a tour, the public interest was not enough to make it profitable. Amundsen was offered various explanations, including that he had gone to the United States first and that he hadn’t sailed up the Thames in his ship, thus failing to provide a newsworthy event upon which to report. But it is more likely that the mediocre interest was due to his lack of proficiency in English (he concluded his speech with the comment “I speak English so badly that I hope you will excuse me if I thank you in only a few words”) and the fact that no Briton was interested in celebrating a foreigner’s victory over what had traditionally been seen as a British quest. As a result, he and his expedition were essentially ignored by the British press. After the warm reception he had received in the United States, Amundsen had every reason to imagine that the conquest of the Northwest Passage would be heralded as a historic achievement in Britain as well, and its conqueror afforded a hero’s welcome. But he was disappointed and hurt by the apparent snub he received in Britain.

  After his muted reception in Britain, a disillusioned Amundsen turned to Europe. For several months trains carried him to the major cities from Copenhagen to Rome, where theatres were packed and dignitaries hosted receptions in his honour. He addressed the Geographical Society in Paris, and he addressed the Berlin Geographical Society, with Kaiser Willhelm II in attendance. He did not bother to return to Britain, even when he was invited to receive King Edward’s Gold Medal “for his work in connection with the magnetic North Pole,” since his continental lecture tour kept him fully occupied in profitable appearances—exceedingly important for a man with debts to pay. He also penned articles for various American periodicals, such as Harper’s Monthly Magazine. On April 20, 1907, at Nansen’s urging, the Norwegian parliament voted to award Amundsen a sum large enough to clear all his remaining debts from the Gjøa expedition.

  His massive European tour ended in August. Soon he was dreaming of “new worlds to conquer,” as he put it in his autobiography, and needed new financing. He returned to Norway for a few months, but in the fall was back in the United States, continuing his Herculean lecture and publicity tour in order to raise funds. He can hardly be said to have lived in Norway during these years, so often was he on the road. It was the start of a pattern that would shape the rest of his life: his home was on rail cars, in hotels and aboard ships.

  While in America, Amundsen floated the possibility of his next adventure. In a frank discussion with a New York Times reporter on October 27, he announced his plans to “discover” the North Pole. The reporter, expressing amazement at the extreme cold and the social isolation, was shocked by the number of years Amundsen claimed the expedition would take. Amundsen replied, “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, to provision the ship, and five years rations. You see, the 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.” The reporter, quite taken with Amundsen’s charming ways, enthusiastically reported Amundsen’s claims about the comfort of snow huts, the friendliness of Arctic peoples, the dangers of frostbite and his fondness for ice: “‘I have some pictures of fine ice,’ Amundsen said, feelingly, and one could almost see his eyes kindle with pleasure at the memory of some particularly artistic iceberg. . . . Your arctic explorer revels in a field of ice, as a farmer delights in a wheat field.”

  Icebergs, people who dwell in snow houses, windswept lands of perpetual darkness lying in the uncharted wastes at the globe’s poles: in the early twentieth century, these exotic scenes were finally being revealed to “civilized” people by the intrepid actions of seemingly fearless adventurers who were impervious to hardship. Newspapers craved this sort of never-before-known content for their papers and spun a variety of angles on the experience to enliven their news reporting. Another article in the New York Times that year reported Amundsen’s speculation that he might have polar bears haul his sledges to the pole (“they’ll be cheap to feed”) under the control of a bear trainer who “guarantees they won’t eat the explorer.” This apparently was something Amundsen was seriously considering but eventually dropped as impractical, not to mention dangerous.

  On December 14, Amundsen was in Washington, D.C., attending a dinner at a posh hotel, where he was honoured to receive the Hubbard Gold Medal from “the largest organization of its kind in the world,” the National Geographical Society. The illustrious guests included Vice President Charles W. Fairbanks, the French and British ambassadors and “a host of other members of the Diplomatic Corps, Senators, Representatives, prominent officials, [and] distinguished scientists,” according to a newspaper story covering the event. It was a signal honour, not to mention that the medal was a large and valuable piece of gold. Soon after, at a well-attended lecture at Carnegie Hall, Amundsen “horrified the audience” with tales of how the Inuit occasionally committed suicide. He explained how a hide string was placed across the snowy ground of an igloo and “all the members of the family solemnly retire to the outside, leaving the sick person within. But there are peep holes, and through these they watch him. He gets up and bends down over the string, trying to force his throat so hard upon that he is strangled.” If the family outside spying through the holes thought the man was not “getting along as fast as he should they kindly go in and help him strangle himself.” Despite spinning amusing or shocking stories for the press, Amundsen continued claiming that he despised the lecture tour after the initial excitement wore off. Certainly, he was making money; but, as he later wrote, he felt he was “merely part of a lecture machine set in motion between New York through intermediate stops to San Francisco.” He earned every penny on his “journey full of work and strain.”

  Amundsen returned briefly to Norway in early 1908 and purchased a chalet-style house perched on some rocks above Bunde Fjord outside of Christiania. He named it “Uranienborg” after the primitive observatory at Gjøahavn, and decorated it in the style of a ship’s cabin with etchings of scenes from his adventures in the Arctic on doors and walls. He moved his old family housekeeper, Betty, into a nearby cottage. In photographs of the home taken from the decks of ships anchored at its dock, it can be seen peeking through the forest upon a rocky promontory; it was easier to reach by water than by land. But all was not perfect. Amundsen’s fame and relative wealth had allowed him to help friends and family, but he was having problems with two of his brothers, Gustav and Jens, whose failed business ventures, resentments and demands for money were bad for the family name. Amundsen provided them with some money to help out, but he soon realized that whatever he supplied would never be enough.

  Amundsen’s journals from the Gjøa’s three-year cruise through the Northwest Passage were heavily edited and published as a book, which came out in the summer of 1908. Originally written in Norwegian, it was translated into English and appeared in the United States as The North-West Passage. Amundsen dedicated the book to Nansen, the man to whom he owed so much. Generous in victory, he devoted the book’s first sentence to his crew, offering his “warmest and most heartfelt thanks to the small party of brave men who risked their lives to ensure the success of my undertaking” and a solemn mention of the young Gustav Juel Wiik. A review in the New York Times pronounced the account “a notable contribution to science and literature” and revealed that “the fascination of the book lies in just this wholehearted kind of simplicity, the sort of sincerity that goes with the doing of great deeds.” The North-West Passage was a modestly successful endeavour rather than a bestseller, but its proceeds, combined with the profits from the American lectures and articles, meant that Amundsen was now reasonably well off. In his autobiography he summed up the two years after emerging from the Northwest Passage rather perfunctorily: “I devoted 1906 and 1907 to lecturing in Europe and the United States, and returned to Norw
ay with enough funds to repay all my creditors, including the one who had nearly prevented the voyage, and I was now free to make other plans.” Now in his mid-thirties, Amundsen could not settle down. He was already dreaming of his next adventure.

  When Amundsen was in San Francisco in early 1908, he inspected the Gjøa, noticed its condition and decided to sell it. He would need a new ship for his next expedition—a polar ice drift, similar to Nansen’s original voyage on the Fram, except this one would succeed in reaching the North Pole.

  For some time, Nansen had been toying with the idea of taking the Fram on another voyage. Antarctica was his preferred destination, for a quick ski dash to the geographical South Pole. The Fram, now officially owned by the Norwegian state, was specially designed to withstand the pressures of being pinched in the ice. Nansen was eleven years older than Amundsen and running out of time for embarking on a multi-year expedition that demanded stamina. He was also preoccupied with his responsibilities as Norway’s ambassador to Great Britain. But in late 1907, Amundsen had sent a letter to Nansen from the United States asking if he could borrow the Fram, which of course would end Nansen’s dreams of attaining the South Pole. Since he was not working toward this objective, and after much inner debate, Nansen relinquished his claim to his old ship and offered it to Amundsen, along with his support. Amundsen was Nansen’s protégé, but Nansen was also pragmatic, appreciating the political benefit to Norway of Amundsen’s conspicuous achievement.

  Amundsen’s fame had made securing the financing for this expedition a much simpler task than the wheedling and begging that had occupied him before he sailed for the Northwest Passage. He presented his plans to the Norwegian Geographical Society in the fall of 1908. His plan was to take the Fram and repeat Nansen’s famous drift, ramming the ship into pack ice and being carried by the currents in the Arctic Ocean, which would allow him to continue the scientific work that Nansen had begun—of mapping the currents and measuring the temperatures at varying depths and seasons—but using better-designed and more sophisticated instruments. These tedious, perpetual measurements, undertaken as his ship sat immobile for years, drifting with the ice, were not the type of thing to inspire Amundsen. But the expedition would offer him the opportunity to do something he found far more exciting: dash on skis toward the North Pole, also using dogsleds—although this was not how the expedition would be sold to the public, at least not in Europe. Amundsen knew that science (and respectability) would still be the necessary frame upon which to hang the cloak that concealed his true intention. King Haakon and Queen Maud immediately forwarded a large donation in support of the expedition, and the resulting publicity sparked fundraising throughout Norway.

  The plan was to enter the Arctic Basin through the Bering Strait and sail northwest until the Fram was immobilized in the plateau of grinding ice. The ship would drift with the undulating fields of ice, and the crew would take soundings to determine water depth in order to map a rough outline of the sea floor, measuring air temperature, water salinity, winds and tides, as well as, according to a London Times article, “the modifying effects of the flaming, shooting boreal aurora.” It would emerge from this seemingly unpleasant polar tour perhaps four years later, somewhere between Greenland and Spitsbergen. The Arctic ice, according to the Times, was the ideal place from which to conduct oceanographic observations and measurements: “This is due to the peculiar conditions there—a sea of 2,200 fathoms deep, or more, upon the surface of which one can move about almost as on dry land. One can live and build upon the ice, and from it lower all one’s instruments into the sea, and reach down to the greatest depths, without all the difficulties with which one has to contend in storm and rough water on the open sea. There is no more ideal place to be found for oceanic investigation.”

  Amundsen sailed to London, and on January 25, 1909, presented a detailed paper outlining his goals to the Royal Geographical Society. The important scientific questions that the expedition would try to answer included the mystery of the aurora borealis: “We all know the magnificent auroras up there in the deep, gloomy polar night . . . those strange, flaming, shooting movements across the sky on calm winter nights—we know them all so well, and have so often admired the mysterious spectacle. No one can doubt that a remarkable force is the back of this, a force that we human beings are determined to find, bind, and utilize.” Nansen wrote a short postscript for the proposal in which he lavished praise on Amundsen as a friend, “a scientific explorer of the right stuff and also as a leader of men, and my confidence in him makes me believe that he is one of those that carry through successfully, in one way or another, whatever they undertake.” He was enthusiastic about the expedition from the start, giving Amundsen his wholehearted support both publicly and privately, and helping with the planning and fundraising.

  Nansen’s support, combined with the support of the Royal Geographical Society, was instrumental in persuading the Norwegian parliament to approve 75,000 kroner in February for the repair and special outfitting of the Fram to meet its new challenges. Although the ship’s main propulsion would remain wind power, as part of the refitting Amundsen had a new diesel motor installed to replace the bulky steam engine. The Fram would not be ploughing through the pack ice; it needed to be manoeuvrable and nimble, to take advantage of momentary openings in the ice and respond quickly to changing conditions. Although steam could be powerful, it needed time to build up the pressure required for that power. Another important consideration was that steam engines wasted fuel—a scarce commodity in the Arctic—because the boilers had to be kept at a slow burn. But using diesel engines for marine propulsion also meant taking a chance: the “direct reversible Marine-Polar-Motor,” built by the Diesel Motor Co. of Stockholm for the Fram’s upcoming voyage, had been designed only a few years earlier. The Fram was one of the first ocean-going vessels—and the first polar exploration vessel—to be fitted with a marine diesel engine, which was much safer and fuel efficient than the small gas motor on board the Gjøa and produced about fifteen times the horsepower. No polar exploration ship had ever had the advantage of a diesel engine, but it was one new piece of technology that Amundsen immediately recognized as being of inestimable advantage. The work on the Fram at the shipyards also included improving the ventilation of the engine room, insulating the beams, remodelling the propeller shaft, adding bilge pumps, repairing the exterior of the hull and replacing the motors for the windlass, as well as installing new anchors and new floors in the galley. Many other minor improvements would update the aging vessel and prepare it for the rigours of at least four years in the Arctic.

  Although he had raised only a quarter of the funds he needed—despite appeals to the nation’s pride—Amundsen, with his characteristic boldness, was already happily launched into the planning and logistical details, taking on more debt, making promises and deals for a voyage that could last for seven years. Despite the mountain of work, he was enjoying a measure of happiness in an aspect of life that had so far eluded him. His relationships with women had been of the clandestinely arranged variety familiar to the travelling mariner, in brothels or with courtesans, or inside an igloo. But in Norway Amundsen met a woman who captured his attention—Sigrid Castberg, the wife of a well-known Christiania lawyer. At the time that they began their secret affair, the city had a population of around 250,000—small enough that within certain circles secrets were bound to escape. Despite his plans for an imminent and lengthy polar expedition, Amundsen urged Castberg to get a divorce and marry him. She wisely put him off, suggesting they be united after his return and remaining his companion until his departure.

  In November 1909, Amundsen boarded a ship bound for New York, on another tour that combined advance publicity for his forthcoming venture with arrangements for some of its practical aspects. He arrived in New York in the centre of a controversy. While he was in the quarantine zone awaiting clearance to enter the United States, a yacht carrying reporters from the New York Herald cruised close by to try to get a
quote from him. He declined. Stepping off the gangplank onto the wharf, however, he was beset by dozens of reporters. They were seeking his opinions on a matter that had not been much in the news in Europe but undoubtedly weighed heavily on Amundsen’s thoughts: the claims of Robert Edwin Peary and Amundsen’s old friend Dr. Frederick Cook to have been the first to reach the North Pole—separately.

  Their rival claims had become public on September 1, mere weeks before Amundsen had sailed from Europe. The New York Times reported on its front page at the time: “Peary Discovers the North Pole after Eight Trials in 23 Years.” Peary claimed to have reached the Pole on April 6, 1909. Cook countered that he had reached the Pole nearly a year earlier, on April 21, 1908. Both American explorers had been striving to reach this elusive goal for many years in many expeditions, some of them together. At one point Cook had even led a voyage that rescued Peary from the ice near Greenland. The evidence supporting their rival successes was vague and inconclusive—some perhaps even fraudulent, as later analysis revealed. But at the time the claims had yet to be scrutinized. Peary was the favourite of the establishment; he had many powerful friends and the backing of the National Geographic Society. One of these friends, Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, had cast doubt on the accuracy of Cook’s claims, and the press not surprisingly encouraged the battle. It would be advantageous to them for Amundsen to take sides, to stir up additional controversy.