The Last Viking

by Stephen Bown

  The reporters pestered him with questions. Taken aback by the vigorous questioning, he “reaffirmed his belief in Dr. Cook.” Amundsen made this potentially damaging statement even though he had been warned not to do so by the Norwegian consul in Chicago, Fredrik Herman Gade, a well-connected lawyer and old friend from Amunsen’s school days, who would be helping him contract for supplies. Amundsen didn’t realize the extent of the controversy in the United States, nor did he appreciate that Peary was the man with the greatest institutional support. Before sailing to New York, he had made a quick trip to Copenhagen to meet Cook. They stayed at the same hotel, and the two explorers were constantly seen about town together. While in Europe, Amundsen declared that he believed Cook’s claim was credible: “Peary’s behavior [in denouncing Cook] fills me with the deepest anger and I want to proclaim publicly that Dr. Cook is the most reliable Arctic traveler I know and it is simply unreasonable to doubt him and believe Peary.”

  Amundsen had greatly admired Cook from his days on board the Belgica and fondly remembered the older man’s friendship and willingness to share what he knew about the techniques of polar survival. Cook had gone out of his way to befriend and mentor Amundsen. In his narrative account of the Belgica voyage, published as Through the First Antarctic Night, Cook wrote of Amundsen that he was “the biggest, the strongest, the bravest, and generally the best dressed man for sudden emergencies.” No wonder that Amundsen’s innate sense of loyalty kicked in. This loyalty, once given, was solid; some of his friends claimed that he was in fact too trusting. Amundsen would go out of his way to help and support anyone he considered to have helped him in the past. It was an admirable character trait, but it would get him into trouble in the coming years.

  In the American press, it was Cook who was being challenged. The balance of evidence, however selective, and public sentiment joined the institutional tilt toward Peary. Amundsen, belatedly sensing trouble while still on the wharf, became evasive with the reporters, who badgered him with questions: What did Scandinavian explorers in general feel about the controversy? Were Inuit boys who had travelled with Cook capable of lying about their destination? Did Cook have the necessary scientific training to make proper measurements? Had Amundsen seen Cook’s records or proof?

  “You don’t hear very much about it,” Amundsen responded to a New York Times reporter. “They [the European press] are very quiet. . . . Perhaps they do not feel justified in rendering their verdict until after Dr. Cook has presented his proofs, as he has agreed to do.” Amundsen mentioned his and Cook’s voyage aboard the Belgica to suggest that Cook had written about that voyage accurately and honestly—so he could not be entirely untrustworthy. He displayed considerable tact in his reply, deflecting the pointed questions while refusing to endorse either of the claimants. “It may be,” he hedged, “that they differed by several geographical minutes. It is not important if the exact mathematical pole was reached or not, but it is important that the geographical conditions of the spot were observed.”

  By this time Amundsen had clearly learned a great deal about managing his public image and playing the press for his own benefit. Gone were the awkward, stuttered sentences in broken English and the uncomfortable responses. The Norwegian adventurer now looked and acted the part of a famous explorer—tall, erect, stately and clear in his opinions and in expressing them. He could be direct or obfuscating. He could spin a tale of the sort he now instinctively knew reporters wanted to hear and people wanted to read.

  American reporters were not interested only in Amundsen’s expeditions and opinions on exploration. The adventurer was already beginning the slow transformation into that particularly American creation, the celebrity, that would reach its apogee a decade later. What did Amundsen think about American football, one reporter wanted to know, and Amundsen had an answer: he “liked American football” and would be recommending it to the Norwegians when he returned. He had taken in a Yale-Harvard game in Cambridge and was impressed with the action, noting that “Yale’s team was superior in every way to the one that represented Harvard” and that “I will talk to the university Presidents [in Norway] and shall attempt to persuade them to adopt the American college rules. . . . [I]f [Norwegians] could see an American game I am sure that this change would be made.”

  Amundsen also mused about the feasibility of and interest in an auto race from New York to Paris, via the Bering Strait. “The crossing of the Bering Straits on the ice will probably be the most difficult stretch of the journey,” he casually remarked; “the eventuality of the loss of a machine at that point should be considered by the contestants.” He was learning to play to the media, getting a sense of how to enthrall people with his exploits and stories, to endear himself to people and to have his opinions reported. He now spoke English well but with a strong accent, and with the occasional distinctive turn of phrase that is evident in his writing and his speeches—an uncommon blend of the casual and the formal, underplayed with a mischievous grin, as if the world was an amusing place and everyone was participating in a shared joke.

  During Christmas 1909, Amundsen stayed at the consul Gade’s estate outside Chicago. Gade was an influential man who had many contacts among other wealthy families, not only in Chicago but in New York and Boston as well. In Chicago, Amundsen was arranging for the shipment of pemmican and canned goods, but he didn’t want to pay full price for these items. Gade helped to arrange for “official supplier status,” much in the way that many companies become brand sponsors of publicity-generating spectacles today. The manufacturer would give Amundsen free or discounted product, which he would then publicly endorse as the best tinned meat, shoe polish, boots or toothpaste, and so on, used in the Arctic by the famous polar explorer. He also sought to arrange deals with suppliers to have their products appear in a photograph taken at the North Pole. Amundsen’s fame, complemented by Gade’s money, ensured that they remained close until the end of Amundsen’s life—each lending the other something he lacked.

  The unexpected conquest of the North Pole, whether by Peary or by Cook, was not good for Amundsen and his latest expedition. Although the controversy got him into the papers again, and reporters dutifully mentioned his next planned voyage in the Fram in the spring of 1910, his expedition was now overshadowed—the North Pole had already been reached. Amundsen, thinking quickly, suggested that perhaps he could verify Cook and Peary’s rival claims on his own journey. But still his fundraising took a precipitous dive. The hook of the expedition, the expedition to the North Pole, had been taken by another, or others, and he needed a new plan. “Will you stop long enough to explore the land Dr. Cook says he observed on his way to the pole?” asked one reporter. “A ghost of a smile flitted across the face of the Norwegian explorer. After a moment’s hesitation he said, in all seriousness: ‘If we strike it—yes.’” He already knew that he wouldn’t be anywhere near the North Pole; he was already contemplating a new objective before he had even departed Norway for New York. During his tour of the United States in the fall of 1909, Amundsen had secretly been planning an expedition to the South Pole, even while talking up the benefits to science of his now-pointless north polar drift. “Everything was prepared quietly and calmly,” he wrote in his book The South Pole.

  The British explorer Ernest Shackleton had just returned from a daring Antarctic adventure, and another British explorer, Robert Falcon Scott, announced in September that he was planning to travel to Antarctica in the summer or fall of 1910, to reach the South Pole. Nansen had been interested in this same geographical prize, but had passed it over to allow Amundsen to use the Fram for his north polar drift. The two Norwegians had earlier discussed the difficulties likely to be encountered on a dash to the South Pole, concluding that a ski and dogsled expedition would be just the method to succeed in Antarctica.

  Years later, Cook wrote that it was he who suggested to Amundsen that he change his plans and go south, when the two men had met in Copenhagen. Wherever the idea had its genesis, the change
of destination occurred with remarkable rapidity. Amundsen was fluid with his plans, never backing down and admitting defeat but pushing on in defiance of daunting odds. Faced with similar setbacks, most people would have returned whatever money had been raised and made their apologies. They would have accepted the vagaries of fate or ill luck. Amundsen, however, just changed his goal and continued in secret. The fact that Scott’s British expedition would be departing in the same season as his was an unexpected bonus as far as Amundsen was concerned. What better way for an independently financed explorer to gain publicity than with the public spectacle of a race?

  The Napoleon of the Poles

  Only one challenge remains in the Polar Regions that can be guaranteed to awaken the public’s interest, and that is to reach the South Pole. I knew that if I could do this, the funds for my planned expedition would be assured.

  ANTARCTICA IS AN uninhabited mass of rock and ice covering the South Pole. The fifth largest continent, falling nearly completely within the Antarctic Circle, it is surrounded by the turbulent, icy waters of the Southern Ocean—the southern portion of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans—known for its enormous waves, ferocious winds and treacherous obstacles. It is the coldest land on the planet, with temperatures as low as –90°C (–130°F) in the interior during winter. During summer, along the coast, the thermometer sometimes rises as high as 15°C (59°F), but it usually remains below 10°C (50°F). It is also the windiest and driest continent, whose interior is a desert receiving as little as 10 centimetres of snow a year. The Antarctic ice sheet smothers nearly 98 per cent of the continent’s land, having an average thickness of 1.6 kilometres and locking up around 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water. It is, of course, entirely dark in winter and endlessly sunny during the summer, making sunburn a serious risk for explorers.

  The continent’s howling waste of permanently frozen, almost uniformly white terrain is punctuated by jagged rock outcroppings—mountain peaks. It has no permanent human population, and it has never had one. Only along the coast does life flourish. There, various species of penguins, fur seals, blue whales, orcas, squids and various fish thrive. Other fauna include such less-than-charismatic creatures as midges, mites, lice and krill. Plant life in this land of rock and ice and seasonal darkness is sparse and consists of lichens and mosses. No animals live in the interior.

  For centuries before ships probed the fringes of this desolate landmass, images of a great southern land appeared on charts. Claudius Ptolemy’s map of the world from the first century C.E. portrays it in order to support the idea that a landmass existed in the south of sufficient size to counterbalance the weight of the continental land in the north, lest the world wobble lopsided and spin out of control. This was one of the key theories motivating Captain James Cook’s second epic voyage of discovery between 1772 and 1775. Cook made several attempts to push south through the ice toward the mysterious, never-before-visited region. His ships Resolution and Adventure fought their way to within 120 kilometres of land before being pushed back by pack ice and storms.

  The first documented sighting of the continent came in 1820, when three separate expeditions voyaged within 30 kilometres of the coast and reported a vast expanse of ice fields. In 1839, the United States Exploring Expedition, led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes under the auspices of the U.S. Navy, also spied the continent but did not land. A decade later, a British expedition led by James Clark Ross in the Erebus and the Terror sailed into what is now known as the Ross Sea, without charts and entirely under wind power, cruising along the mighty ice wall for several hundred kilometres.

  Amundsen was enthralled by these old adventure seekers, particularly Ross. He wrote in his account of his own Antarctic expedition that the long-dead British captain had “plunged into the heart of a pack which all previous polar explorers regarded as certain death. . . . It is difficult for us to understand[,] . . . we who only need a signal to start the propeller, and wriggle out of the first difficulty we meet.” This observation is an example of Amundsen’s characteristic understatement, humility and appreciation for the achievements of others who had gone before—certainly the primitive diesel-driven propeller on the Fram could not have been expected to be this effective.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, various areas near Antarctica, especially South Georgia Island, were used as the semipermanent bases of American, Norwegian and British sealers and whalers. These mariners confined their activities to the plentiful hunting grounds, devoting little time to surveying the coast and no time to exploring the interior of the continent. It was not until the 1890s that interest in exploration drove several expeditions to probe the coastline for a means of accessing the interior and the South Pole. There was, of course, the Belgica expedition, with Amundsen as second mate, and the British Southern Cross Expedition, led by Norwegian mariner Carsten Borchgrevink between 1898 and 1900. Robert Falcon Scott also led an expedition between 1901 and 1904.

  Most important was Ernest Shackleton’s expedition in the Nimrod between 1907 and 1909. Men from Shackleton’s expedition had located the magnetic South Pole, climbed several famous mountains near their McMurdo Sound base, crossed the ice shelf, traversed the daunting and gloomy peaks of the Transantarctic Mountain Range, entered the South Polar Plateau, and with ponies and by man-hauling sledges had come within 150 kilometres of reaching the geographic South Pole, before being forced back, suffering from scurvy. Shackleton returned to Britain in the spring of 1909 a national hero.

  Everyone knew that with Shackleton’s near success, the South Pole, the last remaining great symbol of geographical conquest, would be claimed soon. This was the last chance for fame and glory for the handful of polar hopefuls who had been probing the extremities of the earth for the past generation. Other expeditions to Antarctica were imminent: Robert Edwin Peary mused about going south, now that he had claimed the North Pole, and so did Dr. Frederick Cook. A French doctor, Jean-Baptiste Charcot, had just returned from his second Antarctic expedition and was pondering a third. A German expedition under Wilhelm Filcher was soon to depart for Antarctica, and a Japanese expedition led by Nobu Shirase would set out in December 1910. A scramble to the pole seemed inevitable.

  Amundsen knew there was little time for delay. He was in a race with more than just Scott and the British Antarctic Expedition, though they were his immediate competition. If Amundsen failed, others would be close behind. He believed that this was his final chance to achieve fame as an explorer, to build a reputation that could be leveraged to undertake other projects in the future. Around the world, members of the budding community of adventurers who wanted to be professional explorers all knew it. For many, an expedition to the South Pole was tied to nationalistic ambitions and prestige, and enjoyed institutional financial support. Certainly this was the underlying assumption behind Scott’s expedition: that the discovery of the South Pole should be reserved for the world’s greatest empire, an empire with a history of thus-far doomed but fascinating expeditions in the far-flung corners of the earth, particularly in the Arctic. An American had a competing claim to the North Pole; a Swede, Baron Erik Adolf Nordenskiöld, had navigated the Siberian coast of the Northeast Passage in 1878–1879; and Amundsen, a Norwegian, had claimed the Northwest Passage. The South Pole was to be Britain’s prize.

  Although Amundsen’s ship, the Fram, was owned by the Norwegian state and was only on loan to him, the loan was for an expedition to the North Pole; Amundsen’s desultory efforts to emphasize nationalism were a calculated strategy in his and his brothers’ otherwise private schemes. His expedition did not begin as a “Norwegian” expedition; it would only become more closely tied to the nation after it was successful. The adventurer’s motivations were less nationalistic, more personal. Even most of the Fram’s crew were kept in the dark about the expedition’s ultimate objective. “At all costs we had to be first at the finish,” he wrote. “Everything had to be concentrated on that.” The stated motive of science was likewise merely part o
f a calculated marketing plan for the expedition. The voyage’s scientific veneer, thin as it was, was scrubbed away entirely when the Fram changed course from north to south without warning. Amundsen later wrote, with a self-deprecating smile, one can imagine, that “on this little detour, science would have to look after itself.”

  As early as the fall of 1909 Amundsen had been planning to contrive a race between himself and Scott that he was sure would appeal to the American public in particular. Americans seemed less preoccupied with the objects of science and more accepting of conspicuous achievement, especially in a sporting event. In the United States, if not in Europe, the race itself, coupled with the symbolic if utterly valueless destination of the South Pole, would be enough. Adventure was a form of entertainment, and Amundsen was increasingly aware of his role in satisfying the demand for vicarious competition in a dangerous and little-known region. A race would give the geographical conquest of the pole a human element: something for the press to talk about, to make predictions and wagers over, and to take sides on. In this way Amundsen would be able to sell books and articles, charge for his lectures and gain lucrative product endorsements; he could make a career out of his quest for adventure.

  As far as the public knew, however, he was still pushing on to the Arctic with plans for a north polar drift. Much of the equipment required for expeditions at opposite ends of the planet was the same, so Amundsen’s true intentions could easily be concealed. It was a lot of work to gather everything the Fram would need to sail around the world and to arrange for everything the crew might conceivably need for several years once they were in Antarctica. They would not be able to obtain any supplies once they departed. Nineteen people and about a hundred dogs eat a lot of food over several years. Everything conceivable had to be itemized, quantities calculated and stores obtained beforehand.