The Last Viking

by Stephen Bown

  Amundsen believed Johansen’s “demotion” was for the good of all, and perhaps it was: he had read dozens of accounts of failed expeditions, of breakdowns in leadership, of the infighting and suffering that followed. He was not inventing scenarios to justify being an autocrat. He didn’t like pulling rank and in fact resented it, which may have been the source of his rigid refusal to forgive and forget: he didn’t like being compelled to behave in a way that ran counter his generally easygoing nature. It challenged his perception of himself as the guiding hand among experts who were united behind his vision.

  During the following weeks, the men slowly recovered from their frostbite. Several lay in bed, bathing their damaged extremities in warm water and boric acid poultices. Lindstrøm had no sympathy for the invalids, offering the enigmatic observation, “now you can sit there like a lot of vermin. You should always look out of the window, when the old dog barks.” They also applied the antiseptic to the dogs’ feet.

  The first real signs of spring didn’t come until September 29, when the seals returned to the ice and a flight of Antarctic petrels flew overhead, sending the dogs into a frenzy as they ran out onto the ice to give chase. But not until near the end of October, after another gale and periods of billowing fog, did the weather seem stable enough to start for the South Pole. Now the sun was constantly in the sky and the temperature was at –20°C (–4°F). The men made several small ski excursions while they waited for the skin on their feet to heal, all the while worrying about Scott and his presumed departure. The stress was growing and adding to tensions again. Bjaaland wrote in his diary that “if I emerge from this journey, I must see that I get out of polar exploration. It’s hardly worth the trouble.”

  October 20 was the day. As the five trekkers readied their sledges and dogs, Amundsen had a quiet reconciliation with Johansen; they shook hands and bid each other good fortune. The disappointed man, full of regrets, lonely and nagged by self-doubt, stood apart and watched as the chosen four made their final preparations with Amundsen, their dogs frolicking and eager. They started off. According to Amundsen it was an uneventful departure, with Lindstrøm not even bothering to come out of the kitchen to bid farewell. “Such an everyday affair: What’s the use in making a fuss about it?” he imagined Lindstrøm thinking. The Polar Party now consisted of four sledges with thirteen dogs each, the best of the pack. While viewing the little cavalcade of mounded sledges tethered to the wildly excited, almost uncontrollable dogs, who were “on the verge of exploding,” Amundsen had a moment of introspection about this final dash to the pole. “I tried to work up a little poetry,” he wrote, “the ever restless spirit of man, the mysterious, awe inspiring wilderness of ice—but it was no good; I suppose it was too early in the morning. I abandoned my effort, after coming to the conclusion that each sledge gave one more the idea of a coffin than anything else, all the cases being painted black.”

  Fast and uneventful cruising along the now-familiar snow road brought them to the first depot on October 23. That day presented some challenges, with fog and wind limiting visibility and the men temporarily lost among some crevasses. Navigating blind through the thick fog proved the value of the numbered flag system, as the men were led quickly to the otherwise hidden depot. The pattern was set early on: they would try and cover about 30 kilometres a day, but during blizzards they would rest. During most days the travel time would be limited to five or six hours, the better to sleep and retain their energy. Anything more “could not be risked for the sake of the dogs.” They knew their British rivals would be starting for the South Pole at around the same time, but Amundsen also was aware that wearing out the men early would not get them safely to the South Pole and back. And the dogs could easily grow exhausted hauling the sledges, which weighed an incredible 350 kilograms each. Without the dogs, the men would probably all die.

  There were some very difficult days. In early November, during a particularly thick fog, the troupe was driven off course and entered the realm of the Steers Head crevasses. For 20 kilometres they slowly crossed a series of small crevasses about a metre wide that lay across their path. Both Hanssen and Sverre Hassel cracked through snow bridges and fell into crevasses, luckily not too far to be hauled out. Two weeks after their departure from Framheim, on November 4, the group reached the third and final depot that they had created the previous fall, at 82 degrees, about 770 kilometres from the pole, and rested for two days under unexpectedly sunny skies. The men were in good spirits, having reached the third depot without any serious setbacks. It was like an extended ski trip; by now, they were in great physical condition, and the dogs were “in better shape than when we left. All the sore feet have healed, and a little of the superfluous obesity has gone.” After every day’s travel, the dogs, who had no tents, were turned loose after each being given a pound of frozen pemmican to gnaw on.

  The journey would now traverse deadly terrain that had never before been trodden or skied. The expedition pushed on, skiing behind the sledges, with a lead skier breaking trail for the dogs. Amundsen argued in favour of leaving a new depot every degree on the way to the pole, both to lighten the load for the dogs and to leave something for the return journey, on the assumption that the men could easily find them on the return trip. Every 5 kilometres they stopped the sledges to rest the dogs and to construct a human-sized cairn of snow chunks containing records that stated the date and their location. After several days they saw a range of mountains, clearly in view in the cold crisp sun, and named it the Queen Maud Range, a large range of the Transantarctic Mountains. “Glittering white, shining blue, raven black, the land looks like a fairytale,” Amundsen wrote. “Pinnacle after pinnacle, peak after peak—crevassed, wild as any land on our globe, it lies, unseen and untrodden. It is a wonderful feeling to travel along it.” Amundsen’s account is often characterized by this type of not-quite purple prose, a style that conveys the childlike glee he experienced in beholding nature’s most hidden and chaotic manifestations, lands of mystery that were not suited for human habitation. Nature with a capital “N” appears frequently in Amundsen’s writing as something in which he takes spiritual delight, particularly in connection with rugged, inhospitable and wild regions.

  The appearance of the mighty mountain range directly in their path to the South Pole was not unpredicted—Shackleton had written of seeing mountains in the distance—but it was a daunting obstacle. Time was always the issue—it was not just a race against Scott, but also a race against diminishing food supplies. On November 17 they ascended from the ice at the end of the Ross Ice Shelf onto the land plateau and skied toward the Transantarctic Mountains—monstrous, jagged peaks soaring to 4,900 metres that extend across Antarctica for nearly 2,000 kilometres. For all they knew it might not be possible to cross these mountains, or it could take months to find a safe pass.

  Amundsen pressed on, but the stress must have been great. There was no time for the men to scout for a pass or weigh alternatives. They probably had about a week to find a way through the mountains before a food shortage would make the dash to the pole an impossible prospect. The explorers left their next depot at the base of the mountains rather than push on up. The skiing became steep and treacherous on the long skis with leather-strap bindings. Somehow the skiers controlled their own speed while steering their sledges and managing the dogs on 600-metre descents to ice plateaus. Sometimes the dogs had to be tethered to a single sledge just to get it up a steep incline, and ropes had to be wrapped around the runners to slow the descent. The trek was a remarkable and heroic conquest of their personal fear.

  Amundsen was busy naming land features for friends and patrons in the time-honoured tradition of European explorers stamping their culture and history onto the world’s landmarks. At least in this case the Norwegians did not supplant the names given by indigenous peoples. As well as naming the Queen Maud Mountains, Amundsen named Mount Don Pedro Christophersen, Mount Ruth Gade, Betty’s Knoll, Mount Bjaaland, Nilsen Plateau, Amundsen Glacier, Mount Fridt
jof Nansen, Axel Heiberg Glacier and other features.

  Fortunately the temperature remained at a relatively balmy –20°C (–4°F), so the snow was in stable condition, making avalanches less likely. “As usual,” Amundsen recorded, “the weather has been clear, calm and boiling hot.” This feeling of boiling heat amidst snow and ice is a phenomenon anyone who has spent time on a sheltered ski slope in the spring can appreciate. As the explorers slogged up the incline into the mountains, the silence was occasionally interrupted by the ominous rumbling of distant avalanches.

  One night they camped in the shadow of the mountains on the edge of the Axel Heiberg Glacier, which was “huge, mighty . . . [and] absolutely fjord-like.” From this vantage point Amundsen spied an alternate pass and ruefully noted that a lot of time and danger could have been avoided by merely following the glacier as it oozed back toward the ice shelf, making a relatively easy path up to their current camp. Had they had more time, they could have scouted a better route.

  On November 20, one month after starting their trek, they faced another treacherous climb. It was a clear day, and the sun heated up the glacier so much that they again felt “boiling hot.” Yet the conditions were perfect for skiing uphill. Bjaaland led the way up the steep incline, the dogs following, sometimes using double teams to get the sledges up the incline while swerving around “crevasses and chasms.” The men pitched tents for a second night on the glacier amid the “enormous blocks of ice, mighty abysses and huge crevasses” that blocked their progress in all directions. It was only mid-afternoon and Amundsen set off with Bjaaland and Hanssen to search for a route through the chaotic ice field while the others tended to the dogs and made camp. After exploring several possible routes that were unstable, they found a relatively smooth route to a pass at the head of the glacier that would lead to the Antarctic Plateau. About skiing back down to camp, Amundsen wrote, “It was a beautiful and impressive view we had. . . . The wilderness of the landscape from above is indescribable. Pit after pit, crevasse after crevasse, and huge ice blocks scattered helter skelter. It was easy to see that here, Nature was at her mightiest.”

  The next day was a brutal twelve-hour slog up to the crest, where the exhausted team did little more than eat and then crawl into their sleeping bags. It had taken the team four dangerous days to pick their way through 70 kilometres of mountain range, climbing more than 3,000 metres to reach the edge of the Antarctic Plateau. Now they had a clear run to the pole. But both the men and the dogs were exhausted, and Amundsen called for several days of rest. On November 24, Amundsen called the men together to carry out a plan that had been avoided so far: the slaughtering of the dogs.

  The dogs were a tough breed, “cunning and resourceful in the extreme.” Amundsen had seen them fight and kill each other, steal food from each other, attack newborn pups and eat them. Sometimes the men had had to kill dogs when they were locked in deadly fights with each other. Dogs had fallen down crevasses or wandered away into the polar winter and were never seen again. Many had succumbed to disease, and some had to be killed to end their suffering. “The dogs were quite mad today and went on the rampage,” Bjaaland wrote one day, expressing a frequent sentiment. These dogs were not pets; they were fierce. On one occasion, Amundsen had wrestled to the ground a dog that had stolen food and had torn the meat from the animal’s snarling mouth. Each night the men had to bring their leather ski bindings into the tent or the dogs would have devoured them.

  All of this was familiar to Amundsen and Hanssen from their time with the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic. In those regions, life was harsh for dogs and people alike, and the dogs generally ran free when not harnessed to sledges. Perhaps knowing it would be their epitaph, Amundsen wrote many dog stories in his book: “Thus Jaala, a lady belonging to Bjaaland, took it into her head to go off with three attendant cavaliers. We came upon them later; they were then lying quietly behind a hummock down on the ice, and seemed quite happy. They had been away for about eight days without food, and during that time the temperature had seldom been above –58°F.” At the end of the final day of climbing to the crest of the Arctic Plateau, Amundsen recorded: “It was a sheer marvel . . . what the dogs accomplished today . . . 17 miles with a 5000 ft climb. Come and say that dogs cannot be used here,” he concluded, a direct reference to Scott’s claim that dogs were unsuitable.

  But the pace and the conditions had worn the dogs out, and they were sickly and thin, despite being fed a pound of pemmican a day. Less than a month earlier, Amundsen had described them as “bursting with health” and Bjaaland had claimed they were “hale and hearty.” Now they were barely capable of carrying on. It had long been part of Amundsen’s plan to kill the ones who were too weak or sick, but it was still a hard job. On the night of November 21, each man shot selected members of his dog team. Amundsen, who had no team directly under his control, prepared dinner in the tent. In total, twenty-three dogs were killed and gutted, leaving eighteen, who appeared the healthiest and strongest. The men named this camp “The Butcher’s Shop.”

  The next day they were hit by a sudden storm—one that might have proved disastrous on the glacier, had it come a day earlier. But their forced inactivity allowed the men and their remaining dogs to recover and feast on dog meat. Amundsen knew the dogs would eat each other because he had seen them do it in the Arctic. He explained in The South Pole that by eating some of the sled dogs, the expedition required both less human food and less dog food, thus lightening its load. Comparing sled dogs with ponies as draught animals, Amundsen noted the

  obvious advantage that dog can be fed on dog. One can reduce one’s pack little by little, slaughtering the feebler ones and feeding the chosen with them. In this way they get fresh meat. Our dogs lived on dog’s flesh and pemmican the whole way, and this enabled them to do splendid work. And if we ourselves wanted a piece of fresh meat we could cut off a delicate little fillet; it tasted to us as good as the best beef. The dogs do not object at all; as long as they get their share they do not mind what part of their comrade’s carcass it comes from. All that was left after one of these canine meals was the teeth of the victim—and if it had been a really hard day, these also disappeared.

  Bjaaland also noted that “we have now had three splendid dinners out of our good Greenland dogs, and I must say that they tasted good, a little tough perhaps, though they were not boiled enough.” The fresh meat, in addition to providing calories, was also an extra protection against scurvy.

  The killing and eating of dogs certainly raises the issue that they were being used for the sole purpose of one person’s desire—and society’s desire—to reach the South Pole, a symbolic though unnecessary destination. It is a moral question that equally applies to Scott’s use of ponies, which surely could not have been expected to survive the journey. In traditional Inuit societies the life of a dog would frequently be terminated, but this seems more acceptable in traditional societies, doing what they need to do to survive in harsh and unforgiving environments, rather than using them for the sport or entertainment of their handlers and the public. In the early twentieth century, however, the killing of Amundsen’s dogs apparently wasn’t of any particular concern. Stories written at that time about the South Pole related lurid details about the eating of the dogs, but never questioned the issue of deliberately planning the deaths of animals to further what was in essence a sensational sporting event. Nevertheless, Amundsen wrote, “It is my only dark memory from down there, that my lovely animals were destroyed. I demanded more of them than they could manage. My consolation is that I did not spare myself either.”

  The blizzard kept the men in their tents while the remaining dogs huddled together against the wind. It was still a “heavy gale with thick drift” on November 26, when they crawled out of their tents to set off down the hills to the Arctic Plateau. “We were all fed up with this long lie-in at home,” Amundsen wrote. Bjaaland was more vivid: “Bloody horrible lying still, you can hardly breathe at this altitude.” Despite the weather, th
ey set off through conditions that were “extremely bad—sticky as glue.” Visibility was so poor in the driving snow that they couldn’t see the dogs running ahead of the sleds. And the dogs’ energy was also low: “They had overeaten of their comrades,” Amundsen observed. When the hill turned steeply down, the trekkers stopped and set up camp midslope, on the flattest spot available.

  The next day, the blizzard continued to lash the open plains. The explorers nevertheless continued their relentless trek south, running on compass bearings through the fog and wind as they slowly crossed what Amundsen had named the Nilsen Plateau, after the Fram’s captain. Their march toward the South Pole was frustratingly slow. For days they laboured through innumerable small crevasses that were concealed by the fog. At rest times, they had barely enough room to pitch a tent between the crevasses. At one point they crept forward roped together, as they passed through a jumbled mass of ice crags, pits, hummocks and buckled terrain, where “one has to move two miles to advance one. Chasm after chasm, abyss after abyss has to be circumnavigated.” Amundsen called the deadly region “the Devil’s Ballroom,” and when the fog lifted the explorers saw they could have just gone around it, if only the fog hadn’t blinded them.

  On December 2, with a temperature of –24°C (–11°F), in a “raging gale,” they encountered wind-polished ice on which the dogs’ paws couldn’t get a grip. The crampons had been left at the Butcher’s Shop to save weight. Bjaaland recorded that “we couldn’t see in front of our nose tips and our faces were white and hard as wax candles. The Chief’s nose is like that of a country bumpkin, Wisting’s jaw looks like the snout of a Jersey cow. Helmer has thick scabs and skin as rough as a file. It was a bloody hard day.” The only thing keeping them from freezing to death was the quality of their Inuit-style clothing.