by Stephen Bown
After a day of rest and a few more days of slogging through gale-force winds, travelling blind most of the way, they passed the previous furthest-south record point, set by Shackleton—about 160 kilometres from the South Pole. The terrain eased, becoming “completely flat and fine everywhere.” But the dogs were “horribly worn,” according to Bjaaland, and they needed a rest after the brutal haul. The sun appeared again, the wind dropped and the turn of events was celebrated with extra rations of chocolate. Amundsen was in “a shining humour.” On December 9, the men rested in their tents “to prepare for the final onslaught.” The South Pole was now less than 10 kilometres distant and the skiing looked fine. They cached a final depot of goods to lighten their loads and set off the next day. Despite the good weather they were all now suffering from frostbite, feeling “sore, pain and scabs the whole of our left sides.” Amundsen again noted the poor condition of the dogs, who were being ground down by the crushing job of hauling the sledges through seemingly endless storms. Hunger too was making them dangerously violent and uncontrollable, and the dogs “must be considered as mortal enemies when one leaves the sledges,” he wrote. “Oddly enough they have not tried to break in.” Although they were getting plenty of food, it wasn’t enough.
The journey’s final days were noteworthy for the mostly clear skies. The pole was straight ahead, but they zigzagged across the plain. “It is no easy matter to go strait in terrain where one has no distinguishing marks,” Amundsen noted. “An Eskimo can manage but none of us.” The dogs remained weak and slow, even with the reduced weight of the sledges. Mad with hunger, they were eating their own excrement, searching for leather straps and bindings and gnawing on the wooden sledge frames even after they had eaten a full meal. One wandered off and died, but the rest plodded on to their close but elusive destination. It was, Amundsen noted laconically, “nothing to make a song about.”
In camp on December 14, Bjaaland wrote that they “can now lie and look toward the Pole. . . . The excitement is great. Shall we see the English flag?” The next day the explorers woke early and set off with trepidation and mounting excitement. Hanssen’s eyes were glued to the compass as he yelled out slight direction changes. Amundsen skied ahead, leading and guiding the sledges in their erratic pattern across the featureless expanse of snow. Then one of the men called out “Halt!” at around three o’clock in the afternoon: they had reached the South Pole. (Amundsen thought the date was December 15, but it was actually December 14—he had forgotten to subtract a day as the Fram crossed the International Date Line.)
The moment that had dominated the desire and dreams of the men for a year and a half was strangely anticlimactic. They quietly gathered in a group—five fur-clad men on skis, with seventeen exhausted dogs and three wooden sledges—in the midst of a vast wilderness of ice and snow, the farthest possible point from any human habitation on the planet, and shook hands. Amundsen unwrapped the Norwegian flag they had brought for the occasion. “[F]ive roughened, frostbitten fists it was that gripped the post, lifted the fluttering flag on high and planted it together as the very first at the Geographic South Pole.” Amundsen wrote that planting the flag “was not the privilege of one man, it was the privilege of all those who had risked their lives in the fight and stood together through thick and thin. It was the only way I could show my companions my gratitude here at this desolate and forlorn place.”
Bjaaland later scrawled in his diary: “Today, tired and hungry, thank God we have enough food for the return journey.” In their tent, the explorers in weary satisfaction feasted on a special meal of seal steaks, biscuits, pemmican and chocolate. Wisting then rummaged through his pack, produced a plug of tobacco and quietly handed it to Amundsen. “Can anyone grasp what such an offer meant at such a spot, made to a man who, to tell the truth, is very fond of a smoke after meals?”
A Hero Returns
Good morning, my dear Lindstrøm. Have you any coffee for us?
“OUR FACES SHONE in rivalry with the sun,” Amundsen wrote as his ship neared the port of Hobart, Tasmania, “and soon the Fram, too, began to shine.” The men scrubbed the decks with soap and water, washed the sails and tidied everything to make a good impression when they docked. They exchanged their worn and filthy work clothes for their “shore clothes,” which had been packed away for “a two years’ rest,” and “razors and scissors had a rich harvest.” Amundsen recorded that “even Lindstrøm, who had up to that date held the position among the land party of being its heaviest, fattest, and blackest member, showed unmistakable signs of having been in close contact with water.” As a motor launch putt-putted alongside, the men donned matching Burberry caps and snapped to attention. A brisk old man called up “Want a pilot, captain?” startling them with the sound of a new voice. The old pilot clambered up onto Fram’s deck and glanced around in perplexed silence for a while before exclaiming “I should never have imagined things were so clean and bright on board a Polar ship. Nor should I have thought from the look of you that you had come from Antarctica. You look as if you had had nothing but a good time.”
They eagerly chatted and shared news with the pilot, but Amundsen remained tight-lipped about their exploits. The Tasmanian pilot declined his invitation to remain for breakfast: “Presumably he was afraid of being treated to dog’s flesh or similar original dishes,” Amundsen surmised. The Fram was led through Storm Bay to the quiet town of Hobart, which was then surrounded by dry meadows and woods. Although the region was suffering from a heavy drought, the gently undulating terrain was an “unmixed delight.” It wasn’t ocean, ice or rock, and therefore held considerable novelty. “The Custom-house officers were easily convinced that we had no contraband goods,” Amundsen reported, as he and his men disembarked with the secret of their voyage held close. It was March 7, 1912, and there was still no news of Scott’s expedition. Amundsen knew that it would have been nearly impossible for Scott to have beat them in the race back to civilization; he and his men were indeed the first humans to have reached the South Pole.
He booked into the Orient Hotel. Dressed more shabbily than the other patrons and completely silent about his exploits, he recorded tersely in his diary that he was “treated as a tramp” and “given a miserable little room.” The next day, he visited the Norwegian consul and the telegram office and sent off coded messages to King Haakon, Nansen and Leon. Then he tried to relax while rebuffing the advances of local reporters, hungry for a scoop. Boats cruised out to the Fram to snoop, but his men also revealed nothing.
Amundsen believed that silence would be his key to success; he remembered well how his news had been stolen in Alaska after his Northwest Passage voyage, and he had made great efforts to avoid any financial loss this time. Earlier, he had announced to Nansen and others that the Fram would be putting into Lyttelton, New Zealand, after their voyage, even though he planned on Tasmania all along. No doubt the cable operators and reporters in Lyttelton were primed and waiting to profit from Amundsen’s valuable news, but no one was waiting in Hobart. Although the local reporters knew something was up, they couldn’t get the story, and Leon telegrammed his brother in Hobart, instructing him to cable his story directly to the Daily Chronicle in London and the New York Times in the United States. These papers had agreed to pay 2,000 British pounds for the exclusive rights (the equivalent of roughly several hundred thousand U.S. dollars today). On Friday, March 8, 1912, the papers’ front pages featured a photo of Amundsen, looking jaunty in a dark hat and with a well-coiffed moustache, next to the headline “The South Pole Discovered: Norwegian Explorer Reaches Coveted Goal.” These were accompanied by a map of the polar region and articles such as “Amundsen’s Career of Adventure,” “Amundsen vs. Scott: Mystery of Yesterday’s Press Messages” and “How the News Came to The Daily Chronicle.” The news was republished in Norwegian newspapers, and others around the world followed. Although Amundsen and his men could now relax and begin to enjoy their celebrity, he still didn’t give away too much information—Leon had sol
d the announcement of the feat, not the details. The feature rights still had to be guarded. For the next week, the Fram was deluged with visitors and well-wishers who wanted to see the famous ship, shake hands with the heroes of the day and perhaps get more information out of them. What was it like at the South Pole?
Before the five conquerors had departed the South Pole on December 17, 1911, they had set up a spare tent there and with some humour named it “Polheim,” “home of the pole.” A Norwegian flag hung limply from the tent’s central pole. Inside the tent were notes for Scott and King Haakon and some superfluous equipment. In case they should not make it back, Amundsen asked Scott to forward his letter to the Norwegian king as additional proof that he had reached the pole. Amundsen debated whether or not to leave a few cans of extra fuel oil, but in the end he decided to take them with him, just in case. He and his men then staged a photo shoot. The classic image shows four men arrayed in front of Polheim, dressed in their bulky furs with their hats off, staring up at the flag, while in the background the sunset is hand-painted a mesmerizing red, orange and yellow. The picture is a snapshot taken by Bjaaland with his personal Kodak camera, as are many of the other images that survive from the final stages of the expedition. Amundsen’s official camera broke down, and without Bjaaland’s portable snapshots there would be no photographic record of the momentous journey.
The return from the South Pole had been gruelling but uneventful. The five exhausted men harnessed the remaining dogs to two sleds. The dogs had a rough time on the thirty-nine-day retreat, and five more succumbed to the bitter cold, a disheartening and somewhat melancholy series of deaths, since the men had to kill them as the animals became too weak to go on. About one of his favourite dogs, Amundsen recorded that it “had been latterly showing marked signs of shortness of breath, and finally this became so painful to the animal that we decided to put an end to him. Thus brave Fridtjof ended his career.” The expedition nevertheless covered an impressive average distance of 36 kilometres each day, for a total of about 3,000 kilometres since leaving Framheim. They returned to Framheim on January 25, one day earlier than Amundsen had estimated.
Amundsen, Hassel, Hanssen, Wisting and Bjaaland arrived at what would have been nighttime to find the camp at Framheim silent. Despite their exhaustion, they scrambled out of their equipment and banged open the door, awakening Lindstrøm, Johansen, Stubberud and Prestrud. “Good morning my dear Lindstrøm, have you any coffee for us?” Amundsen asked. Lindstrøm’s “hotcakes and heavenly coffee” were followed by tumblers of celebratory schnapps, poured all round in liberal quantities. Amundsen then announced, “Yes, we’ve been there, the whole thing went like a dream.” Hanssen later wrote that “that gathering around the breakfast table at Framheim after the end of the trip belongs to the moments in one’s life one never forgets.”
Prestrud then related the story of his expedition with Johansen and Stubberud to King Edward VII Land—how they had narrowly beaten a Japanese expedition to explore this part of Antarctica. He also said that they had seen the Fram offshore the day before, but the ship had been driven away by pack ice. The famous ship came in again the next day, hooting its horn in celebration when its crew spied the unfurled Norwegian flags at Framheim announcing the return of the Polar Party. The meeting on the Fram was “a great, jubilant reunion.” Amundsen learned what the men on the Fram had been doing for the past year while he and the Polar Party were marooned in Antarctica: they had completed the first oceanographic survey of the South Atlantic from Africa to South America. By the end of the voyage, the Fram had sailed over 54,000 nautical miles, a distance equal to more than two and a half times around the world. They were broke when they returned to Argentina the previous year, in need of supplies and repairs, and Peter Christophersen had taken responsibility for the ship and crew there. His support in refitting the ship and providing money and supplies enabled them not only to undertake the oceanographic voyage, which lent the expedition an air of scientific legitimacy, but also to return to Antarctica and pick up the Polar Party.
Once reunited, the crew did not waste time at Framheim. They were in a great hurry to rush back to civilization with the news, and transferred only the remaining thirty-nine dogs and a small portion of the most expensive equipment to the Fram. After two days of hauling goods out to where the ship was anchored, they were ready to leave Antarctica. Lindstrøm cleaned Framheim as best he could, so that “it was shining like a new pin,” Amundsen noted. “We won’t be accused of untidiness or dirt if anyone should happen to go there and look.” As they cast off on January 30, the men watched from the deck as Framheim receded in the freezing fog. It was their last view of the bleak shores where they had lived for over a year, and where so much drama and hardship had changed their lives. None of them ever returned to the Great Southern Continent.
The month-long voyage from Antarctica to Hobart was a slow-going churn through high seas and storms. All of the crew just wanted the voyage to be done. During the miserable trip, Amundsen spent hours each day in his cabin, writing his story for the papers and preparing his correspondence, telegrams, articles and speeches for the media storm he knew lay ahead. He had gone so long without speaking English that the work proved more difficult than he had imagined. He enlisted Captain Nilsen, a fluent English speaker, to help with the writing and polishing of his speeches.
The Fram remained in Hobart for two weeks while routine work was done on its propeller and engine. Amundsen was busy with publicity. Interest in the “Great International Polar Race” had been building for several months in anticipation of either Amundsen’s or Scott’s triumphant return. Because they had obtained exclusive regional rights to the story from both Scott and Amundsen, the London Times, Daily Chronicle and New York Times each devoted plenty of ink to publicizing the race and the racers before any news arrived, and enlisted famous people such as Robert Peary and Ernest Shackleton to give them quotes. Nansen himself, in the February 1912 issue of Scribner’s Magazine, compared and contrasted the parties and their chances of success. “If we compare their chances of reaching the South Pole I think that both expeditions have their special advantages. . . . The success of an expedition depends now, as it did before, chiefly on the man.” While rumours flew around London that Scott had reached the South Pole first, Shackleton felt that Amundsen and his party would emerge victorious because “Norwegians can live on the smell of a bone.”
The March 8 New York Times special report on Amundsen’s victory certainly took advantage of the newspaper’s exclusive rights. In a bold proclamation at the head of the article, the newspaper announced its intention to prosecute anyone who violated its copyright. A large spread, the article featured maps and images to enliven a text, written by Shackleton, that offered nothing new but a promise that the details would appear in the paper “probably tomorrow.” The newspaper also ran an article on how “Tasmanians fail[ed] to induce him to discuss exploit before his story reach[ed] the world.” Apparently “Amundsen was attacked by reporters” in Hobart but maintained his “impenetrable reserve.” It was big news, and the newspaper had paid a lot of money for the story, so it squeezed as much as it could from the event.
Meanwhile, Leon was working on his brother’s behalf in Norway, answering correspondence, arranging deals and handling a flood of incoming donations. He met politicians and newspaper reporters and spoke for Amundsen on the world stage. In particular he was beginning negotiations with lecture agents to promote his brother’s inevitably lucrative tour of Britain, Europe and America. Without the help of Leon and Nansen, two tireless supporters, there was no way Amundsen could have managed the financial and diplomatic logistics of the Fram expedition. Even Shackleton, who had an intense rivalry with and dislike of Scott, was working to help Amundsen, being instrumental in arranging Amundsen’s publishing deals in London. Publishers in Britain and the United States, the largest markets, were vying for the rights to his as yet untitled, unwritten and untranslated book. The New York Times reported
on March 17, just days before Amundsen left Tasmania, “Large offers have been cabled to him at Hobart, Tasmania, since the thrilling narrative in the New York Times and London Chronicle.”
Amundsen parted ways with his ship and shipmates on March 20. He briefly toured Australia, giving a series of lectures while he had the world’s undivided attention; he was broke and desperately needed some cash. Meanwhile, the Fram weighed anchor and cruised east from Hobart en route to Argentina. After nearly a month and a half of sailing, the ship rounded Cape Horn and headed north along the east coast of South America and up the Rio de la Plata, arriving in Buenos Aires on May 21. Amundsen, travelling to the city on a commercial steamer, soon met the Fram and his crew. One member was conspicuously absent. Amundsen had sent Johansen home on a separate cargo boat after he began drinking heavily and quarrelling with his shipmates in Hobart. His behaviour was an embarrassment and could result in bad publicity. Amundsen had never forgiven Johansen for his challenge the previous fall, and his “disgraceful” conduct in Hobart solidified Amundsen’s determination to exclude him from any public celebrations in Norway. A bitter and disillusioned man, Johansen committed suicide not long after, in January 1913. Some observers blamed Amundsen for the tragedy, claiming the humiliation of not being included in the Polar Party drove Johansen to his death. But he had been in decline for the many years between returning from his adventures with Nansen and his South Pole expedition with Amundsen. Before leaving for the South Pole, he had failed in the army, abandoned his wife and child and fallen into a rootless and alcohol-fuelled life. The world he returned to in Norway in 1912 was similar to the one he had left, and none of the other men who were excluded from the Polar Party experienced similar problems.