The Last Viking

by Stephen Bown

  One highlight of his U.S. tour was sharing the stage with Robert Peary in a full-capacity Carnegie Hall. Later, Amundsen and Peary were invited to lunch with President Theodore Roosevelt. The National Geographic Society hosted several of Amundsen’s talks and announced in Washington that it was granting him $20,000 toward his next expedition. Amundsen also shared a stage with Peary there, and the National Geographic Society had Peary present him with the explorers’ gold medal. In Philadelphia, he shared the stage with Peary and Shackleton; a photograph from the event shows the three men in formal tuxedos standing behind a small table displaying a giant globe tilted to show Antarctica. The photo bore the caption “The Three Polar Stars.”

  Amundsen also found the time to share his philosophy in less illustrious venues. At an address to students in the Great Hall of the City College of New York, Amundsen, who “appeared to be amused” at the cheering of the three thousand youths in attendance, spoke of the traits that would lead to success in life: “There is one thing that I want to say to you boys, and that is that the secret to my success has been due to self control and will power. Control yourselves, be your own masters, and at the same time develop determination. If you undertake anything, determine to accomplish your purpose and let no obstacle no matter what turn you back. If you do this, my boys, no matter what your life work may be, I will promise to each one of you the fullest measure of success.”

  In San Francisco, it was reported that Amundsen had done something unusual: he had contracted for the purchase of two new-fangled machines, “hydro-aeroplanes,” that he would take north with him, and that before departing San Francisco he, Nilsen and Hanssen would “study flying scientifically for three months.” While he was lecturing in Vancouver, he received word that the U.S. government would “offer him the honor of allowing the Fram . . . to be the first vessel, other than a warship, to pass through the Panama Canal” en route to San Francisco when he departed for his next polar expedition. “I am glad of it,” Amundsen replied simply.

  On February 10, 1913, the Terra Nova returned from Antarctica with the news of Scott’s death. Several months earlier a relief party from the ship had discovered Scott and two other men frozen to death near one of their depots. Scott and his team, after reaching the South Pole a few weeks after Amundsen, had fought a horrifying struggle through vicious blizzards and punishing cold on their return journey. Naturally, the press sought out Amundsen for his opinion. He must have been anticipating some news around this time, as the Antarctic ice usually opened up for navigation in January. “I would gladly forgo any honour or money if thereby I could have saved Scott his terrible death,” he said. In the days that followed, other newspaper reporters observed him in distracted agitation, unable to entirely control his emotions. “While those brave men were dying out there in the waste of ice,” he mentioned quietly to a reporter in Chicago, “I was lecturing in warmth and comfort in Australia.”

  Amundsen, of course, had no direct responsibility for the disaster. He had never even met Scott, and although he felt that Scott’s planning and logistics had been amateurish and foolish, and his hierarchical command structure and disdain for dogs and Inuit clothing a serious impediment, Amundsen naturally felt melancholy and perhaps even remorseful that these men had suffered and died in their brave quest. Though Scott and his men were ill-prepared, Amundsen thought that perhaps they wouldn’t have extended themselves so dangerously to attain the pole if they hadn’t known that Amundsen was also working toward the same goal at the same time. Perhaps his presence had prompted Scott to take additional risks. Amundsen also mused that the surplus oil he had considered leaving at the Pole might have saved Scott’s life. “The day was bright and not very cold,” he observed. “There was a general inspection of the outfit before we started back, and for some time I debated with myself whether or not to leave behind two five-gallon cans of oil I did not expect to need. In the end I did not leave the oil.” When leading an expedition, Amundsen was ruthless and calculating; in victory, he was magnanimous and regretful. It must have been hard to continue to lecture about his own triumph when everyone now knew that the vanquished British explorers had perished miserably. Leon instructed Amundsen to express nothing publicly except heartfelt sympathy—make no comments about Scott’s poor decisions or inept leadership.

  While Amundsen continued to enjoy good press and sold-out halls in the United States, and the magnitude of his accomplishment was elevated when compared with the alternative; in Britain his triumph was quickly overshadowed by Scott’s tragedy. It was even suggested that Scott and his men had died because they were heartbroken at seeing the Norwegian flag at the South Pole. No one wanted to hear that Scott’s equipment was not up the task, that his ponies were all but useless with their hooves sinking deep into the snow, that his men were worn down by hauling the sledges themselves instead of using dogs, or that their inadequate diet led to scurvy. There were claims that Scott’s failure was caused by bad luck, and the corollary, that only good luck had preserved Amundsen, that he wasn’t deserving of respect since his accomplishment and survival were mere outcomes of chance. Scott’s diary, purporting to be a truthful account of the expedition but in reality heavily edited to remove information that might show Scott in anything other than a generous and heroic light, was published in Britain as Scott’s Last Expedition. Unsurprisingly, it became an immediate bestseller. Scott himself became a mythical figure, the embodiment of heroic but doomed struggle, a romantic figurehead and “the man who snatched victory from the jaws of death”: in death, Scott had won.

  Scott was a product of the British Empire in the gilded age before World War I, and he dragged with him to the pole all the baggage of the imperial behemoth of which he was an agent—including the inflexibility to adopt another culture’s ways of doing things or to admit when purely British technology and the British naval hierarchy were insufficient to the task. Although his expedition was technically a private enterprise—Scott was on leave from his job as an officer in the Royal Navy—it was run very much like a national expedition. Just as Amundsen was always working under the stress of creditors who hounded him, and his life and accomplishments must be seen with the chronic lack of financing as a backdrop, so must Scott be seen as an appendage of the British Empire. But a positive assessment of Amundsen and his skills does not necessarily mean the opposite for Scott.

  Without prejudicing opinions about Scott, it is fair to say that Amundsen was better prepared and had experience of polar travel and survival skills that were lacking not only in the British leader but in the British expedition in general. Amundsen had some good fortune, and perhaps slightly better weather. But in the end, his superior planning and leadership, attention to history and adoption of the knowledge of “primitive” peoples won the day. Is it any wonder that in a David and Goliath contest—as the expeditions can be considered in terms of financing and the might of their respective nations, where the gladiator of the establishment was defeated by the upstart—that the establishment rallied around their man, his legacy and his character? Scott was their anointed hero and to challenge him, let alone defeat him, was considered unseemly, somewhat like entering a restaurant and sitting down at someone else’s reserved table.

  Scott’s demise, and his bravery in confronting it, is an oft-told story and an interesting study in how the control of information makes history: how the story of the “race” to the South Pole was manufactured with Scott as the hero and Amundsen as the villain, the man who may have technically won but didn’t deserve the victory. Much has been written about the competition between Amundsen and Scott, with authors taking sides about whether Scott was more concerned with science, or somehow wronged, or whether Amundsen was devious, or the cause of Scott’s death, and so on. But it’s time for a decoupling of these two lives. The so-called race is a literary and historical conceit, contrived at the start by Amundsen and his brother Leon to generate publicity, and perpetuated by authors for nearly a century now, in which Scott’s
and Amundsen’s stories are always told in tandem, with emphasis on their duel, their struggle, their ambition and their tragedy. But the fact remains that the two men never met and had no direct knowledge of each other’s actions in Antarctica or before. The “race”—which only appeared in newspapers after both parties were incommunicado, en route to Antarctica—was always about selling newspapers and books and filling lecture halls, and it took on a life of its own, one uncontrolled by either of the two “racers.”

  It should also be remembered that Amundsen never considered the conquest of the South Pole to be his greatest achievement, although it brought him his longest-lasting fame and earned him a great deal of money. He lived for more than two decades afterward, never bothering to return; he pushed on with other interests and continued his rich and unusual life of adventure and challenge, undertaking creative and daring stunts that enthralled millions. The apparent antipathy for him that developed in Britain in the wake of Scott’s death was something that Amundsen never forgot or forgave. In his memoirs he devoted considerable effort to detailing the ill-treatment he felt he had encountered in Britain, “[j]ust as in times of war it may be observed that the soldiers on the opposing sides retain a high respect for their foes in arms, while the non-combatants at home seem to feel obligated to engage in hymns of hate against their enemies.” His dislike of the British establishment began with his reception after the Gjøa voyage and remained strong, perhaps unjustifiably so, and was based upon only a few mean-spirited remarks by a few individuals. But the British establishment, evidently, had a dislike of Amundsen as well, one that would see its full expression in the wake of Scott’s death.3

  Amundsen met with a more favourable reception in Europe and particularly in America. In America there was no need for the elaborate drapery of scientific camouflage: the contest, the struggle and the record were reasons enough to embark on geographical conquest. It was one of the reasons Amundsen was drawn to the country—he didn’t have to pretend to be in the service of the greater deity of science but could simply do what he was good at and enjoyed doing. Admired by Americans for his energy and boldness, he was regarded as a successful entrepreneur in the field of exploration entertainment—a privately financed citizen, an underdog, challenging and defeating the state-sponsored champion of the world’s greatest empire, and doing it with a showman’s style and flourish.

  Thus it came about that in the spring of 1913, about halfway through his six-month American lecture tour, Amundsen mused about selling his house in Norway and becoming a U.S. citizen.

  As had happened many times before, Amundsen became a victim of his own success. With the North and South Poles already claimed, even with the additional financing by various geographical societies in the United States and Europe, he found it difficult to inspire public excitement for another polar drift. And he was not eager to embark on the voyage in any case—it lacked originality and promised much tedium, with little remuneration or fame. The voyage had already been pushed until 1914, and the Fram still languished in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, at Nansen’s urging, Amundsen dutifully signed up for courses in oceanography. His romantic life was likewise unsettled. Sigrid Castberg had moved on during his two-year absence. Amundsen soon began another romance, however, in an unlikely place: England. Kristine Elizabeth Bennett was the Norwegian wife of a much older, successful English businessman. Amundsen had met her through mutual acquaintances at a dinner in London during his lecture tour in late 1912. Vivacious, outgoing and flirtatious, Bennett saw in Amundsen a respite from the tedium of her otherwise dull life of wealth in the country.

  Amundsen quietly met her on many secret trips to England and in Norway. It was the start of a lingering, complicated and ultimately unsatisfying affair, about which little is known. Amundsen was intensely secretive about his relationships with women as well as with his closest family and friends. He was a romantic at heart, and approached his love interests from that perspective; in geographical conquest, he was hard and uncompromising and above all practical, but in romance, he was the opposite. He had committed himself to seemingly unobtainable goals throughout his life, and this applied to women as well. None of this information ever made it into the press, and Amundsen wrote very little about it; in fact, only recently have the scantest references to his private relationships come to light in his correspondence. “Discreet” hardly describes his approach to affairs of the heart, and this new romance was probably one more reason he was less than enthusiastic about his impending multi-year polar drift, which now seemed like a form of penance imposed by Nansen for Amundsen’s sin of secrecy in heading for the South Pole. Nansen wrote the foreword to the book The South Pole, and his description of Amundsen’s proposed new voyage reads less like a colleague’s celebration of the next victory than a judge’s imposition of a sentence: “Next year [Amundsen] heads toward the Bering Strait,” Nansen wrote definitively, “into the ice and cold and dark of the north, to drift across the North Pole Sea for at least five years.” Amundsen must surely have been dreading such a prospect. What man newly in love would look forward to spending five years floating on a ship locked in the Arctic ice?

  There seemed little way for Amundsen to back out of the north polar drift, particularly in light of Scott’s death and his original public promise to Nansen that the jaunt to the South Pole was merely a stepping stone to the scientifically more important goal awaiting him in the Arctic Ocean. Nansen was relentless in urging him to push on with it, citing honour and duty as the key reasons. Amundsen was no doubt more interested in continuing his affair with Bennett, but on the professional side he would have preferred to return to the region of the Northwest Passage and devote some time to ethnographic studies of the Inuit. He had done what he had set out to do, he had wanted recognition for accomplishing it, and some money, but not the job of being a famous or respected person. He wanted to be known for his feat but then to be left alone until it suited him to go public again, with all the fuss and ceremony and the shackles on his freedom that this entailed. He was the “Chief” or the “Governor” while on his expeditions—there was no other way, he felt, to ensure success—but he resented having to play the role afterward. He had no interest in fulfilling the expectations of society, in being trapped by obligations. It was a paradox of his character that he craved public recognition for daring stunts and yet dreaded the tedium of repetitive lecturing in mediocre venues.

  He returned to Norway and his home at Uranienborg for some months in late 1913, working unenthusiastically on preparations for the fourth voyage of the Fram. A skeleton crew, including many of his old comrades, were lined up. With Captain Christian Doxrud in command, the Fram had sailed from Buenos Aires north to the Panama Canal and was waiting for permission to sail through to the Pacific side. Unfortunately, work on the canal was behind schedule. The Fram was delayed for two months and could get no guarantee of when the waterway would be open, although the crew toured the whole length of the canal by train. By December 16, Amundsen had reluctantly made plans for the Fram to sail around South America and up to San Francisco, where he would join the ship along with some of the other expedition members. He also undertook another short lecture tour of Europe in November and December to raise a last bit of money, followed by another trip to Britain around Christmas to visit Bennett.

  Trying to arrange all the details of his impending expedition by telegram from hotels while he travelled, Amundsen was too busy to do everything that needed doing because he refused to give up his personal life and wholeheartedly devote himself to the expedition. He was constantly delegating from abroad, even instructing Leon in basic personal obligations such as sending flowers for a funeral and arranging renovations of his house. He had delayed his 1914 crossing to America from February to April as he once again visited London for personal reasons, to steal a last few weeks of pleasure with Bennett before heading off to exile in “the ice and cold and dark,” as Nansen had put it.

  Meanwhile, other problems arose. The F
ram had become infested with rats, cockroaches and worms while working its way down the South American coast. The delay at the Panama Canal and the slow progress south made it impossible for the ship to round Cape Horn and sail north in time to make it through the Bering Strait before summer ended and ice set in. This would postpone Amundsen’s departure from San Francisco by another year, until the ice in the strait opened up again. Rejecting this delay, Amundsen abandoned his plan of entering the Arctic Ocean via Alaska and ordered the Fram to return to Norway. He would try the Northeast Passage, north of Siberia, instead. But the earliest the Fram could sail would now be in the spring of 1915.

  The expense of sailing the ship up and down the Central and South American coast and then crossing to Norway was enormous: the provisions would be wasted, the ship worn out and the crew’s wages paid, all to achieve nothing. Amundsen hadn’t been on board the ship since March 1912, when the ever-generous Christophersen had again covered many of its expenses. But clearly Amundsen’s heart wasn’t in the expedition: the enthusiasm and tight control over the planning so evident during his earlier journeys had given way to a slackness and disinterest. He wasn’t personally overseeing the expedition any longer, and being misled about the possibility of using the Panama Canal had wasted vast amounts of time and money. As a consequence he appeared to be observing the expedition as it progressed, making only vague and reluctant plans to join it when the time came to give up his real life. In this way the months of 1914 passed.