The Last Viking

by Stephen Bown

  Although his South Pole escapades had made an enormous amount of money, the expenses had also been enormous, and the profits from his book went into the general revenue of the expedition rather than to Amundsen personally. He had also acquired another expensive pastime: flying, the thrilling path of the future, as he perceived it. He realized that he had accomplished all he could with dogs and sleds and skis; this approach was no longer novel or captivating, and there was nothing more he could do with it. It now bored him. But in San Francisco the previous year, during his American lecture tour, he had flown in a primitive biplane for the first time. The roaring contraption, piloted by a Norwegian-American aviator named Silas Christophersen, had bounced along a large field and lifted into the air for a few turns before returning to earth. Amundsen was stunned. This was exciting in a way he had never before experienced, and he became a devoted convert to the new technology and its possible benefits: speed over rough terrain and a good overview of a large area. He envisioned flight as a logistical aid to help orchestrate the movements of an over-ice expedition. And, not to be discounted, flight had the additional benefit of being novel and exciting. He had noticed the public acclaim awarded to the French aviator Louis Bleriot after he crossed the English Channel in a primitive plane of his own design in 1909, and no doubt Amundsen could imagine himself waving down to admiring crowds as he roared overhead.

  He ordered two seaplanes to be ready for the Fram expedition in early 1914, and he enlisted the Swedish aviator Baron Carl Cederstrom. The aircraft, made of wood-ribbed frames and wire covered in tight canvas and propelled by a primitive 50-horsepower air-cooled engine, were waiting for him in San Francisco, where he planned to study flying for several months before heading north. But when the voyage was delayed again until 1915 and Amundsen had ruled out the Bering Strait as his entrance to the Arctic Ocean, he sent instructions for the biplanes to be sold. He set off for Germany and France to scout for new machines that he could more easily transport to Norway. He now planned to spend the better part of a year there—more time than he had spent in his native country in over a decade.

  After finding a suitable aircraft, a Farman biplane, he ordered it to be sent from France to Christiania, to take on the Fram. This would be the first, and highly experimental, use of a motorized flying machine for polar exploration. In early 1914, Amundsen settled down for a few months to learn to fly, getting the first civilian flying licence in Norway on June 11—crashing only once during his practical exam. Excited by the prospect of the upcoming voyage and its novel plan to use airplanes, the Norwegian parliament voted a huge subscription toward the upcoming expedition. But other events, of international significance, began to intervene. Throughout the summer of 1914, Europe moved inexorably toward war. Amundsen’s plans changed again: the explorer turned down the funding of the Norwegian parliament and donated his plane to the Norwegian military for the duration of the war, which everyone expected to be over quickly.

  The north polar drift, so long a nagging, unfulfilled and unwanted obligation, an albatross around Amundsen’s neck, was now officially called off for the duration of the war. The time for peaceful scientific expeditions had ended. Amundsen had temporarily escaped his exile.

  The Frozen Reaches of Tartary

  A glorious moon made the whole landscape glisten with a vivid whiteness. In several places we could see polar bears moving about on the ice. Added to the moonlight was a brilliant display of the aurora.

  “NO ONE, ” AMUNDSEN wrote in his autobiography, “but a penniless explorer can realize the frightful handicap from which nearly all explorers suffer in having to waste time and nervous energy in their efforts to raise money to equip their expeditions. The heartbreaking discouragements, the endless delays, the blows to pride, if not to self-respect, involved in this search for funds, are a tragedy of the explorer’s life. I now thought I saw an opportunity for once to avoid these sorrows.” Although the war had delayed the Fram’s departure for the North Pole, giving Amundsen a respite from what he must have felt was his voyage of punishment for deceiving the world and rushing to the South Pole, it also left him essentially unemployed. But the war, at least in its early years, presented other opportunities.

  Because considerable wealth remained from his South Pole exploit and, as he admitted, “I had nothing else to do,” Amundsen decided to invest the bulk of his funds in shipping stock, all organized by his brother Leon. “Such an opportunity was obvious in all the neutral countries, and nowhere more obvious than in Norway. Ships were vital to the success of the Allies, and Norway’s excellent merchant fleet commanded prodigious prices for its services.” While he was silently on his way to doubling his fortune in under two years, Amundsen had plenty of spare time to pursue his relationship with Kristine Bennett, alternately in London and Norway, where she frequently returned to visit her family and Amundsen. For the first time, he eased into the life of a well-off gentleman with both time and money on his hands.

  But keeping secret his affair with a married woman was not easy, and at the end of 1915 and in early 1916, he spent several months in Britain attempting to persuade Bennett to get a divorce and flee to Norway with him, something she refused to do. It is easy to conclude that when Amundsen declared that this was the time to continue with his plans for polar exploration, being spurned by his paramour was the reason. The relationship did not end, though, and perhaps he imagined that Bennett would be ready for him after his next adventure, after all, her children were nearly grown and her husband was much older. In either case, “not being in business for any love of business,” Amundsen cashed in most of his investments and began planning his next expedition. Around the same time, he purchased an apartment in the same Christiania neighbourhood as Bennett’s sister. On March 24, 1916, his plans were announced and reported upon in the London Morning Post and the New York Times. His expedition would leave from Point Barrow, Alaska, in the summer of 1917.

  When Amundsen went to inspect the Fram in Christiania, he was shocked by the old ship’s condition. Its long exposure to the warm southern waters had rotted its hull and rendered it unseaworthy. The cost to get the vessel in shape would have been so high that Amundsen decided he would be better off buying a new ship, one designed to his particular specifications. Doing so had the added advantage of making him the owner of the ship (the Fram was still owned by the government of Norway); also, the expedition wouldn’t be hampered by historic ties to Nansen. Amundsen took his design to shipbuilder Christian Jensen, who worked the sketch and ideas into a proper design and began building the unusual vessel. It would be about 40 metres long and 13 metres wide, and have an unprecedented shape: “half of an egg cut through its length.” The hull would be nearly a metre thick and be made from specially imported timber from Holland that involved “extraordinary expense.” According to Harald Sverdrup—the adventurer who voyaged on the new ship for many years, became famous as a scientist and anthropologist in later years and wrote Amundsen’s biography—“her shape made her behave excellently under heavy pressure from ice, but in the open sea she rolled like a wash basin.” To help pay for the construction, Amundsen, or more likely his brother Leon, arranged for the issuing of a special Norwegian stamp series to augment the ship’s building fund. The brothers also arranged to sell postcards that would be carried on the voyage and “cancelled” with a “Royal Norwegian Post Office that has been installed onboard” at the ship’s farthest-north destination. The advertisement showed polar bears staring across an icy sea at a distant sailing ship.

  Meanwhile, Amundsen was back to his peripatetic ways. Once the ship’s construction was set in motion, he made a summer trip to Britain and then in November crossed the Atlantic to the United States, which, like Norway, was a neutral country in the war at this time. He spent several months arranging for the provisioning of the expedition with his companion Herman Gade, spending Christmas with Gade’s family in Chicago, just as he had on several previous occasions. As usual, Amundsen was received with gre
at interest in America. He appeared in the New York Times the day after disembarking from the steamship that had brought him across the ocean. “Captain Amundsen’s hair is white and his face is weather beaten from many years of exposure to wind, sun and sea, but his blue eyes seemed as steady and bright as they were years before, and he walked down the pier at Hoboken with the springing, rolling gait of a mariner.”

  The reporters were much taken with Amundsen’s claims to be bringing an airplane on the ship, “to fly to the North Pole from the nearest point that we pass on the ship.” His stated plan, dutifully reported in the press, was to sail through the now-opened Panama Canal and then north to Alaska, hugging the North American coast. From Alaska he would enter the Bering Strait, cross over to Siberia, and proceed north until the ship became stuck in the ice. As it drifted about the polar basin, Amundsen would await his chance to launch his airplane and cruise to the North Pole. He would be gone for three to five years, he said.

  In addition to arranging to receive bacon from Armour’s and other general provisions from Sprague, Warner & Company in Chicago, Amundsen as usual attended several dinners and awards ceremonies and delivered a few speeches. (He mentioned these companies specifically in his autobiography, so he must have felt they had given him a good deal, did an especially good job or were otherwise deserving of being singled out.) He always liked his public role in the United States, and immediately slipped into his customary good-natured banter there. Perhaps he had less to fear in the way of public scandal in America; but the U.S. press also felt a natural affinity for him and his accomplishments. There was a feeling that he was welcome, that he deserved his fame and had not merely crashed someone else’s party. This may be why Amundsen still planned to sail from Alaska, despite his new ship’s being built in Norway. His only disappointment was that airplanes were in short supply even in a neutral country—they were valuable war machinery that might be needed for defence, so he had to abandon his plans of incorporating flying into his explorations. It was a bitter blow; Amundsen was excited about the prospect of flying to the North Pole, and he instinctively knew such a feat would be novel enough to generate great interest in the expedition.

  He sailed from New York to London in early February 1917, for obvious personal reasons, and then returned to Norway a month later. The war at sea was complicating his plans, and the cost of his expedition’s supplies was rising. At the end of April, Germany launched an unrestricted U-boat war against all neutral and Allied shipping, and the United States entered the war. Although Amundsen had ordered his supplies while the United States was neutral, once the nation joined the Allies, wartime restrictions applied. Now, he had to obtain a special licence that would allow the goods to leave the country, and those goods would cross the Atlantic at great expense in order to avoid the U-boats. The provisioning for the expedition was proceeding slowly, and the war at sea was escalating rapidly. Meanwhile, Amundsen’s new ship was launched to great public fanfare in Oslo in June. There had been much speculation about the name Amundsen would choose, and in the end he named it Maud, “in honour of our beloved queen.”

  But the delays in getting his supplies across the Atlantic meant that even though the ship was ready, he could no longer sail in 1917. Another year would have to pass before he set sail. He would now have to cut out the publicity-friendly voyage to Alaska and instead proceed to the Arctic by sailing north along the Norwegian coast. He also gave up on acquiring an airplane for the expedition. Once Germany began its attacks on neutral, specifically Norwegian, shipping, the possibility of invasion became much more real, and Norway could not let something so valuable as an airplane be used to fly to the North Pole. The time for such civilian heroics had passed.

  Amundsen brooded about Germany’s “ruthless methods of carrying on submarine warfare” throughout the summer and early fall of 1917. He was not unsympathetic to the German cause; he had admired Germany and German ingenuity ever since his early student days, and this, coupled with his quiet dislike of the British, kept his opinion balanced on the fence for the early years of the war. “I did not then, nor do I yet, see any reason to criticize the Germans for using their submarines to destroy enemy shipping, or even neutral shipping where there was reasonable evidence that it was engaged in carrying contraband of war,” he wrote. But when “the Germans threw humanity overboard and proceeded to indiscriminate sinkings without warning, I shared the hot indignation of all civilized people.” In October, one particular incident galvanized his opinion. A German U-boat torpedoed a Norwegian merchant ship in the North Sea, “destroying all those on board, and even firing on such lifeboats as could be launched in the confusion.” After deliberating on a course of action for twenty-four hours, Amundsen collected in an envelope all his German decorations and medals, several of which had been personally pinned to his chest by Kaiser Wilhelm II, and proceeded to the German legation in Oslo. He marched into the office of the German minister, a man with whom he had been acquainted socially. When the man smiled and reached out his hand, Amundsen met the gestures with tight-lipped determination. He refused the handshake and instead read from a handwritten note that expressed his “indignation and resentment” and brought forth his precious envelope, “to be returned to the Emperor.”

  Evidently, returning his awards wasn’t meant to be an entirely private gesture, since it became international news. “Amundsen Rebukes Berlin” reported the New York Times, quoting his comment that his actions were a “personal protest against the German murder of peaceful Norwegian sailors on October 17 in the North Sea.” Amundsen then decided on a greater wartime role for himself and began exploring the possibility of joining the British Royal Navy. Although he was now middle-aged, Amundsen, like many others, was galvanized to take a stand in response to actions he considered dishonourable. His international fame precluded him from being sent to the trenches or into battle; he was much more valuable as a figurehead.

  The U.S. government invited him on a tour of the front lines in early 1918, and he reported from Paris on February 5 that “the qualities that impressed me the most in the American troops at the front are their cheerfulness, confidence, and certainty of being able to do their part in beating the Germans.” Again showing his mastery of the press, he claimed, “I felt in those shell-swept trenches—for they are shelled every day—that there the mighty preparations of America were beginning to be realized, and that the end would be the overthrow of autocracy in Europe and safety for the world. . . . It was a tonic to a friend of America.”

  Naturally these sentiments were well received, and he soon crossed the Atlantic again for another quick tour of some of the northern U.S. states, to see to his provisions and to give speeches to Scandinavian Americans, urging them to support the war, to “put all their strength into their work so that more ships might be built and the submarine menace swept away.” He made an impassioned plea to his audiences: “I say to you that no man can be a slacker and at the same time be a patriot. Every idle man who takes a day a week off just to suit his own whim may be the cause of death to many more men, some of whom may be dear and close to you.” Amundsen widely praised the American troops in the trenches of Europe, claiming in another interview that “there is no fear that the Germans will break through that part of the line.” He had certainly become a skilled speech writer and public speaker.

  American newspapers praised Amundsen as “a born leader of men,” noting that “the driving power of the man is tremendous” and that “he has a magnetic personal charm that attracts heroic spirits to him.” He was on his way to becoming an American hero. Before the Maud headed to sea, President Woodrow Wilson sent him a cable message extending his best wishes for the expedition. Hardly surprisingly, Amundsen’s request to export American provisions to Norway for his adventure was soon granted, and, by April 1918, he was back in Europe completing the preparations for the Maud’s maiden voyage. The crew consisted of several old hands from the South Pole expedition: Helmer Hanssen as captain, Oscar Wist
ing as first officer, Martin Rønne as sailmaker and Knut Sundbeck as engineer. The new recruits included Harald Sverdrup and four other men, for a total crew of nine. Amundsen was now forty-seven years old.

  A few months later, on June 24, 1918, the Maud sailed north. Amundsen chose the date based on information sent to him by the U.S. Navy; its intelligence reports suggested that U-boats had returned to their bases and would no longer be in the northern waters. By mid-July the Maud had left behind its final port, Tromsø, reached the northern coast of Norway and turned east, entering the fabled Northeast Passage. The men did not relax until the end of the month—they “knew that until they had passed the White Sea, we could not be sure that some stray submarine might not be cruising in the waters there.” The tension was so high that on one occasion, when Amundsen spied the turbulent waters of an approaching storm and called out “all hands on deck. Quick!” some of the men scrambled up from below clad “in the scantiest of night apparel, some with pieces of other men’s clothing pulled on awry, and one in a complete suit of civilian street clothes, bowler hat and all, with his suitcase in his hand.”