by Stephen Bown
The Maud continued east through the famous passage, which centuries earlier had been hailed as a possible sea route from England to the Orient but was soon abandoned because of its extreme cold, dangerous seas and crushing ice floes. Amundsen noted, typically, that “it offers no great difficulties to experienced navigators.” He hoped to reach the Bering Strait in one season. Soon, however, one of the passage’s challenges began to present themselves—increasingly icy waters—and the Maud was stopped completely on September 17. The expedition was frozen in for the winter near Cape Chelyuskin, on the Siberian coast. (Although Russia was in the throes of the Bolshevik Revolution, Siberia was not closed to foreigners until several years later.) Amundsen called the little winter shelter “Maudhavn.” The men went ashore on the stony beach to build depots, observatories and kennels for their twenty dogs. Then they spent weeks shovelling snow into great mountains around the sides of the ice-locked Maud, to shelter it against the “searching Arctic winds [that] are the greatest handicap to comfort in winter quarters.” Discomfort, however, would not be Amundsen’s chief worry during the winter of 1918–1919. His luck—something he famously claimed was merely good planning, yet ironically also mentioned as one of the necessary qualities of an explorer—could not always prevent accidents.
Every day, Amundsen went for a morning walk. He was in the habit of carrying one of the pregnant dogs down the gangplank to the ice from the Maud’s deck so that the animal could stroll about. One morning another dog rushed up as he was coming down and bumped into him while he had his arms full. He stumbled and “plunged headlong down the steep slope at the side of the runway,” landing heavily on his right shoulder. The pain was excruciating, and he staggered back to the ship. Wisting, who knew a little first aid, helped to set the badly broken bone. Amundsen was so debilitated that he remained in his bunk for eight days before emerging to perform light duties with his arm and shoulder in a tight sling.
A few weeks later, when one of the dogs was playfully bounding about on the ice, Amundsen carefully picked his way down the slippery gangplank and followed it into the fog out of curiosity. He stopped when he heard strange and eerie sounds coming from the obscuring mist, and soon the dog came running toward him followed by a furious polar bear. “This situation had its humorous side,” Amundsen commented, “but I did not pause to enjoy that.” He stared at the bear and it stared at him. He wondered what he should do. He was alone on the ice, with a bound arm and shoulder, so he turned and sprinted toward the ship. But the bear was faster. It came up behind him, and Amundsen heard its loud rasping breath before being smacked to the ice by a mighty paw. The fall reinjured his arm, and the bear began to maul him, tearing at his clothing. Only when one of the dogs returned to torment the beast did it leave Amundsen alone and take off after the dog. Amundsen staggered up the gangplank and into the ship, bleeding from gashes in his back. Only his heavy leather clothing had protected him from worse injury. Amundsen later wrote in his autobiography that in the moment when he felt that death would surely come to him “laying at the feet of the bear,” his mind did not dwell on “the chief incidents” of his life, the ones that were reputed to pass before a person “in vivid and instant review” at the moment of death. Instead, eccentric as always, he focused on an all-consuming question that “although vivid enough, was certainly frivolous”: the number of hairpins that “were swept up on Regent Street in London on a Monday morning.”
The winter days were now at their darkest and coldest, and Amundsen began a slow recovery from his injuries. Although the gashes made by the bear, once stitched and bandaged, healed on their own, Amundsen’s arm was another matter. It was so damaged that at first he couldn’t even lift a pen to write. “Several times a day, therefore, I would sit in a chair, brace my body, grasp my right fist in my left hand, and with the strength of my left arm force my right arm slowly upward a short distance, repeating the painful operation time after time.” Even by the end of December he could barely lift his arm as high as his face, and it took many more months to fully heal. Years later Amundsen had the arm and shoulder X-rayed in Seattle. The physician expressed shock at the damage and at the fact that he could move it at all. “Thus,” Amundsen wrote, “among such distinctions as I possess must be counted also the one that I am an impossible but successful surgical phenomenon.”
Amundsen restricted himself to sedentary activities while his wounds healed at Maudhavn. Just before New Year’s Eve, he trudged from the Maud to an observatory on shore to spend several hours recording the weather and magnetic forces. The grandly named “observatory” was little more than a single-roomed hut with no window. The lighting was provided by a Swedish kerosene lamp, which also heated the tiny room. Absorbed in his work, Amundsen began to feel drowsy and disoriented, and then noticed that his heart was beating unusually fast. By the time he fully realized the danger, he could barely stand. He struggled to the door, on the verge of unconsciousness, and stumbled out into the snow. Toxic fumes from the malfunctioning lamp had “thoroughly impregnated” his body. For days his heart continued to beat erratically and quickly, and for months afterward even the slightest exercise sent his heart into a wild flutter. It was years before the effects of the fumes fully wore off. In early February 1919, two months later, he nearly collapsed with exhaustion after struggling up a small 15-metre hill to observe the return of the sun. A few years later, doctors advised him to give up exploration, and indeed any strenuous exercise, if he wanted to survive. It was a recommendation he jocularly dismissed. He boasted that “at fifty-five years of age, I would cheerfully wager that I could outrun most young men of twenty-five.”
The rest of the winter was a monotonous string of days, spent waiting for the ice to break. Amundsen was unable to leave the ship for any real travel, so he devoted himself to being the expedition’s cook, apparently to good effect. Some of the men went on expeditions in April and May, but they were short, desultory affairs. There is an old saying that bad luck always comes in threes. By this reckoning, Amundsen should have been done; but fate decreed otherwise. As the ice lingered throughout the summer of 1919, one of the young men on the expedition, Peter Tessem, complained of headaches and melancholy and wanted to go home. Another young man, Paul Knutsen, volunteered to accompany him on a 650-kilometre overland trek south to a Russian outpost on Dickson Island, at the mouth of the Yenisei River. Both men were experienced overland travellers and hunters who had been to Siberia before. With six dogs, a year’s worth of provisions and the expedition’s scientific records and mail, the two men departed the Maud and were never heard from again. Years later, Tessem’s body was discovered near the meteorological station at Dickson; Amundsen sadly called it “the one real tragedy in all my Polar work.”
Through the summer the ice continued to imprison the ship. Open water was in sight but unobtainable. Drawing on his many years of experience, Amundsen remembered Frederick Cook’s solution on the Belgica more than two decades earlier. He had his men drill holes in the ice in a channel leading toward the open water, fill the holes with sticks of dynamite and detonate them simultaneously. When high tide came on September 12, the ice cracked up and the Maud sailed free on a beautiful night when “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.”
The Maud continued along the Siberian coast, in the region historically known as Tartary, but met with an unusual quantity of ice. After a few weeks of sailing, before September had even ended, it was stuck again in the ice, this time at the mouth of the Kolyma River, near Anyon Island. They were still 800 kilometres from the Bering Strait, where the polar drift was supposed to start. It was a demoralizing setback, to have hardly progressed at all and to be stuck again in surroundings that were already familiar. With Amundsen still weak and lacking the will to fully take charge of the expedition, personality clashes dominated the winter as the men became slightly
deranged from boredom and frustration. But here, at least, they would not be entirely isolated from human contact. A band of native Chukchi had made their winter base at the mouth of the Kolyma. The Chukchi were a remote and little-known people who had almost no contact with or influence from their nominal Russian overlords. They spoke their own language and lived a nomadic lifestyle, following the migrating herds of reindeer. Amundsen was still too weak to be involved in any physical activity, but he retained his fascination with polar peoples and urged Harald Sverdrup to leave the ship for an adventure, to travel with the Chukchi. Sverdrup spent over seven months with them as they pursued the reindeer across the tundra of Siberia, learning the rudiments of their language and culture and later writing a book detailing the experience.
That same winter, Amundsen also sent Wisting, Hanssen and another man on a quest by dogsled to locate a Russian wireless station and report on their situation. Their original destination was Nome, Alaska, but it proved impossible for the trio to get a boat to sail from Russia across the Bering Strait in February. While Wisting remained in East Cape to recuperate, Hanssen continued on alone, skiing south with his dogsled until he reached the Russian outpost at Anadyr, on the Bering Sea, near the end of March. Despite the recent revolution, Russia’s borders had not yet closed, and Amundsen’s emissaries had no trouble in getting their news relayed across to Alaska. It didn’t hurt to be the representatives of the famous Amundsen, then ice-locked along Russia’s own northern coast. Hanssen returned north with his news and picked up Wisting. They proceeded back to the Maud, arriving in mid-June 1920, after a six-month journey of nearly 1,000 kilometres.
After Hanssen had made contact with the outside world, Amundsen’s actions became fodder for the press. In the previous two years there had been much speculation about where he might be wintering, about ice conditions, and whether the expedition was in danger, but now that he was known to be near America again, adventuring not far off the coast of Alaska, the media circus began. By this time in Amundsen’s established career, his ongoing exploits were pure entertainment. There were weekly reports of Amundsen’s plans, his setbacks and his progress. Amundsen was now a celebrity. In addition to being famous for his novel adventures, he was famous for being famous. When there was nothing new to report, the papers were filled with columns of opinion and older information to help people catch up on anything they might have missed. “Amundsen in Siberia” proclaimed one report; “Doubt Amundsen Reached North Pole” went another. There were many reports in the New York Times: “Doubts Amundsen Failed,” “Amundsen to Try Again for Pole” and “Amundsen Caught in Ice.” Sometimes the dispatches were completely inaccurate, as was the one claiming that Sverdrup was leaving the Maud to lead an expedition to rescue the two men who left the ship during the first winter. Another fabricated and false story was headlined by the intriguing claim “Amundsen’s Ship Wrecked in Siberian Ice Pack—Alaskan Missionary Brings Details of Explorer’s Plight to Seattle.”
A few weeks after Wisting and Hanssen’s return, the Maud was freed from the ice and pushed east again, but not north toward the North Pole. Amundsen was headed toward Nome, to resupply and again communicate with the world. The crew arrived on July 27, becoming only the second expedition to navigate the entire Northeast Passage. Amundsen was met with a collection of mail from prominent American scientists and explorers such as Vilhjalmur Stefansson, president of the Explorers’ Club, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, welcoming him to Alaska and congratulating him on navigating the Northeast Passage. This accomplishment, combined with his Northwest Passage voyage, made Amundsen the first person to complete a circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean. But during the two-year voyage he had made no progress at all toward the North Pole, and he considered the expedition a failure. Although he soon learned that Kristine Bennett and her husband had moved into a new estate near London, he waited in vain for a declaration of love.
At Nome, three members of the crew decided to leave the expedition, including Amundsen’s old companion Hanssen. Amundsen was displeased with Hanssen’s performance as the captain of the ship and had considered sending him and another man home in any event. But the loss rankled for a long time; although magnanimous in victory and loyal to a fault, Amundsen reacted with anger when he felt someone had let him down. It is, however, hardly surprising that the men wanted to leave after three years of tedium and quietly stressful danger; in the face of several more years of the same, and without the glory of conspicuous achievement to counterbalance it, who wouldn’t be homesick? Amundsen didn’t easily forgive the men, whom he considered to be deserters, and he offered to help them on their way home only as far as his legal obligations required.
No doubt his illness and lack of enthusiasm for the expedition also played a part in the low morale on the ship. By the time he was in Nome, however, Amundsen had apparently regained his vigour and energy. A local physician pronounced his injuries to be healed, and those who remembered him from the last time he had been in town, fourteen years earlier, when the Gjøa had completed the Northwest Passage, noticed that he seemed as energetic now as then. He had apparently shaken off the lethargy that had beset both him and the crew during the disheartening Northeast Passage voyage, and he was eager to leave again, in order to pass through the Bering Strait before it was plugged with ice for the year. Evidently, he felt that he couldn’t yet cancel the expedition because it hadn’t accomplished anything noteworthy. What did he have to show for his enormous expenditure of money and time? He had endured two years of pointless Arctic drifting, and was about to give it a purpose.
After spending only ten days in Nome, the Maud was ready to head out again. Only Sverdrup, Wisting, Amundsen and a Russian man, Gennadij Olonkin, elected to remain on board, along with an Inuit cook whom they called Mary. Newspapers reported that Amundsen didn’t want to hire any local men because the wages demanded by sailors in Nome were too high and he couldn’t afford them. Perhaps this was true: Amundsen had been shovelling money into the Maud’s maintenance and supplies for over three years and had not earned enough to compensate for those expenses. His fortune was quickly depleting as the Maud sat stranded in the ice in various locations along the Northeast Passage. This latest attempt to float north also proved fruitless—the ship was again imprisoned in the ice along the Siberian coast. Wisting and Sverdrup went on another 1,200-kilometre ski and dogsled expedition, leaving Amundsen the only Norwegian on board the Maud for a while. But that winter turned exciting in other ways.
The Maud was again wintering near a band of Chukchi, and Amundsen “became well acquainted with them.” One of the men brought his sick four-year-old daughter, Kakonita, “a charming bright eyed little creature,” on board. The girl’s mother had died, and the father felt he was incapable of taking care of Kakonita; in fact, she was nearly starving and clearly suffering from neglect, and likely would have died without Amundsen’s intervention. The man left her aboard the Maud. Once Kakonita had been nursed back to health, Amundsen devoted himself to her. Since her father had essentially abandoned her and claimed to be unable to take her back, Amundsen began teaching her how to speak English and Norwegian and introduced her to European customs.
This idyll soon ended. When the Maud’s propeller was damaged by ice, Amundsen was pushed beyond the limit of his patience. Restless and annoyed, and with Kakonita in tow, he left only three men to sail the three-masted Maud, set off with a dogsled south along the Russian coast and searched for a boat to take him across to Alaska. He and Kakonita caught a supply ship to Nome and another ship south to Seattle, arriving in July. (The Maud eventually sailed to Seattle as well, once the ice cleared, arriving on August 21 with help provided by some Chukchi boys and a coastguard vessel.) En route to Seattle, Amundsen brought along another girl, Camilla, the nine-year-old daughter of Clarendon Carpendale, an Australian fur trader and agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and his Chukchi wife, as a companion for Kakonita. Carpendale was eager fo
r his daughter to receive a more formal education and be exposed to life away from the remote Siberian coast. Amundsen took on the role of devoted “grandfather” and eventually brought the two girls to Norway to be schooled.
In Seattle, Amundsen was quickly welcomed, particularly by the city’s large Scandinavian community. He was given accommodations and an office, and again was a featured guest at many public events—he was still popular. Soon after settling in, he received a telegram from Leon informing him that despite the voyage’s setbacks the Norwegian government had voted a large sum of money to overhaul the Maud and keep the expedition going. Relieved of his financial burdens, Amundsen bought himself a car and toured Seattle and the surrounding region throughout the fall of 1921, always accompanied by his foster daughters, who became known in the press as “Amundsen’s Esquimaux” and who “attracted the greatest attention.” Amundsen also met Haakon H. Hammer, a Danish American shipbroker and businessman who quickly became Amundsen’s confidant and agent in America.
While no doubt flattered by his increasing fame, Amundsen had other more prosaic matters to address. During all those years along the Northeast Passage, the expedition members had hunted and collected many specimens of interest to museums of natural history. To engender good will, he planned the disposition of some of the expedition’s more exotic booty, including mammoth teeth and various arctic birds, many of which he prepared to be shipped back to Norway as a gift to the state. There was also a large collection of prime furs he wanted to give to Kristine Bennett. Evidently he was still thinking about her, even though they had been apart for many years. He dedicated his hastily written book Nordostpassagen (which was not published in English) to her, albeit obliquely. Also, he had consigned his house to her in his will, though she was already quite rich. “[Amundsen] Says He Will Try Again,” claimed the New York Times in a dispatch from Nome—a claim that might be applied to his pursuit of Bennett as well as to his quest for the North Pole.