The Last Viking

by Stephen Bown

  The expedition had dragged on far longer than planned and, even with the melodramatic reporting of the previous year, it lacked the competition and drama of his earlier exploits. As a result it was not earning him a great deal in endorsements or donations. Ever the optimist, Amundsen forged on, though his sense of his finances, never a strong suit, was inaccurate. He grossly overestimated the value of the furs and bird specimens that he hadn’t given away, and he had wildly optimistic projections of his book sales. Thus his prospects for additional funding did not look promising before Leon’s news of the Norwegian government’s latest donation to repair and refit the Maud.

  Amundsen’s lofty dreams, however, were never tethered to his earthly finances. He was bored with ships and dogsleds, and now that the war was over and the economy was rebounding he returned to his love of airplanes. This time his goal would be to fly to the North Pole, without any scientific pretension at all. While his two remaining crew, Wisting and Olonkin, worked to repair the Maud in Seattle, and Sverdrup began an association with the University of Washington, Amundsen took a train across the United States. He planned to sail to Norway to secure more government support. In January 1922, the New York Times reported: “Amundsen Coming East.”

  Grounded Dreams

  I had never had any opportunity to acquaint myself with business methods. I had always had to rely upon others for the management of any business details. Thus far my trust in others in these matters had never caused me any trouble.

  IN 1903, WHEN the thirty-one-year-old Amundsen had set out for the Northwest Passage in the Gjøa, another milestone in the history of technology was achieved thousands of kilometres to the south and east. Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first tentative hops in a motorized heavier-than-air machine in a field in North Carolina. During the following two decades, the progress in flight was remarkable, yet the technology was still in its infancy. The Atlantic Ocean had been crossed, but only in the “easy” direction, from America to Europe. More aviators had crashed into the ocean than had succeeded in crossing it. A British dirigible floated west to America in 1919, and a German airship did so in 1924. These airships, while slow, stayed in the air for long periods and didn’t crash every time they had engine trouble or headwinds. They did, however, have their own set of problems, such as manoeuverability, their large size and the danger from the combustible gases they used for lift.

  Engineers and pilots were designing and experimenting with new machines throughout Europe and the United States, trying to work out the practical aspects of long-distance flying. In the period of freedom from regulation during the 1920s and the 1930s, aptly named the “Golden Age of Flight,” private air flight was not yet common or regulated, so engineers could take risks with materials and designs, and pilots could challenge distances without interference. Flying in the Arctic was just another challenge—enduring remote locations, freezing temperatures, unknown and unpredictable winds—although many thought the exercise foolhardy and reckless.

  Amundsen’s early success as an explorer was based primarily upon his mastery and adaptation of two historical traditions from different cultures—the Inuit use of dogs and light sleds, and the Scandinavian use of boots bound to wooden planks to travel over snow. But he was not nostalgic when he knew their time was over. He quickly perceived the advantages of air travel in exploring the frozen zones. In 1913, when he first observed primitive airplanes in France and Germany, he saw the future: “I stood with fresh memories of the long sledge journeys in Antarctica, and watched the machine in the air cover distances in one hour that would have taken days and cost fearful effort in the Polar regions.” He learned to fly and was only delayed in bringing airplanes to the Arctic by the war. “The future of Polar exploration lies in the air and I am cheeky enough to claim that honour for myself as I was the first serious polar researcher who realized this and who practically demonstrated this method’s potential,” Amundsen wrote in his autobiography. While this may have been an accurate boast, his early efforts to use airplanes in the Arctic were not always successful.

  After his six-month sojourn in Seattle, organizing the repairs for the Maud and touring the countryside, Amundsen set out east across the United States with his two Siberian foster-daughters, Kakonita and Camilla. The girls eventually proceeded ahead of him to Christiania under the care of Oscar Wisting’s wife, Elise, who had travelled from Norway to meet the expedition in Seattle. In New York, Amundsen met with the directors of the Carnegie Institute to discuss polar scientific issues, conferred with airplane manufacturers about the possibility of a spring delivery of aircraft, and then crossed the Atlantic by ocean liner to Europe. He hadn’t been “home” for over three years, and he would be gone again in less than two months. He spent a few weeks in London first, ostensibly to consult a prominent physician about his heart, but he had a personal motive as well, with Kristine Bennett living so near. He left London at the end of February 1922 and arrived in Christiania secretly. He went directly to Uranienborg and settled his foster daughters in his brother’s home, registering them in school and other activities. He and Leon began planning the next expedition while holed up in Uranienborg, the snowy hills behind them and the icy fjord visible through the front window.

  Around this time, Amundsen began referring to himself as the Norwegian counterpart to the Flying Dutchman, “doomed to lifelong travels in the Arctic Ocean.” In fact, after so long away from his homeland he didn’t really have a home or a stable base of family and friends. His personal life took place on his ship and in various hotel rooms. His house still stood where it always had, the view from its windows was the same, but there was no real spirit to the place. Amundsen was an aging bachelor who didn’t want to face his situation; constant travelling, meeting and planning allowed him to avoid confronting the deficiencies in his life. So long had he been away from urban life, from any semblance of a stable routine, that he had become unmoored from the rhythms of a settled life, unable to fit in or to find satisfaction when at Uranienborg. To whom could he relate as a peer? He stayed only long enough to meet with some government officials, sign papers and enjoy a few family dinners. He was anxious to get going. He was already dreaming of the fulfilment of his long-held dream of polar flight.

  Only when Amundsen left Norway on March 17 was a press release circulated revealing that he had been in the country. A great crowd turned out to see the famous hero as he embarked on the ship that would take him across the Atlantic again, and he dutifully waved from the bridge while the crowd sang the national anthem. In the United States, Amundsen embraced his public role, or at least he was comfortable with it; in Norway, he seemed to shun it and travelled in disguise, doing the bare minimum to generate positive press for his latest venture.

  Leon had ordered two airplanes to be picked up in New York. On board the ship with Amundsen was a young pilot, Oscar Omdal, a lieutenant on leave from the Norwegian navy, whom Leon had selected to be the expedition’s chief pilot. The airplanes would be “more important to the expedition’s economic profits than anything else,” Amundsen speculated. He understood publicity, even if he did not understand business—airplanes were expensive whether they were exciting or not.

  Newspapers in the United States were quick to report the details of Amundsen’s latest expedition. His plan, as he informed reporters, was to “drift from Alaska over the roof of the world to Norway” in his quest to “seek the sources of storms.” But, as exciting as he tried to make it sound, that is only what the new crew members of the Maud would be doing. Amundsen had decided on something altogether more daring for himself. In January, when he was in Norway, he had heard of the new record-breaking flight of a Junkers aircraft that had remained in the air for twenty-seven hours without stopping. This gave him a bold—some would say crazy—idea: to “fly from continent to continent across the Polar Sea,” from Point Barrow in northern Alaska to Spitsbergen—something that (naturally) had never been done before. Amundsen put aside the goal of reaching the No
rth Pole itself, claiming that “the crossing of the Arctic Ocean was still a virgin opportunity.” It was, after all, as he stated in an interview in the New York Times, the “largest of the earth’s surfaces (land or water) that yet lay unexplored.”

  As always, Amundsen was in need of new attention-generating schemes to finance his lifestyle. He no doubt enjoyed the respect his fame brought him, even though he was fed up with the monotony of the lecture circuit, unless it was a prestigious engagement; but he felt humiliated to have to fall back on talking-up past exploits. Leon was a master at dreaming up new schemes to capitalize on his brother’s fame. He had done a fine job of putting Roald in the spotlight after his triumph at the South Pole, and now he extended it even further. One of the fundraising initiatives they again employed for this latest adventure involved postage stamps. The brothers decided that since Roald would be flying over the top of the world, he could easily deliver air mail over the North Pole. They created a postcard, North Star Air Post, Amundsen North Polar Expedition, and arranged for it to be sold through various newspapers, with the papers doing their own advertising and keeping a commission for their efforts. Some of the postcards had the word “air” replaced with “ari,” perhaps to create the aura of a rare and extra valuable collector’s issue.

  Amundsen calculated that his flight would be about 3,200 kilometres through a frozen, fog-ridden area that had never been thoroughly explored. Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole, but the larger Arctic region was essentially terra incognita. An advance expedition led by Godfred Hansen, who had sailed with Amundsen on the Gjøa two decades earlier, had already sailed to leave a supply depot for Amundsen on Spitsbergen. Leon had already sold exclusive newspaper rights to the event, which was portrayed as merely a reconnaissance of the region, which would later be thoroughly and scientifically explored by the crew of the Maud. Amundsen was only interested in the sporting side of the expedition, but he had to justify the Norwegian government’s financial backing. He publicly claimed that his new scheme would have scientific merit too, as the mysterious poles were “climate makers.” He speculated confidently that “the air currents that wheel about the ends of the earth have more effect on the temperature day by day in New York or Paris than any other influence except the sun alone.

  “My interest, therefore, in this North transoceanic flight was not in mere adventure,” he hastened to add. “It is geographical and scientific.” Certainly this was true—geographic exploration is scientific in itself—but with Amundsen the emphasis was always on adventure, on something stirring and unusual to generate publicity and to help with fundraising. “Captain Amundsen prefers to talk more of the adventure that is to come than the perils of the last expedition,” reported the New York Times. “He looks to this as the supreme effort of his life, because the discoveries may be of immense value in the charting of the weather of all the continents.” Whether Amundsen believed his own press or not, he, in consultation with his brother, certainly knew how to put a lofty spin on his plans: he wouldn’t merely be searching for a way to gain public attention in order to finance his dream of cruising in airplanes in the Arctic—he would be working to unravel the mysteries of the global weather machine. This was an altruistic act of incalculable benefit: scientists would be able to “prophesy” the weather “for a long time in advance.”

  Before Amundsen had even crossed the Atlantic, the newspapers from Seattle to New York began reporting these latest plans. The New York Times announced, “Explorer May Fly to Seattle to Test His Arctic Machine.” As usual, regular updates followed, telling the story of the man who “has the imagination of all great explorers and an invincible optimism.”

  As soon as he arrived in New York, Amundsen set about visiting the offices of two airplane manufacturers. He purchased a large German-designed Junkers, which had a passenger capacity of nine and a great cruising radius, and a smaller American-made Curtiss Oriole—a gift from the manufacturer, which was gambling on the publicity it would generate. The Oriole would be used for shorter reconnaissance flights. Amundsen named the Junkers Elizabeth and the Curtiss Kristine, the two names of his married paramour. No explorer before had so utilized his position to promote products in this way. Roald and Leon Amundsen had stumbled on a business model that would drive professional sports for generations: create a public spectacle that draws media attention—in Amundsen’s day, newspapers and magazines, public speeches and ceremonies, slide lectures and, by the mid-1920s, some live radio broadcasts—and then, with the presumption that the public eye will be turned on them for their exploits, sell the attention as advertising. Amundsen sometimes endorsed products directly, but usually products and individuals received their publicity by public association with Amundsen and his exploits.

  Amundsen decided that rather than transport both of his new flying toys across the country by rail, he would fly across the country to Seattle to test the Junkers and ship only the smaller Oriole, landing in key cities to generate news coverage. After all, “a railroad train is too slow for Roald Amundsen,” noted one newspaper. Four people would accompany him on this series of test flights: a pilot from the aircraft company, an engineer, Oscar Omdal, and Amundsen’s long-time friend and benefactor Fredrik Gade. The route would take them through Cleveland, Chicago, Omaha, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Reno, Sacramento and then north to Seattle, where the Maud lay waiting. On April 10, 1922, the Junkers took to the air from a field on Long Island. After cruising for about 550 kilometres, the plane’s engine began to overheat and stall, and the pilot glided down from an altitude of 2,000 metres for an emergency landing in a rough field in northwestern Pennsylvania.

  The plane clipped the top of some trees and then bounced on its huge rubber tires a few times before hitting a tree root and flipping over, which bent the wings and tossed the five men around. As they crawled out from the wreckage, they determined that none of them were seriously injured. Amundsen and Gade were “stiff front and back. It might be our age,” Amundsen admitted. After a day of waiting, he boarded a train to Seattle while some of the men tried to repair the plane in order to ship it west. The damage to the plane proved to be extensive, however, so a new, even larger, Junkers was packed up and shipped west from New York to Seattle. Not surprisingly, the exciting near-disaster made the international news—probably not the sort of publicity the Junkers company was banking on.

  In Seattle, Oscar Wisting was overseeing the provisioning and victualling of the Maud. He welcomed the new crew in May. Including Wisting and Sverdrup, who took a leave from the university to continue his polar research on the Maud, the expedition now had eight crew, including three pilots, one of them a young Canadian officer from the British Royal Air Force, Elmer G. Fullerton. After a last infusion of money arrived from Peter Christophersen in Argentina in early June, all was ready and the Maud lurched out to sea with the two airplanes stowed in several crates on the deck. Amundsen, who suffered from seasickness, decided to take a passenger ship to Nome and meet the Maud there, avoiding the corkscrewing and heaving of the unwieldy and overloaded vessel. On the SS Victoria, he met an attractive Alaskan woman, Winnipeg-born Bess Magids, who was to occupy an increasingly important role in his life in the coming years.

  In Nome, Amundsen gave a final press conference; the mayor had declared a holiday in honour of the explorer’s visit, and for days dogsleds had been bringing people to town to see the famous man off. With his voice “deep with feeling,” Amundsen gave a speech that concluded: “I want to thank the citizens of Nome for many kindnesses and courtesies and the generous hospitality they have always extended to me. Four times I have sailed to the north from Nome.” Asked about their chances of success, the Canadian pilot, Fullerton, then smiled and answered: “It’s either success or death for us.” Even this local ceremony on the northern fringe of the “civilized world” made news headlines.

  A few weeks later, on July 16, near the village of Deering on the north Alaskan coast, Amundsen celebrated his fiftieth birthday. T
he Maud had also proceeded there. Not coincidentally, Deering was where Magids lived with her husband, Sam, the proprietor of a series of remote trading stations. Amundsen wanted a greater spectacle, perhaps to impress the young and beautiful Bess, so he and his crew spent a week flattening a landing field for a test flight of their little Curtiss airplane. (The flights were filmed by Reidar Lund and titled “With Roald Amundsen’s North Pole Expedition to the First Wintering Place.”) Apparently Fullerton then had a dispute with Magids, whom Amundsen was flirting with, and with other members of the expedition. When Amundsen told him that his services as a pilot were no longer required, since there was only one plane to fly, Fullerton declined to do the polar drift on the Maud and Amundsen sent him home. In Vancouver, Fullerton reported to the press that, to his “regret and disappointment,” Amundsen’s plans had changed and there was no more need for him, as his only goal was to fly to Spitsbergen. After a few weeks in Deering, Amundsen and Omdal took passage on the supply ship Holmes north to Wainwright, Alaska, along with the new Junkers, while the Maud, carrying the small Curtiss, which they planned to use to scout ice conditions, continued into the ice near Wrangel Island and was frozen in for the drift, with Wisting in command. The Maud would now be on an expedition of her own, frozen in the ice and out of communication with Amundsen for several years, until October 1925, when it would sail south to Seattle for a shocking welcome.

  For Amundsen and Omdal, the winter of 1922–1923 was one of great physical exertion and, unexpectedly, social outings. When they arrived in Wainwright, it was too late in the season; high winds and storms prevented them from attempting their audacious polar flight. Since Point Barrow, which had only a few hundred inhabitants, seemed too small a place for them to spend the winter, Amundsen and Omdal settled in Wainwright for the long dark season—Amundsen as cook, Omdal as carpenter. The two men built a small two-bedroom house with a dining room and a kitchen, as well as a primitive airplane hanger for storing the valuable Junkers. In November 1922, Amundsen left Omdal to work on assembling the Junkers while he set off on an overland adventure south to Nome.