The Last Viking

by Stephen Bown

  Back in Norway in March, Amundsen disembarked from the train one stop before Oslo5 to avoid the crowds waiting for him there. As usual, he avoided publicity in Norway, particularly before departing on an expedition; he loved celebrating with crowds for a while after he returned. He asked for and received a small donation from the Norwegian state and settled in for a few weeks at Uranienborg. When Ellsworth arrived, he stayed at Uranienborg, enjoying numerous feasts and celebrations with “these hearty people, surrounding the festive [smorgas]board, eating and drinking, laughing and telling stories.” One day, he drank so much fiery aquavit that he forgot to pack his collar for a formal dinner engagement. “At the end of the second day of such feeding,” he noted, “I threw up my hands in surrender. ‘After what you told me in Oslo,’ I reproached Amundsen, ‘I expected only black bread and soup; but, my heavens, you live better than we do in America.’ And I added: ‘Norwegians are certainly big eaters.’ A twinkle came into the squinting grey eyes. ‘You ought to see the Swedes eat,’ said Amundsen.”

  Amundsen’s home was again filled with visiting family and friends, but it was missing his brother Leon and his foster daughters. The girls had been sent back to Alaska during his bankruptcy proceedings the previous year. Of course, they had never been his daughters in a traditional sense; Amundsen was hardly ever in Norway, and they had been shuffled among various relatives and friends for years. He wanted them to return to their homeland in the north. He had taken them in, if his own later writings can be believed, as a sort of experiment to prove to the world that they were just as capable of learning and becoming “civilized” as any European. The experiment done—and proved, in his mind—now he wanted them to return to their families and communities, especially since he could no longer afford their upkeep. His older brother Gustav had arranged for both girls to return to the Carpendale family along the Siberian coast.

  His actions now seem rather callous, but they should be considered in light of the times. It was widely believed that “primitive” peoples were incapable of “civilized” behaviour; that they were in fact not as intelligent or developed as Europeans. Amundsen, who had lived with, emulated and admired many aboriginal peoples during his life, knew this not to be true, and his foster daughters were part of his effort to disprove the claims of racial hierarchy then prevalent—soon to be elevated to a horrific level by the rise of Nazi Germany and, in a slightly different form, by the eugenics movement in North America. He never intended to be the girls’ actual father—he had very little in the way of a domestic streak—and had brought them to Europe to prove a wider point: that they were capable and intelligent, regardless of their ancestry.

  Nevertheless, Amundsen was so busy with his projects, travels and financial stress (the Maud had still not returned from the ice when he was about to fly north with Ellsworth) that when he delegated responsibility for something, of necessity he quickly dismissed it from his mind. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Amundsen wasn’t always honest with himself about his moral, if not legal, responsibilities.6

  When Ellsworth arrived in Oslo at the end of March, he was just in time to attend a grand dinner hosted by the Norwegian Aeronautical Association at the Grand Hotel. There was a fancy cake decorated with airplanes circling a rendition of the North Pole, and many speeches and toasts were dedicated to the daring adventurers. The next day, Amundsen and Ellsworth boarded a train north to Bergen and then a steamship to Tromsø. The aircraft were also transported by train and steamship to Tromsø, and from there they all travelled overseas again, to the tiny coal-mining settlement of Kings Bay on Spitsbergen, which consisted of little more than a few wooden houses on a stony beach. Their boat was caught in tremendous swells, and Ellsworth and Amundsen were horribly seasick. By early May the six men had made themselves at home; they had unpacked and begun assembling the flying boats near the beach, not an inconsiderable task—the temperature was about –10°C (14°F), although they had endless daylight.

  During their first “council of war,” as Amundsen put it, he outlined a plan to which he hoped the others would agree. Two airplanes would set off for the North Pole together and land as near the pole as possible to take observations and solidify their claims to actually having been there. Then, Amundsen explained eagerly, looking around at the other men to gauge their reactions, he and Riiser-Larsen and a mechanic would board one plane and continue on to Alaska while the other plane returned to Spitsbergen. Fortunately, more realistic heads prevailed: the planes had never been tested in the Arctic, the others observed; nor did they have any realistic idea of how fierce the winds would be at the North Pole, nor the rate of fuel consumption, nor the ice or water conditions. If the two aircraft stayed together, then if one plane developed problems, the other could come to the rescue or at least fly out for help. The men all voted down Amundsen’s plan. Then Riiser-Larsen mentioned that while he was in Italy he had heard of a dirigible that was for sale, second-hand, for about $100,000. It was of a newer design by the Italian engineer Colonel Umberto Nobile. Ellsworth was intrigued; he and Amundsen had discussed airships and concluded that whatever their merits, they were far too expensive for their purposes. But at this price, Ellsworth vowed to purchase it. The next summer they could leisurely traverse the entire region while this year contenting themselves with a jaunt to the North Pole and back. Two years earlier, when he had been in Italy, Amundsen had actually flown in the very airship that was now for sale, and he now began making of list of alterations that would better outfit this dirigible for use in the Arctic.

  Kings Bay was still covered with a sheet of ice. This made it difficult to get the airplanes to shore, but it would be a boon for takeoff, because the fuselage could glide over ice with far less drag than in open water, allowing the travellers to stow an additional tonne of fuel—fuel that probably saved their lives. Perhaps it would even compensate for the fact that they wouldn’t be carrying radios with them; the radios hadn’t arrived by mid-May, and the brief window of opportunity for flying in the Arctic would close if they didn’t leave soon. Most of the technical work was completed by Riiser-Larsen and Dietrichson, including bringing Amundsen and Ellsworth up to speed on the techniques of navigation. All that was left for Amundsen was to teach Ellsworth how to ski; despite claiming a great desire for polar exploration, Ellsworth had never skied. The crew waited patiently for weeks until the weather calmed, and on May 21 they prepared to fly. Amundsen was unfortunately preoccupied with the welfare of Kristine Bennett, who had undergone a minor operation in London. One can’t help but feel sorry for the great explorer, to be so obsessed with a woman whom he rarely saw and who surely by now would have left her husband for him if that was her intention.

  The settlement’s coal miners were given the day off from work to watch the historic takeoff. Many, if not all, believed the adventurers to be lunatics, a view shared by the small European and American flying community. From Kings Bay to the North Pole and back would be about 2,400 kilometres through airspace that had never before been flown. In the early morning, the six heavily bundled men crunched across the ice to the two flying boats with purpose, donned their bulky parachutes and climbed onto the wings to enter the aircraft. One photo of Amundsen, a trim and muscular man, shows him looking like a puffy sausage in his layers of flying clothing, including woollen underwear and sweaters, a leather jacket, two pairs of woollen pants, a sealskin greatcoat, a leather flying helmet, gloves, scarves and heavy boots. He would, after all, be flying in an unheated, open-cockpit airplane across the Arctic Ocean, at high speeds and in freezing air.

  The engines roared to life, and the first heavily loaded airplane, N25—Amundsen’s plane, naturally—surged forward across Kings Bay and toward the mountains. N25 was slow to rise, and Amundsen glanced over at Riiser-Larsen to gauge his expression. “Had he been seated at the breakfast table he could scarcely have looked less concerned.”7 Soon the lumbering aircraft gained enough altitude and cleared the mountains. It circled around waiting for N24, and then
upon the two aircraft sighting each other in the golden glow of the rising sun, they headed for the North Pole. Amundsen, the visionary and the dreamer, was again going where no one had gone before. N24 and N25 cruised over a vast sea of ice covered in wispy fog. The takeoff, particularly for N24, had been rough, and some of its rivets had burst under the pressure, causing a small gasoline leak, although no one knew this at the time. For several hours the two airplanes cruised without incident over monotonous terrain, until the fog cleared and the vast majesty of ice presented itself, a frozen plain stretching to the horizon, empty and featureless in all directions. Amundsen glanced out the window as his plane roared north at 120 kilometres per hour, covering in mere hours a distance that would have taken him more than a week to travel by skis and dogsled. Using binoculars, the men’s radius of vision was extended to nearly 100 kilometres, or about 15,000 kilometres each hour, of terrain never before seen. It contained no surprises: “At least I thought we might see a bear,” Amundsen commented.

  After eight hours they had travelled about 1,000 kilometres, and Amundsen thought they must be near the North Pole. He began looking for a spot to land, but when N25 descended, he saw rough blocks of ice thrust up in pressure ridges, cut by serpentine gashes of open water and plugged with icebergs and frozen detritus. As the two aircraft cruised above the treacherous terrain, one of N25’s engines began to sputter. Riiser-Larsen reacted swiftly, steering the lurching aircraft into a narrow channel of slushy open water that was bounded by icy walls on either side. In a masterful display of dexterity and nerve, he eased the stricken flying boat between the ice outcroppings and zigzagged along the waterway until the slush brought it to a stop just in front of a giant iceberg.

  Dietrichson, in the other airplane and without a radio, had no idea what had happened. He flew N24 for ten minutes further along, until he spied a wider, safer-looking lagoon, and dropped the craft into the slush. But the channel was too short. The airplane bounced across the surface and crashed into a mighty, 200-metre-diameter ice floe. It began to take on water. “Omdal! Omdal!” Dietrichson called. “The plane is leaking like hell!” Dietrichson, Omdal and Ellsworth quickly leaped out of N24 and into a metre of snow.

  Suddenly there was silence. Looking around, Ellsworth saw a lone seal regarding them from the water’s edge. One of the plane’s engines was mangled, and water had filled parts of the damaged craft. Dietrichson grumbled that Amundsen had probably flown on without them to the North Pole, until Ellsworth pointed out that they would have heard the engines above them. The men quickly set up a tent. They began pumping water from the hull and heating water for soup and coffee. “We owed ourselves a drink,” Ellsworth recalled. (It was the era of prohibition in the United States.)

  The next day, they climbed a nearby ice hummock, from which through their binoculars they spied N25 across the expanse of ice. They couldn’t communicate except by waving flags back and forth—a tedious process, since no one understood Morse code or semaphore. It seemed too dangerous to risk walking the 5 kilometres or so between the two downed planes, since the terrain was impassable with jagged ice, chaotic crevasses and shifting channels of thin ice and open water. For the next several days the two parties worked independently, unloading their planes, setting up their camps and working on repairs as best they could. The first challenge, however, was to somehow prevent the ice from freezing-in the airplanes when the temperature dropped.

  On the second day, when they found they could do nothing to move their heavy flying boat back into a level position, Ellsworth and his two companions tried to reach Amundsen’s group. They set off on skis, and were making progress through the heavy snow, ridges and crevasses before they were faced with a channel of open water. The ice continued to drift, and fortunately it brought them closer to their companions rather than farther away. They set off again, carrying 50-kilogram packs and carefully pushing across the thin ice that had formed over the previous day’s open channel. It was dangerous, but they had no choice. Omdal took the lead, followed by Ellsworth and then Dietrichson. Without warning the ice sagged and split, and Omdal and Dietrichson plunged into the Arctic Ocean, soon to be followed by Ellsworth, who lost his balance and slid from view. Arms flailing, Ellsworth grabbed hold of an ice chunk and hauled himself up from the channel. He quickly unstrapped his skis and held one end out to Dietrichson, who managed to drag himself from the ocean. Omdal, still strapped to his massive pack, clung to the ice edge, but the current was dragging him under. “I’m gone,” he called, “I’m gone!” But Ellsworth crawled closer, using his skis as a brace, and reached out to cut Omdal’s pack loose; it quickly swirled under the ice. His hands numb from the cold, Ellsworth clutched Omdal’s coat and dragged the barely conscious mechanic onto the ice. Omdal’s hands were cut and bloody, and five of his teeth had been smashed, but he could still move. The three men immediately began to crawl to the safety of more solid ice. Amundsen and Riiser-Larsen, who had picked their way across the ice from N25 to meet them, quickly helped their three freezing compatriots back to the camp around the N25. Shivering and exhausted, they had a shot of liquor, changed into dry clothes and warmed up with hot chocolate.

  “Here we were, 600 miles from civilization, landed upon the ice with airplanes equipped for landing upon water, with the engine of one of the planes utterly out of commission, and with provisions adequate for full nourishment for only about three weeks.” It was now that Amundsen displayed the leadership characteristics for which he had won so many honours. He calmly but quickly organized the men into groups, established work shifts and patterns to divide up the endless daylight: eating, working, resting, smoke breaks, sleeping. The men began hauling the miraculously undamaged N25 from the icy hill it was perched upon, and pulled on ropes while the engines roared, rocking the airplane back and forth. The six men were able to accomplish what had been impossible for three, and soon the plane was level on the ice’s surface.

  For the next few weeks the men worked at levelling a runway on the ice—clearing the snow and hacking away the ice ridges. They had only a single axe and improvised cutting tools, which they constructed by attaching knives to the end of ski poles. They spent days walking around the floe, flattening the piles of snow, aided by the freeze-thaw cycle. Amundsen organized the rations so that they would have food for twenty-five days, until June 15, at which time he suggested that they try to trek overland toward Greenland, even though they would be out of food by then. There was no more discussion of continuing on to the North Pole; merely getting back in the air and returning to Spitsbergen would be challenge enough. It was now life or death. They were trapped on a floating island of ice and snow. Soon, the brutal work made the men weary and sickly. Unable to wash, they became filthy. Amundsen’s face became lined, and his beard came in white. He appeared to have aged ten years in a few weeks.

  The constant sunlight wasn’t the only reason sleep eluded the men: the ice beneath them was always shifting. At one point they left N25 in a small pool while focusing on the runway, only to have the ice start to close in, threatening to crush the airplane. “I expected at every moment to see the side stove in like a concertina,” Amundsen wrote. Once alerted to the danger, the men hacked at the newly forming ice and rocked the floating plane back and forth to make sure that ice formed under it rather than around it. They all knew that if their craft became frozen-in or damaged, they would certainly die. The stress began to take its toll, and the men quarrelled about even minor things; certainly the possibility of death hovered over everyone. None of them wanted to end their lives here, spending their last moments with companions who sighed in their sleep, let their biscuits crumble into a mess or dropped precious strands of the diminishing tobacco supply into the snow.

  After making a few aborted attempts to take off on shorter distances, Dietrichson now knew approximately the length of runway they would need.

  Now on half rations, the men were becoming weaker and their work slower. For breakfast they had a small cup of hot chocola
te and three medium-sized crackers; for lunch, a cup of soup, and for dinner, more hot chocolate and crackers. It was not much nutrition for men doing heavy work in cold temperatures, but it was all the airplanes were able to carry. “I should estimate,” Amundsen wrote, “that we moved at least 500 tons of ice in the twenty-four days.” They still found the time to take numerous measurements of ocean currents, depth and temperature; Amundsen wanted to have at least a little scientific data to show for the expedition’s efforts—just enough to make it into the papers, and to prove that there was no land near their accidental camp.

  After more than three weeks of work, the “day of decision” arrived. The runway was done; it was in fact about 100 metres longer than they had hoped for. “If someone offered me a million kroner for those extra hundred metres, I would not accept,” Amundsen recalled, echoing the common sentiment: the distance was barely enough for the plane to take off, in Dietrichson and Riiser-Larsen’s view, even assuming the airplane’s fuselage was structurally sound enough to go skidding over a rough ice field before lift-off. On that day, June 15, fog shrouded the airplane and obscured the lumpy runway. But there was no delaying their departure: they had run out of food and it was not possible to extend the length of the runway any farther because of a thick ice ridge. The men unloaded everything unnecessary from the fuselage—extra clothes, camp equipment, skis, tents, guns, tools, movie camera, canoe—and flung it all unceremoniously onto the ice in a great pile. They had only this one chance, and if they failed to lift off in time, the plane would smash into the ice ridge. Six people weighing down one airplane would be a close thing, but if they didn’t try this they would surely die. There was no talk of leaving anyone behind.