The Last Viking

by Stephen Bown

  Amundsen heard the news of what he had said about Cook when he was in Montreal, en route to New York. He immediately declared that he had been misquoted, that he had in fact never made any comments of that nature, that the reporter of the “purely mythical interview” in a Fort Worth newspaper had written “pure fabrications.” Nevertheless, the damage was done, and his scheduled address to the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., was abruptly cancelled, as was his hefty speaker’s fee. “There is something wrong somewhere,” Amundsen said, as he tried to fend off numerous additional questions about why this had happened, what he really believed and if he was offended or angry. “I don’t want to get into any controversy,” he replied to one reporter for the New York Times on March 3. “I am told I am very indignant, but I am not. I am rather amused than otherwise at the childishness of things. Maybe they will grow up some day.”

  He left New York for Europe a few days later, on March 6, but not without giving a final interview in the hours before his ship sailed. What more could possibly be said after five months and hundreds of interviews—more than a dozen in the New York Times alone—during this lecture tour? He disliked overcoats. Amundsen apparently tugged and itched at the collar of his overcoat “as often as Huck Finn tugged at his uncomfortable new Sunday suit,” the reporter noted, before quoting Amundsen: “So many people stare at me when I go without an overcoat in winter that I felt I had to go out and buy this one. I don’t like to wear them. It isn’t pleasant to feel the long tails of the coat flapping against you when you walk. And I never had a cold when I went without one.” He was certainly a charming eccentric in America, and this only served to boost his popularity and gain him more publicity. But now he had to return to Europe quickly; he was supposed to be departing from Spitsbergen in two months, and he hadn’t done anything to prepare for the technical side of the next expedition. The giant airship was about to leave Italy, and Amundsen needed to be at the ceremony.

  Umberto Nobile was born in 1885, in a town in southern Italy near Naples. His father was a middle-ranking government official, and both parents encouraged his education. He graduated from the University of Naples in engineering and soon turned his considerable talents to the new field of aeronautical engineering, particularly airship design. A slight man, compared with Amundsen, he was not an athlete or a sportsman. Handsome and cultured, he fit the image of a university professor and a scientist. At the University of Naples, he founded the Institute of Aerodynamics and was a lecturer in the School of Engineering. He was far more interested in the problems of airship design than in being a pilot, and had limited experience flying the machines that he had devoted his professional career to developing.

  After the First World War, Nobile settled in Rome, where he became the director of the military airship facility. When Benito Mussolini and his Fascist Party seized power in October 1922, Nobile and his fellow aeronautical engineers were inducted into the Italian armed forces. By 1925, Nobile was a colonel and worked for the undersecretary for air, one of the four most important officials in the Fascist leadership, where he designed the N-class semi-rigid airships. But Nobile was neither a man of action nor a natural leader, and he probably wouldn’t have minded a more behind-the-scenes, technical or consultative role in the Amundsen-Ellsworth expedition. But Mussolini and the Fascist leadership had a different plan.

  Lighter-than-air airships, dirigibles, or aerostats, are buoyant aircraft that remain in the air without propulsion. They use a series of propellers and small rudders to manoeuvre what is essentially a large floating bag of gas. Airships are unlike airplanes, which use the force of air propelled under a wing to provide their lift; if the motor fails, the airship doesn’t come crashing to the ground, a virtue that Amundsen and Riiser-Larsen speculated would ideally suit airships for exploring the Arctic, with its unpredictable climate and terrain, and avoid the problems they had so recently encountered with their flying boats. Jean-Pierre Blanchard first crossed the English Channel in 1785 in a balloon propelled by an odd-looking, self-powered, flapping-wing contraption that had a rudder for steering. There were improvements to this design throughout the nineteenth century, including attempts to use steam power for propulsion. Other power source options included having eight people pedal to turn propeller cranks like rowers in a galley and, by the end of the nineteenth century, electric motors and early internal-combustion engines. The “golden age” of airship design began in the early twentieth century, with countless designs being tested for buoyancy, propulsion and steering.

  The original airships were the fully rigid German zeppelins—large cigar-shaped machines with metal frames covered by a stiff outer layer of rubber-coated fabric and filled with hydrogen. The first airship of this design was built in 1900. A non-rigid airship, or blimp, in contrast, is distinguished by having no frame at all. Blimps are essentially balloons that have a compartment or gondola strapped beneath, and they rely on air currents for horizontal movement. The Germans, Italians and French used airships for reconnaissance and bombing raids during the First World War, but with little success, since airplanes proved more useful for military applications—the airships were cumbersome to manoeuvre and highly flammable. In 1919, a British airship made the first double crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Dirigibles were fashionable in the 1920s, creating thrilling aerial spectacles that captured the public imagination as much as or more than airplanes did. But airships were not without their problems. There were several high-profile accidents with airships when they were caught in storms and buffeted to the ground.8

  Nobile’s airship designs were semi-rigid, a hybrid of the two other airship designs, combining much of the strength and manoeuvrability of the zeppelins but without their enormous weight and corresponding size. Amundsen felt they would be the perfect blend of functionality for use in the Arctic, which is what led him into dealings with Nobile and the Fascist government of Italy—a government for which he had little respect or political sympathy. He convinced himself that everything would turn out for the better, and perhaps he would retire thereafter.

  In the mid-1920s, disasters had not yet dampened public enthusiasm for airships, and they were widely believed to be the future of long-distance or oceanic travel. The media spectacle of a dirigible cruising over the North Pole was the key reason Amundsen’s latest venture was financially possible on such short notice. Despite the infusion of Ellsworth’s money, it would be quite a task to get the airship to Spitsbergen. Bases for the airship would have to be constructed near Oslo, at Vadsø on the north Norwegian coast and near Kings Bay on Spitsbergen, requiring the construction of mooring masts, giant hangars and stockpiles of gas and engine fuel, in addition to the other equipment needed for the expedition. Much of this work was under way while Amundsen was on his publicity tour of the United States; it was organized by the Norwegian Aero Club. There were cross-currents of expectations between the principal leaders long before most of them had even beheld the dirigible Norge at Kings Bay.

  Ellsworth wanted to be named co-leader of the expedition because of his financial contribution, in spite of his lack of experience or skills. Amundsen, as always, wanted to be the overall leader of the expedition, a task for which he was admirably suited, and to be the official discoverer of any new lands they might find in the Arctic; he would be the public face of the expedition. But Nobile considered himself to be far more than a mere hired pilot. As an officer in the Italian military, his task was to highlight the superiority of Italian engineering to the world. Dr. Rolf Thommessen, president of the Norwegian Aero Club, was a great admirer of Mussolini and more than willing to give credit to the Italian contingent of the expedition, even above Amundsen, and above Riiser-Larsen, who had taken airship training in England and would be second in command.

  Amundsen should have been more attuned to these competing interests. He had previously observed and noted that problems arose in expeditions when there was a lack of complete authority in one person; different factions could develop and
threaten the cohesiveness of an expedition. In Amundsen’s very first meeting with Nobile, at Uranienborg, Nobile had made an astonishing offer: that he and the Italian government would give the airship to the expedition for free if it would fly under the Italian flag. Mussolini’s interest in the expedition had increased when he realized its enormous potential for publicity. It was an offer that Amundsen had outright refused. It should have been apparent to him then that he was not dealing with a private individual or business: Nobile was an agent of Mussolini, and his airship was actually the property of the Italian state. “I did not realize it at the time,” Amundsen recalled, “but it is now clear that it was a deliberate effort on the part of the government to gain for the present Italian political regime in particular, and for the Italian people in general, a world wide advertisement. My idea of a transpolar flight was thus subtly to be appropriated as their own by the Italians, and my skill in Arctic exploration was to be utilized as the means of a dramatic achievement for which the Italians would take the credit.”

  Before Amundsen had even returned to Europe, complications arose around the original agreement: Nobile felt his contribution was large enough to warrant his being the coauthor of the official book. Amundsen, who counted on lectures and book sales for his income, refused to agree to this. Then Nobile wanted the expedition’s name changed to the Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile Transpolar Flight, which Amundsen and Ellsworth were forced to concede, although newspapers in the United States still referred to it by its original name. The New York Times on March 14, for example, ran an article headlined “The Coming Polar Flight—By Amundsen,” wherein it was revealed that Amundsen and Ellsworth, whose portraits featured prominently, were “ready for hardships.” But the three co-leaders also argued over who would have final decision-making authority over where and when the airship would fly. It was finally agreed that Amundsen and Ellsworth would be the “expedition leaders” while Nobile would hold the title of “airship commander.” They would vote on any disagreements. Nobile wanted most of the crew to be Italian, while Amundsen and the Norwegian Aero Club, naturally, wanted them to be Norwegian. Eventually it was agreed that only six of the sixteen-person crew, including Nobile, would be Italian. But Ellsworth was concerned the American participation was being minimized, and he demanded that American newspapers be offered first rights to the story. Ellsworth and Amundsen had also made the usual promotional deals involving stamps and postcards, as well as various additional serial rights to their story and images, that would be penned either by themselves or by others.

  Amundsen and Ellsworth were essentially aligned to exclude Nobile; after all, they were already “companions in danger and in achievement.” Amundsen had no problem in sharing the fame with his American friend, but he did not want to share it with the Italians, though the Italian contribution, and particularly Nobile’s, was arguably just as important. Amundsen probably wouldn’t have been so opposed to sharing credit with Nobile if the colonel hadn’t been an officer in the Fascist government, and if he had felt that Nobile was, like Amundsen and Ellsworth, working toward the same personal goal, rather than being more concerned with creating propaganda. Not only were there potential rivalries in the leadership; Amundsen and Nobile had each chosen key loyal men as part of their contingent, creating two factions that were divided on linguistic and cultural lines as well as personal loyalty. The Norwegian crew were ready to quit over Nobile’s leadership before the airship even left Rome, and Ellsworth was apparently jealous of Riiser-Larsen’s role and didn’t want the tall Norwegian to have any role in writing the official account of the adventure. There was plenty of intrigue and jockeying for prestige, resulting in squabbling that only grew with the scope of the undertaking.

  Amundsen included Riiser-Larsen, Oscar Omdal and his old companion Oscar Wisting, who had only recently returned from being stuck in the ice with the Maud. He reasoned that since Wisting been with him at the South Pole, he was entitled to be at the North Pole too if he wished. In fact, Amundsen offered a right of first refusal to the entire crew of the Maud, loyalty to his crew being extremely important to him, more so than loyalty to his family: he left behind his nephew Gustav S. Amundsen. At the last minute, however, he displaced the Russian radio operator Gennadij Olonkin, who had served on the Maud for many years, with a Norwegian man, to ensure that Norwegians on the voyage were not outnumbered by Italians. Amundsen was apparently and belatedly realizing the overriding politics of the voyage, in which nationality trumped loyalty. In hindsight, the personality problems, from the leaders to the air crew and the ground crew, were so hopelessly politicized and partisan, putting many qualities above competence and skills, that a positive response to any disaster could hardly have been expected.

  Nobile’s task of ensuring that the ship could cross thousands of kilometres from Spitsbergen over the North Pole to Alaska was perhaps not as simple as Amundsen thought it was. The known problems associated with airplanes were being exchanged for a new set of challenges associated with airships. Amundsen would be relying on the technical expertise of men he didn’t know, dealing with problems he didn’t fully understand. For example, hydrogen gas expands with increases in elevation and temperature, both of which vary throughout each day. When pressure in an airship became too high, it had to be “valved off” to prevent a rupture in its outer skin. To counter the loss of gas throughout the trip, ballast would have be jettisoned to keep the airship balanced and under control. The trip over the North Pole to Alaska was planned to take about fifty hours of flight time, with no place to land or refuel or re-ballast, so Nobile would have to monitor ballast and hydrogen carefully to ensure that the dirigible had enough of each to get to Alaska. Nobile, for his part, had no real experience with snow and ice, never having seen either, except on his winter trip to Oslo a few months earlier. Amundsen wrote that Nobile kept slipping in the snow when walking. He grew more nervous about the expedition’s prospects.

  Piloting an airship was anything but a routine exercise. The Norge was 106 metres long and 19.6 metres wide through the middle. It was propelled by three 245-horsepower Mayback internal-combustion engines and could easily cruise at about 80 kilometres per hour in the right conditions. When Nobile was calculating the weight of the men and equipment, he had little room for error, since he had already used up most of the excess weight that the airship could carry in strengthening and reinforcing the hull. Although Amundsen and Ellsworth were annoyed at Nobile’s preoccupation with minutiae such as what clothing each man would be wearing, Nobile had reason to worry: he felt that the airship was at the threshold of its carrying capacity for such an unpredictable flight.

  Amundsen later discovered that Nobile’s clothing and luggage restrictions apparently applied more to Amundsen and the Norwegians than to Nobile and the Italians; unbeknownst to Amundsen or Ellsworth, Nobile and his men loaded additional cases of equipment, mostly clothes and uniforms. Nobile also brought along his tiny pet dog, Titina.

  At a ceremony held on the grassy fields of the airport in Rome stood Mussolini, impeccably outfitted in trim suit and bowler hat rather than the Fascist black shirt. Amundsen and Ellsworth were likewise attired in their finest suits, while Nobile stood erect in his colonel’s uniform. They all gazed solemnly at the looming bulk of the airship and watched as the Italian flag was taken down from the stern of the newly named Norge and the Norwegian flag was hoisted in its place. Then there were bombastic nationalistic speeches in Italian and the raising of the Fascist salute. Mussolini, his face inscrutable, folded the Italian flag, handed it to Nobile, and said loudly: “This is to be dropped on the ice at the Pole!” The crowd dutifully cheered, roused by the thought of an Italian airship reaching that famous spot. More speeches followed before the congregation broke up and the men went their separate ways. Amundsen noted with distaste that Thommessen had agreed to Mussolini’s request to have the original name of the airship, N1, and some distinctive Italian colours remain on the vessel. It was far too late to back out now, but Am
undsen was feeling an increasing unease about the choice of Nobile as airship commander.

  A few weeks later the Norge was ready to fly again. It dropped its mooring cable and set off for Spitsbergen on a round-about journey that would take it to publicity stints in England and Oslo before pressing on to Leningrad and then north to Spitsbergen. The Norwegian and Italian crews were aboard for the brief European tour, continuing their training on airship operation under Nobile’s direction. The tour was meant to generate publicity for the upcoming flight; many people had never before seen a dirigible, and its mere presence was a public spectacle. Amundsen and Ellsworth travelled by train instead, delivering a few speeches and ceremonial lectures before crossing the choppy, storm-bound waters to Kings Bay on April 12, 1926.

  The ocean was clear of ice, but the mountains and town were still smothered in snow. At the tiny mining settlement, work continued on the mooring mast and the hangar. Both should have been completed, but severe winter storms had delayed their construction. The Norwegian Aero Club was responsible for the hangar, an enormous three-sided but roofless building near Kings Bay that would protect the Norge from the Arctic winds while the crew awaited perfect conditions for departure. All the materials for the enormous wooden frame and canvas sides had been hauled north to the remote spot by ship at great expense in the previous months. While Amundsen began overseeing the final details, the Norge waited in Leningrad for the hangar’s completion before making the journey to Spitsbergen. On April 29, all eyes watched as an American ship steamed into Kings Bay. On board were visitors who were not entirely unexpected, nor were they entirely welcome.