by Stephen Bown
Most of the actual piloting was done by Oscar Wisting, as Lieutenant Emil Horgen controlled the lift and horizontal rudder wheels. Riiser-Larsen was the principle navigator, doing the calculations by hand and relaying the information to Nobile, who then made judgments and told the pilots what to do. The radio operator kept busy relaying messages of the airship’s progress across the top of the world to eager newspapers. Although there was a perpetual drone from the engines and occasional engine trouble caused by frozen water vapour, the only real danger came from ice forming on the dirigible as it entered fog, which made it heavier and harder to control when its valves and flaps jammed. Whereas it needed to be low to the ground for better visibility in the fog, it risked a deadly ice build-up at lower altitudes as well.
Other navigators, including Ellsworth, were busy with sextant observations, sun readings and magnetic compass bearings, in an effort to determine position. The Norge neared the North Pole at around 1:30 a.m. on May 12. As Riiser-Larsen squinted into his sextant, he announced: “Ready the flags. Now we are there.” Nobile called for the engines to be cut, and all went quiet as the giant dirigible slowly drifted over an unremarkable icy spot. It then began to slowly circle the lifeless location at about 100 metres elevation. In the great cabin, Amundsen stared over at his old companion Wisting, who had been at the South Pole with him. Now they were together at the opposite end of the earth, the first people in history to obtain this distinction. They did not say anything, merely exchanging a quiet handshake. No doubt it was an emotional if undemonstrative moment. Amundsen, then Ellsworth, and then Nobile, brought out their national flags, attached to sharp metal poles, and dropped them to the ice below, where they stuck upright, fluttering slightly in the wind.
Nobile had firmly told Amundsen and Ellsworth to bring only small flags, about the size of handkerchiefs, to keep the weight down on the airship, so they stared in astonishment when he brought forth an enormous Italian flag, carried reverently in a special casket under Mussolini’s orders. Nobile also brought forth several other pennants and flags representing various cities and associations, which he dumped out the window of the cabin making the airship look, in Amundsen’s words, “like a circus wagon in the skies.” One of Nobile’s fluttering flags was so large that it drifted toward one of the engines and was caught in the slowly spinning propellers, nearly damaging the rotor. Amundsen laughed at Nobile, annoyed both at the duplicity and the Italian’s conceit. It was reminiscent of the time when Nobile told all the men on the voyage to reduce their clothing allowance and then provided all of his own men with ceremonial uniforms. Nobile ignored the derision and wrote in his log book: “Planted the Italian Flag at the Pole.” From here all directions led south.
How many men could claim to have been at the North Pole by 1926? Frederick Cook’s claim to have been the first arrival had never really been accepted, and he was widely believed to have provided fraudulent evidence. Peary was widely believed at the time to have been there on foot, but that claim has been challenged and is no longer universally accepted. He may not have been deceitful, but he failed to account for the drifting of pack ice in his calculations and was overly generous in his estimations of the distance he travelled over the ice. He probably never came within a reasonable distance of the North Pole, certainly not enough to be credited with attaining it. As for Byrd, the controversy over his flight was to come in the following years, when the true distance he claimed to have flown was calculated to have been unrealistically far for that type of airplane and that duration of flight. The crew of the Norge, on the other hand, were the first to indisputably reach the North Pole. All of Amundsen’s records have stood the test of time. This is something uncommon for that era, when assessing an explorer’s claims was difficult and yet the fame, prestige and money awarded for claiming an exotic geographical conquest were great enough to propel men into fraudulent claims for their achievements.
After an hour of circling the North Pole, the Norge’s engines roared and the airship turned to cross the unknown expanse toward Alaska. For Amundsen and Ellsworth, the exciting part of the journey was just beginning—the search for new land. Every hour brought never-before-seen terrain and the possibility of bumping into the mountain range Peary claimed to have sighted years earlier. The two explorers hovered near the airship’s windows, their eyes scanning the horizon for any variation in the ice plain. Meanwhile, exhaustion was beginning to take its toll on the crew. They had already had a night of interrupted sleep before they left, and then another aboard the airship, where the incessant noise of the engines and the howling of the wind, freezing temperatures and cramped conditions were not conducive to relaxation or sleep. Discarded thermoses and food littered the cramped cabin floor. Although excitement had accompanied them to the North Pole, weariness now set in. Nobile got some sleep—a lot, according to Amundsen; barely a few hours, Nobile claimed afterward.
A couple of hours after they left the pole, mysterious pools of fog began to appear. They grew larger, until finally the Norge was enveloped in fog. Not only did this hamper visibility, frustrating Amundsen and Ellsworth, but it began to slowly condense into ice on the exterior of the airship. Eventually the ice formed an enormous crust and made the airship much heavier, ruining Nobile’s carefully arrived-at weight-to-gas-and-ballast calculations.
Occasionally chunks of ice would break off and slide down the canvas coat of the airship, falling into its engines. When a chunk hit the whirling propeller blades it was shot into the outer shell, rending it in several places. The real worry was that the shards of ice would puncture a gas chamber or damage a propeller blade, either stalling or deflating the airship, and causing it to crash on the ice. So Nobile reduced the rotational speed of the outer engines, slowing the airship down and prolonging their journey. The irregular positioning of the remaining and accumulating ice continued to create a great danger, however: it was forming more heavily on the bow of the ship, pulling the nose down until the crew’s frenzied shifting of ballast compensated for it. Soon ice coated the aerial wire that dangled behind the airship, too, cutting off all contact with the outside world; a situation only Amundsen regarded as normal. Not only could the Norge not report its position and observations, it no longer had access to updated weather reports in Alaska. Rescue ships were put on alert because no one knew why radio contact with the airship had ended. But no rescue ship could reach the crew where they were now. Nobile later accused Amundsen of deliberately cutting radio contact, for which there is no evidence; but the dire situation no doubt heightened the tension and excitement of the expedition in a way that regular check-ins could never do.
After a few hours, the fog dissipated and the airship droned onward, looking for land. The crew saw no land, only ice covering a vast sea. Then, as chunks of ice continued to slide off the exterior of the airship, causing more tears in the outer coating, Riiser-Larsen called out “Land ahead to starboard!” And when the crew took their measurements, they determined that the Norge was drifting along the north coast of Alaska. The last great unknown region of the earth had been crossed, and there was no new land to be found. Later that morning the airship cruised slowly over a frozen beach. Amundsen thought the land looked like Point Barrow, but with visibility poor he couldn’t be certain. Pushed by an increasing tailwind and turbulent conditions, the ship headed along the coast until the crew saw some Inuit below, looking up at them and waving. Then they saw the red roofs of a caribou farm that Amundsen and Omdal knew to be near Wainwright; in fact, they could see Amundsen’s cabin, where people stood on the roof cheering and waving. Among the crowds were George Wilkins and his co-pilot, the Norwegian Ben Eilson, the other competitors in that summer’s race to the North Pole, who had been unable to fly after their earlier crash due to fog.
But the voyage wasn’t over. The final day of the four-day flight was the most dangerous and most difficult. The men were exhausted. Riiser-Larsen reported having hallucinations, and others fell into stunned slumber where they stood, hav
ing slept little since leaving Kings Bay. Amundsen and Nobile were faced with yet another decision: take the long route, following around the coast to Nome, or turn inland and over the mountains to reach Nome directly. These mountains had never been crossed by a flying machine and their elevation was unknown, making the trip particularly dangerous.
Soon the decision was made for them. Erratic winds began to buffet the Norge and more ice began to form as the airship drifted uncontrollably out over the Bering Strait. The crew scrambled out along the rigging to knock off the ice, its weight threatening to drag the craft into the frigid waters. The men were poorly equipped to respond to this emergency. Many had received only basic training, and they were still unable to converse in a common language. The airship was alternately driven low over the water and tossed into the air. “I cannot attempt to give any details of this breathless race under the implacable fog, among the hills, over the ice of Kotzbue Bay, over frozen lagoons,” Nobile wrote afterward. “Who can tell what route we followed, or how we wound in and out of the fog? Even today I can still live through the emotions of this wild flight under the fog, without knowing where we were or where we were going; but the recollection is confused, as in a nightmare.”
The temperature fluctuated with the Norge’s altitude changes, making it nearly impossible for Nobile to accurately estimate how much hydrogen to valve off in order to keep the airship as high as possible. There was no more ballast to drop to make the craft lighter, but if Nobile released too much gas it would be too heavy when the storm cleared. Should they fly under or over the fog? What was the weight of the ice on the outside of the ship? When the airship finally made its way back toward the coast, Nobile feared that a rogue gust of wind would knock the airship into the mountainous terrain. If it did hit, there might only be seconds to jump from the damaged airship before it exploded—the vast volume of hydrogen would go up in flames instantly with a spark of electricity or an open flame. So the airship continued south along the coast, weaving between hills, trying to keep below the fog. Villages appeared and disappeared, people waved. There was little the crew could do to change their predicament.
Riiser-Larsen decided to check their position by using his sextant to take a reading on the sun. He climbed along the ladders to the bow to get out from underneath the shadow of the airship, as Nobile was steering it higher to get above the fog. As soon as the airship cleared the fog, the sun heated up its surface and the hydrogen gas expanded, swelling the chambers to bursting. The automatic valves started releasing gas, but not fast enough to solve the immediate crisis of the chambers nearly bursting. The airship was still pointed up for the ascent. Nobile desperately spun the elevator wheel, but it didn’t respond. In desperation he began yelling in Italian and gesticulating wildly in the direction of the front of the airship, while the Norwegians looked on in bewilderment.
Only after a few agonizing moments did they realize what he was saying. They rushed to the nose of the airship, clambering along the gangplank and shifting their weight until the airship slowly tilted downward before its gas chambers exploded. But now the airship was plunging precipitously through the fog toward the ground. The men dashed back to the cabin. During a period of only a couple of minutes, the Norge had soared to 1,650 metres before plummeting to little over 180 metres while being blown inland with the wind.
On another occasion Nobile forgot to respond to Riiser-Larsen’s shout to fly up—he stood at the elevator wheel stunned and unresponsive, probably literally asleep at the wheel, while the airship roared toward a hilltop, until Riiser-Larsen pushed him aside and cranked on the wheel. The ship reversed direction again, barely avoiding the ground. And once, they came so close to a hilltop in the fog that the dangling antenna hooked on some rocks and snapped off. Although Amundsen saw these incidents as yet further evidence of Nobile’s poor flying ability, they more likely pointed to the unsuitability of using hydrogen-filled dirigibles to fly in regions where temperatures and winds fluctuate wildly.
More storms followed along the coastline while the Norge bucked in the headwinds, at one point making no progress at all. Nobile, totally exhausted, fell asleep in Amundsen’s chair. Nevertheless they continued, and a few hours later spied the roofs of houses below. They agreed to land the airship, even though Amundsen knew the community wasn’t Nome. The Norge cruised over a three-masted ship in the frozen bay and readied an enormous anchor and the landing ropes. But it was still not over. Before anyone had climbed down, a sudden gust pushed the airship toward the shore, pulling loose the anchor. Nobile cranked the valves to release hydrogen. The great machine began to sag and shrink, accompanied by the sounds of a tonne of ice cracking and falling from the outer shell. Its terrified crew slid down the ropes while the great beast collapsed around its skeletal framework, limp and unresponsive, in a field not far from the cottages. A group of onlookers gathered round, quietly staring at the deflated behemoth. Where were they? “Teller” came the reply—still about 160 kilometres north of Nome, but safe enough. The New York Times promptly ran a curious story, “Amundsen Visited Teller Back in 1922,” detailing his previous visit to the community in the Maud to purchase reindeer meat.
The world’s final patch of undiscovered geography was discovered not from the deck of a heaving ship or from behind a pack of panting dogs, but from inside the technological wonder of a flying ship, where the explorers were curiously removed from the event. Outside the window of the droning machine the surface of the earth had passed unremarkably beneath them, as if in a dream. It was a strangely modern end to the age of exploration, ushering in an age of passive observation, in which the machine was as much the hero as the people who operated it.
Amundsen and Ellsworth didn’t fully appreciate the technical challenges of flying an airship under any conditions, let alone in the Arctic. They just wanted someone to pilot the craft according to their instructions, much as they hired men for many other jobs requiring technical proficiency. Nobile was the wrong person for this arrangement—picky, proud, an academic and a high-ranking military officer—he was a man of distinction in Italy who felt he should have been given greater respect in the Arctic. When this was not forthcoming from Amundsen and Ellsworth, Nobile felt no compulsion to honour his agreements with them. He was also the wrong man by profession. He wasn’t a pilot for hire, a private individual looking for employment; he was a high-ranking officer in a foreign armed force, and as such was not entirely at liberty to make his own personal decisions. Clearly, Amundsen and Nobile were incompatible personalities grappling for respect and leadership; but it was the fallout from publicity that turned irritation to hatred.
After a few days in Teller, Amundsen, Ellsworth, Wisting and Omdal boarded a launch for Nome. The wireless in Teller wasn’t working, and Amundsen wanted to get his story out. Nobile and Riiser-Larsen stayed behind to supervise the packing of the airship for its trip back to the southern United States, though it was severely damaged and might never fly again. The Teller wireless transmitter was soon repaired, and Nobile sent off his own press report to the world detailing the adventures of the Norge, highlighting his own and the Italian role. This news was received with great fanfare in Italy, where 100,000 fans cheered a speech marking the event given by Mussolini, who was flanked by a large Italian flag alongside smaller Norwegian and American flags. According to his contract, Nobile had no legal right to do this. The contract stated that “Nobile shall be under obligation not to publish any papers, articles, photographs or designs relating to this expedition without the authorization of the Norwegian Aero Club. . . . [This] includes radio or other telegraphic communications sent from the airship or from land stations during stops.” He was entitled to send a communication to the Italian government “on the condition that these communications shall in no case be published before the press-telegrams”—which, of course, they were.
Amundsen and Ellsworth finalized their version of the story later in May and sent it to the American newspapers that had paid a great deal of
money for the story (first to the New York Times, which had paid $55,000 for exclusive first rights). But Nobile’s attempt to scoop them damaged their newsworthiness: parts of the story had already been poached and had made the rounds as general news. This threat to their exclusive contract must have reminded Amundsen of the Northwest Passage scenario all over again.
He and his comrades were not received as enthusiastically in Nome as they had hoped. Amundsen had promised that the airship would land in Nome, and according to a newspaper account “the Chamber of Commerce had gone to considerable expense placing a cable and four anchors on the Nome landing field. A triumphal arch had been erected on the main street and streamers and banners lined the street, while all the buildings and homes were decorated.” Over one hundred men had been readied to haul the landing ropes of the airship. Not surprisingly, they didn’t understand the difficulties of airship landings, and “a feeling of resentment against Amundsen was expressed by many over the failure of the explorer to bring the Norge to Nome.” Then Nobile made a separate and ostentatious display of his arrival a few days later and kept his Italian crew separate from the Norwegians, even organizing a celebration ceremony in honour of the flight to which neither Amundsen nor Ellsworth was invited. The three explorers and their crew departed together on a steamship bound for Seattle, frequently posing for photographs but with the two sides never actually speaking to each other during the twelve-day voyage.