The Last Viking

by Stephen Bown

  The tenor of the debate changed after the publication in 1979 of Roland Huntford’s epic and revisionist Scott and Amundsen, a ground-breaking work that was republished in 1999 as The Last Place on Earth. Huntford’s book, which focused on contrasting Amundsen’s and Scott’s journeys to the South Pole, shattered many of the myths fuelling the disparaging British view of Amundsen. Yet the debate concerning the relative virtues of Amundsen and Scott has continued, unfortunately without much subsequent discussion of Amundsen’s substantial accomplishments following his exploits in Antarctica. This book is intended to address the dearth.

  With the exception of Huntford, many who have written about the conquest of the South Pole have seemed to believe that Amundsen could do no good. Instead of portraying a firm and visionary leader, they present Amundsen as an autocrat. Rather than recognizing him as a curious explorer, they see him as single-mindedly in pursuit of glory. Rather than acknowledging his talent for self-deprecating storytelling, they describe him as a shallow and narcissistic manipulator. And rather than praising him for making skilful use of indigenous polar traditions and technology, they disdain him for being heartless in the treatment of his dogs. To diminish his achievements, his critics claim that Amundsen was merely lucky.

  There was actually a time when British schoolchildren were taught that Scott the Briton was the first person to reach the South Pole, and that Amundsen had cheated in “the great race.” Amundsen’s legacy certainly raises questions about our knowledge of the past: What do we really know about past events—and hence the present—when our understanding of those events (and the people involved in them) has been shaped, perhaps manipulated, by the political and social agendas of vested interests and longstanding prejudices?

  Some portrayals of Amundsen are bizarre. There are claims that his entire life’s goal was to reach the North Pole, and that everything he did was for his own aggrandizement. Also, that contemporaries who thought well of him were “bootlickers.” In this view there is only one actor, Amundsen; all the other members of his expeditions were apparently bit players in the drama of the Norwegian explorer’s life. The truth is that all the members of his expeditions were keen participants in those death-defying adventures over the years.

  Some writers muster up shock that Amundsen had affairs with three married women, regarding it as evidence of his pathological desire to defeat others—in this case, their husbands—just as he would stop at nothing to conquer Scott and the South Pole. But what other women was Amundsen likely to meet, given the circumstances of his life? In the early twentieth century, women married early and usually had children. Amundsen had little time to socialize in the periods between his multi-year expeditions to the wilds. The first opportunity he had to consider settling down was upon his return from the South Pole, when he was already forty years old. Most women within a decade of his age were in all probability already married. And what of the possibility that Amundsen was the object of pursuit for mature women seeking an escape from their dull or otherwise unfulfilling marriages? He was famous, a man of mystery, and undoubtedly carried about him a hint of danger and a whiff of scandal—worthy of a fling or a brief engagement, perhaps, but not of a lifelong commitment.

  Ultimately, however, we know little about Amundsen’s relationships because he was not one to kiss and tell. He knew that anything he said might irreparably damage the reputations of the women with whom he was involved, and remained silent even when things did not work out as he had hoped. In those conservative days, this was an honourable trait. His endless travels and occasional affairs didn’t lead to happiness or contentment; discontent was the price the voyager paid for fame and adventure.

  Amundsen has remained an enigmatic figure in the literature devoted to him, his reputation depending upon the time and source. High achievers tend to be much more complicated than the stereotypes employed to portray them, which in Amundsen’s case appear to have been repeated from book to book over the years. Amundsen was multi-faceted, and he could be taciturn, rude and brusque. Many accounts attest to this. In his final years, following his quarrel with Umberto Nobile, he appeared to be erratic and, some feared, unmoored. But even more numerous than these accounts are those from comrades who praised his leadership qualities, his warmth, his sense of humour and generosity.

  Amundsen could be a hard taskmaster. He was temperamental, unstinting in his attention to detail and occasionally rough with his words. Many of his men complained in their private journals of his abrasiveness and brusqueness while under stress, yet they willingly signed on for more adventures with Amundsen when the time came. Some of their comments are reminiscent of those in which soldiers might gripe about their famous general between battles but rally passionately to him once the fighting starts. Amundsen’s men recalled their journeys fondly in hindsight, even while the day-to-day record in their diaries suggests that these journeys were mostly unpleasant and frustrating, filled with hardships and tedious delays. Clearly, their feeling of accomplishment and camaraderie prevailed long after the expedition was over.

  Although it could be infuriating to heed the seemingly endless details of Amundsen’s instructions, most of his men knew that it was this apparent fussiness that brought them back alive and victorious rather than in a body bag or with their heads hung in failure. Amundsen’s attention to detail made his expeditions successful, and as the expedition leader he was merely the enforcer of what all knew were the necessary logistics of his operations if they wanted to succeed. They knew what was expected of them before they signed on. On a day-to-day basis the personal dynamics of any small, endangered group could be trying. Living together for months, or even years, hearing the same old jokes and stories, dealing with the same irritating aspects of other personalities, is bound to drive anyone a little mad. It wasn’t Amundsen’s job to make his men happy, but to lead them to victory, alive.

  It’s hard to know whether members of Amundsen’s crews knew that it was equally frustrating for their leader to be preoccupied with these annoying interpersonal details. He was forced to make hard choices, sometimes life-and-death decisions, quickly and frequently. Rarely was there time for reflection as events unfolded, and in hindsight some of his decisions proved unnecessary or wrong. The stress must have been great—the second-guessing, planning and rethinking of various scenarios over and over again, anxiety-inducing as the possibilities of defeat or victory alternately preyed on Amundsen’s imagination. At the same time, Amundsen was perceptive enough to know what others were experiencing or feeling, and he was generous with his praise of others’ abilities and contributions. He shared credit willingly and the public acclaim widely.

  Sverre Hassel, Amundsen’s expert dog-driver and an experienced polar sailor, seems to have been the one who was most irritated by Amundsen during their South Pole expedition. Nevertheless he kept his work in perfect form and never quarrelled much with either his leader or other crew members. He vented his frustrations in a private notebook but did not engage in quarrels or make them public. After a “victory banquet” in Buenos Aires, Hassel wrote that Amundsen “said he knew he was an unpleasant man to work with. And he is right. However, it is extraordinary how an honest admission of one’s faults can help alleviate the dislike they create.” Like the other members of Amundsen’s party, Hassel forgave his old boss his cantankerous moments. He remained in touch with Amundsen throughout his life and died while visiting him at Uranienborg many years later in 1928.

  In later years Amundsen arranged work for the men who had remained loyal to him, pushing for their promotion and fighting for government recognition and pensions for them, even lending them money. Although expedition member Olav Bjaaland chose to remain in Norway for the rest of his life after returning from the South Pole and did not join in any further expeditions, Amundsen lent him money to start a ski manufacturing business. On another occasion, Amundsen threatened to cancel one of his expeditions when the Norwegian government appeared to be reneging on promises made to his cre
w about their positions and decorations. He was loyal to a fault, using his fame and influence as well as his own money, or the expeditions’ money, to work for the interests of his former comrades. In Britain, Ernest Shackleton, responding to Amundsen’s self-effacement in a speech to the Royal Geographical Society, noted that “throughout the lecture tonight I never heard the word ‘I’ mentioned; it was always ‘we’. I think that is the way in which Amundsen got his men to work along with him, and it brought the successful conclusion.”

  Amundsen’s most fascinating trait was his ability to constantly reinvent himself as an explorer, devising new techniques for new goals. He dreamed up new ventures that combined geographical exploration and public spectacle. With an almost unparalleled ability to conceive, plan and execute seemingly crazy schemes, he also had a good grasp of how to publicize his adventures. Like an artist constantly changing mediums, Amundsen made transitions from sailing ships to skis and dogsleds, to open-cockpit airplanes, to a prototype airship. An uncompromising individualist, he refused to be discouraged by the changing times or his aging body, was never content to return again and again to the same place or the same methods, or to settle into comfortable respectability. Not for him the dwelling on past glories as the world passed him by.

  Amundsen pursued travel to feed an insatiable hunger for the excitement he felt in anticipating his next destination; he was never more alive than when he was dreaming of and planning a new adventure. He devoted all his personal resources to his expeditions, sums of money that on several occasions would have allowed him to retire comfortably. Money meant nothing to him, except as a means of making possible his latest plan. Yet regaining this feeling of exuberance and vitality became more difficult as he got older and as the number of things that were new to him diminished. Amundsen wanted the excitement never to end; nor, perhaps, did he want the public adulation and respect that came in its wake to subside. He had no career other than exploration; telling the tales of his adventures was his source of income, even when he was bored with the lecture circuit. Yet he shunned institutions and respectability, even refusing the prestige offered by a Norwegian university appointment and the security of a regular salary.

  There is an integrity and consistency in Amundsen’s life. He was a man of action rather than a philosopher; angst-ridden questioning and self-doubt, circular musings on the meaning of life and the nature of God, or fretting about either the immediate future or eternity were not for him. He knew what goals he wanted to achieve in his life and he set out after them, again and again, in a intriguing cycle of reinvention and novelty. This approach to life may have contributed to his loneliness and a certain detachment from the rhythms of others’ lives, but for Amundsen it also prevented stagnation, regret and boredom. Perhaps he would indeed have been more conflicted and meditative if he had been thwarted in his quest for heroic adventure, but thankfully that was not the case—he created an unparalleled legacy of real-life adventure, of daunting physical and mental challenge, while engaged in an uncompromising pursuit of the chimera of acclaim. What makes him such an intriguing character is that he chose his life, rather than having it thrust upon him.

  Amundsen towers in the pantheon of great explorers, and his death marked the end of an era. It is now impossible to do what Amundsen did, just as it is not possible to accomplish what Magellan did. The corporate-funded, technology-dependent, risk-averse expeditions of today seem sterile compared with the gambles of the heroic age in which pioneers such as Amundsen were exploring unknown geography with untested technology. Amundsen ushered in the end of grand-scale terrestrial exploration by claiming the most desired geographical prizes, at the polar extremes of the earth. At the same time he developed a business model that would be used by future explorers to finance their expeditions.

  Amundsen’s conquests gave rise to the phenomenon of the explorer as entertainer, one who is unfettered by the constraints of past generations that travelled under the orders of a government or a commercial patron with geopolitical objectives. His accomplishments are all the more noteworthy because he achieved them as a private citizen, with mostly private financing, but did so in an era when geographical conquest was a proxy battle between nations, fought in a highly publicized manner for political prestige and national honour. In some ways he was like a private, self-funded athlete competing in the modern Olympic Games.

  Amundsen packed more travel, excitement, danger, tragedy, pathos and triumph into his fifty-six years than seems possible, even now. He led as successful a life as can be imagined, creating a record of sensational geographical feats that were front-page news in their day and that will never be forgotten. He fulfilled all his youthful dreams and then, as far as we know, died according to his professed desire, in a dramatic burst of publicity and mystery. He had earned the title bestowed on him by the popular press—“the last of the Vikings.”

  A Note on Sources

  There are many ways to interpret a life. I have approached Roald Amundsen’s life in such a way as to not only reveal the astounding adventures of a unique and compelling personality, but to place these exploits in their historical context: Why was Amundsen so important, and why did anyone care about what he was doing? I am not a polar expert; I have never been to either of the poles and I have no plans to travel there, but in the early twentieth century the quest to explore these last remaining uncharted places was an obsessive goal for some nations, and they fought to be the first to dispel the few geographical mists that still shrouded the planet. My interest is in Amundsen as an individual working within the technological and psychological limitations of his day—a person who struggled to accomplish what was important in his era, not what was or is universally important, if indeed there is any such thing.

  In viewing Amundsen as a historical character, I am interested in how the world viewed him, as much as I am interested in how he viewed the world—in how he changed the world, as much as how the world changed him. This broad view of his actions speaks to his character: he spent nearly his entire adult life engaged in publicity-financed exploration, recording the details both to earn his living and for posterity. Amundsen viewed himself as a public figure, and it is this public persona that has been my chief interest, rather than the minutiae of his private life. His public life is very well documented, both by Amundsen himself in his prolific articles, lectures and books, and by others in articles, interviews, photographs and motion pictures. His private life, however, is more obscure. He purposely hid it behind a daunting façade of grim, heroic determination. The concealment itself was part of his character. The Last Viking is intended as a large-canvas story of Amundsen’s life and times rather than as a meditation on his character.

  As a Canadian historian and biographer, my interest in Amundsen stemmed from his activities in the Northwest Passage rather than at the South Pole, and as a result I had no preconceived notions of Amundsen in relation to Robert F. Scott. I didn’t begin with the thesis that Amundsen was either superior or inferior to Scott and then set out to prove my case. I was just curious—and then stunned to realize that Amundsen was usually discussed only in relation to Scott and Antarctica. Almost everything written about Amundsen is in the context of “the race to the South Pole,” and the sixteen years following his return from Antarctica are often summed up in a paragraph or two. The post–South Pole years of his life, however, take up nearly half of The Last Viking and include the years when he was an American celebrity, as well as his experimentation with pioneer airplanes, his five years of sailing the Northeast Passage, his failure and then success in flying open-cockpit airplanes toward the North Pole and his pioneering use of an airship to fly over the North Pole and Polar Basin. Amundsen achieved his greatest popularity during these years, particularly in the United States.

  Amundsen and many of his friends wrote primarily in Norwegian. Until recently much of this material was unavailable in English, contributing to the relative lack of information about him in the English-speaking world. More
than any other factor, the language barrier to accessing some of Amundsen’s correspondence is probably the reason for his waning popularity in the English-speaking world. This raises questions concerning what we know about important individuals, their ideas and actions: if they left a great deal of source material in a widely spoken language, then we learn about them and they are considered important; if their surviving correspondence was minimal or lost or in a language spoken by fewer people, or they were not from a dominant culture, then our portrait of the past does not include them.

  I was aided greatly in my research by the recent translation—made in preparation for the 2011 celebrations in Norway commemorating the centenary of Amundsen’s reaching the South Pole—of diaries and letters and other documents, including copies of Amundsen’s lectures, letters from his agents, promotional brochures and so on. The Fram Museum in Oslo, Norway, is the source of much of this information. The museum’s publication Cold Recall: Reflections of a Polar Explorer, edited by Geir O. Klover, provides the original text of Amundsen’s Northwest Passage and South Pole lectures, his correspondence with his lecture agents in the United Kingdom and the United States, and examples of advertisements for Amundsen’s lectures and product endorsements. There has been a fair amount of other new material about Amundsen made available in recent years as well, particularly information about his possible Inuit descendants in northern Canada and the fate of his adopted daughter Kakonita, who settled near Vancouver, B.C. This has been written about only in a few recent magazine articles; see particularly George Tombs’s “Amundsen’s Family Secrets: Another Side of the Polar Explorer Emerges as an Inuit Family Connection Comes to Light” in the October/November 2011 issue of Canada’s History.