Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  He may have come by his affinity for adventure naturally, growing up as one of four boys in a family of seafarers and shipping traders on the south coast of Norway. His father, an often-absent captain of ships away on the seven seas, with enthralling stories to show for it, was in some ways a mythic figure to the impressionable boy. His mother, however, was a closer, stronger influence, with other, less fancifully romantic ideas for her youngest, and shaped him early on for a career in medicine. For her, he buried his passion while plodding cheerlessly through school. She died when he was twenty-one, still on his undistinguished way to becoming a doctor. Though deeply grieved, his fealty to her and her plans for him vanished with her death, and almost immediately he dropped out of school.

  The year was 1893, when Fridtjof Nansen, eleven years older than Amundsen, took the Fram north into the Arctic for the first time; Nansen was Amundsen’s idol. Amundsen had applied for a position, but Nansen had thought him too young and inexperienced. He also tried to sign on with the Frederick Jackson expedition to Franz Josef Land but was also turned down. When the Fram pulled out of Christiania that June day, no doubt Amundsen was in the crowd to watch it go, wishing it were he so proudly standing at the helm.

  Amundsen was not one to hang around wishing and regretting, however. He devoted himself to preparing, mentally and physically, for the life he intended to have. He skied long and hard into the mountains to hone his skills and build his strength into a rock-solid two hundred pounds (though, at six feet tall and lithe, and with an angular face, he always looked thin). (His one “defect,” as he regarded it, was poor vision [nearsightedness], which he kept secret because he thought that wearing glasses was not in the noble image of a polar explorer.) He camped out in the winter cold and dark. He continued to devour the accounts of earlier polar travelers, weighing in his mind what they did right or wrong. He assiduously studied navigation and other arts of master mariners, to obtain a mate’s license. He even secured a seasonal job aboard a sealing ship in the ice-studded waters east of Greenland, to get a flavor of the environment and life aboard ships, in a self-styled apprenticeship reminiscent of Nansen’s on the Jason before his Greenland crossing.

  With all these cementing his foundation, the first real career-enhancing opportunity came in June 1896 when he was accepted as able seaman aboard the Belgica of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, a scientific investigation at the perimeter of this unknown continent, during which Amundsen was also to employ his abilities as a skier. Just over a month after his signing-on, the astounding news broke: Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen, followed within a week by the Fram and the rest of the crew, all returned safely to Norway. Amundsen, as so many others around the world, was full of admiration and extolled the feat and the accomplishments of this man. He no doubt had another, competing feeling bubbling inside, not jealousy exactly, but an even greater sense of urgency to get on with his own pursuit of fame at the ends of the earth. Amundsen, regardless, was not among the thousands who greeted the returning Fram in Christiania. He was elsewhere, in training for his own life of adventure.

  Even before the Belgica departed Antwerp for the Southern Ocean (Antarctic Ocean) in August 1897, Amundsen had been promoted to first officer. This was not so much a compliment to him but due to a lack of qualified men signing on to a long and dangerous expedition, one known to be poorly financed. The expedition leader was Adrien de Gerlache, an officer in the Belgian navy without any experience in polar exploration. The ship’s company, nineteen crew and four scientists, was a mix of nationalities: Belgian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, French, and American.

  FIGURE 77

  Roald Amundsen in 1906, about age thirty-four, in his cabin of the Gjøa, after his successful transit of the Northwest Passage. Photograph by Harry Randall.

  Nansen had visited the Belgica in the southeastern Norwegian coastal town of Sandefjord, where it had been for repairs and outfitting, an outward gesture to give it and the crew his blessings and best wishes. Perhaps there was a subliminal message, too, that Nansen was keeping alive the possibility of going to that other pole himself, an idea he had discussed at length with Otto Sverdrup on the Fram and on the sledge trip with Johansen. In Sandefjord, Nansen and Amundsen would come face-to-face for the first time, one now exalted and magisterial, the other admiring and aspiring. Each would remember the meeting years later, for different reasons—Amundsen for being in the radiant presence of a hero, Nansen for the indelible impression the younger man made on him: “Having once seen that face, one does not easily forget it.”1

  What was it about that face? He had a look you can see in pictures of him all through his life, from young boy to older man: a seriousness, without mirth or warmth in the downturned mouth, and when a rare smile does show, it never really touches the face or goes into the eyes. The eyelids droop but not as if he is tired; the eyes themselves gaze coldly and directly from under them, watchful, calculating, and scrutinizing, like a hawk’s. The large nose is also raptorial, aquiline. In that face there is stoic self-assuredness but also a sense that he is hiding something from us, or at least protecting something in himself. In almost all the photographs when he is with other people, there is a separation between him and them, sometimes in physical distance and sometimes in his body language or facial expression. He seems, in all, to be a very private man, mysterious somewhat, aloof, and alone in the midst of all the public attention he craved and was given, yet fortified against it.

  The Belgica voyage—though completed, the first ever overwintering in the Antarctic, and the first to use dogs and sledges there—was a near disaster. The ship was almost lost to the ice, two of the crew died (one by drowning and one by scurvy), two went insane, and most of the others were stricken by scurvy, in varying degrees of severity. Moreover, the commander, Gerlache, proved unequal to the task and, in effect, lost control of ship, crew, and expedition.

  But for Amundsen personally it was exactly what he wanted: a real-life learning experience in the demanding polar environment he desired, a chance to prove his mettle, and an opportunity to use adversity to his benefit. He not only succeeded in all three but also relished the life he had there. He, and his newfound friend and mentor, the ship’s doctor American Frederick Cook (who had arctic experience in Greenland with Robert Peary and Eivind Astrup), alone of the crew did not suffer from scurvy after they started eating raw penguin and seal meat (at first Gerlache and the others refused to eat such alien fare). He pioneered the sledge trips on the continent. As Gerlache became increasingly ineffective as leader, and the men fell into illness and despondency, Cook and Amundsen rose in power and authority, and helped save the entire enterprise.

  With Amundsen and Cook now directing the show, and with men stronger in recovery from scurvy, they sawed, chopped, and blasted the Belgica free, after more than a year trapped in the ice. Eight months later it was back in home port in Antwerp but without Amundsen. He left the ship in Buenos Aires and went home on a different one, by himself, avoiding all the fanfare of the Belgica’s homecoming. He did so not because he had other places to go or things to see or do. It was to be his signature style, repeated at the conclusion of other expeditions he commanded. He had his mind on something else and his eyes, those eyes, firmly locked on other horizons.

  In his account of the Belgica voyage in his autobiography, My Life as an Explorer, published twenty-eight years after the fact, Amundsen never mentions Gerlache by name, only as a “Belgian sailor.” It was as if he really did not matter, in the greater scheme of things.

  ››› Back in Christiania, Amundsen, now twenty-seven, met Nansen for the second time, not as a starstruck acolyte but as fellow member of the “polar club.” He came to him with a special purpose in mind, to get Nansen’s support, and the influence he could bring to bear, for his lifelong dream: to sail the entire route that had long stymied so many others in such dramatic and tragic ways, the Northwest Passage. He also had in mind another goal he knew would appeal to Nansen the scientist, to determine the
exact current location of the magnetic pole, known to have moved since first discovered by James Clark Ross in 1831 but to where exactly no one knew.

  He got Nansen’s endorsement, a key, powerful tool to leverage money from would-be donors, especially when skeptical of a venture with such known risk and conducted by such a relatively untested leader. Even with Nansen’s name behind him, Amundsen, never a good businessman anyway and always dogged by financial problems, found money hard to come by. Nonetheless he forged ahead and, in 1901, with his newly minted master’s mariner license in hand, finally secured enough pledges to purchase a ship from Tromsø, the seventy-foot, single-masted sealer/fishing boat named the Gjøa (pronounced, more or less, “Yew-ah”). He had it refitted for the Arctic and provisioned for five years of travel; he hired on a crew of only six (manageable and easier to sustain, as Nansen had proved), including one who had just returned with the Fram in September, Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm. No doubt Sverdrup had given him high marks for his temperament and cooking.

  On June 16, 1903, the Gjøa left Christiania but not to the cheers and waves of thousands of well-wishers, as when the Fram departed on its voyages. Instead, to avoid old creditors who might be there to collect before he left, maybe never to return, or new ones he had had to borrow from to finance the increasingly costly trip, it slipped away under cover of midnight and in the rain, quietly towed out of harbor and down the fjord, and then let go to sail on its own out to sea. Even the king of Norway, one of his sponsors, was left in the dark. As he had returned from Antarctica, as it would be thus in future times, Amundsen came and went in shadows.

  Amundsen and crew took the Gjøa around Greenland, up Baffin Bay, and then followed Sir John Franklin’s course through Lancaster Sound to Beechey Island. There they saw the same sad wreckage that, a year earlier, Victor Baumann, Oluf Raanes, and Ivar Fosheim had seen when they came from the Fram over North Devon Island. They also saw the gravestones of the three of Franklin’s men who had died there, a stark and sobering reminder to those who were now following their very route. From there they continued southwest to King William Island, near where Franklin and his men had disappeared; they avoided becoming trapped in the ice by sailing around the eastern side, into safe harbor on the southeast corner of the island.

  They ended up spending nearly two years there, a place they named Gjøahavn (Gjøa’s Haven or Harbor), to accomplish one of Amundsen’s goals: fixing the location of the magnetic pole. In the process, they found it had moved north many miles in the seventy-plus years since Ross’s discovery. They filled in gaps in maps of the region. They also struck up a long-term relationship with a group of Inuit, who helped them by supplying fresh meat, clothing, and sorely needed social interaction over the long haul, in return for useful goods that the Norwegians could supply. Amundsen’s own accounts of this time speak of nothing but hard work, harmony, and goodwill.

  But, according to Amundsen biographer Tor Bomann-Larsen, it had not all been exactly a bed of roses. As revealed in diaries of some of the crew, the “Governor” or “Boss,” as he was now alternately nicknamed, displayed other, less admirable, aspects of his personality. As he grew impatient to get on with his primary goal, the Northwest Passage, he could grow sullen and withdrawn or, just the opposite, testy, critical, and meddlesome. He lost interest in things that once engaged him, such as the magnetic observations, and left them to others. He would sometimes spend days away from the ship, sledging by himself.

  On August 13, 1905, they were able to steam away from Gjøahavn, taking a track well south off the continental shore. Less than a week later, they cleared the constricted passage between big Victoria Island and the mainland, and into the last stretch of the Northwest Passage. Two days after that they met an American whaling ship coming the other way, and the captain informed him of clear sailing all the way to Alaska; the Gjøa could complete its journey before another winter caught it out.

  Encountering increasing ice, Amundsen headed not to Alaska but to King Point on Canada’s Yukon coast, with its small Inuit presence (again, whether due to ice or something else, he chose not to proceed a short way up the coast to Herschel Island, with its larger, mixed settlement and harbor for whaling ships). There they prepared for a third winter. It would be a winter without Amundsen.

  In mid-October he left with his dogs and sledge, in the company of two Inuit and a whaling-ship captain also stranded at King’s Point because of the ice, to find a telegraph office to send out word of the successful navigation of the Northwest Passage. The office happened to be in the tiny settlement of Eagle City on the Yukon River in Alaska, over the mountains, a month and a half and eight hundred miles away. The first telegram was to Nansen, not only to break the news but also to request more money to be wired. He would not return to the Gjøa until March 12, five months hence. (He had good reason to leave the ship hastily to deliver the news. Through his brother Leon, Amundsen had made a lucrative contract with one newspaper back home for the exclusive story. But his news leaked out to the American press, and the contract became null and void. Amundsen’s financial woes continued.)

  When the Gjøa reached Nome, Alaska, at the end of August that year, it was not by intention. The ship was under sail only after damage to its screw; then the gaff broke and forced it into harbor for repairs. Still, the town turned out in force, in welcoming congratulations. After only a few days there, Amundsen packed his bags and boarded a steamship headed to San Francisco, leaving his ship and mates behind.

  The Gjøa made it to San Francisco later, after Amundsen had left for points east and on to other matters. It never had the glory of sailing home, as had the Fram, into the hearts of its citizens. Amundsen sold the ship to help pay his bills, to a group of Norwegian ex-patriots in San Francisco, who in turn donated it to the city. There it stayed for sixty-five years, outdoors but never sailing and slowly deteriorating through the punishment of the elements, neglect, and lack of protection. In one account from the 1960s, “The hippies had a special sense of appreciation for Gjøa. They liked to climb the rig and found out that the vessel was an ideal place for overnighting. . . . One hippie told us what a great pleasure it was to touch the ship’s frames, experiencing the voyage through the Northwest Passage on a [sic] LSD-trip. Remains of coal inside the ship clearly showed that fires had been lit to keep warm.”2

  In 1972, the Gjøa finally made it home, rescued by its own people. It did not make it back on its own, as would have been so fitting once, but on the deck of another ship. It was put up on blocks on Oslo’s Bygdøy Peninsula, right next to the building housing the Fram. It stayed there for several decades, outside and under tarps, still waiting for a new home like the Fram’s. It looked a rather forlorn, hunkered-down waif that visitors on the way to the Fram would pass with barely a second look. But even without going aboard, one could sense Amundsen’s powerful but distant presence.

  In 2013, the king opened the large new expansion to the Fram Museum where the Gjøa now resides, with a detailed exhibition of the history of the Northwest Passage.

  22 ›THE GREAT DECEPTION

  It was to be a pivotal moment, a day in late September 1907, a year after Roald Amundsen’s completion of the Northwest Passage, when their lives took sharp right-hand turns away from each other. Amundsen had come to Fridtjof Nansen’s home seeking an answer to a question he had posed a few months earlier. Though newly garlanded with honor and respect, Amundsen still needed the older explorer’s greater weight and authority for his latest idea: to repeat what Nansen had done with the Fram but taking it one step further and actually crossing the North Pole and into the record books.

  For this trip he had not been so bold as to ask Nansen specifically for the Fram. On paper the Norwegian government owned it, but Nansen had the gravitas and moral authority to decide its use. Perhaps he had hinted that the Gjøa, which he had not yet sold, could do the job. If so, it might have been a cagey strategy, for Nansen told him that if he were to attempt the feat, the Fram was the only ship cap
able. Would it be available? Nansen stopped short of an outright offer, as he still had simmering in his mind to take the Fram himself to Antarctica and from there trek to the South Pole. He would have to think about it. Amundsen had planted the seed in ground he hoped would be fertile.

  Nansen was torn, to his core. Since coming home from his expedition, his life had taken different, sometimes divergent paths, into the public world of politics and diplomacy, and privately into seclusion for writing, withdrawal in dark moods, and a troubled marriage with Eva. He had used his renown and charisma in Norway’s struggle for independence from Sweden, a “cold war” that culminated peacefully, and for Norway successfully, in 1905. He had become Norway’s first ambassador to Great Britain, a position that took him away from the ordinary and sometimes-oppressive life at home and into the exciting, tempting bright lights of foreign high society.

  His absences and behavior also left him guilty and regretful at times, mostly about Eva. In letters to her, he expressed undying love and a desire to renew his devotion and give more affection to her. To prove it, he told her to put aside any worries she had about him leaving for Antarctica, that it was more important to him to spend the time with her and attend to other pressing work. Moreover, he justified, a young Englishman named Ernest Shackleton was getting ready for an expedition to reach the pole and would no doubt succeed, making his own effort moot.