FIGURE 78
A dapper Amundsen and his dog, with the Fram at anchor outside his home in Svartskog, south down the fjord from Christiania. This is prior to the ship leaving in 1910, supposedly for the Arctic, when in reality it went to the Antarctic. Photograph by Anders Beer Wilse.
But still he waffled, still he dreamed, up until the very day that Amundsen came to his house for an answer. Nansen and Eva had returned from a holiday in the country, before he was to leave again for London. Amundsen arrived, expectant. Nansen knew it was time for a decision; it could wait no longer: would it be Eva or the South Pole? Nansen asked him to wait in the downstairs hall while he went up to the bedroom to talk to his wife. Amundsen stood quietly, hat in hand.
In the bedroom Eva, burying her own feelings, deferred and told her husband it was his decision, to do what he had to do. She would not try to influence him one way or the other. Nansen turned and left the room. He walked down the stairs to where Amundsen was waiting. Then he said the memorable few words that would change not only their lives but also the course of history: “You shall have the Fram.”
››› Barely a year later, just as Amundsen was beginning to make arrangements and prepare the Fram for his Arctic trip, a bomb dropped: the news that on April 22, 1908, the American Frederick Cook, Amundsen’s shipmate and friend from the Belgica expedition, had sledged to the North Pole, or so he claimed, via the route between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. Shortly thereafter, there was a second bomb: another American, Robert Peary, the driven Arctic veteran who had rebuffed Otto Sverdrup in Smith Sound, had also made it to the pole, the same way, on April 6, 1909. Or so he claimed.
Amundsen, seeker of historical gold, had just missed getting to the mother lode in time, or so he believed then (the claims of both men had not yet been doubted, debunked, and disputed as they would eventually be, a war of reputations that has continued up to this day). Unlike Nansen, his primary motivation was not scientific knowledge to be gathered on the trip. He wanted to cross the Arctic basin and stick the Norwegian flag on that single point at its apex, no matter what it took to get there. So the big question ran through his mind: what should he do, now that the prize is gone?
There was still another prize waiting, the South Pole, but it too was in jeopardy. In January 1909, Ernest Shackleton had come to within one hundred miles of it before forced to turn back. Now another Englishman, Royal Navy captain Robert Falcon Scott, was getting ready to sail to Antarctica for the next try. Amundsen quickly decided what to do. By his own admission, he would attempt a “coup,” to take the Fram south instead of north and snatch this prize from under Scott’s nose, just as Cook and Peary had snatched the North Pole from under his.
Scott would leave England in August 1910, aiming to arrive at Antarctica in its spring. It was already October 1909 when Amundsen made his move. He had precious little time to spare. He would secretly figure out the new logistics, revise preparations without tipping his hand, and make it “down under” in time to beat Scott to the pole. He knew he could not reveal his drastic change of plans publicly without risking the entire venture. Nansen might well withdraw his approval and prohibit the Fram from leaving if he knew, as he had sacrificed his own southern ambitions for Amundsen’s promise to go north. The king, and the government, might also disapprove, and both were essential funders of the expedition.
So the stealth began. He proceeded as if nothing had changed, professing that he would still go to the Arctic on the scientific mission, taking the refurbished Fram (now with a diesel engine to replace the steam one) around Cape Horn, up the length of the Pacific, through the Bering Strait, and into the ice, to begin a drift like Nansen’s. In reality, however, he intended to sail directly to Antarctica, never stopping, and there set up a base station for ten men overwintering and to store the food, supplies, and equipment for the sledge trip to the pole the following spring. After dropping off the land party and all supplies, the Fram would sail away to conduct oceanographic surveys in the Southern Ocean over fall and winter, before returning in summer to pick them up.
Continuing the ruse, the seven-year stock of provisions for the Arctic would now feed and equip both the land party heading to the pole and the ship’s company while at sea. He had the base station constructed and then deconstructed and put on board, saying it was to be the observatory and laboratory for the scientific work. He arranged for one hundred sledge dogs to be delivered just before the Fram departed.
Amundsen discussed his plan only with closest friends and confidants, those who would help make it all work while keeping the lid on. His brother Leon, his at-home voice and business manager, would make his way to Madeira independently, in advance of the Fram’s arrival, to bring letters for the crew and receive letters to go home, including Amundsen’s near-obsequious confessionals and self-justifications to Nansen, the king, and government officials. Leon was also to handle all the fallout when the world learned about what was happening.
››› His handpicked crew of twenty was the by now usual mix of sailors and engineers necessary to perform all the functions of the expedition. Two had been with him on the Gjøa and proven themselves, cook Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm and mate Helmer Hanssen. Two others, Sverre Hassel and Jacob Nødtvedt (as had Lindstrøm earlier) came recommended by Otto Sverdrup from the second Fram expedition. At Nansen’s urging, Amundsen also accepted first-expedition luminary Hjalmar Johansen, though reluctantly. Unhappy and disconsolate in his job with the military, and struggling as a divorcé and father of young children, he had fallen back into old ways, drifting, drinking heavily, and running out of money. On several occasions he, and his desperate wife, had asked Nansen for financial help, which out of loyalty and concern for his old companion he obliged. Now Nansen saw a new opportunity for his rehabilitation with Amundsen, and Amundsen had no choice except to accommodate him. Nansen could not know that the personalities of these two headstrong men would not mesh and that Johansen’s new lease on life would be far different than hoped or imagined.
FIGURE 79
The crew before departure in Christiania, July 1, 1910. Sitting front, from left: Olsen, Nødtvedt, Gjertsen, and Kutschin. Sitting middle, from left: Johansen, Nilsen, Amundsen, and Prestrud. Standing, from left: Wisting, Sandvig (dismissed in Madeira), Schröer (left in Bergen before final departure), Kristensen, Bjaaland, Hanssen, Hansen, Rønne, Stubberud, and Beck (arm on Prestrud). Missing are Hassel, Lindstrøm, and Sundbeck. Photograph by Anders Beer Wilse.
The three officers were all navy men. Thorvald Nilsen, the Fram’s captain, was a lieutenant, young at twenty-nine but holding a new captain’s certificate with several years’ experience in deepwater sailing in the merchant marines. The first mate was another lieutenant, Kristian Prestrud, in appearance neat and preppy, and in manner refined. Like Nilsen, he was twenty-nine and had additional experience in the merchant marines. Second mate Hjalmar Gjertsen, a fresh-faced, boyish-looking, athletic man of twenty-five (he, like Johansen, had been a champion gymnast), also had several years at sea under his belt.
So too at the Naval Academy in Horten, Amundsen found other general crew members, one of whom, Oscar Wisting, would go on to have a long association with Amundsen, spanning many years and subsequent polar endeavors. Wisting, a seasoned sailor of thirty-nine, would be a jack-of-all-trades on the Fram, to do a bit of everything from cook to tinsmith, navigator, doctor, dog handler, and sledger.
Gjertsen and two others to whom Amundsen offered positions on the Fram had met him in 1909 when he came to Horten to conduct a rather unusual but clever experiment, one that showed Amundsen’s openness to trying something new and innovative. He had the idea of using kites to lift a man high off a ship (sort of a precursor of today’s sport of paragliding), to get a better view across the pack ice and more easily pick a way through leads. He engaged Martin Rønne, a forty-year-old sailmaker at the shipyard, to sew the kites (it would take more than one to do the job) and a lightweight fabric chair for the high-flying lookout.
Rønne and Gjertsen, both slight, light men, also tested the kites. The kites worked, sort of. It took seven to lift a man some two hundred yards into the air, but they were hard to control and keep aloft. The entire scheme was dropped, however, when lightning killed the then captain watching on deck (Nilsen took over his position). Amundsen hired Rønne anyway, to be the expedition’s maker and fixer of sails, dog harnesses, boots, sleeping bags, tents, and even clothes. A busy man he was to be with his sewing machine, sail twine, and sewing palm, and a genial one whose Italian-like face always had a gentle smile shining from behind his big, broom-like mustache.
Several came on board through other connections. Prestrud knew the rugged seven-seas sailor Halvardus Kristensen from his naval duty and had recommended him. Carpenter and handyman Jørgen Stubberud had worked on fixing up Amundsen’s new house outside Christiania, and so his known skills were to be put to good use on the ship and sledging expeditions. Amundsen happened to meet a Norwegian skiing (and ski-jumping) champion, and expert ski maker, Olav Bjaaland at an event, and quickly seized the opportunity to offer him a position. Another navy man, Ludvig Hansen, came with the reputation of fine tinsmith and sailor. Big and square-jawed, seasoned Andreas Beck from northern Norway had much useful experience in Arctic regions, as harpooner and skipper aboard sealing and whaling ships, and as an ice pilot on a scientific expedition to Svalbard. Karenius Olsen, at seventeen, was the youngest on board and was put to work in a variety of duties, including as cook.
Only two were non-Norwegians. First engineer Knut Sundbeck was a Swede who had helped design and build the Fram’s diesel engine in Stockholm. He had come on board late, after Amundsen fired the previous engineer. Amundsen knew Sundbeck personally and was well aware of his brilliance and skill with the new marine diesel technology. Alexander Kutschin, a twenty-four-year-old sailor from northern Russia, had come to Bergen to study oceanography under Dr. Bjørn Helland-Hansen, an associate and friend of Nansen. Eventually, acting on Nansen’s high recommendation, Amundsen hired him as oceanographer for the trip. (There had been one other scientist along, another non-Norwegian: a bespectacled German oceanographer named Adolf Hermann Schröer. Early on Schröer was hired for a two-month oceanographic cruise around the British Isles, and did not continue on the Fram.)
FIGURE 80
Fram under full sail “on the way to the South Pole, 10 June 1910.” The ship looked different on each expedition: for the first, white with a stepped-down foredeck; for the second, white with a full upper deck; and for the third, black with full upper deck. Photograph by Anders Beer Wilse.
Amundsen intentionally did not have a doctor on board. Amundsen was well aware of the checkered history of doctors on polar expeditions, mostly due to the opiates they had access to for treating pain but all too often used on themselves. Amundsen chose instead to have others on the crew, in this case Gjertsen and Wisting, learn to yank teeth, set broken bones, sew up gashes, and treat maladies.
››› As he did with the Gjøa seven years earlier, Amundsen took the Fram quietly and almost unnoticed out of Christiania in the middle of the night, adding to the veil of secrecy. One man did see it leave, as polar writer Roland Huntford tells it: “In the small hours of June 7 he was sitting up in the tower of his home to watch as the Fram, in perfect northern summer twilight, emerged from the inner arm of the fjord where she had been anchored . . . and, with bare masts over windless waters, moved for the third time down the channel to the sea, like a Viking ship slipping out on a raid.”3
This witness, of course, was Nansen, but the raid he saw beginning was not for gold or jewels but for a single point on earth, a name, and a reputation. It was also a raid of another kind, when Amundsen would try to scale the high walls of the Nansen fortress of exploration and take a place next to him.
FIGURE 81
Fram’s three officers taking simultaneous sextant observations to fix a position. Amundsen swore them to secrecy about his change of plan of going to Antarctica instead of the Arctic. From left, Kristian Prestrud, Captain Thorvald Nilsen, and Hjalmar Gjertsen.
Except for the man he had chosen to be captain, Thorvald Nilsen, none of the crew knew at that time the real destination. Two months later, after a test trip for the oceanography work in the north Atlantic, ending in Bergen to repair the new diesel, then another to Kristiansand to pick up the dogs and more supplies, Amundsen unveiled the plan to his other officers, second-in-command naval Prestrud and third mate Gjertsen, both polar novices, but swore them to secrecy with a formal, signed agreement. Later, on the way to Madeira, he also told Hassel, with the same binding agreement. They, as others of the crew, had scratched their heads over some of Amundsen’s actions, particularly building such an elaborate meteorological station and taking all the sledge dogs on the long (and hot, when in the tropics) journey around South America, when they could have been picked up in Alaska, just before going into the ice. Now they knew why.
On September 6, they reached the Portuguese island of Madeira, more than two thousand miles away and safely out of reach of any upset or disgruntled authorities or creditors. Three days later, just as the Fram was set to leave, Amundsen called the entire crew on deck. His two first officers, Nilsen and Prestrud, were holding rolled-up charts. The men darted nervous glances at one another. What was going on? Then Amundsen dropped his bomb.
Nilsen and Prestrud unrolled the charts of the southern hemisphere and Antarctica. Amundsen, pointing to the charts, told the assembled his plan. The men looked on in bewilderment and shock, as Amundsen’s words sank in.
When done, he gave them all a choice, staying on or returning home. His timing was perfect: a captive audience, on a ship about to leave that was a very long way from home. Just in case, he had a backup. If someone declined, he could find a replacement in Madeira. When Amundsen asked each individually, one by one they all agreed to stay with the Fram.
FIGURE 82
Kristian Prestrud checks the ship’s chronometer as the curious look on, Funchal, Madeira. Here Amundsen announced to a stunned crew his intention to go to the South Pole instead of the North, as they had thought. September 6, 1910.
Amundsen had not yet decided who would go where when they reached Antarctica, but most assignments seemed obvious. About half would be the “shore party” on the continent; half, the “sea rovers” on the Fram. The shore party would have the best sledgers, skiers, and polar veterans; the sea rovers, the savvy sailors and engineers. One group to make it to the pole and back and one to bring them home safely. The rest would be history. Amundsen, of course, would lead the charge to the pole.
23 ›TERRA NOVA
On October 3, 1910, back in Christiania and almost a month after the Fram left Madeira, Leon Amundsen sent this telegram, written earlier by his brother Roald, to Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the Terra Nova, Christchurch, New Zealand. “Beg inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic.”4 It was signed “Amundsen,” sent from “Christiania.”
Those clipped few words must have sent chills down the spine of the intended reader, who actually received it on October 9 in Melbourne, Australia, before he reached Christchurch. The telegram was Amundsen through and through: brief, terse, unequivocal, yet slightly oblique and vaguely mysterious. Though the telegram stated its origin as Christiania, the Fram had left that city four months and thousands of miles ago, long and far enough on its way south to give away its position. Why had he sent it anyway—out of politeness and as a gesture of respect, or as a gauntlet thrown down to a competitor?
Captain Scott was already well known for the first ever, albeit unsuccessful, attempt on the pole during the Discovery expedition in 1901–4. Now, feeling pressure from Ernest Shackleton and his near miss there in 1908–9, he was going back for another try. Sixty-five men in the reinforced and elegantly named Terra Nova had left Cardiff, Wales, on June 15 and, not thinking there was any great urgency at stake, took their time, stopping off along the way for rest, scientific collecting, and resupply, in addition to
being delayed by problems. Scott had not been on the ship for the first long leg of the voyage but met it in Cape Town, South Africa, for the trip across the Indian Ocean to Australia. He again made his own way from Australia to New Zealand, where he reboarded for the final run to Antarctica.
Lyttelton, New Zealand, is a picturesque town on the slopes of an extinct volcanic caldera on the east side of New Zealand’s South Island. Its protected, deepwater harbor made it one of the main shipping hubs on the South Island, as the port for the city of Christchurch eight miles to the north, and it was attractive for larger, deep-draft trade vessels crossing the Pacific. It also happened to be strategically positioned as a “launching pad” for expeditionary ships heading to the Ross Sea side of Antarctica over two thousand miles away. In their previous voyages, Scott and Shackleton (and Australian Douglas Mawson) had chosen Lyttelton as their last stop before heading to the great white unknown to the south. Now Scott was there again.
FIGURE 83
Lindstrøm with an albatross. Birds and other animals were collected in great number and preserved for scientific study after the expeditions. The meat was eaten by men or dogs. Though the scientific work was not a priority for Amundsen, Lindstrøm took great interest in it.
››› Amundsen, by contrast, never stopped for eleven thousand miles. He never went anywhere near New Zealand but took a route different than the Terra Nova’s: across the Atlantic and down along the east coast of South America; then across the South Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean; past Kerguelen Island; and southwesterly to Antarctica’s Ross Sea. He did not need to stop for food, provisioned as the Fram was for seven years, nor for science or rest. When it left Madeira, the Fram was almost three months and four thousand miles behind the Terra Nova. It arrived at the Great Ice Barrier (now Ross Ice Shelf) of Antarctica on January 14, 1911, a mere ten days after the Terra Nova.
Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram Page 25