Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  Somewhere in his depths, Scott must have known that dogs and skis were essential for travel in such conditions, for so long, and over such great distances. He had hired a Norwegian expert skier to teach his men the skill and even brought him on the Terra Nova. He had brought dogs along, though only thirty and poorly trained, with two drivers. In his diaries he concedes, now and then, that both skis and dogs are real assets to a polar expedition, even necessary. Like a stubborn child, he refused to commit himself fully to their use even though he knew it was the right thing to do. Instead, skis and dogs seemed token gestures, perhaps even window dressing for peers to see, while he went ahead with what he knew, though it meant disaster.

  They were on their own, hauling the heavy sledges by themselves. The ponies were long gone. There were no dogs. Scott had sent them back, to provide support later on the return. None of the five was an expert skier, and one, Henry Bowers, whom Scott had taken from another support party, had no skis at all (mysteriously, Scott had ordered all on that former party to take off their skis, stash them at a depot, and proceed on foot). Ahead were hundreds of miles of uncertain going, through almost certain times of ferocious weather and terrible ice and snow conditions.

  They were about to embark on one of the greatest, saddest journeys in the history of polar exploration.

  ››› For the Norwegians it was a steady ski from the pole to Framheim, from victory into warm companionship; for the British, though, it was a slow, agonizing march from defeat to lonely, freezing death. It took Amundsen’s men forty-three days to make the eight hundred or so miles back, an average of over twenty miles a day. Scott’s covered just over seven hundred in seventy-one days, averaging less than ten miles per day. Amundsen’s men and dogs never wanted for food; in fact, there was too much. Scott’s men were slowly starving from a combination of overexertion, inadequate protection from the cold, and lack of food from ill-placed or poorly stocked depots.

  Slowly, inescapably, one after the other, the five weakened and began to fail. Edgar Evans, a rough-tough naval petty officer, was the first. With frostbite and disorientation from incipient scurvy that caused his fingernails to fall out, he fell on Beardmore Glacier, injured his head, and had to be transported on a sledge. Just before Evans died, Scott found him in the tent “on his knees, clothing disarranged, hands uncovered and frostbitten and with a wild look in his eyes.”11 He died on February 17, at age thirty-five, after a month of torment since leaving the pole.

  FIGURE 96

  The race to the South Pole, showing Amundsen’s and Scott’s routes. For scale, the Fram and Terra Nova were about five hundred miles apart along the edge of the Great Ice Barrier, and Amundsen’s route was approximately nine hundred miles one way.

  Next was army officer Lawrence “Titus” Oates. With frostbitten feet and a war wound aggravated by the cold and perhaps scurvy, Oates eventually could no longer pull on the sledge and had to be helped along by the other three, slowing slow progress even more. At night in the tent he stuck his bad leg out through a slit in his bag, so the cold would freeze it and numb the pain. Somehow he struggled on, each day worse than the day before. He begged to be left behind in his sleeping bag so the others could go on, but they would not leave him. Finally, on his last morning, he managed to get up and make his way to the entrance of the tent. Scott in his diary recorded the now famous words, perhaps ennobled by the writer, he supposedly uttered as he left: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”12 He went out into a blizzard, at forty below, and was never seen again. It was a month after Evans died, March 17. Oates was thirty-two.

  By March 22, Scott knew the end for them, the remaining three, would not be long, even though they were within fifteen miles of possible salvation at big One Ton Depot. One of the other two was Edward “Uncle Bill” Wilson, physician, naturalist, and artist on the expedition; Wilson was well liked by the crew and an old friend and companion of Scott’s from the Discovery Antarctic expedition. The other was Bowers, nicknamed “Birdie” for his big, beak-like nose; a short, stocky, indefatigable, and agreeable character, Bowers was the unfortunate one who had plodded most of the way without skis.

  Their strength was spent, and their advance was now a crawl, at best a few miles a day, and lately they were not able to move at all due to fierce storms and deep cold. Their food was almost gone—so too the fuel, by which they cooked, melted water, and gleaned a little bit of warmth. Their feet were frozen, not just frostbitten, and could not be thawed again, for the pain would be too intense and the flesh would begin to rot.

  In the final days, Scott still managed to write in his diary, often in moving words that described their final descent. On March 24 (or 25) he gave an official statement, as befitting a Royal Navy officer, of what went wrong, ascribing that the “causes of the disaster are not due to faulty organization, but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken.”13 Those misfortunes, he stated, were three: the delay in setting out depots due to the loss of the ponies through the ice; unusually bad weather during the entire expedition; and unusually soft snow on the Beardmore Glacier. His self-assessment would be challenged many times over, his judgment questioned, and his decisions second-guessed. But never questioned was how he or his men faced their last moments. His own final words, long memorialized in our literature and conscience, are always alive, and bear repeating:

  [March 24 or 25, 1912, in “Message to the Public”] Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for. R. Scott.

  [Thursday, March 29] I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.

  It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott.

  [last entry] For God’s sake look after our people.

  ››› Scott was forty-three years old; Wilson, thirty-nine; and Bowers, twenty-eight. Of the three, only Bowers was single and without children. Bowers had left a short letter to his mother. “Oh, how I do feel for you when you hear all,” he wrote toward the end; “—you will know that for me the end was peaceful as it is only sleep in the cold.”14

  ››› A search party from the Hut found them eight months later, the following spring on November 12, 1912. One of that party, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, recorded in his diary what they came across, and he wrote about it later in his book The Worst Journey in the World. At first they thought it was a cairn covered with snow. Upon brushing the snow away, they saw the peak of a tent. They had to dig the snow and ice away to gain access. “Soon we could see the outlines,” Cherry-Garrard wrote. “There were three men here. Bowers and Wilson were in their sleeping bags. Scott had thrown back the flaps of his bag at the end. His left hand was stretched over Wilson, his lifelong friend. Beneath the head of his bag, between the bag and the floor-cloth, was the green wallet in which he carried his diary. The brown books of his diary were inside: and on the floor-cloth there were some letters.” Among those letters was one from Amundsen to King Haakon, unopened. Later, Scott’s sledge was dug out. On it were 150 pounds of rocks and fossils they had collected along the way, for the sake of science.

  The search party gathered all the documents and other important items to take back. They left the bodies where they lay and dropped the tent over them, a collective shroud. Then they built an ice cairn and placed atop a cross made of two of their wooden skis. Cherry-Garrard wrote, “I do not know how long we were there, but when all was finished, and the chapter of Corinthians had been read, it was midnight of some day. The sun was dipping low above the Pole, the Barrier was almost in shadow. And the sky was blazing—sheets and sheets of iridescent clouds. The cairn and cross stood dark against a glory of burnished gold.”

  ›››
Their bodies are still there, entombed in the Ross Ice Shelf, but no one is exactly sure where. More than one hundred years of ice and blowing snow have buried them and made them part of the shelf. They are moving with it, slowly, steadily, toward the sea from where they first lay down to die. Someday, two or three hundred years from now, they will arrive at the steep-walled edge of the shelf and then calve off into the water and drift away. Their Antarctic journey at last will be over, another voyage begun.

  27 ›ABANDONING SHIP

  In his rather obsequious letter to Fridtjof Nansen two years earlier from Madeira, Roald Amundsen justified his sleight of hand in taking the Fram south instead of north, while begging the master’s forgiveness and understanding. As if there were no doubt that he would capture the pole, he also stated what he would do after Antarctica: “We will first go by Lyttelton in New Zealand to cable the news, and from there to San Francisco to continue the voyage north.”15 Whether this was his real intention all along or something he said mostly to appease Nansen is not obvious even from his later personal writings or later actions.

  After Antarctica, he did not go to New Zealand but instead went to Tasmania, south of Australia, even though it was farther away and a tougher trip—sailing against prevailing winds and currents—and even though especially he was anxious to be the first to get out the news (when he left the Great Ice Barrier, he did not know where Scott was or his situation). It was also farther away from Buenos Aires, where the Fram was to go for refitting. Why, once again, was there a big change of a previously announced plan? Was it simply that he wanted to avoid any possibility of crossing paths with the Terra Nova, since surely it would be going back to Lyttelton? Or was there another reason he did not mention, perhaps more strategic for his future plans?

  It was a long, hard five weeks of the Fram fighting its way to Hobart, the picturesque capital on Tasmania’s southeastern shore. When at last they made landfall on March 4, it would still be a few more days, and more rough weather, before they came under protection of the island and could sail in more easily. They took the opportunity to spruce up the ship, and themselves, for reentry into civilization. “Even Lindstrøm,” Amundsen noted, “who up to date had held the position among the land party of being its heaviest, fattest, and blackest member, showed unmistakable signs of having been in close contact with water.”16

  The pilot they picked up to bring them in had heard nothing of the Terra Nova, so no news was good news for Amundsen. He would indeed be the first to tell of their feat but typically not in a great gushing of public celebration. His style was more to keep them guessing, even a bit toward the cloak and dagger. When the Fram dropped anchor at the mouth of Derwent River just outside Hobart, Amundsen alone left the ship with the harbormaster in his launch, briefcase packed with drafts of telegrams. His instructions for the crew, most no doubt champing at the bit to get off themselves, were not to leave and not to let anyone on board, nor answer any questions.

  FIGURE 97

  The five who made it to the South Pole. In Hobart, Tasmania, March 7, 1912. From left, Sverre Hassel, Oscar Wisting, Roald Amundsen, Olav Bjaaland, and Helmer Hanssen. Amundsen soon left the ship, never to sail it again. Photograph by John Watt Beattie.

  Amundsen went ashore dressed, disguised really, as an ordinary sailor and made his way to a hotel where he “was regarded as a tramp, with my cap and blue jersey, and given a miserable little room.”17 The covertness continued with the first telegrams he sent out, to the king of Norway, Nansen, and his brother Leon, all coded to keep the contents away from prying eyes. Then he retired to his “miserable little room” for the night. In the morning he received a telegram, also coded, from his brother Leon, instructing him to send the news to the Daily Chronicle in London. Leon had arranged a lucrative contract with this newspaper for the exclusive story. By that night the world knew. Telegrams poured in and “reporters almost broke down the door to my bedroom.” But rather than revel in all the mounting attention, Amundsen made sure “no one got in” and, instead of euphoria, he expressed worry about his ongoing problem, money. “Unfortunately,” he lamented in his diary, “a great deal of money disappears here. The telegrams were very expensive . . . then there’s clothes, hotel, etc.” In the midst of momentous events, the nagging trials of life go on.

  On March 11, after four days of sitting on the Fram, looking longingly at Hobart, the crew was finally allowed to go ashore and into a cheery social life now certainly heightened by their notoriety. For one, in particular, it also led to an old familiar pitfall. Hjalmar Johansen took to the bars, and his private demons, bottled up since his confrontation with Amundsen on the barrier, were loosed. Four days later, Amundsen fired him, saying only that he “was impossible to have on board any longer.”18 (Another crew member, Sverre Hassel, thought it otherwise, that Johansen resigned). Whether in return for money to get home or yielding to the Boss’s strength of will, Johansen signed a document Amundsen put before him, agreeing to abide by his original contract, namely, not to say anything to anyone about the expedition. As of that moment, Johansen was no longer a member of the Fram’s third expedition. He would never sail with it again. Ironically, neither would Amundsen.

  They all dispersed. Most of the dogs were given to Australian explorer Douglas Mawson, whose ship Aurora was back in Hobart after dropping him off in Antarctica. Johansen went home as an anonymous, steerage passenger on other ships. On March 20, the Fram set sail for Buenos Aires, the same day that Robert Falcon Scott and his three companions pitched their tent for the last time on the Great Ice Barrier. Amundsen, bidding the ship good-bye, set out later on his own for Australia and New Zealand, to begin cashing in on his fame through public presentations.

  Amundsen also needed solitary time, free from all the hoopla, to write his book about the adventure while still fresh in the public’s mind, to be published later under the title The South Pole. While not lecturing, he once again traveled in disguise and under a false name (actually, his two middle names), mailing home sections to Leon as he completed them. After Australia he went to New Zealand and then Buenos Aires, where he was to rejoin the Fram and, perhaps more importantly now, meet with his gilded savior Don Pedro Christophersen and cement his continuing financial support. During this period, his diary entries are scant and almost entirely about progress on the book and the cost of things, his two most pressing issues now. On May 21, he disembarked in Montevideo, Uruguay, to meet Christophersen and then proceeded to Buenos Aires further up the Rio de la Plata, there to greet the Fram as it came in on May 26, almost three months since he had stepped off it in Hobart.

  After a short period when Amundsen and his crew were in the public eye, at a festive banquet and on the streets of Buenos Aires, they soon melted away as a group, continuing the dispersal begun in Hobart. At Christophersen’s invitation, Amundsen moved into his luxurious private country home in Montevideo to work on his book. At Christophersen’s expense, all but one of the Fram’s crew left for Norway on June 7, exactly two years to the day after leaving Christiania, as passengers on another ship. Only Thorvald Nilsen stayed behind, to oversee repairs to the Fram and restocking (all paid, again, by Christophersen) for its trip to the Arctic, at some undetermined time in the future. The Fram now lay moored in Buenos Aries, a vessel emptied of dogs and men, away from a life at sea or in the ice, docile, and in limbo.

  The Fram had done everything it was designed to do and more. Nilsen estimated that it had been “two and a half times round the globe,” a total of 62,600 miles (54,400 nautical miles). It had weathered countless storms and heavy seas. It had pushed through mile after mile of pack ice and been locked in it for seven Arctic winters. It had dodged menacing icebergs repeatedly and artfully, in both hemispheres. Under Nansen and Otto Sverdrup, it had been the furthest north of any ship; under Amundsen and Nilsen, the furthest south. It had traveled to the ends of the earth and back.

  ››› When Nansen and Sverdrup returned to Norway at the completion of the Fram’s first
two expeditions, it had been to great crowds and rousing celebrations, to the honors bestowed on them as heroes. These too would be waiting for Amundsen, but he wanted none of it. In early July, after finishing his book, he practically sneaked away from Christophersen’s home and boarded a ship for Europe. His furtive act surprised, disappointed, and even angered his patron, though not to the point of reneging on his beneficence. Back in Christiania on the last day of July, once again disguised and under his alias, he made his way alone and unrecognized by tram and then by foot to the king’s residence to announce his return, not to great crowds, but to one man only, in private.

  The Fram’s crew had arrived earlier, on July 2, and quickly disappeared into the city and countryside, to their homes and communities. Not until August 20 did they all reassemble, as dinner guests of the king, looking a bit uncomfortable and more like businessmen than explorers, with clean-shaven faces, trim haircuts, and formal evening attire. Only two of the Fram’s Antarctic expedition were missing, Nilsen, of course, and Johansen.

  FIGURE 98 Clean-cut and younger-looking third expedition members reassembled back in Christiania, August 1912. Left to right, front row: Hassel, Wisting, Bjaaland, and Hanssen. Middle row, Hansen, Olsen, Prestrud, Gjertsen, Kristensen, and Lindstrøm. Back row: Rønne, Sundbeck, Beck, and Stubberud. Missing are Amundsen (not available), Nilsen (with Fram in Buenos Aires), and Johansen (dismissed from the expedition). Photograph by Anders Beer Wilse.