Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  The Maud then went north, to find the east-west current that would take it on the drift across the North Pole. However, before the ship got very far it encountered ice that gripped it and drove it west across the Bering Strait to the coast of Siberia’s Chukchi Peninsula, where it stayed for another winter, its third. Instead of heading north when freed the next summer, it had to go south to Seattle for repairs to its severely ice-damaged screw and shaft. By the time it arrived, Amundsen was already there.

  Not one to hang around while the ship was locked in ice, he had had Wisting drive him by dog sledge to East Cape (the easternmost settlement in Russia) where he caught a ride on a ship to Seattle. He did not stay there long, either, leaving for Norway. The Maud, once it got to Seattle, remained under Wisting’s care there for a whole year.

  When Amundsen returned to the Maud in May 1922, he came with two airplanes, dismantled and stuffed into many big crates, and men to fly and fix them. They all sailed forth from Seattle on June 3, 1922, and headed north once again, with a more crowded scene on board—the remnants of the old crew; two scientists; two pilots and two mechanics; a Chukchi native who had come on to assist; Amundsen; and the boxed-up airplanes on deck. Amundsen, one of the pilots, and one plane were transferred to another ship and taken to Wainwright (now Ulguniq), on the north shore of Alaska. There they would assemble the plane, test it, and then take off for their flight over the pole. The Maud kept going northwest, under Wisting’s command and carrying the other plane and pilot, to find the frozen sea above Siberia, begin its long-anticipated drift, and use the plane for ice reconnaissance.

  The flights and the drift never happened. Ice conditions and the weather around Wainwright were too bad for flying that summer, and during the next the plane crashed while on trials and was too severely damaged to fly again. (Over the winter, the ever-restless Amundsen sledged south to do more “business” in the more lively, cosmopolitan Nome, a town of perhaps two thousand people [down from twelve thousand during the Gold Rush at the turn of the century], leaving the pilot to his own devices in a small house in Wainwright.)

  The Maud became snared in the ice north of Wrangel Island, in an eerie coincidence almost exactly where the Jeannette had been entrapped more than four decades earlier. For the next two years, it drifted with the floes, northwesterly, but not toward the pole. It was headed to the New Siberian Islands when Amundsen telegraphed Wisting, instructing him to abort the mission, break out of the ice, and return to Nome.

  It was easier said than done. For several weeks they struggled to free the ship, finally succeeding in early August just north of the New Siberian Islands. It curled back, south then east, along the open water of coastal Siberia but was locked in again in September. It spent yet another winter, another ten months, in the ice before breaking free and going on to Nome.

  It was a hard accounting. The Maud had not even reached the southernmost point of the Fram’s start on its own icebound voyage. One man had died of unknown causes. The Chukchi native had abandoned the ship when frozen in off Siberia and gone home. The flying experiment had failed, as it had at Wainwright. The plane, having had difficulty taking off and landing in irregular pack ice, was disabled permanently after several short test-flight crashes.

  The Maud never made it back to Norway but ended up in Seattle, recalled there by Amundsen, where it was seized by his creditors for unpaid bills. Eventually, the Hudson’s Bay Company bought it to serve as a supply ship to its outposts in the Canadian Arctic and, its final job, to be a floating radio station in Cambridge Bay (now Inuinnaqtun) at Victoria Island. It is still there, at least its battered remains, sunk in the bay’s icy water, its hull just showing above the surface. The Fram’s masts have gone to scavengers and the weather; the Fram’s windlass went to rust and rot. At least it is not yet only a memory. Some still hope that one day it will be raised, taken back to Norway, be restored, and take its place next to the Fram and Gjøa.

  From the rearview of history, the Maud expedition, for all its failures, had some glowing successes: collection of abundant, revelatory scientific data (especially by Harald Ulrik Sverdrup on oceanography and meteorology); preliminary insights into and lessons learned about flight in polar regions; and the first surface circumnavigation of the Arctic (by Amundsen and Hanssen). But even as the Maud lay immobile in the ice, and even before it would be taken from him, Amundsen had moved on. He would leave the dogs and sledges on the ice, leave ships to the sea, and take to air to capture that one last place he wanted, to add to the ones he already had.

  FIGURE 100

  A face to remember. Roald Amundsen, at about age fifty-three, three years before he disappeared forever in the Arctic in 1928 while searching for the missing airship Italia and its crew (see text). Photograph by Lomen Brothers (Nome, Alaska).

  ››› Despite his abortive and almost calamitous attempts off Alaska, Amundsen remained committed to flying as the future of polar exploration. Aviation, and planes, had improved by leaps and bounds during and after World War I, an all-too-familiar story of boons to technology coming out of terrible upheavals in society. In the meantime, however, Amundsen had gone bankrupt, despite his fame and selling of assets (including the Maud), and he desperately needed money to continue his plan to fly over the Arctic basin. Through good fortune and good timing, help arrived at that moment. When he was in New York on a lecture tour of the United States to raise money, a wealthy polar enthusiast and admirer came calling. Lincoln Ellsworth offered his own money (and that of his millionaire father) to the cause, with one big string: that he himself would not just be a bystander to watch and cheer but also go along as a participant.

  In the spring of 1925, two German Dornier Wal seaplanes, unnamed and referred to only by their prosaic registration numbers, N24 and N25, took off from Spitsbergen and headed north. Aboard N25 were pilot Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen; Amundsen as navigator and the expedition commander; and a German mechanic, Karl Feucht. The pilot of N24 was Leif Dietrichson, with copilot cum mechanic Oskar Omdal (of one of the planes on the Maud), and as navigator, the American Lincoln Ellsworth.

  They figured that eight hours of flying would get them to the pole. After flying eight hours they came down to check. Riiser-Larsen picked a narrow lead between floes and landed N25 safely, while Dietrichson, under orders to keep the planes together, guided N24 to another lead some distance away.

  Their calculations were a bit off. Instead of being at the pole, they were 156 miles away from it. N24’s fuselage had been damaged on takeoff at Spitsbergen, and it now began to take on water. Its crew quickly unloaded fuel and supplies and then on skis began transporting them over the ice toward the sister ship. The ice was thin, and both Dietrichson and Omdal fell through into the frigid water. Ellsworth, using his skis as poles, reached out to the floundering men and pulled each out before the coldness and currents took them away. It took nearly a week before they got to N25.

  The lead around N25 had begun to freeze and close, so they rushed to get it up on the ice before it was too late. Getting to the pole was out. If the remaining one seaplane were to get back to Svalbard, it would have to take off from the ice, carrying the extra weight of three more men. However, the floe on which it sat was too small, so they found another and, with great difficulty, maneuvered the plane across the uneven pack to reach it. Next, they had to make a runway on the new floe, long enough to allow the overweight plane to become airborne. At first they scraped and hacked at the ice with what few tools they had, trying to flatten the uneven surface and make a runway out of shifting pack ice, but then Omdal suggested it would be much easier—for both their labor and the plane’s glide—to pack down snow.

  After three and a half weeks, the runway was finally ready. They left most everything on the ice: fuel, food, sledges, extra clothes, and even the canvas boat, with only enough fuel to get back to Svalbard and food to last but one day for each of them. With the five other men crammed into the fuselage, Riiser-Larsen opened the throttle full, and N25 began to
move down the runway. It was all or nothing now, success or failure, one try only. Gå fram!

  It gained speed, and then, with a great jumble of pack ice and the Arctic Ocean awaiting them if they could not get high enough, it struggled into the air just before reaching the end of the runway. Eight and a half hours later, almost out of gas, with Svalbard in view, N25 developed steering problems and Riiser-Larsen had to bring it down and drive it like a boat across the water the remaining few miles to land. They had returned, after twenty-six days on the ice and given up for lost.

  Later, with Riiser-Larsen at the controls, N25 took Amundsen to Oslo, where great crowds eagerly waited. It was the first and only time he accompanied a vessel of his own back home to Norway, and into public adulation, after a momentous voyage. It did not matter that he had not reached the pole, had not crossed the polar basin, or had lost a plane. It was more about the actors and the drama played out on this world stage.

  Even as the celebrations went on around him, Amundsen had his mind on something else. Riiser-Larsen had suggested to Amundsen that, instead of planes, they should take an airship (dirigible) across the pole. Riiser-Larsen had already flown airships in England and was convinced of their utility for this purpose: they were big, could be repaired in flight, were fast (by using the wind as well as engines for propulsion), and did not have to land. Amundsen agreed, and together they approached Italian airship designer, builder, and pilot, Umberto Nobile. Ellsworth again offered his ample money to drop in the yawning till, again with the proviso of being one aboard.

  After wrangling over their roles and makeup of the crew (and over offended egos and national prides), Amundsen and Nobile took their places, Amundsen as commander of the expedition, directing the mission, and Nobile as captain and pilot, carrying out the orders. Riiser-Larsen was second-in-command and navigator. Oscar Wisting, who had just returned from the Maud now in hock in Seattle, controlled the vertical elevator. Maud seaplane and N24 survivor Oskar Omdal was one of the mechanics. Lincoln Ellsworth was again navigator. Lest there be any doubt whose expedition this was, Amundsen named the airship the Norge.

  On May 11, 1926, the Norge floated off from Spitsbergen. Riding in the gondolas beneath its great belly with sixteen men was a mix of Norwegians and Italians. The next day, they were there, over the North Pole! They dropped their flags, Norwegian, American, and Italian (many more Italian flags, with one much bigger, offending Amundsen) and then continued on toward Alaska, crossing the great unseen sector of the Arctic Ocean, where land, or even a continent, might be hiding, awaiting their discovery. But there was nothing but ice and water, and only on May 14, after exactly three days of “flying,” did the Norge come down at Teller, Alaska, not far from Nome. It was over, the first flight of any kind to the North Pole and across the polar sea. Amundsen and Wisting were now the only two to have seen both poles of the world, for whatever they were worth.

  Amundsen, having done everything he set out to do as a young man, retired.

  ››› During and after the Norge crossing, Amundsen and Nobile had a bitter and rather public falling-out over the continuing conflict of leadership and who got credit. Two years later, in late May 1928, Nobile tried it all again, taking Norge’s sister airship Italia (named in reprisal for Amundsen’s Norge?) from Spitsbergen to the pole. Italia did reach the pole but crashed on its way back, killing one man on impact and dropping nine from the smashed gondola onto the ice; three were injured in the process, including Nobile with a broken leg. Six others disappeared with the airship as it drifted away. A massive search got underway, drawing sixteen ships, twenty-three airplanes, and over one thousand men from eight different countries into the operation. One of those men was Amundsen. He immediately came out of his retirement when asked to help, putting aside his enmity.

  Amundsen quickly acquired the loan of a French seaplane, a Latham 47. Its crew of four Frenchmen flew it to Bergen, where they picked up Amundsen and his former pilot of N24, Dietrichson, and then went on to Tromsø for refueling before heading north. Three hours after leaving Tromsø, the plane’s radio went dead. The search for the Italia became also the search for Amundsen: Norge and Italia, the Norseman and the Italian.

  The pilot of an Italian airplane first spotted the surviving Italia crew camped out on the ice. Days later, a Swedish pilot landed his plane there and took off Nobile and his little dog (which had also been on the Norge flight). He came back to pick up the remaining crew, but the plane crashed, leaving it to a big British-built Russian icebreaker (the first ever), the Krasin, to make its way through the ice to them and finish the rescue.

  Nobile would recover physically but would spend the rest of his life trying to erase the black mark of the accident and its aftermath, particularly what many considered the captain abandoning his crew. Amundsen and the others on the Latham 47 were never found. Three months later, one of the wing floats from the plane washed ashore on the Norwegian coast, and yet later, a fuel tank that had been made into a kind of float . . . for the plane? . . . for them?

  ››› One June day in 1928, Amundsen had had a visitor at his home outside Oslo, one of the four who had accompanied him to the South Pole and the man who had sledged so far in the Sverdrup Islands: quiet and reflective Sverre Hassel. That day, while in Amundsen’s garden and no doubt admiring the flowers, Hassel had a heart attack and died. Twelve days later, Amundsen took off in the Latham 47 to look for Nobile and disappeared forever. Amundsen was fifty-five.

  ››› As he grew older, Amundsen had become more isolated and critical of others, distant from those formerly closest to him, even his family. He never married. He raised no children. He had chosen the kind of life he wanted, and lived it, and died by it. His final disappearance was, in a way, true to form. He managed once again to avoid the huge crowd in Oslo that turned out for him, not in celebration but in mourning.

  30 ›THE LONELY PLACES

  Fridtjof Nansen had gone the other way with his life since returning from the Arctic in 1896, not up in the air, obsessively for a place on earth, or away from others but down to earth, spread out into the world itself, with all its tumult and confusion, and all those crying out in need.

  He was famous and revered. He was an internationally best-selling author and turned it all into financial security, even wealth. He had a grand stone mansion built, “Polhøgda” (Polar Heights) outside Christiania, to be a home for his growing family, a sanctuary for study, and a retreat from the busyness beyond its doors. He had given the Fram to Amundsen that fateful day in 1907, with professed intention to dedicate himself to the quieter, more solitary pursuits of scientific inquiry, writing, and art, comfortable passions he had put aside for exploration. He especially wanted to delve deeply into oceanography, pouring over the mountains of data brought back on the Fram. He could have leaned back and rested on his laurels and had even said many times he wanted to.

  But that was only one side of him, the private, reflective, and creative side. The other side craved the human, the public, and the interpersonal. Two sides were at war within, or one could say two opposite poles pulled him inward and pushed him out.

  He became more engaged in Norway’s independence from Sweden and helped bring about a peaceful separation in 1905. Then he was appointed Norway’s first foreign minister to Great Britain, taking him away from home for long periods of time and into high society, social whirl, and the intrigues of politics. He found it at once exciting and repugnant, this life in the public eye, leveraging rewards by posturing and manipulating, securing political favors from powerful men, and being the object of admiration and attention of beautiful and elegant women.

  He had struggled, too, with another internal conflict. He had left exploration and the Fram also to recommit himself to a marriage in which both he and Eva had struggled off and on, and from which, in his traveling and public life, he had strayed into relationships with other women. His love was deep, if flawed. When Eva sickened with pneumonia that same year he let go of the Fram, he wa
s away in London and rushed home too late to be with her before she died.

  FIGURE 101

  Nansen with his children, after his wife Eva’s death, 1908. His son Åsmund would die two years later. After a dark period in his life, he emerged to become a great humanitarian. In front, from left: Liv, Odd, Åsmund, and Kåre. Behind, Nansen holding Irmelin. Photograph by Ingeborg Motzfeldt Løchen.

  His “black moods,” always hovering in the wings, became worse and more pervasive, no doubt deepened by guilt over his absences and infidelities. “The dark expression in his eyes frightened me,” Nansen’s daughter Liv wrote later in Nansen: A Family Portrait of her father during this time. Polhøgda became a cold fortress against the outside world, a melancholy, lifeless place for him and those close to him. His children numbered five, the oldest Liv at thirteen when Eva died, and the youngest Åsmund at four. They felt his distracted sadness and the want of his attention and were handed over to others for much of the parenting that, in his sorrow and state of mind, was too much for him. He withdrew from others to his rooms and inside himself. “He had chosen Eva over the Fram,” his daughter wrote. “Now he had neither.”

  ››› As grief loosed its stranglehold on him, he began to pick up his scientific work again and escaped his self-imposed isolation on sea voyages, most involving oceanographic surveys to the north. He got back into the world, bit by bit. Then, in 1913, the double tragedy hit: Hjalmar Johansen’s suicide and, a few months later, the death of his youngest son Åsmund, now eleven. Nansen fell back into the pit of sorrow and reclusion. He slowly emerged, once again, but by then the Great War (World War I) was looming over Europe, and its enormity and proximity awakened in him a new calling that, in one form or another, would motivate him for the rest of his life. He would raise his sonorous voice, and use his fame and his personal power, to defend innocent people from tyranny, injustice, and suffering.