It has been said of him, quite unjustly, that he merely climbed a ladder set in place by others. Yet the errors of his predecessors, manifest long before he came on the scene, were still unacknowledged by the Royal Navy, for one. In 1889, Sir Clements Markham was still championing the outmoded practice of manhauled sledges. The use of dogs “was a very cruel system,” Markham told the International Geographical Congress in Berlin that year, to which Nansen responded tartly, “It is also cruel to overload a human being with work.” It was no accident that the better-trained and better-equipped Norwegian beat Markham’s protégé, Scott, to the South Pole. Scott was always an amateur. Amundsen, like Nansen and Peary, was a professional.
He had prepared himself for the task since childhood. Long before he heard that secret voice urging him to conquer the Passage, he had been devouring the works of the explorers. John Franklin was his first hero. Franklin’s account of starvation on the Barren Grounds of northern Canada “thrilled me as nothing I had ever read before.” He credited this single volume, which he had read at fifteen, with shaping the course of his life. At that point he decided, irretrievably, to become an explorer. Oddly, in view of Amundsen’s later unblemished record, it was Franklin’s account of his sufferings that appealed most to the fifteen-year-old. “The idealism of youth, which often takes a turn toward martyrdom, found its crusade in me in the form of Arctic exploration.”
But Amundsen’s admiration of Franklin didn’t extend to emulation. When Amundsen set out in 1903 to conquer the Passage, he had no intention of suffering the way Franklin had. He had spent half his life preparing for just such a journey. He had, by then, read every word of every journal published by every Arctic explorer, and he had talked to several face to face. He knew the vicissitudes that awaited him; he also knew how to cope.
As a teenager he hardened his muscles by playing football (which he didn’t like) and skiing (which he adored). He went on ski trips and clambered up the mountains around Christiania (Oslo) to toughen himself. In order to acclimatize himself to the chill blasts of winter, he insisted on leaving his bedroom window open in the otherwise hermetically sealed house. Eight years of conscientious exercise developed him so well that when he took his medical for compulsory army service, the doctor ignored his myopia and called in his colleagues to exclaim over his muscles.
His mother refused to allow him to volunteer to go with Nansen on the Fram; she wanted him to be a doctor. That same year – his twenty-first – she died, and he was free to follow his chosen profession. In his study of the various Arctic journals, he had been struck by two fatal weaknesses common to many expeditions, especially the American ones. First, he noted, the commander often had no navigational experience and had to defer to the advice of others. Thus each expedition had, in effect, more than one leader – Charles Hall’s case was the extreme example – and that led to tension, disagreement, lowered morale, and indecision. Secondly, there had often been friction between the scientific staff on one hand and the captain and crew on the other. That had been apparent on the Kane, Hall, and Greely expeditions and to a lesser extent on earlier ones. Armstrong, the doctor and scientist on board the Investigator, had never got on well with McClure, for instance. To these twin problems, Amundsen had an indisputable solution. He would study navigation and science until he had mastered both. On his expedition there would be no divided command.
His first task was to get a skipper’s licence, a lengthy and difficult procedure. For two summers he shipped as an ordinary seaman aboard an Arctic sealing vessel. Then, in 1897, he became first mate aboard the Belgica, carrying a Belgian expedition seeking the South Magnetic Pole. The Belgians were not prepared for polar travel. Their clothes, equipment, and food were all inadequate. The captain’s aversion to fresh meat amounted to a mania. He not only refused to eat it, he also kept it from the crew until everybody came down with scurvy, the captain and commander so ill they took to their beds and made their wills.
Here Amundsen developed a lifelong admiration for the ship’s doctor, the same Frederick Cook who had been on an earlier expedition with Peary. With Amundsen’s help, Cook saved the day, digging in the snow around the ship for carcasses of seals, sewing warm clothing into blankets, and goading the emaciated men into sawing a channel through the ice that had trapped them. At one point, the ingenious Dr. Cook carefully collected a cache of specimen penguin skins, which he sewed into a mattress to use as a buffer to protect the ship’s sides from the pressure of the ice.
Amundsen returned from the Antarctic after two years with the practical experience he would need to get his skipper’s papers. He was still studying both navigation and the work of the Arctic explorers, notably that of Frederick Jackson, the man who had rescued Nansen, and James Clark Ross, who had discovered the North Magnetic Pole. In the Antarctic, Amundsen had listened to his scientific colleagues arguing whether or not the magnetic poles were fixed or whether they moved. He was fired then by a new idea: if he could discover the secret of the North Magnetic Pole, that would be a coup almost equal to the conquest of the Passage. More, it would give him a scientific cover for his main objective, providing a guise of respectability to cloak the raw romance of exploration.
Scientists who cared not a whit for the Passage tended to brighten when the young Norwegian mentioned the North Magnetic Pole. Amundsen had no intention of taking along experts in magnetism when he made his voyage. Instead, he would become a scientist; he would make himself proficient in taking magnetic observations. He approached the British for aid; when they refused his request, he turned to the Germans.
And so, late in 1900, Amundsen, virtually penniless, took a cheap room in a poor quarter of Hamburg. Armed with an introduction from an Oslo scientist, he rapped unannounced on the door of the acknowledged authority on terrestrial magnetism, Professor George Neumayer, director of the German Marine Observatory. He explained his mission. To justify further explorations, he told the professor, he must acquire scientific knowledge. Neumayer, who reminded Amundsen of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, stared hard at the lanky young Norwegian with the long, morose face. “Young man,” he said, “you have something more on your mind than this! Tell me what it is.”
Amundsen mentioned the Passage. That did not satisfy the professor. “Ah,” he said, “there is still more.” At last Amundsen mentioned studying the North Magnetic Pole. At that Neumayer flung his arms around him, crying, “If you do that you will be the benefactor of mankind for ages to come. That is the great adventure.” He took Amundsen under his wing. The precise young man calculated that in the forty days that followed, he had spent two hundred and fifty hours studying the theory and practice of magnetic observation.
His next move, in Norway, was to secure Nansen’s backing for his proposed expedition. With more than a little trepidation, he went out to his hero’s villa at Lysaker and knocked on the door of his study, humbled by his own insignificance in the presence of the greatest Norwegian of his day – a man who to him seemed almost superhuman. Nansen, as a result of the journey of the Fram, had acquired a towering reputation, fuelled by a burgeoning Norwegian nationalism that in five years would cause a permanent break with Sweden. The Norwegian independence movement required a pantheon of heroes, and Nansen stood on the pinnacle. In Amundsen’s eyes, he was as terrifyingly austere as the Arctic itself. But now he was happy to lend his support and prestige to the venture, for he saw the younger man as the British and Americans had seen their polar adventurers – as a future hero who could give his country a new sense of pride by carrying its flag through uncharted channels. Amundsen said later that he dated the actual realization of his expedition from that moment.
That winter of 1900-1901, he went off to Tromsoe, the headquarters of the whaling captains. There, with funds borrowed from his brother, he bought a little wooden square-sterned sloop, the Gjöa. Compared to the three-hundred- and four-hundred-ton British ships that had butted vainly against the Arctic ice, it was a cockleshell. But Amundsen was an ad
vocate of smallness. The Arctic archipelago was a skein of shoals, channels, and ice barriers. Only a small ship, Amundsen believed, could thread her way through this maze. “What has not been accomplished by large vessels and main force,” he said, “I will attempt with a small vessel and patience.”
His crew too would be small, all handpicked and prepared to live off the land. There might not be game enough for 129 men, as Franklin’s officers had discovered; but there would be enough, Amundsen was convinced, for seven. That would be the total complement of the Gjöa. They would all go native, wearing native clothing, sleeping in native snow houses. Rae had done it, he reminded the Norwegian Geographical Society, and at trifling cost.
For the next two years, Roald Amundsen was caught up in a flurry of fund-raising and preparation. He learned from everyone – from the whalers at Tromsoe and also from the Lapps, who taught him the insulating properties of sennegras. He took the Gjöa on a training cruise. He got his master’s certificate. He had long sessions with Otto Sverdrup, from whom he learned the mystique of Eskimo dogs and dog driving: how to treat dogs as equals, how to use dogs in concert with skis, why Greenland huskies were better than the Siberian breed. Nothing escaped him; he even rejected commercial pemmican in favour of his own recipe. Late in 1902 he went off to England to talk to other Arctic explorers – Sir Clements Markham, Sir Allen Young, and the aging Sir Leopold M’Clintock, who was still in bed the morning Amundsen knocked on his door – and then on to Potsdam for more work on terrestrial magnetism.
At last he was ready. He had everything he needed, except money. On June 16, 1903, with the thirty-one-year-old herring boat loaded with five years’ provisions and equipment, all tightly sealed in large, oddly built provision boxes, he and his crew of six cast off from the docks at Christiania in a torrential downpour. Underfunded and in debt, he left on the stroke of midnight, it was said, to escape his creditors. As a scientific explorer Amundsen had no peer; in financial matters he was always a child.
Within two months the Gjöa had pierced the heart of the Arctic archipelago. On the evening of August 22 she arrived at Franklin’s last safe wintering place, Beechey Island. For the explorer, this was hallowed ground. Standing on the deck of the little schooner, he tried to picture the scene: the splendidly equipped ships with the British colours flying at the mastheads, all abustle; the officers in their dazzling uniforms; the boatswains with their pipes; the blue-clad sailors scrambling ashore; and the commander himself, his round face beaming with gentle amiability. At least, that is what Amundsen says he thought. But he wrote those words in 1908 when international hero-worship of Franklin was at its height and every writer, whether English, American, or Scandinavian, paid lip-service to the mythic stature of the commander of the Erebus and the Terror. No one interested in raising funds for a new expedition, as Amundsen then was, would have dared to puncture the Franklin legend. By his own actions, however, Amundsen showed that he was totally at odds with the Franklin school of exploration, though he had no intention of being ungracious. “Let us raise a monument to them, more enduring than stone,” he was to write, “that they were the first discoverers of the Passage.”
Which route should he now follow? To the northwest the hunting fields of Melville and Prince Patrick islands, with their vast herds of muskoxen, beckoned invitingly. But Amundsen was not a slave to personal sentiment. When he took his magnetic observations, the needle pointed stubbornly south, so south he determined to go. He left Beechey Island, with its three grave markers, its ruined depots, and its monuments to faded glories – Lady Franklin’s marble slab, Belcher’s memorial column, and the little plaque in memory of young Bellot – and with “the heaviness and sadness of death” hanging over that lifeless, fog-shrouded shore, he headed into “waters never sailed in … hoping to reach still farther where no keel had ever ploughed.”
He moved down Peel Sound and into Franklin Strait. Here, in the vicinity of the North Magnetic Pole, the compass was useless. Like the Vikings of old he steered by the stars. He passed the point where Allen Young had been forced to turn back by the ice. Would this be his fate, too? M’Clintock had once said that in his opinion, the sound was navigable no more than once in every four or five years. Pacing nervously back and forth along the deck, Amundsen tried to hide his inward agitation from his comrades. The ship lurched under his feet, increasing his concern. But the sea was calm; he felt irritated by his own skittishness. Again he felt movement beneath him and again he looked over the rail at a glassy sea. The irregular motion continued until he realized at last what it was. He would not, he said later, have sold that slight motion for any amount of money! What he was receiving was a message from the open ocean – a swell that told him there was no wall of ice to block his way to the south. Fortune, which had defeated Allen Young, was on his side.
On August 31, after he had passed Bellot Strait, where M’Clintock had been trapped, the engine room caught fire. Disaster faced the Gjöa’s company. Twenty-two hundred gallons of oil lay directly in the path of the flames. At any moment the ship might be blown to bits. But the crew worked smoothly and without panic to quell the blaze before it reached the oil.
Amundsen navigates the North West Passage, 1903-1906
The following day, the sloop ran aground on a reef. Amundsen and his men pitched ten thousand pounds of dogfood overboard in a vain attempt to free her. A gale sprang up, flung the Gjöa against a rock, and splintered her false keel. Holding fast with all his strength to prevent being thrown into the boiling sea, Amundsen cursed himself for not keeping watch in the crow’s-nest. As the vessel blundered ahead under full sail (Amundsen’s decision), dancing from rock to rock (Amundsen’s description), he wondered whether she might break up. Should they lower a boat and escape with a few necessities? Or should they take a chance and drive on to possible destruction?
He ordered the small boats to be cleared and loaded. As that was being done, the others began to throw the rest of the deck cargo into the sea. The schooner was being driven toward the shallowest part of the reef when suddenly she was hurled upward and flung bodily onto the rocks with a series of thumps that caused Amundsen to pray to his Maker for succour. One final thump occurred, and then, to everyone’s amazement and relief, she slid off the reef into deep water.
Amundsen had learned his lesson. From that moment on he would keep one man always aloft and another at the prow testing the depths with a lead. They were moving down the east coast of King William Island through James Ross Strait and into Rae Strait – the route Franklin had not known existed. Suddenly, Godfred Hansen cried out from aloft, “I see the finest little harbour in the world.” Here, on the southeast corner of King William Island, they anchored. Amundsen christened it Gjöa Haven. It would be their home for the next two years.
The Passage beckoned invitingly. Simpson Strait was open; the way seemed clear to the west. But Amundsen was mindful of his scientific responsibilities. He must build an observatory, explore the unmapped neighbourhood, and locate the North Magnetic Pole, which he figured was some ninety miles to the northeast. When that was accomplished there would be time to follow the channels westward.
He had developed an ingenious form of prefabrication by using the big packing boxes as building materials. With these boxes, filled with sand, he constructed two buildings for magnetic observation (using copper nails to prevent magnetic interference), a supply hut, an astronomical observatory, and another small hut in which two of the crew lived for two winters. The rest bunked down on the Gjöa.
The buildings were scarcely completed before a band of Netsilik Eskimos arrived. These were pure aborigines, untainted by recent white contact. Seventy-five years before, their grandparents had briefly encountered James Clark Ross on his trip to the site of the North Magnetic Pole, and this folk memory remained with them as clearly as if the meeting had taken place that month. To the Netsiliks, the arrival of the legendary white men was like the coming of supernatural beings. When, in November, Amundsen visited one
of their camps, there was pandemonium: men, women, and children rushed forward to grab at his clothing, to stroke his face, and to feel the contours of his body. An affectionate bond developed between the explorers and these primitive people – the merriest human beings that the sombre Norwegians had ever encountered. A gregarious lot, they moved to Gjöa Haven in a body. At one point Amundsen discovered there were eighty women and children camped there.
This eighteen-month contact with the Netsiliks had profound effects. Amundsen was not a trained anthropologist, but he was on the ground and able to study their lifestyle before civilization changed them. The results, when published, were invaluable. He approached them with humility in the belief that they had a great deal to teach him. Commander Robert Scott and his men were in the Antarctic on their first expedition at this same time, stubbornly manhauling 240-pound loads on heavy sledges in the old British naval tradition, starving and freezing because of improper clothing and inadequate food. Amundsen, meanwhile, was flourishing in a similar environment. Here on King William Island, where Franklin’s followers had perished, he was honing the techniques that would make it possible for him to conquer the South Pole and live to tell about it.
The Eskimos became his teachers, and Amundsen and his comrades were willing pupils. A jocular old man, Teraiu, whom Amundsen befriended and gave a berth aboard the Gjöa, showed them all how to build snow houses, using a long-handled knife and a forty-inch caribou horn. In his memoirs, Amundsen cheerfully described one of these earlier attempts: “They, no doubt, hardly thought that a ‘Kabluna’ (foreigner) could manage a piece of work, which was their own specialty. But they did not wait very long before very audibly expressing their views on the point. Hansen and I did something or other they were not used to, and in a trice the whole crowd burst into noisy exultation. Their laughter was uncontrollable; the tears ran down their cheeks; they writhed with laughter, gasped for breath, and positively shrieked. At last … they took the whole work in hand, but had to stop now and then to have another laugh at the thought of our stupidity.…”
The Arctic Grail Page 62