But the Norwegians persevered because, as Rae had discovered before them, and Peary too, the snow houses they could build on the trail were vastly more comfortable than any tent. There were other discoveries: the Netsiliks scoffed at the white man’s attempt to stop frostbite by rubbing the skin with snow. Snow against frost? It was nonsense. The right way, the white men learned, was to remove a warm hand from a glove and rub it vigorously against the affected spot.
These were no ordinary gloves; these were Eskimo gloves, with long cuffs tied tightly to prevent snow creeping up the arm. Three weeks after his arrival, Amundsen was wearing a full set of deerskin clothing and for the next twenty months continued to dress as a native. The secret, which was still eluding the British Navy, was air circulation. Tight wool clothing caused men to sweat. The native parkas and trousers were loose, fast drying, and windproof. It was essential, too, that the undergarments be made of deerskin. Unlike wool, deerskin sheds dirt; unlike wool, it is warm to the touch when it is put on. As Amundsen remarked, “in woollen things you have to jump and dance about like a madman before you can get warm.”
The Netsiliks taught Amundsen the value of deerskin stockings, with the fur turned inward, and deerskin footgear stuffed with sedge grass, which absorbed moisture and dried out quickly at night. Again, as Peary had learned, this added to the flexibility of polar travel. Amundsen noted how quickly an Eskimo could leap out from under the covering of his sleeping bench in the morning and jump into his loose clothing; it took but an instant. It was the same at bedtime. Amundsen published all this detail in his book The North West Passage, which was available in English in London by 1908. More than three years later, Apsley Cherry-Garrard recounted in The Worst Journey in the World – the story of the second Scott expedition – that British naval officers required half an hour to thaw themselves into their frozen sleeping bags each evening.
There was more to learn, ranging from the secret of operating a kayak (Amundsen took a chilly ducking on his first try) to the native system of coating the sledge runners with a film of ice, which Amundsen found allowed them to “slide like butter” over any kind of snow. The Netsiliks also helped the Norwegians grasp the art of dog driving – a technique that requires humility, for this is in no sense a master-servant relationship; there must be a rapport between man and beast.
Finally, from the Eskimos Amundsen, like Nansen, learned the value of patience in the Arctic. Earlier explorers, reckless to achieve record mileages, had derided the natives for their sloth. But the natives understood the value of maintaining proper pace. Sweat in the Arctic can kill. To overtax one’s strength can be fatal, for that leaves the human body with no resources for an emergency. M’Clintock’s sledgers had exhausted and crippled themselves, sometimes permanently, for no other reason than vanity, as their published boasts make clear. The Eskimos arrived at their destinations more slowly but with minds and bodies unimpaired – able to move forward, day by day, without collapsing. For this, they were often reviled for “laziness.”
Certainly, two winters at Gjöa Haven required monumental patience. The North West Passage continued to beckon. Who knew whether Simpson Strait would be free of ice when the scientific work was finally done? Amundsen “burned at the thought of the time when we should show our Norwegian flag to the first vessel on the other side.…” But having clothed his plans in the garment of science, he was determined to fulfil his pledge. He knew that idleness, especially under these conditions, could be demoralizing; he had read the works of the earlier explorers. That was one reason why he had kept his numbers small: as he said “there can always be work found for a few.” Actually, he found his comrades prepared to make their own work. He had brought along no fewer than seventy-five games to play; significantly, they were never used except by the Eskimos, who didn’t understand them but played them anyway – and with great enthusiasm.
In the spring and summer all seven were occupied with expeditions to map the northwest coastline of Victoria Land and also to find the site of the North Magnetic Pole. When Amundsen reached the spot where James Clark Ross had located the pole, he discovered that it had moved some thirty miles. He did not reach that site, but that didn’t matter. Science would recognize his discovery that the pole was not fixed as his major achievement.
He came to another realization: the unnavigated portion of the North West Passage was no more than one hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies. It lay between Cape Crozier, the most westerly point of King William Island, and Cambridge Bay, where Collinson had wintered. One old man with whom Amundsen had developed a close friendship confided to him that one of Franklin’s ships had drifted to Cape Crozier where he and his friends looted it before it was crushed by the ice.
The time for departure was rapidly approaching. In May, 1905 the first mail in two years arrived by native dogsled from the west. On June 1, the self-regulating instruments that had been operating for nineteen months were stopped. The houses were taken down and the ship was painted. By the end of June, with the last of the exploring parties back at Gjöa Haven, the channels were beginning to open. But it was August 12 before the coast of King William Island was free of ice.
It was time to leave. They had spent two years in relative comfort, growing fat on game and fish. To pass the time, Amundsen had founded a society to taste all the products of the land – from fox steaks to caribou tripe. “Thanks to my comrades,” he wrote, “I left Gjöa Havn with nothing but happy memories. We never had a misunderstanding or a dispute of any kind.” Few other Arctic explorers could have made that statement. But few other expeditions had operated as Amundsen’s had – with no social or disciplinary gap between the members. Amundsen treated his six crew members as equals and shared their labours. It was the same with the Eskimos; if anything, he treated them as his superiors, unlike Peary, who saw them as chattels.
But like Peary, he held no brief for the popular notion that by Christianizing or “civilizing” them, they would somehow become better human beings. Quite the contrary: “During the voyage of the ‘Gjöa’ we came into contact with ten different Eskimo tribes in all, and we had good opportunities of observing the influence of civilization on them, as we were able to compare those Eskimo who had come into contact with civilisation with those who had not. And I must state it as my firm conviction that the latter, the Eskimo living absolutely isolated from civilisation of any kind, are undoubtedly the happiest, healthiest, and most honourable and most contented among them.”
Amundsen urged (vainly, as it turned out) that the natives be guarded from “the many perils and evils of civilisation” by strict laws, thus following the example of Denmark. “My sincerest wish for our friends the Nechilli Eskimos is, that civilisation may never reach them,” he declared.
On their part, the Eskimos had been studying the illustrated papers and magazines that Amundsen had brought along, many of them depicting terrifying battle scenes from the Boer War. Understandably, they showed no interest in emigrating to the land of the white man – a realm they visualized as one of unlimited violence. “Good-da! Good-da! (Good-day),” they shouted cheerfully as the sloop cast off into the thick fog and left them behind. In truth, Amundsen said, they had learned his language more easily than he and his comrades had learned the Netsilik tongue.
The Gjöa groped its way through the fog into the shallow, island-dotted strait named for Thomas Simpson guided by some of the natives in their kayaks, who seemed to know exactly where they were heading in spite of the murk. These were totally unknown, totally unpredictable waters; no white man had sailed through them before. The soundings jumped from seventeen fathoms to five, then back again. Sandy bottoms suddenly turned ragged and stony. They were in the midst of what Amundsen called “disconcerting chaos.” Sharp stones faced them on every side. Low-lying rocks loomed up just above the surface of the channel. “We bungled through zigzag as if we were drunk,” he said. The lead continued to fly up and down in dismaying fashion. Standing at the helm, Amundsen found
that he was shuffling his feet out of sheer nervousness while the lookout in the crow’s-nest flung his arms about like a maniac indicating sudden shifts to port and starboard. There were so many rocks ahead that “it was just like sailing through an uncleared field.”
Somehow the Gjöa got through, then slipped between the ice floes in Victoria Strait to reach the flat, monotonous coastline of Victoria Land, and anchored at last in Cambridge Bay. The date was a historic one: August 17, 1905. Roald Amundsen and his crew had managed to bring their ship through the hitherto unnavigated link in the North West Passage.
What Amundsen had shown was that there was no practical passage here for large ships. Nor could any vessel of his time, no matter what its size, force its way through the ice stream that swept round Banks and Prince Patrick islands from the Beaufort Sea. And only a tiny craft of shallow draft, such as the Gjöa, could hope to make it through Simpson Strait.
The truth was now revealed: even if Sir John Franklin had known that King William Land was insular, even if he had been able to slip past its east coast by Rae Strait, he would certainly have foundered among the rocks and shoals that almost did for Amundsen’s little ship. The Erebus and the Terror were too big and too awkward, and it is more than probable that the expedition’s fate would have differed only in degree from the tragedy of 1848.
For Amundsen, the rest of the journey was comparatively easy. He had Collinson’s charts and descriptions to guide him. Every fibre urged him to press on, now that he was on the threshold of success; but the waters were shallow and hazardous, and he knew that it was better to sacrifice a few hours rather than jeopardize his vessel. Once again the Norwegian practised patience.
One last set of rocks and shoals barred the entrance to Dolphin and Union Strait. Once through that hazard, Amundsen found himself breathing more easily. In spite of a devouring hunger, he had not been able to swallow a morsel of food or snatch a moment’s sleep during this critical passage. Now, having regained his calm, he had “a most rapacious hunger” to satisfy.
At eight on the morning of August 26 he was awakened by his second-in-command, Hansen, crying “Vessel in sight!” These were memorable words, for Amundsen realized that the ship in question must have come from the Pacific. His childhood dream had been fulfilled; the North West Passage had been conquered at last.
He was not an emotional man, but now he experienced a peculiar sensation in his throat and felt unexpected tears starting in his eyes. “I suppose it was a weakness on my part,” he wrote later – always the phlegmatic Scandinavian. He dressed himself quickly and before going out on deck paused for a moment to look at Nansen’s picture on the wall of his cabin. For a moment he thought that it had winked at him. Then, smiling broadly, he strode out to meet the strange sail from the west.
She was a two-masted schooner, the Charles Nansen of San Francisco, her decks jammed with a cosmopolitan group of well-wishers – Eskimo women in red dresses and black American seamen in variegated costumes, all “mingling together just as in a land of fable.”
Out of this throng stepped a corpulent and jovial figure with wrinkled, copper-coloured features – Captain James McKenna, the ship’s master and an old Arctic trader. “Are you Captain Amundsen?” he asked. The explorer was surprised that he was known. When he answered, McKenna seized his hand and asked if his was the first ship he had encountered. He brightened when Amundsen told him she was. “I am exceedingly pleased,” he said, “to be the first one to welcome you on getting through the North West Passage.”
Amundsen was hungry for news. The only newspapers on board were old. One carried a dismaying headline suggesting that Norway was about to go to war with Sweden, an eventuality that was happily averted. But he was delighted to find that McKenna had a set of up-to-date charts and plenty of information about ice conditions to the west.
Amundsen’s goal was Bering Strait, but as the Gjöa moved west and the ice grew thicker, her passage became more sluggish. She passed the mouth of the Mackenzie, tried to make Herschel Island, but was blocked by ice on September 9. She was not alone; some dozen ships were in the vicinity, all stuck fast. On the shore, at King Point, the schooner Bonanza was grounded and beached, and here a little colony had sprung up – sailors from the wreck and Eskimo families building huts. Here the crew of the Gjöa, too, was destined to spend a third winter – ten more months – in the Arctic.
Amundsen was eager to get the news of his triumph to the civilized world. That would not be easy. The nearest telegraph post was at Eagle, Alaska, on the Yukon River, five hundred miles to the south on the far side of the nine-thousand-foot Ogilvie range. Captain William Mogg of the Bonanza was also anxious to get to San Francisco to outfit another ship and get back to the Arctic before losing another whaling season. Both men knew that the mail run from Herschel Island was due to leave for the Yukon by way of Fort McPherson in late October. They decided to go with it.
There was a problem: Amundsen, who had left Christiania one jump ahead of his creditors, didn’t have a cent. That meant that Mogg, with no experience of Arctic land travel, would be in charge. He was short and he was fat and he couldn’t run with the dogs, so he would have to ride on one of the sledges – a dead weight for the entire trip. Moreover, he positively refused to take any pemmican – the ideal nourishment for such a journey – because he considered it dog meat. Amundsen had no choice but to eat Mogg’s beans, cooked, dried, and packed in sacks – beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, day after day, a daunting and unpalatable prospect. But there was no help for it. Equipped with two sledges, twelve dogs, and two Eskimo mail carriers, they set off from Herschel Island on October 24, 1905, growing hungrier and thinner on their bean diet.
Amundsen’s overland trek to reach the telegraph at Eagle, Alaska, in the late fall of 1905
The Eskimos left them at Fort Yukon. Amundsen trotted ahead of the single dogsled bearing Mogg, who was now so eager to reach Eagle that he refused to stop for lunch. Amundsen hungrily protested; Mogg was obdurate; after all, he pointed out, he had the money and he was in charge. The trail along the Yukon River was dotted with roadhouses, each a day’s travel apart – a legacy of the Klondike gold rush. Amundsen took advantage of this to bring Captain Mogg to his senses. He stopped the team at the exact halfway point between two roadhouses. Then he turned back to Mogg and told him he could keep the team and the provisions. He, Amundsen, would trudge on alone.
Mogg was terrified. He cried out that he knew nothing of northern travel; Amundsen was leaving him to certain death. The explorer replied that he could not continue without three meals a day; if Mogg didn’t feed him properly, he would abandon him. At that Mogg surrendered. The pair reached Eagle on December 5, 1905, with the Fahrenheit thermometer reading –60°. At the U.S. Army telegraph station Amundsen dispatched a one-thousand-word message to Nansen, whose letter to the Norwegian Consul at San Francisco had helped publicize the expedition. Since Amundsen had no money, he was forced to send the telegram collect, a circumstance that caused so many complications that the story reached the press before it reached Nansen, thus frustrating his chance to sell it as an exclusive for Amundsen’s benefit.
The following March, 1906, Amundsen arrived back at King Point to discover that his second engineer, Gustav Wiik, was dangerously ill, apparently from pleurisy. He died a few days later before help could reach him from Herschel Island. In Amundsen’s absence, his men had constructed a crude observatory to continue their magnetic studies. In July, the instruments were taken down and placed on board, ready for departure. The mail from Edmonton arrived on August 9, bringing news of the great San Francisco fire and the massive relief arrangements organized by General Greely. The following day, the Gjöa slipped through a channel in the bay ice and resumed her passage westward.
There was one last struggle with two large masses of ice off Point Barrow. The six Norwegians attacked the great blocks with ice hooks, and the vessel charged through. With that barrier breached, the Gjöa moved on to meet that p
ortion of the whaling fleet that had not been frozen in and had come up from San Francisco for the summer season. With it came Captain William Mogg and a large packet of mail.
At Nome, early in September, a huge celebration awaited them. An enormous searchlight played on the little vessel as she came in sight and a roar of welcome issued from a thousand throats, followed by a sound that brought tears to Amundsen’s eyes. It was the national air of his country.
For more than three centuries, since Martin Frobisher’s day, the North West Passage had defied the efforts of the world’s best seamen, to become a graveyard of broken ships. John Barrow had once thought it could easily be conquered in two seasons. But eighty-eight years had gone by since John Ross, glimpsing a phantom range of mountains, had failed to penetrate the mysterious archipelago at the top of the world. Parry had almost made it in 1819 – only to be blocked by an implacable wall of ice. Franklin’s men had actually located the Passage, only to die before they could reach it. McClure had managed to get through – but only by sledge. For three decades, since Allen Young’s last failed attempt in 1875, the Arctic had been silent and the Passage remained unchallenged. Now, through careful planning, some luck, great common sense, and, perhaps most important, the example of the Eskimos, Roald Amundsen had snatched the prize of centuries from the greatest navy in the world. But another thirty-four years would pass before another little ship – the St. Roch – would be able to repeat Amundsen’s triumph.
The Arctic Grail Page 63