1912

by Chris Turney

  WILLIAM ERNEST BOWMAN (1911–1985)

  In the lead-up to 1912 Roald Amundsen was already something of a household name. Born in 1872, the Norwegian was obsessed with polar travel from an early age. Reading stories of the doomed Franklin expedition, and later inspired by Fridtjof Nansen’s crossing of Greenland in 1888, he was keen to emulate his heroes. But Amundsen, born into a family of shipowners, was devoted to his mother, who from all accounts had a strong personality and was intent on her fourth son becoming a doctor. Amundsen’s heart wasn’t in it, but he dutifully enrolled at university as a medical student. Barely attending lectures, he received terrible grades and it looked likely he would be asked to leave, when his mother unexpectedly died. At twenty-one Amundsen was suddenly able to escape his obligations, and he promptly went off to sea.

  The Norwegian soon had the opportunity to develop as a polar explorer, becoming first mate on the Belgica expedition of 1897 to 1899. Under de Gerlache, Amundsen gained valuable leadership skills during the long Antarctic winter dark. It was a turning point. Amundsen’s efforts were subsequently highly praised and his standing soared, allowing him to attempt what his hero Franklin had failed to achieve: to find the Northwest Passage.

  Busily raising money from numerous sources, Amundsen was aware that a new route was not in itself enough to open the wallets of the wealthy. He needed scientific credibility and support to give the trip cachet. Just as Shackleton had realised that scientific results would help justify his travels, Amundsen worked hard to get recognition from learned societies. No one had reached the North Magnetic Pole since Ross, seven decades before. Had it remained in the same location or moved, as many supposed? Here was a hook to justify the jaunt. Funding continued to prove difficult to source, but there was enough interest for Amundsen to muster a team and start gathering supplies for a two-year trip.

  Careers and lives had been lost in the quest for the Northwest Passage. It was a formidable task for any explorer. Most had tried using large ice-breakers to punch a path through the sea ice. Amundsen had neither the resources nor the enthusiasm for such an approach, and instead settled on a different strategy.

  Outside the impressive Fram Museum in Oslo, in a dry dock, sits a low, narrow wooden trawler. The Gjøa is one of the world’s great exploration vessels—but it is largely ignored by visitors today, who walk by to the viewpoint of the local fjord. Amundsen, however, saw this doughty ship offered an alternative method to those tried before. It was capable of taking seven men and enough supplies to survive at least one winter in the ice. More importantly, the Gjøa could hug the coast and work through the shallows: crucial for finding a way through the sea ice.

  He consulted widely with scientific groups and individuals: Nansen wrote an exhaustive book of instructions on what measurements to make at sea and why, which Amundsen diligently studied; for guidance on magnetism and navigational equipment Amundsen travelled to Hamburg and spent time with the great German scientist Georg von Neumayer. Amundsen was not above asking fellow adventurers for advice, either, writing to Frederick George Jackson about the Burberry waterproof linen he had used in the Arctic.

  Funding remained tight. So much so that, his boat stocked with supplies and scientific equipment, Amundsen left Europe in 1903 with creditors chasing him to the quayside. No one was to hear from him for three years.

  Setting off towards Baffin Bay, the ship made the long journey past the myriad islands that straddle the Canadian Arctic. Taking advantage of the shallows, the Gjøa pushed on until it could go no further, then spent the winter months locked in sea ice. The time was not wasted: on 26 April 1904 Amundsen became the first to reach the position of Ross’s North Magnetic Pole, and found it had indeed moved. The scientific community would later scramble to understand these new findings—but for now they remained unknown. Cut off from the rest of the world, Amundsen would not finish the journey that so many others had failed to complete until 1906.

  When news broke of his success in negotiating the Northwest Passage, Amundsen stepped onto the international stage. At only thirty-four he had ploughed the first new route into the Pacific since Magellan and Drake worked their way around the opposite end of the Americas. Yet the trip had not been as lucrative as he hoped. An American military officer had intercepted Amundsen’s telegram to Nansen reporting his success. The American had enthusiastically let the rest of the world know before the exclusive could be delivered to newspapers willing to pay for it; and, once the cat was out of the bag, editors were not interested in paying for old news. Amundsen had also hoped to claim the British government prize of £20,000 offered in 1745 to discover a sea route for the Northwest Passage. Nansen made enquires but found it had been awarded to those searching for Franklin. Amundsen felt cheated but learned a valuable lesson: secrecy was the key to future success.

  The Royal Geographic Society remained enthusiastic about Amundsen’s success. Its secretary, Scott Keltie, wrote to Amundsen and suggested that if ‘things are properly managed you ought to make a considerable sum’ from articles, lectures and a book on his journey. Keltie proposed bringing the Gjøa up the River Thames to London—which, after Amundsen ‘practically circumnavigating America…would produce a very great effect upon the British public’. The Norwegian was impatient to get back and rejected the advice, travelling straight to Europe and leaving the Gjøa to make its way home under another captain.

  On his return Amundsen began planning his next sojourn into polar waters, a scientific exploration of the Arctic. He was to follow in Nansen’s footsteps and finish what the great man had started: to drift across the Arctic in the Fram and claim the North Geographic Pole. Complementing the ship’s crew, an expedition team of nine men was brought together. Included was Hjalmar Johansen, who had made the attempt on the North Pole with Nansen. On getting home, Johansen had struggled as a captain in the army and as a family man, regularly finding solace in alcohol. On 24 November 1908 he applied to join Amundsen on his venture. Nansen strongly supported his application and the deal was done, though Johansen was not Amundsen’s first choice.

  Two months later Amundsen made a pilgrimage to the RGS and received its blessing for the trip. When challenged, he agreed the sole objective of reaching furthest north had in the past led to an unnecessary waste of money and life. Publicly, the main object of the expedition would be a scientific study of the polar ocean.

  And yet it was implicitly understood that capturing a pole was popular and financially lucrative. Amundsen was not a scientist, though he understood the value of science in making expeditions happen. The RGS secretary was very supportive. On 28 July 1909 Keltie wrote to Leon Amundsen—Roald’s brother, who was managing the expedition—and encouraged him to negotiate with the British papers. The Daily Mail and The Times, in particular, would be ‘disposed to give a very handsome price should your brother actually get to the Pole’.

  But the events of September 1909 changed all this. With the news that Cook and Peary were claiming the same goal, Amundsen was in a conundrum. He had secured money for an attempt on the north, but the pole had apparently been taken and his backers were getting antsy. On 9 October Keltie commented that it would be hard to get ‘any very big price’ after the ‘Peary–Cook business’. In spite of this, Amundsen wrote to his friend Cook in early September, congratulating him on his success but informing him he was not able to join the American’s European tour of triumph. He needed time to think.

  After Peary’s announcement on 7 September, Amundsen assiduously avoided sending the new claimant a letter of compliment. ‘Peary’s behaviour fills me with the deepest anger and I want to proclaim publicly that Dr Cook is the most reliable Arctic traveller I know and it is simply unreasonable to doubt him and believe Peary,’ he recorded. Amundsen caught the next train to Copenhagen, to see Cook. With one claim he might have been able to justify a trip north, at least on scientific grounds; but with two, Amundsen needed advice. And who better to offer it than his old confidant?

  Precis
ely when Roald Amundsen changed his mind about heading north is unclear. Years later Cook wrote in his controversial memoirs that he had suggested Amundsen go for the South Geographic Pole when the two met in Copenhagen. Amundsen was more circumspect, but there is no doubt something happened in Denmark to change the Norwegian’s mind. There was a flurry of letters to expedition members after Amundsen met Cook, informing them that the expedition would not depart until July the following year. No specific reason was given.

  One geographic record remained to be claimed: the South Geographic Pole. Amundsen had to keep quiet. He was all too aware of what had happened in London to Arctowski, after the Belgian’s rumoured 1907 plans for an assault on the Antarctic. As far as anyone outside Amundsen’s immediate circle was concerned, the Norwegian explorer was intending to take the Fram south around Tierra del Fuego, then north up the American west coast, to enter the Arctic through the Bering Strait. The route would avoid Nansen’s troubled path and allow a better starting point for the Fram, from the Siberian coast, for the approach on the pole.

  Amundsen’s preparations might have seemed odd to the more careful observer. For a start, the explorer had 120 Greenland dogs, and he insisted on these being sent to Norway rather than picking them up en route, in Alaska; the dogs would have to suffer the tropical heat twice. Then there was the wooden hut he was taking. If Amundsen was intending to spend the time on the Fram, designed to keep a large team in relative comfort, he did not need a base on the ice. If he needed to ski—as Nansen had done—he would not require a hut. It was all a bit strange, and some of his team questioned what was going on. They were fobbed off with excuses.

  Outside Norway the scientific equipment Amundsen was ordering gave a hint of the change in plan. In early 1910 he wrote to Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition headquarters and asked for supplier details of their hypsometers. Up to this point the correspondence had mainly been about fabrics; this enquiry was entirely different. Hypsometers are an elegantly simple device for measuring height above sea level. Traditionally, bouts of rheumatism had been used as an indirect measure; hypsometers are altogether more scientific. These contraptions are made up of a small metal column tightly fitted over a metal bowl filled with snow, which is melted and then boiled by a small spirit burner. A thermometer set within the device gives the temperature of the boiling water. Because atmospheric pressure changes with height, the boiling temperature of water also changes, making it possible to calculate altitude. The higher you are, the lower the atmospheric pressure and the lower the boiling water temperature. For every gain in altitude of twenty-five metres, the boiling temperature drops 0.1°C. It is not altogether reliable, and Hints to Travellers suggests that to minimise errors ‘at least four or five readings should be taken, at half-minute intervals.’

  Hypsometers were the principal way of measuring altitude on expeditions in mountainous areas, alongside increasingly accurate barometers. There was no need to determine altitude on the Arctic sea ice, and Shackleton may have known, or at least suspected, something was afoot. But no one said anything publicly. It was a sensitive time: Britain had supported Norway’s separation from Sweden, in 1905. Nansen, instrumental in the dissolution, had been dispatched to Britain as Norway’s first independent ambassador, serving between 1906 and 1908. Amundsen’s incursion in Antarctica could easily be regarded as an insult to a country that had encouraged the young nation’s self-determination.

  When Scott’s decision to head south was announced, on 13 September 1909—just after Peary’s reported return from the Arctic—Amundsen was suddenly aware there was competition for the south. Nonetheless, the Norwegian felt his plan was justified: no one had the right to claim anything until they got there. Anyway, he had overwintered in the Antarctic region before Scott had even been made leader of the Discovery expedition.

  Amundsen now had to tread a fine line. ‘At all costs we had to be first at the finish. Everything had to be concentrated on that,’ he later wrote. The Norwegian was keen to differentiate his work from the scientific efforts of Scott; it had to be a different sort of expedition. ‘On this little détour, science would have to look after itself’—but ‘we could not reach the Pole by the route I had determined to take without enriching in a considerable degree several branches of science.’

  There was more science to the Norwegian effort than was generally supposed. But some of the planned research would never come to pass, thwarted at the last moment. Probably the most significant casualty was the magnetic work. On 5 August 1909 a young American, Dr Harry Edmonds, wrote to Amundsen agreeing to the Norwegian’s invitation to join the Fram on its quest for the North Geographic Pole, for what was described as the ‘most important part of the scientific work of the trip’. The son of a judge in San Francisco, and claiming ‘inherited powers of endurance in pioneer work’, Edmonds had an unusual but useful skill set. He was a trained medical doctor, had been on an Arctic expedition and had also run a magnetic observatory. Amundsen was delighted, and confirmed the American’s position as lead magnetic observer and expedition doctor. Edmonds and his equipment would be picked up in San Francisco by the Fram on the way north.

  Later that year Amundsen contacted one of the world’s leading centres for magnetic research: the Department of Research in Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute of Washington. Because of Edmonds’s experience in magnetics, the institute agreed to employ him for six months to design and construct the equipment needed on the Fram. Equipment lists were drawn up; magnetometers and dip circles were identified. Then the Norwegian wrote to Edmonds, confirming a delay in the expedition, though not giving the real reason. Edmonds felt his time at the institute had been ‘without any value whatever to the expedition’. By July 1910 he was ready to go.

  Despite Amundsen’s insistence, Edmonds was not keen to join him in Christiania by the Norwegian’s deadline of 1 August. He could not understand the need for it. Colleagues had told him any measurements travelling around the Horn would be worthless; the Fram would have to be swung to take measurements at sea and these would be of little value, given that measurements had already been made on land by people at the institute. The plan, as Edmonds understood it, had been to take observations once the Fram was frozen in. Edmonds claimed he was ‘absolutely in the dark…about the trip’. He sat tight, and refused to travel until the Fram reached San Francisco.

  Amundsen was furious, claiming he would ‘now have to start without medical service on board which is very annoying’. The Carnegie Institute could—or would—not intercede, and Edmonds was unmoved. Amundsen had run foul of his own secrecy.

  For the trip north there were plans to use polar bears for dragging sledges; now even the ever-ambitious Amundsen could not justify attempting to take them south. The Norwegian was also developing man-bearing kites. The idea rapidly lost its appeal when, in the summer of 1909, the expedition’s second-in-command, Captain Ole Engelstad, died when he was struck by lightning. Yet Amundsen was ahead of the game: today kite skiing is hugely popular; in 2008 the Norwegian Ronny Finsås set the record for kiting from the South Geographic Pole to the coast, in just five days.

  As some of Amundsen’s plans—though not his final destination—leaked out, the media asked other explorers their opinions. Borchgrevink was one of the more vocal. He had advised Scott to use reindeer in the south, and criticised Amundsen for not taking them north.

  Amundsen convinced Nansen to let him borrow the polar vessel Fram, though he knew his mentor also wished to make an attempt on the South Geographic Pole; when Amundsen decided to switch to the south, he did not tell Nansen. And when Scott twice called on Amundsen to discuss scientific collaboration during the different polar bids, the Norwegian hid. The subsequent arrival of British scientific equipment was deeply embarrassing, but Amundsen was committed to heading south and kept quiet. Amazingly, when the expedition departed few of the crew knew the true destination, most still believing they were heading north via the Bering Strait.

&nbs
p; The Fram left Norway on 9 August 1910 but only once the ship reached the Atlantic Portuguese island of Madeira, some four weeks later, did Amundsen tell his nineteen-strong expedition of the new objective. Though given the option of returning home, all agreed to proceed. Leon Amundsen had gone with the Fram to Madeira and, once all had been settled, returned to Europe clutching a packet of letters and telegrams with the explosive news.

  One was a three-page typed apology from Roald to Nansen, explaining his motives and need for secrecy, fearing the titan of Norwegian exploration would attempt to dissuade him; in it Amundsen did not reveal where he would set up a base but said that he would try to meet Scott in Antarctica, and tell him of his plans. The telegram to Scott announcing the Norwegian’s plans was sent on 3 October 1910, and reached the British leader in Melbourne. The secret was out, leading The Times to comment that Amundsen had not ‘played the game’.

  The Norwegian expedition members were aware of how much was at stake. The explorer and scientist Bjørn Helland-Hansen wrote to Leon Amundsen, ‘Now we must just hope that all goes well with the dogs and the disembarkation then everything will be fine, in spite of reindeer, ponies and automobiles.’ The race for the South Geographic Pole was on.

  In mid-January 1911 the Norwegians were pleasantly surprised to find the pack ice in the Ross Sea was not as bad as expected. The sun’s warmth had already much weakened it. Travelling nearly a month later than Scott had given Amundsen a tremendous edge: it took five days, as opposed to three weeks, to cover almost the same stretch of ocean. Knowing the British were working in the McMurdo region, Amundsen sailed for Shackleton’s Bay of Whales.

  The team got to work fast. They erected the hut that had caused consternation in Norway and christened it Framheim. Meanwhile, the sledges and dogs were immediately put through their paces in preparation for the journey further south. Within two weeks the new home was built, the provisions were safely on the ice and the Fram was sent north to explore the depths of the southern Atlantic Ocean.