Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  But then, Amundsen hadn’t known it either. After the failed attempt to reach the North Pole by ship in the Maud, Amundsen had taken to aircraft instead. First ski-planes, then flying boats, and finally – his last desperate attempt – a semi-rigid airship he’d bought from Mussolini. When he finally saw the North Pole in 1926, circling three hundred feet above the sea ice in the Norge, Amundsen still believed, like the rest of the world, that Commander Robert Peary of the US Navy had already been there, having crossed the ice from Greenland. But Peary had falsified his journals. So had another US naval officer, the aviator Richard Byrd, who claimed to have overflown the pole in his aeroplane three days before Amundsen took flight in his airship.

  So the Norge had been first after all. Taking off from Spitsbergen, the Italian-built airship had flown direct across the North Pole to Alaska – the first ever visit by mankind to the ‘Zone of Maximum Inaccessibility’, a huge unexplored area between Greenland, Siberia and Alaska.

  It took three and a half days to fly two thousand nautical miles over an expanse of the planet that no one, not even the Inuit, had witnessed before. There was room enough in that unknown region for an island the size of a continent, or for the fabled open polar sea, or even for a hole in the earth’s crust giving access to the interior. Who would claim it and give it a name?

  It turned out that there was nothing there but ancient sea ice. Amundsen, who had dreamed all his life of claiming new lands for his new country, had been dreaming of something that did not exist. This was his last expedition, and he spent it sitting on a chair and staring out of a plastic window. Another first for Amundsen, thought Fay, turning away from the computer screen: that’s how we all do our exploring now.

  She too had just drawn a blank, sitting on her chair and staring at her plastic window. None of the search engines or online encyclopedias could give her any clue as to why this cardboard file marked ‘Roald Engelbregt Amundsen’ contained only one short US newspaper clipping. A clipping in which Amundsen wasn’t even mentioned.

  Billings County Pioneer, March 20, 1941

  QUEEN BESS OF THE ARCTIC

  MRS. BESS CROSS of Deering, Alaska, has been paying her every-fifth-year visit to the States. Sounds prosaic, but to her sourdough friends in and out of Alaska, and to the fashionable feminine apparel dealers in New York, it is an event eagerly awaited.

  To every sourdough – miner, trapper and those in other lines – to every Eskimo, in fact, to all Alaska, Bess Cross is known as ‘Queen of the Arctic’. She went to Alaska as a bride of 16. Her first husband, Mr Samuel Magids, operated a trading post and she assisted him. When he died, Bess carried on, and expanded. Today she has a large string of such posts all over the Alaskan wilds, and especially along the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

  In Alaska, Bess wears a fur parka, walrus-hide boots, sealskin trousers as a matter of necessity, not from choice. She is definitely feminine, and about once every five years she comes to the States, always traveling by plane. She goes to New York and indulges in a regular orgy of clothes buying. She selects the daintiest, most luxurious of feminine apparel; lives in a fine suite at the Waldorf; entertains lavishly for a period of from two to three weeks, and then flies back to her string of Alaskan trading posts, to the white men and Eskimos who love and respect her, and to whom she is always ‘Queen Bess of the Arctic’.

  Fay had wasted two hours online trying to work out the relevance of this ancient puff piece. Nothing. Whatever Bess Cross had meant to Bert Nilsson, to Fay she was just another loose gear.

  Part Seven

  Hjalmar Johansen Seamount

  82º57’N 3º40’W

  New York City, 1928

  The news was brought to Bess with her morning coffee in a copy of the New York Times.

  King’s Bay, Spitsbergen, June 19th 1928. – There has been no news here tonight of Roald Amundsen and René Guilbaud, who left Tromso, Norway, yesterday in a French seaplane to aid in the search for General Umberto Nobile and his crew of the dirigible Italia.

  She waited until the maid had left her hotel room, then put on her gown and went to the window. Far below, trucks and cars snarled down Fifth Avenue. They shivered in the hot fug of June.

  She tied up her black hair, straightened her shoulders.

  He had disappeared before, five times, in his ships Gjoa, Fram and Maud, in his Dornier seaplane, in his airship the Norge. He had always reappeared. Coming back from the dead was his calling in life.

  He’d been missing for three weeks that time before last, three years before, when his plane was trapped in the ice north of Spitsbergen. Three weeks: twenty-one days. Twenty-one or bust. Shall I hit or shall I stick? What a bind she was in, what a perfect predicament. Bess dearly loved poker, was said to be the boldest player between the Yukon and Point Barrow – the best dog-driver too, natives excepted. But she didn’t care for blackjack. She could always read faces but she couldn’t count cards.

  She looked around her hotel room. Her bags were packed, all but one, over there in the corner. If she had to she could move pretty quickly. When she’d left Seattle for New York, only five days before, she hadn’t been sure that her husband wouldn’t follow her. Her room at the Waldorf was booked to one ‘Engelbregt Gravning’, Amundsen’s alias. The steamer for Oslo would sail in three days, and perhaps she’d be on it. But she knew very well that Sam Magids might change his mind and set out to retrieve her. She would have to sit tight in the Waldorf with only the money that her husband had given her, the chance contents of his wallet, numbly presented to her in their hallway in Seattle, her bags already waiting on the stoop outside. Most of that money had been spent by now on trains and on boat tickets.

  Should she go back to Sam, or was it too late?

  Twelve days later, when her ship berthed in Oslo, Mrs Samuel Magids was met at the gangway by a telegram from Amundsen’s brother.

  Regret inform RA still missing. Kindly proceed Victoria Hotel Oslo. Await instructions from attorney H. Gade. Discretion advised. Do not come Uranienborg. Do not speak journalists.

  She tipped the messenger half a dollar; it was almost the last one she had. Behind her, the sheer metal slab of the Hellig Olav obstructed her view of the fjord. In front was the customs shed, the formalities she had yet to undergo. Between the ship and the shed she was nowhere, perfectly poised.

  What should she do now? She drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t very tall, and counted her dwindling options. Amundsen’s brother Gustav was shunting her off into a siding after only two weeks without news of him; the Amundsen family was sticking on fourteen. But Bess, having nothing left to lose, decided to hit. Instead of wiring her husband for the fare back to New York, which she knew that he would send her, she threw in her last chip. She checked in to the Victoria Hotel. If she was going to have her heart broken she would do it on Amundsen’s dime. For three years he had begged her to join him in Norway, to leave her husband and her friends, the dizzying freedom of her life in Alaska, and as soon as she had wired him that she was on her way at last he had fled into the north again, a glorified passenger in a self-serving race to save General Nobile, a man he could not stand. Bess had paid – paid everything she had – to see Amundsen’s hand, but not for one moment had she guessed that he was bluffing. Perhaps, it occurred to her now, he hadn’t known that himself.

  It was Gade the lawyer who came to see Bess first, the morning after her arrival. He telephoned in advance and arranged to meet her in the hotel lobby. It was ten o’clock and businessmen sat in twos and threes at the tables by the window, washed by the cool grey glare of an overcast morning. From time to time the men would glance at Bess, as was normal.

  She waited on a high-backed chair and read The Times of London.

  Amundsen’s continued absence was buried deep inside the paper, a couple of paragraphs in the wider story of the search for the airship Italia, which had crashed during a flight over
the pole. The reporter contrasted the intermittent wireless calls from General Nobile, adrift with several survivors on the pack ice north of Spitsbergen, to the silence from Amundsen, whose missing plane was also equipped with a radio.

  The Times reporter observed that the esteemed Norwegian explorer, conqueror of the North West Passage, Magnetic North, the South Pole, the North East Passage, the North Pole and the Arctic Basin, was known for his peculiar ‘ill-luck’ with wireless telegraphy. Had not his wireless-equipped airship the Norge – like its sister the Italia designed and piloted by the Italian aeronaut Nobile – vanished off the face of the earth two years before, just as it entered the most significant phase of its flight, the crossing from Spitsbergen to Alaska of the ice-bound Arctic Basin, never before observed by human eyes? And had this artful silence not left the whole world holding its breath until the Norge reappeared, conveniently close to an Alaskan telegraph station, whence exclusive articles sped to newspapers favoured by virtue of their generosity to Captain Amundsen? Did not history suggest that the astute Norwegian would yet again emerge from the northern mists with another tale of adventure to tell to any agency willing to pay for it?

  The waspish tone did not surprise Bess. She knew that Amundsen had fallen out with the British, even with those – the factions of Shackleton and Mawson – who had supported him against the ghost of Scott. He had likewise taken against the Germans, who had once provided him with his training in magnetics, with Teutonic admiration, and with aircraft and funds. And he had then gone to war with the Italians, whom he felt had tried to usurp his command of the Norge expedition.

  Until now, Bess had accepted these rifts as the price of achievement; in her own life, a journey which had started in Winnipeg thirty years before, passed on through Seattle, the Kotzebue Sound, New York, London, the North Slope and – this week – Oslo, she had always observed that the further you went the fewer people kept up with you. You left places and people behind you. But until now no one had ever left her.

  Gade was Norwegian but he wore a checked American suit and had acquired informal manners in Chicago and at Harvard. He pulled up a chair and ordered them both coffee, though Bess didn’t want any. Then he looked about the lobby. He’s watching out for journalists, thought Bess. But they would all be up in Tromsø, or Hammerfest, or Spitsbergen, competing to file from the most northerly dateline. She had learned the ways of newspapers since she’d fallen in with Amundsen.

  ‘Is there any definite news?’

  Gade looked around to see if anyone might hear him, then pursed his lips and stared down at his coffee.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Then is there anything you can tell me that hasn’t been in the newspapers?’

  Gade seemed to be searching for a formula. He looked away from her again, towards the windows and the light.

  ‘We feel . . . I believe . . . that the newspapers are too optimistic about the chances for Roald’s survival.’

  So he will be ‘Roald’ now. How very un-Norwegian. Of course, Gade had been his friend since they were at school together. And of course Gade was, like herself, almost an American. But Roald. Even she called him Amundsen.

  ‘I see.’

  He paused, choosing his words. ‘Much of the optimism about Roald and his men is based on the fact that Nobile and his people have survived on the ice for over a month now. And of course, Roald’s experience of the pack is second to no man alive. Excepting Nansen, I suppose.’

  Nansen, thought Bess. After all he has done, Amundsen still can’t get out from under Nansen, that frozen old man in his ridiculous tower.

  Gade was still talking. ‘But what the foreign newspapers don’t seem to appreciate, and what the Norwegian ones don’t care to print, is that Roald is unlikely to have made it as far as the ice. It’s much more likely that his aircraft went down in the open sea before it even reached Bear Island.’

  Having nothing better to do that morning, she idly clutched at some straws.

  ‘It’s a seaplane. They might have landed on the water and made it ashore somewhere.’

  ‘It’s very unlikely. We’ve already searched Bear Island and checked the coast of Spitsbergen. And you have to understand, their Latham was designed for lakes and sheltered inlets. It was light in construction. It wouldn’t have survived for long on the open ocean. It couldn’t land safely in anything but a flat calm.’

  She decided she would sip her coffee after all. ‘The Daily Telegraph has an interesting story. It says that one of Amundsen’s French pilots once broke a wing-float landing on the sea. He rigged an empty petrol tank in its place and flew off again.’

  ‘The Frenchman was only on the sea for an hour. Anyway, Roald and his men don’t have enough food or water to last them this long. They were to pick up their emergency provisions at Ny-Ålesund.’

  Gade looked at her beseechingly. And she knew – she knew – she’d known it already. Why was she doing this to him, to herself? She banged her spoon against the side of her coffee cup, enjoying her moment of petulance.

  Embarrassed, Gade took out his cigarette case. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Not at all. I’ll have one too, please.’ He looked pained: perhaps it wasn’t yet done for ladies to smoke publicly in Oslo. But she stared at him until he passed a cigarette then waited for him to light it for her. One of the young businessmen, glancing across, saw that she was smoking and nudged his companions; they all turned to stare. All this went on behind Gade’s back. I’ll bet he’s wondering why I’m smiling, thought Bess.

  Gade studied the point of his cigarette. ‘We were wondering what your intentions are should Amundsen fail to return.’

  It’s possible, she decided, that Gade might mean well by me. He’d always been friendly before, at Chicago, in the Waldorf, at Amundsen’s Norwegian estate at Uranienborg. She hadn’t felt that Gade was a fake. But she also knew he was Amundsen’s man and Amundsen was gone now. What would Amundsen’s brother, Gustav, want from her? It was a pretty sure bet that he wanted her gone. She was still married to someone else, after all, and Amundsen was a national hero. And there’d be an estate to divide, perhaps quite a large one.

  ‘I shall stay here until there is word of Amundsen. I’m his fiancée, you know, Mr Gade. We have an engagement.’

  There it was, her only card, face up on the table. And a moment before she hadn’t intended to play it at all. If Amundsen is gone for good, she’d told herself. I’ll slip away from here, move on again. She still had her nerve and her looks. There were plenty of places she hadn’t yet been. But it had suddenly seemed to her that she needed something to take with her – a bankroll, a grubstake – so she wouldn’t have to wire Sam and ask him to pay her to stay away. Or ask him to forgive her.

  She wouldn’t yet admit her real motive, which was that she couldn’t let Amundsen go without clawing something back from him. He’d already taken enough from her: she was thirty years old now, but he was fifty-five.

  So they sat there, Bess and Gade, in the lobby of the Victoria Hotel, contemplating the thing that lay between them. I’ll learn everything about him from how he plays this one, she thought. The engagement was a secret one, a bluff that he can call if he wants to play the heel. What kind of man is he? She knew that Herman Gade was a businessman, a lawyer, a former mayor of Lake Forest, Illinois, and lately a diplomat, Norway’s envoy to Brazil. The signs weren’t good.

  Gade ground his cigarette into the ashtray. ‘An engagement with Roald,’ he said. ‘Who else have you told about that?’

  ‘Only my husband.’ Never had she needed her poker face more.

  He nodded slowly. ‘That’s just as well.’

  Here it comes, she thought. I’ll be easily got rid of. A few secret words between a dead man and a foreigner, a runaway wife, not even divorced yet. It means so little now.

  Suddenly she couldn’t bear the lowness of it all. ‘I don�
�t give a damn about such matters. I’m not here to enforce any arrangement. I don’t act for money. My husband always gave me everything I wanted. He and his brother are two of the richest men in Alaska. But I’ll stay here until this is over. Amundsen sent for me and I came.’

  Heads had turned. Was I speaking so loud? Gade’s face was twisted, as if in pain.

  ‘You misunderstand me,’ he said. ‘Your status isn’t in question, and certainly not your behaviour. Roald had already taken steps before he went north. There’s a considerable settlement. I have the papers at my office, witnessed and signed.’

  Then perhaps Gade’s a good man after all, she thought, surprised, sinking back in her chair. Legal papers, like inconvenient playing cards, can be made to disappear.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about these things,’ she said. ‘Not while there’s any chance he’s still alive.’

  In the newspapers Amundsen was still alive, trekking across the pack ice or manfully steering a raft. While aircraft from all over Europe circled Nobile’s camp on the pack ice, dropping supplies on the buckled floe, it was expected that Amundsen would soon appear on skis to win the glory and vengeance of saving his old rival. That was his sort of entrance. On the sea, in the air, on the ice, there was no one to match the bold Captain Amundsen.

  These flights of romance were a torment to Bess. When she tried to sleep she saw the sun flash on varnished wings, heard the wind keen in stay-wires, smelled the fumes from a manifold, just as she had six done years before, skylarking in Kristine, his new Curtiss ski-plane.

  Was it for that that I loved him? Until then he’d only been an adventure, the only one she had ever been almost ashamed of. Because his fame was behind it: he was otherwise too old, much too old for her. But up in the air he’d turned into a kid again, a comical big-nosed boy who laughed as he buzzed a herd of caribou, scattered them into the lake and the muskeg, then zoomed upwards, skimming the snow-streaked slope above her husband’s trading post at Deering, then down again, only feet above the huts and storerooms, the Eskimo kids gleefully diving for cover, and out over the ice-choked sound, climbing northward, slowly northward, across the Arctic Circle and towards the gleaming Brooks Range. It was there, beyond those mountains, that he still saw a young man’s horizon, that infinitely fine, eternally impending line between everything and nothing.