A view of Gjoa Haven harbour (Uqsuqtuuq) from the Amundsen memorial. On this high hill, Roald Amundsen set up an evolving series of stations from which to take magnetic observations.
Photo by Sheena Fraser McGoogan.
Roald Amundsen was born in July 1872 into a substantial, sea-faring family based near Sarpsborg, about ninety-five kilometres south of Oslo. He grew up on the outskirts of the city, then called Christiania. As a boy, he became enthralled with his fellow Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, who had made the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap and then crossed the Arctic by exploiting the drift of the pack ice. Amundsen began skiing seriously, honing his abilities by undertaking ambitious (and dangerous) cross-country expeditions.
At the same time, he became intrigued by the lost Franklin expedition. His mother wanted him to become a doctor, but after she died in 1893, Amundsen quit university and took to the sea as an ordinary sailor. He qualified as a mate within two years and obtained his master’s licence in 1900. By then he had spent two years as a mate on the Belgica Antarctic expedition led by Adrien de Gerlache, during which he developed a lasting friendship with the American doctor Frederick A. Cook.
Influenced by Nansen, Amundsen grew interested in the scientific dimension of Arctic exploration, especially the mystery of the shifting magnetic poles. He consulted a scientist at the meteorological institute in Christiania, who encouraged him to learn the necessary skills and provided a reference letter. Amundsen travelled south to Hamburg to seek instruction from geophysicist Georg von Neumayer, director of the German Marine Observatory, and the world’s foremost expert on terrestrial magnetism.
Neumayer had been engaging with the shifting poles for more than three decades. In 1857, steeped in the science of Alexander von Humboldt and encouraged by the British naval establishment, he had sailed to Melbourne, Australia, built the Flagstaff Observatory and conducted extensive magnetic studies. Back in Germany, he had become chair of the International Polar Commission and, in the early 1880s, founded the first International Polar Year.
Amundsen described later how in Hamburg, he “hired a cheap room in the poor part of the city.” Next day, “with beating heart,” he presented his letter card to Neumayer’s assistant and was ushered into the presence of a man of about seventy, with “white hair, benign, clean-shaven face, and gentle eyes.” The young man, stammering, said he wanted to go on a voyage and collect scientific data. Neumayer drew him out, and finally Amundsen blurted that he wanted to conquer the Northwest Passage, and also take accurate observations of the north magnetic pole to resolve its mysteries. The white-haired man rose, stepped forward and embraced him. “Young man, if you do that,” he said, “you will be the benefactor of mankind for ages to come. This is the great adventure.”
For three months, Amundsen studied with Neumayer. The older man treated him to dinners and introduced him to scientists and intellectuals. Then, back in Norway, having secured the backing of the influential Nansen, Amundsen set about preparing his dual-purpose expedition. He used a small inheritance to buy a tiny forty-seven-ton sloop, a fishing boat called the Gjoa (seventy feet by twenty). He then devoted two years to training and refurbishing, sailing in the waters east of Greenland while, at the behest of Nansen, conducting oceanographic observations.
Amundsen had difficulty raising enough money to undertake his quest. He borrowed considerable sums. Creditors began threatening to place the Gjoa under lien. On June 16, 1903, with six carefully chosen men, he slipped away, sailing out of Oslo under cover of darkness.
On the west coast of Greenland, at Godhavn (Qeqertarsuaq) in Disko Bay, Amundsen brought aboard twenty “Eskimo” dogs. Then, after acquiring additional provisions and kerosene from Scottish whalers, he sailed across Davis Strait into Lancaster Sound. He proceeded past Beechey Island and swung south into Peel Sound. He battled storms, survived an engine-room fire and, in Rae Strait, sailed too close to shore and nearly ran aground on a submerged rock.
In early September, with winter threatening, Amundsen entered the shelter of Gjoa Haven. Here he spent the next nineteen months, taking continuous magnetic readings. Soon after arriving, and as the ice formed, Amundsen put together a magnetic observatory out of shipping crates built in Norway with copper nails to avoid magnetic interference. He covered this with sod to keep the light from impinging on photographic paper, and used oil lamps for heat. Both Amundsen and his assistant, Gustav Wiik, probably suffered enough carbon monoxide poisoning to damage their hearts. Wiik, who conducted 360 magnetic readings using four different instruments, and so spent by far the most time in the makeshift hut, died on the westward voyage out of the Passage.
Charles Deehr, a space physicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute, says that the information collected by Amundsen and Wiik is similar to what he collects today from satellites in the so-called “solar wind,” the flow of sun radiation that excites the aurora borealis. Those measurements, Deehr says, “offer more than a glimpse of the character of the solar wind 50 years before it was known to exist.” Quoted by journalist Ned Rozell in the Alaska Science Forum, Deehr said that “Amundsen was the first to demonstrate, without doubt, that the north magnetic (pole) does not have a permanent location, but moves in a fairly regular manner.”
Amundsen’s results, analyzed in 1929, showed that between 1831 and 1904, the north magnetic pole moved fifty kilometres. In the summer of 1905, as he prepared to sail out of Gjoa Haven, Amundsen buried a few artifacts beneath a cairn. Those artifacts, among them a signed photograph of Neumayer, can today be found in Yellowknife at the Prince of Wales Heritage Centre.
In The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen, Canadian author Stephen R. Bown remarks that most books treat Amundsen in the context of the 1911 race to the South Pole. That race—which ended with Amundsen becoming the first explorer to reach the Earth’s southernmost point, while British explorer Robert Falcon Scott died trying—certainly makes for a gripping story. But both writers and readers often overlook one crucial fact: Amundsen succeeded because, in addition to training in Norway, he gleaned practical knowledge from the Netsilik Inuit. In November 1903, not long after he arrived in Gjoa Haven, a hunting party came upon the Norwegian visitors. Amundsen established friendly relations and, when the Inuit settled nearby, shared many hunting adventures with them. Like John Rae before him, Amundsen adopted Inuit clothing and footgear, and learned from experts how to travel across ice using dogs and dogsleds, and how to build a warm shelter using blocks of hard snow.
The Inuit helped Amundsen in countless ways. As he entered his second season of darkness, knowing that whalers habitually wintered in the northern reaches of Hudson Bay at Fullerton Harbour, Amundsen wrote a note asking to purchase eight dogs. Late in November 1904, a hunter named Artungelar set out to deliver this request. He travelled with one companion and four dogs, and encountered harsh conditions. Three dogs died along the way, and then, as he neared Fullerton early in March 1905, the Inuk discharged his rifle accidentally and shattered his right hand. He bandaged it up and acquired ten dogs from an American whaler and two Canadians—J. D. Moodie and Joseph-Elzéar Bernier—attached to the Arctic, a Canadian government vessel. Artungelar set out before the end of March and reached Amundsen on May 20, carrying also, from Bernier, some much-appreciated newspaper clippings.
What he learned from the Inuit, notably about dogs, Amundsen brought to his South Pole expedition. By comparison, Robert Falcon Scott could barely ski and, having never met any Inuit, brought ponies to the Antarctic instead of dogs. Thanks to the same quirk of the British psyche that had transformed the plodding, overweight John Franklin into a larger-than-life explorer, Robert Falcon Scott nevertheless became a romantic figure. As Bown writes, he became the embodiment of heroic but doomed struggle, “the man who snatched victory from the jaws of death.” Half a century before Scott, the British had convinced themselves that Franklin and his men, tragically lost in an impassable strait, had somehow “forged the last link with th
eir lives.”
During his two-year sojourn in Gjoa Haven, Roald Amundsen adopted Inuit clothing and learned from experts how to build snow huts and use dogs and dogsleds.
Courtesy of the National Library of Norway.
As to actually navigating the labyrinthian Northwest Passage, how did the Norwegian determine which way to sail? Amundsen credited John Rae: “His work was of incalculable value to the Gjoa expedition. He discovered Rae Strait, which separates King William Land from the mainland. In all probability through this strait is the only navigable route for the voyage . . . This is the only passage which is free from destructive pack ice.”
History proved Amundsen correct. As late as 1940–1942, when the Canadian schooner St. Roch became only the second vessel (after the Gjoa) to complete the Northwest Passage, and the first to do so from west to east, Captain Henry Larsen sailed through Rae Strait. And when, in 1944, Larsen managed to return westward through Lancaster Sound and Parry Channel, far to the north, he relied heavily on twentieth-century technology, in the form of a 300-horsepower diesel engine.
In recognizing the crucial importance of Rae Strait, Amundsen recalled the words of Leopold McClintock, who had long ago suggested that if Franklin followed that route, “he would probably have carried his ships through to Behring’s Straits.” Indeed, McClintock anticipated Amundsen when he added that, “perhaps some future voyager, profiting by the experience so fearfully and fatally acquired by the Franklin expedition, and the observations of Rae, [Richard] Collinson, and myself, may succeed in carrying his ship through from sea to sea; at least he will be enabled to direct all his efforts in the true and only direction.”
On August 17, 1905, Roald Amundsen reached Cape Colborne near Cambridge Bay, the easternmost point attained by a ship from the west. By sailing there—almost three hundred kilometres west of where Franklin’s Terror would eventually be found—he had established the viability of the Northwest Passage. A few days later, he encountered a ship, the Charles Hansson out of San Francisco. He hoped to continue into Bering Strait, but ice halted his progress at King Point near Herschel Island. He took magnetic recordings and, over the winter, trekked over the ice to Eagle, Alaska, to send telegrams announcing his accomplishment. He resumed sailing in mid-August 1906, and reached Nome, Alaska, on the thirty-first.
Roald Amundsen achieved more in the Arctic than in the Antarctic. He led the way through the Northwest Passage, and later traversed the Northeast Passage along the Russian coast. In May 1926, he flew an airship over the North Pole, so becoming the first expeditionary leader indisputably to reach it. Amundsen was living at Uranienborg, preparing to marry, when in 1928, at age fifty-five, he flew north to rescue an Italian explorer, Umberto Nobile. He disappeared into the Arctic and was never seen again.
30.
“Give Me My Father’s Body”
Today, from a ridge at Cape York on the west coast of Greenland, visitors can gaze out over crescent-shaped Melville Bay, which sweeps southward for 240 kilometres. Directly west of this massive bay, all through the nineteenth century, whalers and explorers dreaded to challenge the Middle Ice. Today, that Middle Ice is just an historical memory: for months every summer, the waters of Baffin Bay lie open. From Cape York, turning and facing inland, visitors can see a twenty-eight-metre-high monument dedicated to American explorer Robert E. Peary, essentially a grotesque obelisk jutting skyward, and topped by a giant “P.”
In August 1897, Peary had arrived at this cape on a mission. During a previous expedition, three years before, he had learned the location of three ten-thousand-year-old meteorites from which the polar Inuit had been extracting metal since before 1818, when John Ross found them using metal implements. In 1895, Peary had taken the two smaller chunks, called “the woman” and “the dog,” to New York. Now, he hired all the able-bodied Inuit in the area and steamed six hours south to Bushnan Island. There, the people helped him load the largest piece onto his ship—the so-called “Ahnighito fragment,” also called “the tent,” which weighed almost thirty-five tons. Peary then returned to Cape York. “I sent my faithful Eskimos ashore,” he wrote later, “accompanied by several barrels of biscuit, and loaded with guns, knives, ammunition, and numerous other articles which I had brought to reward them for their faithful service.”
But as Kenn Harper writes in Give Me My Father’s Body, six Inuit remained on board his ship the Hope, among them a hunter-guide named Qisuk and his young son, Minik or Mene (born at Etah around 1890). On October 2, 1897, when the ship reached the Brooklyn Naval Yard in New York City, twenty thousand people paid twenty-five cents each to visit the ship and see what the Boston Post had described as “the strange cargo.”
The Inuit were brought to the Museum of Natural History, where according to Minik, “we were quartered in a damp cellar most unfavorable to people from the dry air of the north.” Two anthropologists studied the new arrivals, but then came a New York heat wave. Soon all six of the Inuit, lacking immunity to local diseases, were suffering from tuberculosis.
The first to die was Minik’s father. “He was dearer to me than anything else in the world—especially when we were brought to New York, strangers in a strange land. You can imagine how closely that brought us together; how our disease and suffering and lack of understanding of all the strange things around us . . . made us sit tremblingly waiting our turn to go . . . we grew to depend on one another, and to love each other as no father and son under ordinary conditions could possibly love.”
Robert Peary washed his hands of the Inuit he had brought south. Within eight months three more were dead. A young adult, Uisaakassak, was then sent back to Greenland, leaving Minik alone among strangers. The boy had pleaded to see his father buried with proper Inuit ceremony. Museum staff were bent on studying the dead bodies, so they mounted a make-believe funeral. As Harper writes, “They got an old log about the length of a human corpse. This was wrapped in a cloth, a mask attached to one end.” With Minik present to say his ritual goodbye, they buried the lot by lantern light.
William Wallace, the museum’s chief custodian, brought Minik to live with his family in New York City and, in summer, upstate New York. The boy attended school, learned to read and write, and became “Minik Wallace.” Meanwhile, his father’s body was defleshed. Mounted on an armature, the skeleton was put on display at the museum. As William Wallace wrote later, Minik found out the hard way. The New York newspapers had got wind of the display. At school, from other children, he learned of the reports.
The family noticed a change in the boy, Wallace wrote later: “He was coming home from school with my son Willie one snowy afternoon when he suddenly began to cry. ‘My father is not in his grave,’ he said. ‘His bones are in the museum.’” Minik had realized the truth. “But after that,” Wallace wrote, “He was never the same boy. . . . Often we would see him crying, and sometimes he would not speak for days. We did our best to cheer him up, but it was no use. His heart was broken. He had lost faith in the new people he had come among.”
William Wallace deeply regretted what had transpired. He supported Minik in a push to get the American Museum of Natural History to release the bones so they could be given a proper burial. On January 6, 1907, in a magazine supplement, the New York World published the first article to make his case. The headline gave Kenn Harper his book title: “Give Me My Father’s Body.”
When that campaign faltered, young Minik turned his energies to getting Robert Peary to send him home. On May 9, 1909, the San Francisco Examiner offered a sensational treatment under the headline, “Why Arctic Explorer Peary’s Neglected Eskimo Boy Wants to Shoot Him.” The story described how, set adrift after the death of his relatives, “Little Mene Wallace . . . had seen his father’s skeleton grin at him from a glass case in the New York Museum of Natural History.”
When he learned that his father’s bones were on display in the American Museum of Natural History, Minik Wallace lost faith in the people he had come among.
Courtesy
of Wikimedia Commons.
Eventually, Peary’s people decided to cut their losses. Later, they claimed that they sent Minik north with many gifts, but Harper determined that the young man arrived in northern Greenland with only the clothes on his back. In August 1909, he came ashore at Uummannaq, an Inuit camp in North Star Bay at the site of present-day Thule. He wore a light sweater, a thin overcoat, a pair of short socks, and shoes fit for New York City. He had his medical and dental kits and nothing else.
Minik had forgotten much of his first language, but picked it up quickly. He also became a notable hunter. He worked as a handyman for Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen, who set up a trading post nearby, Thule Station. For a time, he was married. Even so, he remained an outsider, and a teller of tall tales, and he felt happiest when Qallunaat visited from the south, white men for whom he could work as a guide and translator. In 1913, at age twenty-three, he joined the American Crocker Land Expedition, which set out to confirm the existence of a huge island north of Ellesmere Island—one that Robert Peary claimed he had seen from the far north in 1906.
Peary had invented this island in hopes of securing the financial support of a wealthy banker named George Crocker. Doubts about its existence became significant after 1909, because Peary’s rival, Dr. Frederick Cook, claimed to have traversed that territory en route to the North Pole. Peary’s backers undertook the expedition to prove Cook a fraud, but they ended up demonstrating that their own man was the scam artist.
In April 1909, and after supposedly completing a twenty-three-year quest to reach that same Pole, Robert E. Peary had refused a congratulatory handshake from his right-hand man, Matthew Henson. On April 6, after taking an astronomical reading in foggy conditions, Peary planted an American flag and ordered Henson to lead their four Inuit companions in three cheers. He then snapped a few photos.
Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage Page 29