Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (28 page)

The word was out, thanks to the news carried back in the pilot boat. As the
Fram
approached the harbor, boats large and small appeared, loaded with curious onlookers, and gathered around it in increasing numbers until there was a flotilla accompanying it into town. Awaiting, lining the docks and shore, were crowds of cheering, waving people.

Reams of telegrams went out that day and night to families, friends, and high officials, just as they came pouring in for the crew. One of those was from Sverdrup’s wife, saying she was on her way from Christiania to be with him. Another was from an admiral in the navy, offering a ship to tow the
Fram
into Christiania, a royal gesture of honor and solicitude. In a few days, when the celebrations and reunions were over, the naval ship
Heimdal
, with Sverdrup and his wife aboard, towed the
Fram
out of port. The
Heimdal
’s captain was someone Sverdrup knew very well, a man named Sigurd Scott-Hansen.

The way back along the coast included a stop at Larvik to pick up the
Fram
’s
proud designer and builder, Colin Archer; then they made the last leg of the journey into Christiania. In Sverdrup’s words in
New Land
,

›››
The second
Fram
expedition was a monumental undertaking with monumental results. In the four years, Sverdrup and his men explored an area over one hundred thousand square miles in size, more than all other expeditions combined up to then. They sledged a total of eleven thousand miles, in the process encountering and mapping three previously undiscovered islands of a total area of twenty-three thousand square miles, and ascertaining the shape and size of Ellesmere Island (seventy-six thousand square miles). They collected fifty thousand plants, innumerable birds and animals, tons of rock samples, thousands of jars of plankton and other dredged material, and four years’ worth of meteorological and marine data, all of which would take scientists more than twenty years to sort and study.

In the name of Norway and the king, they had laid claim to those new lands they had discovered, as history and tradition allowed. But the winds of change were blowing about ownership of the Arctic. Sverdrup, a man by nature least inclined to do so, would fight almost to his dying day for those faraway lands, as he would to save the ship that took him there.

III ›››
THE THIRD EXPEDITION
1910–1912

ANTARCTICA AND THE SOUTHERN OCEAN
‹‹‹

FIGURE 76
Map of the
Fram
’s route on the third expedition. Not shown is route
after
Roald Amundsen left the ship in Buenos Aires. From 1913 to 1914, under Christian Doxrud’s and Thorvald Nilsen’s commands, it traveled from Buenos Aires to the Isthmus of Panama and back, and then to Norway. Photograph by Anders Beer Wilse from original map.

21 ›
THE BOSS

H
e was one of those very few who, from earliest awareness and memory, know what they want to do with their lives. He was one of the even fewer who actually did it and almost as he envisioned. Ever since he was eight or nine, Roald Amundsen had wanted not only to be a polar explorer but also to be the best and the first to discover something of significance in those regions. The British Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, a tragic drama played out twenty-seven years before his birth, fired his youthful imagination and powered his dreams of glory. Though Amundsen was ambitious in this way, he was also eminently practical and clearheaded, and the Franklin debacle gave him some early, sobering insights about what
not
to do when venturing for months and years into these places. Others would come along to fuel this duality, inspiring him by their soaring visions and yet imparting cold, hard lessons for him through their successes or failures. He needed both in full measure if he was to do what he so desperately desired.

He may have come by his affinity for adventure naturally, growing up as one of four boys in a family of seafarers and shipping traders on the south coast of Norway. His father, an often-absent captain of ships away on the seven seas, with enthralling stories to show for it, was in some ways a mythic figure to the impressionable boy. His mother, however, was a closer, stronger influence, with other, less fancifully romantic ideas for her youngest, and shaped him early on for a career in medicine. For her, he buried his passion while plodding cheerlessly through school. She died when he was twenty-one, still on his undistinguished way to becoming a doctor. Though deeply grieved, his fealty to her and her plans for him vanished with her death, and almost immediately he dropped out of school.

The year was 1893, when Fridtjof Nansen, eleven years older than Amundsen, took the
Fram
north into the Arctic for the first time; Nansen was Amundsen’s idol. Amundsen had applied for a position, but Nansen had thought him too
young and inexperienced. He also tried to sign on with the Frederick Jackson expedition to Franz Josef Land but was also turned down. When the
Fram
pulled out of Christiania that June day, no doubt Amundsen was in the crowd to watch it go, wishing it were he so proudly standing at the helm.

Amundsen was not one to hang around wishing and regretting, however. He devoted himself to preparing, mentally and physically, for the life he intended to have. He skied long and hard into the mountains to hone his skills and build his strength into a rock-solid two hundred pounds (though, at six feet tall and lithe, and with an angular face, he always looked thin). (His one “defect,” as he regarded it, was poor vision [nearsightedness], which he kept secret because he thought that wearing glasses was not in the noble image of a polar explorer.) He camped out in the winter cold and dark. He continued to devour the accounts of earlier polar travelers, weighing in his mind what they did right or wrong. He assiduously studied navigation and other arts of master mariners, to obtain a mate’s license. He even secured a seasonal job aboard a sealing ship in the ice-studded waters east of Greenland, to get a flavor of the environment and life aboard ships, in a self-styled apprenticeship reminiscent of Nansen’s on the
Jason
before his Greenland crossing.

With all these cementing his foundation, the first real career-enhancing opportunity came in June 1896 when he was accepted as able seaman aboard the
Belgica
of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, a scientific investigation at the perimeter of this unknown continent, during which Amundsen was also to employ his abilities as a skier. Just over a month after his signing-on, the astounding news broke: Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen, followed within a week by the
Fram
and the rest of the crew, all returned safely to Norway. Amundsen, as so many others around the world, was full of admiration and extolled the feat and the accomplishments of this man. He no doubt had another, competing feeling bubbling inside, not jealousy exactly, but an even greater sense of urgency to get on with his own pursuit of fame at the ends of the earth. Amundsen, regardless, was not among the thousands who greeted the returning
Fram
in Christiania. He was elsewhere, in training for his own life of adventure.

Even before the
Belgica
departed Antwerp for the Southern Ocean (Antarctic Ocean) in August 1897, Amundsen had been promoted to first officer. This was not so much a compliment to him but due to a lack of qualified men signing on to a long and dangerous expedition, one known to be poorly financed. The expedition leader was Adrien de Gerlache, an officer in the Belgian navy without
any experience in polar exploration. The ship’s company, nineteen crew and four scientists, was a mix of nationalities: Belgian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, French, and American.

Nansen had visited the
Belgica
in the southeastern Norwegian coastal town of Sandefjord, where it had been for repairs and outfitting, an outward gesture to give it and the crew his blessings and best wishes. Perhaps there was a subliminal message, too, that Nansen was keeping alive the possibility of going to that other pole himself, an idea he had discussed at length with Otto Sverdrup on the
Fram
and on the sledge trip with Johansen. In Sandefjord, Nansen and Amundsen would come face-to-face for the first time, one now exalted and magisterial, the other admiring and aspiring. Each would remember the meeting years later, for different reasons—Amundsen for being in the radiant presence of a hero, Nansen for the indelible impression the younger man made on him: “Having once seen that face, one does not easily forget it.”
¹

What
was
it about that face? He had a look you can see in pictures of him all through his life, from young boy to older man: a seriousness, without mirth or warmth in the downturned mouth, and when a rare smile does show, it never really touches the face or goes into the eyes. The eyelids droop but not as if he is tired; the eyes themselves gaze coldly and directly from under them, watchful, calculating, and scrutinizing, like a hawk’s. The large nose is also raptorial, aquiline. In that face there is stoic self-assuredness but also a sense that he is hiding something from us, or at least protecting something in himself. In almost all the
photographs when he is with other people, there is a separation between him and them, sometimes in physical distance and sometimes in his body language or facial expression. He seems, in all, to be a very private man, mysterious somewhat, aloof, and alone in the midst of all the public attention he craved and was given, yet fortified against it.

The
Belgica
voyage—though completed, the first ever overwintering in the Antarctic, and the first to use dogs and sledges there—was a near disaster. The ship was almost lost to the ice, two of the crew died (one by drowning and one by scurvy), two went insane, and most of the others were stricken by scurvy, in varying degrees of severity. Moreover, the commander, Gerlache, proved unequal to the task and, in effect, lost control of ship, crew, and expedition.

But for Amundsen personally it was exactly what he wanted: a real-life learning experience in the demanding polar environment he desired, a chance to prove his mettle, and an opportunity to use adversity to his benefit. He not only succeeded in all three but also relished the life he had there. He, and his newfound friend and mentor, the ship’s doctor American Frederick Cook (who had arctic experience in Greenland with Robert Peary and Eivind Astrup), alone of the crew did not suffer from scurvy after they started eating raw penguin and seal meat (at first Gerlache and the others refused to eat such alien fare). He pioneered the sledge trips on the continent. As Gerlache became increasingly ineffective as leader, and the men fell into illness and despondency, Cook and Amundsen rose in power and authority, and helped save the entire enterprise.

With Amundsen and Cook now directing the show, and with men stronger in recovery from scurvy, they sawed, chopped, and blasted the
Belgica
free, after more than a year trapped in the ice. Eight months later it was back in home port in Antwerp but without Amundsen. He left the ship in Buenos Aires and went home on a different one, by himself, avoiding all the fanfare of the
Belgica
’s homecoming. He did so not because he had other places to go or things to see or do. It was to be his signature style, repeated at the conclusion of other expeditions he commanded. He had his mind on something else and his eyes, those eyes, firmly locked on other horizons.

In his account of the
Belgica
voyage in his autobiography,
My Life as an Explorer
, published twenty-eight years after the fact, Amundsen never mentions Gerlache by name, only as a “Belgian sailor.” It was as if he really did not matter, in the greater scheme of things.

›››
Back in Christiania, Amundsen, now twenty-seven, met Nansen for the second time, not as a starstruck acolyte but as fellow member of the “polar club.” He came to him with a special purpose in mind, to get Nansen’s support, and the influence he could bring to bear, for his lifelong dream: to sail the entire route that had long stymied so many others in such dramatic and tragic ways, the Northwest Passage. He also had in mind another goal he knew would appeal to Nansen the scientist, to determine the exact current location of the magnetic pole, known to have moved since first discovered by James Clark Ross in 1831 but to where exactly no one knew.

He got Nansen’s endorsement, a key, powerful tool to leverage money from would-be donors, especially when skeptical of a venture with such known risk and conducted by such a relatively untested leader. Even with Nansen’s name behind him, Amundsen, never a good businessman anyway and always dogged by financial problems, found money hard to come by. Nonetheless he forged ahead and, in 1901, with his newly minted master’s mariner license in hand, finally secured enough pledges to purchase a ship from Tromsø, the seventy-foot, single-masted sealer/fishing boat named the
Gjøa
(pronounced, more or less, “Yew-ah”). He had it refitted for the Arctic and provisioned for five years of travel; he hired on a crew of only six (manageable and easier to sustain, as Nansen had proved), including one who had just returned with the
Fram
in September, Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm. No doubt Sverdrup had given him high marks for his temperament and cooking.

On June 16, 1903, the
Gjøa
left Christiania but not to the cheers and waves of thousands of well-wishers, as when the
Fram
departed on its voyages. Instead, to avoid old creditors who might be there to collect before he left, maybe never to return, or new ones he had had to borrow from to finance the increasingly costly trip, it slipped away under cover of midnight and in the rain, quietly towed out of harbor and down the fjord, and then let go to sail on its own out to sea. Even the king of Norway, one of his sponsors, was left in the dark. As he had returned from Antarctica, as it would be thus in future times, Amundsen came and went in shadows.

Amundsen and crew took the
Gjøa
around Greenland, up Baffin Bay, and then followed Sir John Franklin’s course through Lancaster Sound to Beechey Island. There they saw the same sad wreckage that, a year earlier, Victor Baumann, Oluf Raanes, and Ivar Fosheim had seen when they came from the
Fram
over North Devon Island. They also saw the gravestones of the three of Franklin’s
men who had died there, a stark and sobering reminder to those who were now following their very route. From there they continued southwest to King William Island, near where Franklin and his men had disappeared; they avoided becoming trapped in the ice by sailing around the eastern side, into safe harbor on the southeast corner of the island.

They ended up spending nearly two years there, a place they named Gjøahavn (Gjøa’s Haven or Harbor), to accomplish one of Amundsen’s goals: fixing the location of the magnetic pole. In the process, they found it had moved north many miles in the seventy-plus years since Ross’s discovery. They filled in gaps in maps of the region. They also struck up a long-term relationship with a group of Inuit, who helped them by supplying fresh meat, clothing, and sorely needed social interaction over the long haul, in return for useful goods that the Norwegians could supply. Amundsen’s own accounts of this time speak of nothing but hard work, harmony, and goodwill.

But, according to Amundsen biographer Tor Bomann-Larsen, it had not all been exactly a bed of roses. As revealed in diaries of some of the crew, the “Governor” or “Boss,” as he was now alternately nicknamed, displayed other, less admirable, aspects of his personality. As he grew impatient to get on with his primary goal, the Northwest Passage, he could grow sullen and withdrawn or, just the opposite, testy, critical, and meddlesome. He lost interest in things that once engaged him, such as the magnetic observations, and left them to others. He would sometimes spend days away from the ship, sledging by himself.