Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (37 page)

After wrangling over their roles and makeup of the crew (and over offended egos and national prides), Amundsen and Nobile took their places, Amundsen as commander of the expedition, directing the mission, and Nobile as captain and pilot, carrying out the orders. Riiser-Larsen was second-in-command and navigator. Oscar Wisting, who had just returned from the
Maud
now in hock in Seattle, controlled the vertical elevator.
Maud
seaplane and N24 survivor Oskar Omdal was one of the mechanics. Lincoln Ellsworth was again navigator. Lest there be any doubt whose expedition this was, Amundsen named the airship the
Norge
.

On May 11, 1926, the
Norge
floated off from Spitsbergen. Riding in the gondolas beneath its great belly with sixteen men was a mix of Norwegians and Italians. The next day, they were there, over the North Pole! They dropped their flags, Norwegian, American, and Italian (many more Italian flags, with one much bigger, offending Amundsen) and then continued on toward Alaska, crossing the great unseen sector of the Arctic Ocean, where land, or even a continent, might be hiding, awaiting their discovery. But there was nothing but ice and water, and only on May 14, after exactly three days of “flying,” did the
Norge
come down at Teller, Alaska, not far from Nome. It was over, the first flight of any kind to the North Pole and across the polar sea. Amundsen and Wisting were now the only two to have seen both poles of the world, for whatever they were worth.

Amundsen, having done everything he set out to do as a young man, retired.

›››
During and after the
Norge
crossing, Amundsen and Nobile had a bitter and rather public falling-out over the continuing conflict of leadership and who got credit. Two years later, in late May 1928, Nobile tried it all again, taking
Norge
’s sister airship
Italia
(named in reprisal for Amundsen’s
Norge
?) from Spitsbergen to the pole.
Italia
did reach the pole but crashed on its way back, killing one man on impact and dropping nine from the smashed gondola onto the ice; three were injured in the process, including Nobile with a broken leg. Six others disappeared with the airship as it drifted away. A massive search got underway, drawing sixteen ships, twenty-three airplanes, and over one thousand men from eight different countries into the operation. One of those men was Amundsen. He immediately came out of his retirement when asked to help, putting aside his enmity.

Amundsen quickly acquired the loan of a French seaplane, a Latham 47. Its crew of four Frenchmen flew it to Bergen, where they picked up Amundsen and his former pilot of N24, Dietrichson, and then went on to Tromsø for refueling before heading north. Three hours after leaving Tromsø, the plane’s radio went dead. The search for the
Italia
became also the search for Amundsen:
Norge
and
Italia
, the Norseman and the Italian.

The pilot of an Italian airplane first spotted the surviving
Italia
crew camped out on the ice. Days later, a Swedish pilot landed his plane there and took off Nobile and his little dog (which had also been on the
Norge
flight). He came back to pick up the remaining crew, but the plane crashed, leaving it to a big British-built Russian icebreaker (the first ever), the
Krasin
, to make its way through the ice to them and finish the rescue.

Nobile would recover physically but would spend the rest of his life trying to erase the black mark of the accident and its aftermath, particularly what many considered the captain abandoning his crew. Amundsen and the others on the Latham 47 were never found. Three months later, one of the wing floats from the plane washed ashore on the Norwegian coast, and yet later, a fuel tank that had been made into a kind of float . . . for the plane? . . . for them?

›››
One June day in 1928, Amundsen had had a visitor at his home outside Oslo, one of the four who had accompanied him to the South Pole and the man who had sledged so far in the Sverdrup Islands: quiet and reflective Sverre Hassel. That day, while in Amundsen’s garden and no doubt admiring the flowers, Hassel had a heart attack and died. Twelve days later, Amundsen took off in the Latham 47 to look for Nobile and disappeared forever. Amundsen was fifty-five.

›››
As he grew older, Amundsen had become more isolated and critical of others, distant from those formerly closest to him, even his family. He never married. He raised no children. He had chosen the kind of life he wanted, and lived it, and died by it. His final disappearance was, in a way, true to form. He managed once again to avoid the huge crowd in Oslo that turned out for him, not in celebration but in mourning.

30 ›
THE LONELY PLACES

F
ridtjof Nansen had gone the other way with his life since returning from the Arctic in 1896, not up in the air, obsessively for a place on earth, or away from others but down to earth, spread out into the world itself, with all its tumult and confusion, and all those crying out in need.

He was famous and revered. He was an internationally best-selling author and turned it all into financial security, even wealth. He had a grand stone mansion built, “Polhøgda” (Polar Heights) outside Christiania, to be a home for his growing family, a sanctuary for study, and a retreat from the busyness beyond its doors. He had given the
Fram
to Amundsen that fateful day in 1907, with professed intention to dedicate himself to the quieter, more solitary pursuits of scientific inquiry, writing, and art, comfortable passions he had put aside for exploration. He especially wanted to delve deeply into oceanography, pouring over the mountains of data brought back on the
Fram
. He could have leaned back and rested on his laurels and had even said many times he wanted to.

But that was only one side of him, the private, reflective, and creative side. The other side craved the human, the public, and the interpersonal. Two sides were at war within, or one could say two opposite poles pulled him inward and pushed him out.

He became more engaged in Norway’s independence from Sweden and helped bring about a peaceful separation in 1905. Then he was appointed Norway’s first foreign minister to Great Britain, taking him away from home for long periods of time and into high society, social whirl, and the intrigues of politics. He found it at once exciting and repugnant, this life in the public eye, leveraging rewards by posturing and manipulating, securing political favors from powerful men, and being the object of admiration and attention of beautiful and elegant women.

He had struggled, too, with another internal conflict. He had left exploration and the
Fram
also to recommit himself to a marriage in which both he and Eva had struggled off and on, and from which, in his traveling and public life, he had
strayed into relationships with other women. His love was deep, if flawed. When Eva sickened with pneumonia that same year he let go of the
Fram
, he was away in London and rushed home too late to be with her before she died.

His “black moods,” always hovering in the wings, became worse and more pervasive, no doubt deepened by guilt over his absences and infidelities. “The dark expression in his eyes frightened me,” Nansen’s daughter Liv wrote later in
Nansen: A Family Portrait
of her father during this time. Polhøgda became a cold fortress against the outside world, a melancholy, lifeless place for him and those close to him. His children numbered five, the oldest Liv at thirteen when Eva died, and the youngest Åsmund at four. They felt his distracted sadness and the want of his attention and were handed over to others for much of the parenting that, in
his sorrow and state of mind, was too much for him. He withdrew from others to his rooms and inside himself. “He had chosen Eva over the
Fram
,” his daughter wrote. “Now he had neither.”

›››
As grief loosed its stranglehold on him, he began to pick up his scientific work again and escaped his self-imposed isolation on sea voyages, most involving oceanographic surveys to the north. He got back into the world, bit by bit. Then, in 1913, the double tragedy hit: Hjalmar Johansen’s suicide and, a few months later, the death of his youngest son Åsmund, now eleven. Nansen fell back into the pit of sorrow and reclusion. He slowly emerged, once again, but by then the Great War (World War I) was looming over Europe, and its enormity and proximity awakened in him a new calling that, in one form or another, would motivate him for the rest of his life. He would raise his sonorous voice, and use his fame and his personal power, to defend innocent people from tyranny, injustice, and suffering.

With new life and purpose, Nansen traveled the world and worked tirelessly, almost manically at times, for his new causes. While Norway remained neutral during the war, he went from city to town, from meeting to meeting, to urge caution against complacency and for his country to strengthen itself against invasion and prepare for shortages.

What he feared came true: under pressure from Germany, Norway ran low on food and fuel and became dependent on the United States for shipments to fill the gap. However, after the United States entered the war in 1917, it banned all exports, and Norway ran perilously low on essential supplies for its citizens. Nansen went to Washington and, after months of haggling and negotiation, secured, on his own authority when officials back home dragged their feet, an agreement allowing shipments of food to begin. While in the United States, he came to Roald Amundsen’s assistance once more. He forged an agreement with the U.S. government for supplies and equipment (recall those two boxed-up planes) to be sent cross-country for the
Maud
when it arrived on the west coast.

After the war, Nansen’s humanitarianism branched out and widened beyond Norway’s borders and self-interest. He became his country’s first representative to the newly formed League of Nations, the intergovernmental body created to maintain world peace through arbitration of disputes and just treatment of all peoples, regardless of nationality. In that role, for ten years until he died, he would be the driving force for providing relief to millions of the displaced and unfortunate, the sick and starving, and the persecuted. Out of a moral compunction, in
taking on such herculean tasks he overrode his own expressed desire to get back to what he knew and did best, science.

Named the league’s “High Commissioner for Prisoners of War,” he was responsible for getting half a million prisoners back to their homes between 1920 and 1922, across twenty-six different countries. The war, and the concomitant Russian Revolution, had also left millions of displaced, homeless, and often starving refugees scattered throughout Europe, the Soviet Union, and Asia. As the league’s “High Commissioner for Refugees,” he created and instituted the “Nansen Passport,” a document recognized by over fifty countries, which allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees free movement across borders, resettlement, and rehabilitation into new lives.

Millions more were dying and suffering during the Russian famine of 1921–22, brought on by drought but also by war-induced land ravages and transportation disruptions. Nansen put on another mantle, “High Commissioner for Relief to Russia” and, overcoming resistance of many Western nations to helping an emerging communist one, arranged for food to be distributed to starving Russians, a mammoth logistical and political undertaking that saved as many as twenty-two million lives.

He did yet more. After Turkey defeated the Greek army in 1922, Greeks living in Asia Minor became sudden and frantic refugees, wanting to get back home. Nansen brokered a peaceful exchange and repatriation of a million and a half
Greek refugees for half a million Turks in Greece. In 1924–25, he worked on behalf of nearly two million Armenians, stranded in Turkey and the Soviet Union, enabling them to escape their hopelessness and find new homes in other lands.

In 1922, Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He donated all the prize money, and an equal amount given by an admiring donor, to ongoing relief efforts. After his death in 1930, and in recognition of his work, the League of Nations established the Nansen International Office for Refugees to continue his legacy. Eight years later, it too would win the Nobel Peace Prize.

›››
What was it that turned this man into the great public figure, reluctant but ultimately heroic, he became later in life? How was he able to get through the tortured periods of his own life when he could barely function and move so brilliantly on to such accomplishments for all humankind?

His daughter Liv believed that this new, overwhelming passion grew out of his own time of greatest spiritual darkness and cold, after he watched helplessly as those he loved so dearly died and while he was away tending to himself. In him the cool ember of compassion, always there and smoldering, burst into heat and flame, never to be extinguished.

Could there have been something else at play in this transformation, this devotion so complete and selfless to others in anguish? Was he trying to erase, as best he could, the regret he often felt and expressed about being away from his own wife and children, for so long, when they needed him the most? Could it be from the guilt of falling to recurrent affairs with women, while professing undying love for his own wife? Was he trying, in some extraordinary way, to make up for what he had lost, let go, or pushed away?

›››
A few years before the end of his life, Nansen gave a speech to assembled students at St. Andrews in Scotland, across the North Sea from Norway, on the occasion of receiving an honorary position in the university. “The first great thing is to find yourself,” he said, in English, “and for that you need solitude and contemplation, at least sometimes. I tell you deliverance will not come from the rushing, noisy centers of civilization. It will come from the lonely places.”
¹
His lonely places: the Arctic, inside himself.