The Last Viking Read online

  Also by Stephen Bown

  Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail

  Forgotten Highways: Wilderness Journeys Down the Historic Trails of the Canadian Rockies

  Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600 –1900

  1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval Spain Divided the World in Half

  And yet even today we hear people ask in surprise: What is the use of these voyages of exploration? What good do they do us? Little brains, I always answer to myself, have only room for thoughts of bread and butter.

  —Roald Amundsen, The South Pole

  In spite of the long time I had spent in the Arctic I was always longing to go back again. Kipling says that the man who hears the East a-calling never hears anything else, but the Arctic and the ice call just as strongly to some people.

  —Helmer Hanssen, Voyages of a Modern Viking

  No man more than the explorer is tempted to adopt the doctrine of ends justifying the means. An explorer soon discovers that the world is full of busybodies righteously ready to save him, as they probably think, from himself. The only way to deal with such people is to agree to their terms and then go ahead as one pleases. There are enough legitimate discouragements in the world without submitting to artificial ones.

  —Lincoln Ellsworth, Beyond Horizons

  Contents

  List of Plates

  PROLOGUE The Last of the Vikings

  PART ONE

  WEST

  1 The Boy from the Mountain Kingdom

  2 Polar Apprentice

  3 An Extraordinary Plan

  4 Where Franklin Died

  5 An Education at Gjøahavn

  PART TWO

  SOUTH

  6 “I Resolved Upon a Coup”

  7 The Napoleon of the Poles

  8 Dogs and Skis

  9 A Featureless Expanse of Snow

  PART THREE

  EAST

  10 A Hero Returns

  11 A New Battlefield

  12 The Frozen Reaches of Tartary

  PART FOUR

  NORTH

  13 Grounded Dreams

  14 The Arctic Phoenix

  15 The Dirigible and the Fascist

  16 A Massed Attack on the Polar Regions

  PART FIVE

  LOST

  17 No More Poles to Conquer

  EPILOGUE The End of the Heroic Age

  A Note on Sources

  Endnotes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  List of Plates

  1. Roald Amundsen as a boy in Christiania, circa 1875.

  2. Portrait of Amundsen as a youth, showing how he wanted to be known, an intrepid adventurer, rather than how he was.

  3. Amundsen and Hanssen learning from the Inuit, preparing for their first dog sled foray in the winter of 1903/1904.

  4. The remnants of practice snow houses litter the ground surrounding the Gjoa, the evidence of Amundsen’s labor.

  5. A Netsilingmiut Inuit family lounges inside a snow house, circa 1904.

  6. A Netsilingmiut Inuit family readies for travel; note the baby carried on the woman’s back.

  7. Young visitors to Gjoa Haven. Amundsen encouraged the people to visit him at the Gjoa so that he could learn Arctic survival and travel skills.

  8. The crew of the Gjoa pose in Nome, Alaska, after their successful navigation of the Northwest Passage, 1906.

  9. Dancing with the dogs aboard the Fram, 1910. During the voyage south from Norway to Antarctica the dogs had the run of the ship and the attention of the crew. They all knew their failure or success would depend upon the health of the dogs.

  10. Framheim snowed-in. The explorers dug tunnels through the snow and constructed several storage and workrooms from the snow. They also held contests to encourage each other to venture outside.

  11. The Fram at the ice edge, ready to unload cargo for the expedition before sailing for Argentina.

  12. Amundsen and crew working on equipment in the kitchen of Framheim, 1911.

  13. Bjaaland, Prestrud, and Wisting packing sledges for the great trip in one of Framheim’s underground snow rooms.

  14. Four exhausted explorers stare at the flag they had planted at the South Pole, December 1911.

  15. Helmer Hanssen and his dog team pose for a photo at the South Pole, an unremarkable patch of snow.

  16. Amundsen and crew posing on the Fram’s deck in Hobart, March 1912, before announcing their news to the world.

  17. This formal portrait of Amundsen, circa 1918, shows the classic profile of “the White Eagle of Norway.”

  18. Amundsen’s custom built ship, the Maud, in Christiania fjord soon after it was launched, 1918.

  19. Reading in the cabin of the Maud along the Northeast Passage

  20. Amundsen feeding his pet polar bear Marie along the Northeast Passage in the winter of 1920.

  21. Amundsen, looking relaxed at the helm of the Maud, Nome, Alaska, 1920.

  22. Amundsen, Kakonita and Camilla in Seattle. It must have been a culture shock for the two girls who had never been away from their tiny Arctic communities before, and who were about to visit New York and cross the Atlantic by steamship to Norway.

  23. The fuselage of N25 being unloaded from the transport ship Hobby onto the ice at Kings Bay, May 1925.

  24. The flying boats being assembled on the frozen rim of Kings Bay. Note the open cockpits, the lack of landing gear, and the mighty engine on the wings above.

  25. Amundsen looking cool, leaning against the side of his plane before the flight.

  26. Amundsen, Ellsworth being drawn through the crowd-lined streets of Oslo in celebration, July 5, 1925.

  27. Umberto Nobile, displaying his customary smug expression, and his pet dog Titina, the first dog to reach the North Pole.

  28. The Norge leaving Leningrad for Norway, note the men outside tending the engines. The Italian members of the crew had never seen snow before.

  29. The Norge is hauled from its green canvas hangar in Kings Bay on May, 11, 1926, in preparation for its historic flight. The mighty open-roofed shed was constructed at great expense with imported materials in the month before the flight.

  30. The Norge deflating in Teller, Alaska. Amundsen and Ellsworth went on to Nome while Nobile remained to pack up the damaged airship, May 1926.

  31. Amundsen and Ellsworth posing in celebration after the pioneering flight that disproved the existence of land surrounding the North Pole.

  32. The leaders of the Norge expedition, Amundsen, Ellsworth, Nobile (seated) and Riiser-Larsen (far left), posing for a photo as they cruised south to Seattle, June 1926. The relaxed atmosphere conveyed in the photo belied the undercurrents of disgruntlement, frustration and distrust that soon erupted into a bitter public feud.

  The Last of the Vikings

  I tried to work up a little poetry—the ever-restless spirit of man, the mysterious, awe-inspiring wilderness of ice—but it was no good; I suppose it was too early in the morning.

  “THE STANDARD OF Fascist Italy is floating in the breeze over the ice of the Pole,” radioed General Umberto Nobile, commander of the dirigible Italia, on May 24, 1928. The enormous airship and its crew of sixteen had flown from their base on Spitsbergen the day before and were now leisurely circling the frozen expanse at the top of the world. In the tiny main cabin strapped underneath the monstrous gas chamber, a gramophone scratched out the Italian folk song “The Bells of San Giusto,” and the men celebrated with a homemade liqueur.

  A month earlier, Pope Pius XI had publicly blessed the crew and commande
r in Italy, urging them to “consecrate the summit of the world,” and had presented them with an enormous ceremonial oak cross for that purpose. It was impossible for the crew to disembark from the cabin onto the ice due to winds that kept the airship 150 metres in the air, and the men struggled to manoeuvre the great cross out the cabin door. They solemnly watched it plummet to the ice with the flag of Italy’s National Fascist Party attached to it, fluttering in the polar wind. Then, in a “religious silence,” they tossed out a Milanese coat of arms and a little medal of the Virgin of the Fire.

  After the brief ceremony, which also included playing the Fascist battle hymn “Giovinezza” followed by a flourish of salutes, the airship slowly turned around and began to struggle against headwinds and fog on its way back south to Spitsbergen. The visibility being poor, Nobile couldn’t determine the Italia’s location. The crew became disoriented, and Nobile ordered the airship to descend closer to the pack ice for a better view. They were still almost three hundred kilometres northeast of Spitsbergen when the rear of the airship became “heavy” and lurched toward the ice. Alarmed, Nobile and his officers tried to regain control over the Italia by increasing the speed of the propellers. But it was too late. The rear end of the dirigible hit and scraped along the jagged surface of the ice. “There was a fearful impact,” Nobile wrote later. “Something hit me on the head, then I was caught and crushed. Clearly, without any pain, I felt some of my limbs snap. Some object falling from a height knocked me down head foremost. Instinctively I shut my eyes, and with perfect lucidity and coolness formulated the thought: ‘It’s all over!’”

  During the impact one man plunged from the cabin onto the ice and died instantly. Nine men scrambled from the wreckage and leaped or were thrown to the ice. As flames erupted from the crippled airship, it spun away in a trail of smoke. Six men were trapped in the cabin, never to be seen again. The nine survivors, several of them severely injured, huddled on the ice amid the detritus of boxes and equipment that had been thrown from the airship while Nobile’s little dog Titina, uninjured in the collision, explored the bleak surroundings. After several days without radio contact, Nobile finally accepted that the expedition was indeed in trouble and in need of rescue; only a month of provisions had survived the crash.

  Roald Amundsen was attending a public luncheon when news of the disaster reached Oslo. Upon hearing the news he stood up and announced, “I’m ready to leave at once to do anything I can to help.” But as the Norwegian government began planning a rescue expedition, astonishing word came from Italy. Benito Mussolini had refused all assistance from Norway (despite the fact that the airship had probably gone down off Norway’s northern border), particularly if the rescue were to be led by Amundsen. Nobile and Amundsen had been caught up in a nasty public feud for the past eighteen months—the fallout from a previous joint dirigible expedition to the North Pole—and Mussolini did not want the honour of Italy besmirched by Nobile’s being rescued by his enemy. It would be an affront to Italian dignity. To the budding strongman, then beginning his scheme to reinvigorate Italy’s image in the eyes of the world and to reposition his country as a powerful player on the international stage, the prospect of the nations of the world coming to Italy’s rescue was humiliating. Captain Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, an organizer of the Norwegian rescue operation and a past colleague of Amundsen’s, wrote in astonishment: “I could not rid myself of the idea that it was preferable for the expedition to suffer a glorious death, [rather] than a miserable homecoming.”

  To avoid offending Mussolini, the organizers of the Norwegian expedition quietly dropped Amundsen from the rescue operation. It was a slight the aging but proud adventurer, officially retired for over a year, would not easily accept. Over six feet tall, weatherbeaten and still powerfully built at fifty-six years of age, he could not resist the urge to step into the spotlight one more time, perhaps to find closure for his quarrel with Nobile and redemption from the sordid publicity of the past two years.

  In the 1920s, dirigibles were considered the future of air transport. A spectacular airship crash in the howling wastes of the polar sea commanded public interest; both nations and publicity-seeking individuals were eager to be seen as part of the thrilling escapade. So Amundsen began to arrange a private rescue plan. Money, as it had been throughout his tumultuous career, was Amundsen’s chief concern. He had only recently cleared most of his debts, so his friends and family were not enthusiastic about financing his participation in what had become an international game played for national prestige.

  There was strong sentiment in Norway that passing over Amundsen to please Mussolini was not only foolish but also a national embarrassment. Through the intercession of Fredrik Petersen, a Norwegian businessman in Paris, the French government quickly approved the use of a Latham twin-engine biplane equipped with pontoons, and a crew, to be put under Amundsen’s command. The aircraft would help scour the ice for the stranded survivors of the Italia and ensure that France was a player in the great game of rescue, a drama that was generating voluminous columns of print in newspapers and magazines throughout Europe and North America. Although his fiancée was travelling from America to meet him, the Norwegian adventurer readied himself for the dangerous dash to Spitsbergen.

  There was a reason Amundsen was able to command such international attention on short notice: he was the most famous of Norwegian explorers, and probably the most famous living explorer in the world. For nearly two and a half decades, his many thrilling exploits had pushed the frontiers of geographical knowledge and entertained millions. There was no one alive more deserving than Amundsen of the honour of a commanding role in the international extravaganza that would eventually include eight nations, dozens of ships and planes, and over 1,500 men.

  In the early twentieth century, many of the great geographical mysteries that had intrigued adventurers for centuries remained unsolved, leaving unexplored blank spots on otherwise increasingly detailed global maps. Whereas Tibet, Africa and the Amazon had been repeatedly visited, every ocean navigated and every desert traversed, the Northwest Passage, the South Pole and the North Pole, sirens to generations of seekers, had not yet been conquered. Yet one man would undisputedly claim all these prizes within a twenty-year span.

  Although he is known for being the first person to reach the South Pole—which, ironically, he didn’t consider to be his greatest accomplishment—the Norwegian Roald Amundsen should also be remembered as one of the greatest explorers of all time. Like the accomplishments of the revered British mariner James Cook, Amundsen’s feats are unrivalled. Unlike the expeditions of others—particularly British empire-against-the-world, our-way-as-the-civilized-way excursions—Amundsen approached his goals as physical and mental challenges. They were planned like military operations. The Norwegian explorer’s style—a rational, as opposed to a romantic, approach to travel and exploration—proved successful where others had failed: in the harshest, most unforgiving places on the planet, where a single mistake could result in failure and perhaps death. His military-style execution of his objectives, carried out with gusto and flamboyant self-promotion, changed forever the way the geographical world would be perceived and future expeditions planned.

  Amundsen was a skillful publicity seeker. To fund his exploits, he made the rounds of the lecture circuit telling hair-raising tales of his death-defying adventures and geographical conquests. In the press he was referred to as “the last of the Vikings,” and he learned early never to do anything without securing advance publicity (and payment for exclusive rights to his story). Larger than life, arrogant and competitive, Amundsen was a meticulous organizer and avoided the extreme sufferings and early death so common among other adventurers. He could be taciturn and rude in public, and his accomplishments were tainted by the perceptions that he was devious and cold-hearted, that his quest for glory and public acclaim in the exploration game was somehow unseemly or ungentlemanly and that he had violated some unwritten code that dictated how respectable adventurers
were to conduct themselves. In fact, while Amundsen viewed exploration as an exciting undertaking to settle his restless spirit, he somehow failed to appreciate, or ignored, the underlying political and nationalist motivations that inspired and financed others, making him the object of much vitriol, as occurred when Robert Falcon Scott of the British Antarctic Expedition perished while racing Amundsen to the South Pole.

  Amundsen has been contrasted and compared with Scott by biographers and polar historians for the past century. His life and accomplishments have been condensed to this single episode, in which he is often portrayed as an uncouth bit player in the tragic drama of Scott’s death. But Amundsen was not universally regarded as a cold and austere man. His American friend Lincoln Ellsworth claimed that “he was like a child whose confidence has been betrayed so often that it finally trusts nobody. So he encased himself in a shell of ice. . . . Nobody was warmer hearted, no boy could frolic more joyously than Amundsen in his fifties, as he was when I knew him.” Amundsen also had an intuitive sense of other people’s moods and thoughts. When he sensed that others found it uncomfortable to be constantly looking up at him, he would indicate that everyone should be seated.

  Although he strove for respectability, cloaking his exploits in scientific accomplishment, Amundsen pursued his objectives as a series of conquests, as records to be broken and listed on his résumé, metaphorical trophies for his mantel, much like professional adventurers do today. He commented to a friend when he heard of the American Richard Evelyn Byrd’s plan to fly to the South Pole: “Of course Byrd can fly to the South Pole, if he wants to, but what is the use? I don’t understand such a thing. I was there, Scott was there—there is nothing more to find. Why should anybody want to go to a place where somebody else had already been? Or go there for the sake of doing it a different way?” On another occasion he wrote that he was glad he hadn’t been born later, because then there would have been nothing left for him to do but go to the moon. He was the supreme man of action, an actor in a grand drama of his own devising. The only reason he didn’t endorse equipment in order to fund his expeditions was that adventure tourism as a form of middle-class recreation did not yet exist and there was not much equipment to promote, although he did promote other products—shoes, toothpaste and tinned meat—whenever he could.