Fog. Nothing but fog. Amundsen and his men left Framheim, their home on the Antarctic, without looking back. There was nothing to see. The fog masked the hard edges of the land, the Pole now a far distance away, up across that barrier of ice. They had no wish to return. It was done. Slowly, the Fram pushed her way through the icebergs towards the open sea. It was the end of January 1912.
‘Tasmania, still?’ Nilsen asked Amundsen.
‘Yes,’ said Amundsen.
‘It’s further than New Zealand.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t want us to finish our journey where the English started from.’
‘They may yet beat us with the news.’
‘I know. Even though we beat them to the Pole. That’s why I want to land where no one knows us. I’ll send my telegrams from Hobart. Get us there quickly.’
Nilsen shrugged and turned his eyes back to the bow. Amundsen was the boss, the governor. What he said must be done. The Fram, no longer heavily laden, was nothing more than an upturned walnut shell built to drift through ice. She was not for a sailing race. Nilsen prayed for a favourable wind.
The kind wind never came. The seas were restless. The cold did not ease. A week later they were still surrounded by the ice, an unhappy ship in dangerous waters, and a divided crew. Silence, not songs, filled the vessel. Where was victory now? Jagged tempers. And Amundsen, invisible, alone in his cabin, refining his first message, his story of triumph.
Gradually, too gradually, the endless daylight of the Antarctic summer shrank into the gentler rhythm of night and day. They left the cold behind and moved into coolness. Then the air grew milder, and after four weeks, they reached the heat. It did nothing to soothe their tempers. Many of the men took their meals separately. They couldn’t look each other in the eye.
‘Land ahoy!’
March 1912 had just begun.
‘At last.’ Amundsen threw down the book he had been reading and went on deck. The faint outline of islands shimmered indistinctly in the distance.
‘Tasmania?’ he asked no one in particular.
‘Yes,’ Oscar Wisting said. ‘We should be there in a couple of days.’
‘No sooner?’
‘Depends on the weather, you know that.’
‘We need to get there quickly. We’ve spent too long on this damn ocean. The world must know of our achievement, must have proof we got there before the English.’
‘Where do you think they are now?’
‘Who cares? As long as they’re safe. We were there before them. That’s all anyone need know.’
‘Shouldn’t we have left that spare fuel at the Pole? We didn’t need it in the end.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ Irritation in his voice. ‘It’s not important now. Getting to land is.’
‘A few more days, skipper; just a few more days.’
‘I pray it is so.’
That night, the heat brought a hurricane. It swept the small ship back out to sea. Next morning, there was no land in sight. Another hope was defeated, and more time wasted. Amundsen started planning his next voyage. He would go north this time.
And so it went for days, the explorer trying, with steam and sail, to beat the elements. Nature, never appeased, relented for some hours, until land was in sight, and then the storms rose again to drive him away from his wish.
Amundsen, fiercer than ever, more silent than ever, grew more impatient, more desperate, a fire burning in the heat of the Southern hemisphere. The Pole would not be conquered until the world knew about it, until King Haakon knew Amundsen and his men had planted that red, white and blue flag into the foot of the Earth. No one need know more than that.
The sixth day of March dawned, the sixth day of waiting for land to be within reach. And then the storm came again. It blew them along Tasmania’s coast, past Hobart, like a dried-out leaf in the wind of drought, tore sails, splintered a mast.
‘Will this never stop?’ Amundsen screamed at the mirror. ‘I want my reward. My soul for my reward. My life, even.’
Silence. No wind. No smack of water against wood. No swell of sea or sky. Amundsen rushed to the bridge.
‘Full steam ahead. Now,’ he shouted. ‘I won’t be stopped this time.’
Five hours later, they dropped anchor off the coast. Finally.
At noon, a boat drew up to the Fram’s side. The local doctor’s boat. The pilot and his customs officials scrambled up the rope ladder. Amundsen was waiting for them, his face fresh from shaving.
‘Any news of the English?’ he snapped.
‘No, sir,’ the pilot answered.
‘Good. Let’s go.’ He grabbed his briefcase, danced down the ladder, and jumped into the boat. He glared at the other boats beginning to gather. ‘Get rid of them,’ he shouted up at Wisting. ‘Don’t let them on board.’ He pointed at the men with notepads. ‘Go away.’
An hour later, Amundsen unlocked the door of a room in the Hotel Orient. He threw his case onto the bed, ripped off his tie, and sat down in front of the desk. He wrote, in code, a note addressed to his king, a note to his patron, Axel Heiberg and, finally, a note with instructions to his brother Leon.
He dressed as an ordinary sailor and wandered, unrecognised, to Hobart’s telegraph office, from where he had the coded messages sent. To avoid questions, he paid in coins, gave the exact change, muttered his thanks in broken English. He longed to be amongst his fellow countrymen again, to speak a proper language.
Back at the hotel, Amundsen lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. What now? Would he ever meet Scott? Would they ever become friends and laugh about their Antarctic race? He hoped so, and regretted having refused to meet the man in Oslo before the race had begun. He had been afraid to share their common goal, had kept his desires secret. Would it have been better to share the glory? He doubted it. He wouldn’t have wanted to. At last, after five weeks of wakefulness, sleep grabbed him and wrapped him in its warm comfort, forgiveness even.
In Norway, Leon Amundsen decoded the message. Pole reached, fourteenth to eighteenth December last year. All is well. The world was theirs. At last.
Fog, nothing but fog.
When the flying boat took off from Tromsø late that June afternoon in 1928, the sun was shining weakly into the cockpit. Warmth and blurred shadows. For once, Amundsen smiled. He was going out into the wilds again, to rescue an enemy from the cold of the Arctic ice floes. He would own the world again.
Motionless in his seat, he watched the land drop away from them as the plane lifted away from the fjord. There were five others with him. He was confident they would succeed in rescuing the marooned Italian, Nobile, from the ice where his airship had crashed. What could stop them? Just like nothing had been able to stop his victory at the Pole.
His smile faded. Scott had won, ultimately, he reflected.
By dying and leaving behind all those fine words in journals the world had devoured, writing about himself and his courageous companions, every English gentleman would be proud of him. Scott had won by not coming back, by being a better writer than he, the explorer. The irony of it. Nothing mattered any more, nothing had ever mattered. All achievement was empty, all glory vain. Life had no meaning.
Amundsen bit back a sigh. How dearly he would have liked to smoke now they were at last up here in the air, away from all that threatened him. But he had left his broken lighter with his chemist friend in Tromsø, telling him he no longer needed it. What had possessed him to do that? His mood darkened. He couldn’t speak with the four Frenchmen flying the plane. Nor could he speak with the one other Norwegian on board. There was nothing left to say. And he would not share his secrets.
Then the fog came. The sun just went out. No longer could they see where they were going, and their instruments weren’t telling them. The drone of the engines fluttered. The plane shifted. They tried to settle it back into a pattern but couldn’t. The turbulence increased. Gossamer demons smashed at the windshield. The noise of the buffeting was louder than the engines. They stuttered again, stalled, stopped.
‘Hold on,’ shouted Dietrichson.
‘Try to start them again,’ called Amundsen. ‘Pull her up, pull her up.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Let me try.’ Amundsen was on his feet now, the old man with the need to be in control, always in control. He should never have trusted these people, should never have agreed to fly out in this wooden thing they all knew wouldn’t survive a crash into the biting Arctic seas. He pushed Guilbaud out of the way, cared not that the man couldn’t understand a word he was saying. He snatched at the instrument panel. Nothing. No response. He pulled at the joystick. Nothing, again. He turned to the others and shrugged.
‘We will have to swim,’ he said in English, and laughed. No one laughed with him.
They all survived the crash. All came through the sudden cacophony of noise in a sea of silence. There were no screams. The plane was in pieces, and they clung to those pieces they could grab hold of. The fog reached down into the water, the sun somewhere behind it, so close to the longest day. It was never dark here at this time of the year, but cold, so cold.
They scrambled up out of the sea, shivering by now. They tried to fashion one of the plane’s floats into a life raft, but their freezing hands were useless. Their strength ebbing, they huddled together on the slippery surface of fragmented wood, but nothing would bring them warmth. One by one, they stopped breathing, slumped forward, and slid towards the remorseless sea. He could not hold them all. He had to let go, until only he and Dietrichson were left.
‘No … no hope,’ Dietrichson stammered.
‘Always hope, always,’ Amundsen said quietly.
Dietrichson didn’t answer. He fell onto his back, slowly. Amundsen closed the dead man’s eyes, as gently as his shivers would allow. He wrapped himself into his wet clothes and lay down. There was no point fighting now. Is this what Scott had felt in his last moments? He looked up into the nothingness of the fog. All he could do was wait for his night to come. All he could hope for was freedom from pain.
Pictures rushed across his vision. His ships. His men. The white plains of the south. The desolation. The black tent they had pitched. The bright red of his flag. He stopped shivering. Scott stepped into his dying dream. Maybe they could be friends now. Amundsen raised his hand in welcome.