There are many ways to interpret a life. I have approached Roald Amundsen’s life in such a way as to not only reveal the astounding adventures of a unique and compelling personality, but to place these exploits in their historical context: Why was Amundsen so important, and why did anyone care about what he was doing? I am not a polar expert; I have never been to either of the poles and I have no plans to travel there, but in the early twentieth century the quest to explore these last remaining uncharted places was an obsessive goal for some nations, and they fought to be the first to dispel the few geographical mists that still shrouded the planet. My interest is in Amundsen as an individual working within the technological and psychological limitations of his day—a person who struggled to accomplish what was important in his era, not what was or is universally important, if indeed there is any such thing.
In viewing Amundsen as a historical character, I am interested in how the world viewed him, as much as I am interested in how he viewed the world—in how he changed the world, as much as how the world changed him. This broad view of his actions speaks to his character: he spent nearly his entire adult life engaged in publicity-financed exploration, recording the details both to earn his living and for posterity. Amundsen viewed himself as a public figure, and it is this public persona that has been my chief interest, rather than the minutiae of his private life. His public life is very well documented, both by Amundsen himself in his prolific articles, lectures and books, and by others in articles, interviews, photographs and motion pictures. His private life, however, is more obscure. He purposely hid it behind a daunting façade of grim, heroic determination. The concealment itself was part of his character. The Last Viking is intended as a large-canvas story of Amundsen’s life and times rather than as a meditation on his character.
As a Canadian historian and biographer, my interest in Amundsen stemmed from his activities in the Northwest Passage rather than at the South Pole, and as a result I had no preconceived notions of Amundsen in relation to Robert F. Scott. I didn’t begin with the thesis that Amundsen was either superior or inferior to Scott and then set out to prove my case. I was just curious—and then stunned to realize that Amundsen was usually discussed only in relation to Scott and Antarctica. Almost everything written about Amundsen is in the context of “the race to the South Pole,” and the sixteen years following his return from Antarctica are often summed up in a paragraph or two. The post–South Pole years of his life, however, take up nearly half of The Last Viking and include the years when he was an American celebrity, as well as his experimentation with pioneer airplanes, his five years of sailing the Northeast Passage, his failure and then success in flying open-cockpit airplanes toward the North Pole and his pioneering use of an airship to fly over the North Pole and Polar Basin. Amundsen achieved his greatest popularity during these years, particularly in the United States.
Amundsen and many of his friends wrote primarily in Norwegian. Until recently much of this material was unavailable in English, contributing to the relative lack of information about him in the English-speaking world. More than any other factor, the language barrier to accessing some of Amundsen’s correspondence is probably the reason for his waning popularity in the English-speaking world. This raises questions concerning what we know about important individuals, their ideas and actions: if they left a great deal of source material in a widely spoken language, then we learn about them and they are considered important; if their surviving correspondence was minimal or lost or in a language spoken by fewer people, or they were not from a dominant culture, then our portrait of the past does not include them.
I was aided greatly in my research by the recent translation—made in preparation for the 2011 celebrations in Norway commemorating the centenary of Amundsen’s reaching the South Pole—of diaries and letters and other documents, including copies of Amundsen’s lectures, letters from his agents, promotional brochures and so on. The Fram Museum in Oslo, Norway, is the source of much of this information. The museum’s publication Cold Recall: Reflections of a Polar Explorer, edited by Geir O. Klover, provides the original text of Amundsen’s Northwest Passage and South Pole lectures, his correspondence with his lecture agents in the United Kingdom and the United States, and examples of advertisements for Amundsen’s lectures and product endorsements. There has been a fair amount of other new material about Amundsen made available in recent years as well, particularly information about his possible Inuit descendants in northern Canada and the fate of his adopted daughter Kakonita, who settled near Vancouver, B.C. This has been written about only in a few recent magazine articles; see particularly George Tombs’s “Amundsen’s Family Secrets: Another Side of the Polar Explorer Emerges as an Inuit Family Connection Comes to Light” in the October/November 2011 issue of Canada’s History.
The heart and soul of The Last Viking, however, is a collection of more than four hundred newspaper articles about Amundsen, primarily from the New York Times (which published articles that also appeared in other newspapers), which I relied upon extensively to enliven his story and to enrich the understanding of his personality. There are literally thousands of extant newspaper articles about Roald Amundsen, if one chose to search for them. Every city he visited produced a story about his latest exploits. In general, however, little of unique interest is contained in these reports that differentiates them from the reportage in the New York Times, which frequently ran a similar version of a local story submitted by correspondents. Many of these stories can be searched and read online at little cost, or for no cost at a university microfilm station.
I have elected to quote mainly from the New York Times for several reasons: because it was the newspaper of record at the time and had a large national and international audience, and because it reproduced variations on almost everything written about Amundsen from other sources, including articles from European correspondents and reprints from smaller local newspapers. Amundsen also had a special relationship with the New York Times: he sold the newspaper exclusive rights to the stories of his adventures, ensuring that he received a great deal of publicity even when he wasn’t returning from an expedition. If a story made the New York Times, it must have been important enough to be of more than purely local interest and therefore is a good reflection of American sentiment about and interest in Amundsen and his exploits.
Amundsen spent most of his adult life either on his expeditions or in the United States (where he was particularly fond of the Waldorf Astoria in New York), rather than in Norway, as is commonly assumed. In fact, he was hardly ever in Norway; nevertheless he was a national hero there. But he was equally famous in the United States. In the 1920s the American coverage of Amundsen picked up dramatically, even though many of his exploits then lacked the unique flare of capturing the South Pole; it was during this period that he became a celebrity and every detail of his public life was reported.
These articles have never been brought to light in a book, apart from the obvious headlines concerning the Northwest Passage and the South Pole. I was able to discover and access this extensive source of new information because of the digital searching capabilities of the New York Times Article Archive. These articles were probably never previously used because of the Herculean task of searching for them. Yet they reveal a whole new perspective on Amundsen. Who knew that in early-twentieth-century America Amundsen was constantly in the news, like a modern rock star?
The articles provide wonderful insight into Amundsen’s activities and character. In an era before television, radio and the Internet, newspaper and magazine articles were the main source of public news and entertainment. The articles on Amundsen are not primarily what we would consider news. They are lingering biographical treatments, full of quotes, descriptions of his unusual life and his opinions on all matters, including polar exploration. A different portrait of Amundsen emerges from these articles—not the typical one of Amundsen as the stern and ruthless foil to Scott, but that of a droll, self-deprecating storyteller who had unusual opinions and strange dreams.
I could not have written this book without the prior work of Roland Huntford, especially his book on Scott and Amundsen, The Last Place on Earth. Huntford focused on Antarctica and on how Amundsen’s career and life were melded with Scott’s. The Last Viking seeks to extend and expand on Huntford’s work to include all of Amundsen’s adventures, including his numerous publicity tours of the United States.
Also valuable was the work of the Norwegian biographer Tor Bomann-Larsen, who has gone through a collection of Amundsen’s voluminous correspondence in Norwegian that provides details about Amundsen’s relations with his family and about his financial records, which are helpful in creating a full chronology of the less-public periods of his life, particularly in Europe. Bomann-Larsen focuses more on what the world (especially Norway) was to Amundsen and on the details of the people, primarily the Norwegians, who shared his life. As a reassessment of a national hero, his book Roald Amundsen is perhaps unjustifiably critical of Amundsen’s personal attributes. While I appreciate the great work Bomann-Larsen has done in bringing to light new documents concerning Amundsen, I have come to very different conclusions regarding Amundsen’s character and historical significance. But that is to be expected from two authors from different backgrounds; Bomann-Larsen is looking at his famous countryman and challenging some of the myths surrounding him in his native land, whereas for me Amundsen has always been an international figure. His accomplishments are of global significance, and his greatest fame was in the United States.
I sincerely hope that the public interest in Amundsen stemming from the centenary of his and Scott’s conquest of the South Pole will inspire further interest in this most fascinating and enigmatic of polar explorers and will result in greater access to the documents that provide information about his life.
Further Information on the Web
Motion pictures, black-and-white and silent, were in their infancy when Amundsen was engaged in his later expeditions. One fascinating film includes footage of Amundsen’s flight to the North Pole with Lincoln Ellsworth in 1925. Amundsen’s brief appearance on camera is intriguing; it starts with the familiar stern face common in his still photographs, and then, after a moment, he transforms into the smiling, somewhat shy and self-effacing character described by his friends. View the footage online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEHmD-FDUEU. The close-up of Amundsen begins at 2:11.
The Fram Museum in Oslo is a fantastic source of information about Amundsen, including a photo gallery, short biographies of Amundsen’s men and excerpts from their expedition journals, and information about all of Amundsen’s expeditions as well as those of other Norwegian explorers. Visit the museum online at www.frammuseum.no.
The New York Times Article Archive is a great place for those interested in reading Amundsen-related articles in full or in researching a specific aspect of Amundsen’s storied life in the United States. They are organized by date, and many of the early articles are free. Visit the archive online at www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/nytarchive.html.