A glorious moon made the whole landscape glisten with a vivid whiteness. In several places we could see polar bears moving about on the ice. Added to the moonlight was a brilliant display of the aurora.
“NO ONE,” AMUNDSEN wrote in his autobiography, “but a penniless explorer can realize the frightful handicap from which nearly all explorers suffer in having to waste time and nervous energy in their efforts to raise money to equip their expeditions. The heartbreaking discouragements, the endless delays, the blows to pride, if not to self-respect, involved in this search for funds, are a tragedy of the explorer’s life. I now thought I saw an opportunity for once to avoid these sorrows.” Although the war had delayed the Fram’s departure for the North Pole, giving Amundsen a respite from what he must have felt was his voyage of punishment for deceiving the world and rushing to the South Pole, it also left him essentially unemployed. But the war, at least in its early years, presented other opportunities.
Because considerable wealth remained from his South Pole exploit and, as he admitted, “I had nothing else to do,” Amundsen decided to invest the bulk of his funds in shipping stock, all organized by his brother Leon. “Such an opportunity was obvious in all the neutral countries, and nowhere more obvious than in Norway. Ships were vital to the success of the Allies, and Norway’s excellent merchant fleet commanded prodigious prices for its services.” While he was silently on his way to doubling his fortune in under two years, Amundsen had plenty of spare time to pursue his relationship with Kristine Bennett, alternately in London and Norway, where she frequently returned to visit her family and Amundsen. For the first time, he eased into the life of a well-off gentleman with both time and money on his hands.
But keeping secret his affair with a married woman was not easy, and at the end of 1915 and in early 1916, he spent several months in Britain attempting to persuade Bennett to get a divorce and flee to Norway with him, something she refused to do. It is easy to conclude that when Amundsen declared that this was the time to continue with his plans for polar exploration, being spurned by his paramour was the reason. The relationship did not end, though, and perhaps he imagined that Bennett would be ready for him after his next adventure, after all, her children were nearly grown and her husband was much older. In either case, “not being in business for any love of business,” Amundsen cashed in most of his investments and began planning his next expedition. Around the same time, he purchased an apartment in the same Christiania neighbourhood as Bennett’s sister. On March 24, 1916, his plans were announced and reported upon in the London Morning Post and the New York Times. His expedition would leave from Point Barrow, Alaska, in the summer of 1917.
When Amundsen went to inspect the Fram in Christiania, he was shocked by the old ship’s condition. Its long exposure to the warm southern waters had rotted its hull and rendered it unseaworthy. The cost to get the vessel in shape would have been so high that Amundsen decided he would be better off buying a new ship, one designed to his particular specifications. Doing so had the added advantage of making him the owner of the ship (the Fram was still owned by the government of Norway); also, the expedition wouldn’t be hampered by historic ties to Nansen. Amundsen took his design to shipbuilder Christian Jensen, who worked the sketch and ideas into a proper design and began building the unusual vessel. It would be about 40 metres long and 13 metres wide, and have an unprecedented shape: “half of an egg cut through its length.” The hull would be nearly a metre thick and be made from specially imported timber from Holland that involved “extraordinary expense.” According to Harald Sverdrup—the adventurer who voyaged on the new ship for many years, became famous as a scientist and anthropologist in later years and wrote Amundsen’s biography—“her shape made her behave excellently under heavy pressure from ice, but in the open sea she rolled like a wash basin.” To help pay for the construction, Amundsen, or more likely his brother Leon, arranged for the issuing of a special Norwegian stamp series to augment the ship’s building fund. The brothers also arranged to sell postcards that would be carried on the voyage and “cancelled” with a “Royal Norwegian Post Office that has been installed onboard” at the ship’s farthest-north destination. The advertisement showed polar bears staring across an icy sea at a distant sailing ship.
Meanwhile, Amundsen was back to his peripatetic ways. Once the ship’s construction was set in motion, he made a summer trip to Britain and then in November crossed the Atlantic to the United States, which, like Norway, was a neutral country in the war at this time. He spent several months arranging for the provisioning of the expedition with his companion Herman Gade, spending Christmas with Gade’s family in Chicago, just as he had on several previous occasions. As usual, Amundsen was received with great interest in America. He appeared in the New York Times the day after disembarking from the steamship that had brought him across the ocean. “Captain Amundsen’s hair is white and his face is weather beaten from many years of exposure to wind, sun and sea, but his blue eyes seemed as steady and bright as they were years before, and he walked down the pier at Hoboken with the springing, rolling gait of a mariner.”
The reporters were much taken with Amundsen’s claims to be bringing an airplane on the ship, “to fly to the North Pole from the nearest point that we pass on the ship.” His stated plan, dutifully reported in the press, was to sail through the now-opened Panama Canal and then north to Alaska, hugging the North American coast. From Alaska he would enter the Bering Strait, cross over to Siberia, and proceed north until the ship became stuck in the ice. As it drifted about the polar basin, Amundsen would await his chance to launch his airplane and cruise to the North Pole. He would be gone for three to five years, he said.
In addition to arranging to receive bacon from Armour’s and other general provisions from Sprague, Warner & Company in Chicago, Amundsen as usual attended several dinners and awards ceremonies and delivered a few speeches. (He mentioned these companies specifically in his autobiography, so he must have felt they had given him a good deal, did an especially good job or were otherwise deserving of being singled out.) He always liked his public role in the United States, and immediately slipped into his customary good-natured banter there. Perhaps he had less to fear in the way of public scandal in America; but the U.S. press also felt a natural affinity for him and his accomplishments. There was a feeling that he was welcome, that he deserved his fame and had not merely crashed someone else’s party. This may be why Amundsen still planned to sail from Alaska, despite his new ship’s being built in Norway. His only disappointment was that airplanes were in short supply even in a neutral country—they were valuable war machinery that might be needed for defence, so he had to abandon his plans of incorporating flying into his explorations. It was a bitter blow; Amundsen was excited about the prospect of flying to the North Pole, and he instinctively knew such a feat would be novel enough to generate great interest in the expedition.
He sailed from New York to London in early February 1917, for obvious personal reasons, and then returned to Norway a month later. The war at sea was complicating his plans, and the cost of his expedition’s supplies was rising. At the end of April, Germany launched an unrestricted U-boat war against all neutral and Allied shipping, and the United States entered the war. Although Amundsen had ordered his supplies while the United States was neutral, once the nation joined the Allies, wartime restrictions applied. Now, he had to obtain a special licence that would allow the goods to leave the country, and those goods would cross the Atlantic at great expense in order to avoid the U-boats. The provisioning for the expedition was proceeding slowly, and the war at sea was escalating rapidly. Meanwhile, Amundsen’s new ship was launched to great public fanfare in Oslo in June. There had been much speculation about the name Amundsen would choose, and in the end he named it Maud, “in honour of our beloved queen.”
But the delays in getting his supplies across the Atlantic meant that even though the ship was ready, he could no longer sail in 1917. Another year would have to pass before he set sail. He would now have to cut out the publicity-friendly voyage to Alaska and instead proceed to the Arctic by sailing north along the Norwegian coast. He also gave up on acquiring an airplane for the expedition. Once Germany began its attacks on neutral, specifically Norwegian, shipping, the possibility of invasion became much more real, and Norway could not let something so valuable as an airplane be used to fly to the North Pole. The time for such civilian heroics had passed.
Amundsen brooded about Germany’s “ruthless methods of carrying on submarine warfare” throughout the summer and early fall of 1917. He was not unsympathetic to the German cause; he had admired Germany and German ingenuity ever since his early student days, and this, coupled with his quiet dislike of the British, kept his opinion balanced on the fence for the early years of the war. “I did not then, nor do I yet, see any reason to criticize the Germans for using their submarines to destroy enemy shipping, or even neutral shipping where there was reasonable evidence that it was engaged in carrying contraband of war,” he wrote. But when “the Germans threw humanity overboard and proceeded to indiscriminate sinkings without warning, I shared the hot indignation of all civilized people.” In October, one particular incident galvanized his opinion. A German U-boat torpedoed a Norwegian merchant ship in the North Sea, “destroying all those on board, and even firing on such lifeboats as could be launched in the confusion.” After deliberating on a course of action for twenty-four hours, Amundsen collected in an envelope all his German decorations and medals, several of which had been personally pinned to his chest by Kaiser Wilhelm II, and proceeded to the German legation in Oslo. He marched into the office of the German minister, a man with whom he had been acquainted socially. When the man smiled and reached out his hand, Amundsen met the gestures with tight-lipped determination. He refused the handshake and instead read from a handwritten note that expressed his “indignation and resentment” and brought forth his precious envelope, “to be returned to the Emperor.”
Evidently, returning his awards wasn’t meant to be an entirely private gesture, since it became international news. “Amundsen Rebukes Berlin” reported the New York Times, quoting his comment that his actions were a “personal protest against the German murder of peaceful Norwegian sailors on October 17 in the North Sea.” Amundsen then decided on a greater wartime role for himself and began exploring the possibility of joining the British Royal Navy. Although he was now middle-aged, Amundsen, like many others, was galvanized to take a stand in response to actions he considered dishonourable. His international fame precluded him from being sent to the trenches or into battle; he was much more valuable as a figurehead.
The U.S. government invited him on a tour of the front lines in early 1918, and he reported from Paris on February 5 that “the qualities that impressed me the most in the American troops at the front are their cheerfulness, confidence, and certainty of being able to do their part in beating the Germans.” Again showing his mastery of the press, he claimed, “I felt in those shell-swept trenches—for they are shelled every day—that there the mighty preparations of America were beginning to be realized, and that the end would be the overthrow of autocracy in Europe and safety for the world. . . . It was a tonic to a friend of America.”
Naturally these sentiments were well received, and he soon crossed the Atlantic again for another quick tour of some of the northern U.S. states, to see to his provisions and to give speeches to Scandinavian Americans, urging them to support the war, to “put all their strength into their work so that more ships might be built and the submarine menace swept away.” He made an impassioned plea to his audiences: “I say to you that no man can be a slacker and at the same time be a patriot. Every idle man who takes a day a week off just to suit his own whim may be the cause of death to many more men, some of whom may be dear and close to you.” Amundsen widely praised the American troops in the trenches of Europe, claiming in another interview that “there is no fear that the Germans will break through that part of the line.” He had certainly become a skilled speech writer and public speaker.
American newspapers praised Amundsen as “a born leader of men,” noting that “the driving power of the man is tremendous” and that “he has a magnetic personal charm that attracts heroic spirits to him.” He was on his way to becoming an American hero. Before the Maud headed to sea, President Woodrow Wilson sent him a cable message extending his best wishes for the expedition. Hardly surprisingly, Amundsen’s request to export American provisions to Norway for his adventure was soon granted, and, by April 1918, he was back in Europe completing the preparations for the Maud’s maiden voyage. The crew consisted of several old hands from the South Pole expedition: Helmer Hanssen as captain, Oscar Wisting as first officer, Martin Rønne as sailmaker and Knut Sundbeck as engineer. The new recruits included Harald Sverdrup and four other men, for a total crew of nine. Amundsen was now forty-seven years old.
A few months later, on June 24, 1918, the Maud sailed north. Amundsen chose the date based on information sent to him by the U.S. Navy; its intelligence reports suggested that U-boats had returned to their bases and would no longer be in the northern waters. By mid-July the Maud had left behind its final port, Tromsø, reached the northern coast of Norway and turned east, entering the fabled Northeast Passage. The men did not relax until the end of the month—they “knew that until they had passed the White Sea, we could not be sure that some stray submarine might not be cruising in the waters there.” The tension was so high that on one occasion, when Amundsen spied the turbulent waters of an approaching storm and called out “all hands on deck. Quick!” some of the men scrambled up from below clad “in the scantiest of night apparel, some with pieces of other men’s clothing pulled on awry, and one in a complete suit of civilian street clothes, bowler hat and all, with his suitcase in his hand.”
The Maud continued east through the famous passage, which centuries earlier had been hailed as a possible sea route from England to the Orient but was soon abandoned because of its extreme cold, dangerous seas and crushing ice floes. Amundsen noted, typically, that “it offers no great difficulties to experienced navigators.” He hoped to reach the Bering Strait in one season. Soon, however, one of the passage’s challenges began to present themselves—increasingly icy waters—and the Maud was stopped completely on September 17. The expedition was frozen in for the winter near Cape Chelyuskin, on the Siberian coast. (Although Russia was in the throes of the Bolshevik Revolution, Siberia was not closed to foreigners until several years later.) Amundsen called the little winter shelter “Maudhavn.” The men went ashore on the stony beach to build depots, observatories and kennels for their twenty dogs. Then they spent weeks shovelling snow into great mountains around the sides of the ice-locked Maud, to shelter it against the “searching Arctic winds [that] are the greatest handicap to comfort in winter quarters.” Discomfort, however, would not be Amundsen’s chief worry during the winter of 1918–1919. His luck—something he famously claimed was merely good planning, yet ironically also mentioned as one of the necessary qualities of an explorer—could not always prevent accidents.
Every day, Amundsen went for a morning walk. He was in the habit of carrying one of the pregnant dogs down the gangplank to the ice from the Maud’s deck so that the animal could stroll about. One morning another dog rushed up as he was coming down and bumped into him while he had his arms full. He stumbled and “plunged headlong down the steep slope at the side of the runway,” landing heavily on his right shoulder. The pain was excruciating, and he staggered back to the ship. Wisting, who knew a little first aid, helped to set the badly broken bone. Amundsen was so debilitated that he remained in his bunk for eight days before emerging to perform light duties with his arm and shoulder in a tight sling.
A few weeks later, when one of the dogs was playfully bounding about on the ice, Amundsen carefully picked his way down the slippery gangplank and followed it into the fog out of curiosity. He stopped when he heard strange and eerie sounds coming from the obscuring mist, and soon the dog came running toward him followed by a furious polar bear. “This situation had its humorous side,” Amundsen commented, “but I did not pause to enjoy that.” He stared at the bear and it stared at him. He wondered what he should do. He was alone on the ice, with a bound arm and shoulder, so he turned and sprinted toward the ship. But the bear was faster. It came up behind him, and Amundsen heard its loud rasping breath before being smacked to the ice by a mighty paw. The fall reinjured his arm, and the bear began to maul him, tearing at his clothing. Only when one of the dogs returned to torment the beast did it leave Amundsen alone and take off after the dog. Amundsen staggered up the gangplank and into the ship, bleeding from gashes in his back. Only his heavy leather clothing had protected him from worse injury. Amundsen later wrote in his autobiography that in the moment when he felt that death would surely come to him “laying at the feet of the bear,” his mind did not dwell on “the chief incidents” of his life, the ones that were reputed to pass before a person “in vivid and instant review” at the moment of death. Instead, eccentric as always, he focused on an all-consuming question that “although vivid enough, was certainly frivolous”: the number of hairpins that “were swept up on Regent Street in London on a Monday morning.”
The winter days were now at their darkest and coldest, and Amundsen began a slow recovery from his injuries. Although the gashes made by the bear, once stitched and bandaged, healed on their own, Amundsen’s arm was another matter. It was so damaged that at first he couldn’t even lift a pen to write. “Several times a day, therefore, I would sit in a chair, brace my body, grasp my right fist in my left hand, and with the strength of my left arm force my right arm slowly upward a short distance, repeating the painful operation time after time.” Even by the end of December he could barely lift his arm as high as his face, and it took many more months to fully heal. Years later Amundsen had the arm and shoulder X-rayed in Seattle. The physician expressed shock at the damage and at the fact that he could move it at all. “Thus,” Amundsen wrote, “among such distinctions as I possess must be counted also the one that I am an impossible but successful surgical phenomenon.”
Amundsen restricted himself to sedentary activities while his wounds healed at Maudhavn. Just before New Year’s Eve, he trudged from the Maud to an observatory on shore to spend several hours recording the weather and magnetic forces. The grandly named “observatory” was little more than a single-roomed hut with no window. The lighting was provided by a Swedish kerosene lamp, which also heated the tiny room. Absorbed in his work, Amundsen began to feel drowsy and disoriented, and then noticed that his heart was beating unusually fast. By the time he fully realized the danger, he could barely stand. He struggled to the door, on the verge of unconsciousness, and stumbled out into the snow. Toxic fumes from the malfunctioning lamp had “thoroughly impregnated” his body. For days his heart continued to beat erratically and quickly, and for months afterward even the slightest exercise sent his heart into a wild flutter. It was years before the effects of the fumes fully wore off. In early February 1919, two months later, he nearly collapsed with exhaustion after struggling up a small 15-metre hill to observe the return of the sun. A few years later, doctors advised him to give up exploration, and indeed any strenuous exercise, if he wanted to survive. It was a recommendation he jocularly dismissed. He boasted that “at fifty-five years of age, I would cheerfully wager that I could outrun most young men of twenty-five.”
The rest of the winter was a monotonous string of days, spent waiting for the ice to break. Amundsen was unable to leave the ship for any real travel, so he devoted himself to being the expedition’s cook, apparently to good effect. Some of the men went on expeditions in April and May, but they were short, desultory affairs. There is an old saying that bad luck always comes in threes. By this reckoning, Amundsen should have been done; but fate decreed otherwise. As the ice lingered throughout the summer of 1919, one of the young men on the expedition, Peter Tessem, complained of headaches and melancholy and wanted to go home. Another young man, Paul Knutsen, volunteered to accompany him on a 650-kilometre overland trek south to a Russian outpost on Dickson Island, at the mouth of the Yenisei River. Both men were experienced overland travellers and hunters who had been to Siberia before. With six dogs, a year’s worth of provisions and the expedition’s scientific records and mail, the two men departed the Maud and were never heard from again. Years later, Tessem’s body was discovered near the meteorological station at Dickson; Amundsen sadly called it “the one real tragedy in all my Polar work.”
Through the summer the ice continued to imprison the ship. Open water was in sight but unobtainable. Drawing on his many years of experience, Amundsen remembered Frederick Cook’s solution on the Belgica more than two decades earlier. He had his men drill holes in the ice in a channel leading toward the open water, fill the holes with sticks of dynamite and detonate them simultaneously. When high tide came on September 12, the ice cracked up and the Maud sailed free on a beautiful night when “a glorious moon made the whole landscape glisten with a vivid whiteness. In several places we could see polar bears moving about on the ice. Added to the moonlight was a brilliant display of the aurora.”
The Maud continued along the Siberian coast, in the region historically known as Tartary, but met with an unusual quantity of ice. After a few weeks of sailing, before September had even ended, it was stuck again in the ice, this time at the mouth of the Kolyma River, near Anyon Island. They were still 800 kilometres from the Bering Strait, where the polar drift was supposed to start. It was a demoralizing setback, to have hardly progressed at all and to be stuck again in surroundings that were already familiar. With Amundsen still weak and lacking the will to fully take charge of the expedition, personality clashes dominated the winter as the men became slightly deranged from boredom and frustration. But here, at least, they would not be entirely isolated from human contact. A band of native Chukchi had made their winter base at the mouth of the Kolyma. The Chukchi were a remote and little-known people who had almost no contact with or influence from their nominal Russian overlords. They spoke their own language and lived a nomadic lifestyle, following the migrating herds of reindeer. Amundsen was still too weak to be involved in any physical activity, but he retained his fascination with polar peoples and urged Harald Sverdrup to leave the ship for an adventure, to travel with the Chukchi. Sverdrup spent over seven months with them as they pursued the reindeer across the tundra of Siberia, learning the rudiments of their language and culture and later writing a book detailing the experience.
That same winter, Amundsen also sent Wisting, Hanssen and another man on a quest by dogsled to locate a Russian wireless station and report on their situation. Their original destination was Nome, Alaska, but it proved impossible for the trio to get a boat to sail from Russia across the Bering Strait in February. While Wisting remained in East Cape to recuperate, Hanssen continued on alone, skiing south with his dogsled until he reached the Russian outpost at Anadyr, on the Bering Sea, near the end of March. Despite the recent revolution, Russia’s borders had not yet closed, and Amundsen’s emissaries had no trouble in getting their news relayed across to Alaska. It didn’t hurt to be the representatives of the famous Amundsen, then ice-locked along Russia’s own northern coast. Hanssen returned north with his news and picked up Wisting. They proceeded back to the Maud, arriving in mid-June 1920, after a six-month journey of nearly 1,000 kilometres.
After Hanssen had made contact with the outside world, Amundsen’s actions became fodder for the press. In the previous two years there had been much speculation about where he might be wintering, about ice conditions, and whether the expedition was in danger, but now that he was known to be near America again, adventuring not far off the coast of Alaska, the media circus began. By this time in Amundsen’s established career, his ongoing exploits were pure entertainment. There were weekly reports of Amundsen’s plans, his setbacks and his progress. Amundsen was now a celebrity. In addition to being famous for his novel adventures, he was famous for being famous. When there was nothing new to report, the papers were filled with columns of opinion and older information to help people catch up on anything they might have missed. “Amundsen in Siberia” proclaimed one report; “Doubt Amundsen Reached North Pole” went another. There were many reports in the New York Times: “Doubts Amundsen Failed,” “Amundsen to Try Again for Pole” and “Amundsen Caught in Ice.” Sometimes the dispatches were completely inaccurate, as was the one claiming that Sverdrup was leaving the Maud to lead an expedition to rescue the two men who left the ship during the first winter. Another fabricated and false story was headlined by the intriguing claim “Amundsen’s Ship Wrecked in Siberian Ice Pack—Alaskan Missionary Brings Details of Explorer’s Plight to Seattle.”
A few weeks after Wisting and Hanssen’s return, the Maud was freed from the ice and pushed east again, but not north toward the North Pole. Amundsen was headed toward Nome, to resupply and again communicate with the world. The crew arrived on July 27, becoming only the second expedition to navigate the entire Northeast Passage. Amundsen was met with a collection of mail from prominent American scientists and explorers such as Vilhjalmur Stefansson, president of the Explorers’ Club, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, welcoming him to Alaska and congratulating him on navigating the Northeast Passage. This accomplishment, combined with his Northwest Passage voyage, made Amundsen the first person to complete a circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean. But during the two-year voyage he had made no progress at all toward the North Pole, and he considered the expedition a failure. Although he soon learned that Kristine Bennett and her husband had moved into a new estate near London, he waited in vain for a declaration of love.
At Nome, three members of the crew decided to leave the expedition, including Amundsen’s old companion Hanssen. Amundsen was displeased with Hanssen’s performance as the captain of the ship and had considered sending him and another man home in any event. But the loss rankled for a long time; although magnanimous in victory and loyal to a fault, Amundsen reacted with anger when he felt someone had let him down. It is, however, hardly surprising that the men wanted to leave after three years of tedium and quietly stressful danger; in the face of several more years of the same, and without the glory of conspicuous achievement to counterbalance it, who wouldn’t be homesick? Amundsen didn’t easily forgive the men, whom he considered to be deserters, and he offered to help them on their way home only as far as his legal obligations required.
No doubt his illness and lack of enthusiasm for the expedition also played a part in the low morale on the ship. By the time he was in Nome, however, Amundsen had apparently regained his vigour and energy. A local physician pronounced his injuries to be healed, and those who remembered him from the last time he had been in town, fourteen years earlier, when the Gjøa had completed the Northwest Passage, noticed that he seemed as energetic now as then. He had apparently shaken off the lethargy that had beset both him and the crew during the disheartening Northeast Passage voyage, and he was eager to leave again, in order to pass through the Bering Strait before it was plugged with ice for the year. Evidently, he felt that he couldn’t yet cancel the expedition because it hadn’t accomplished anything noteworthy. What did he have to show for his enormous expenditure of money and time? He had endured two years of pointless Arctic drifting, and was about to give it a purpose.
After spending only ten days in Nome, the Maud was ready to head out again. Only Sverdrup, Wisting, Amundsen and a Russian man, Gennadij Olonkin, elected to remain on board, along with an Inuit cook whom they called Mary. Newspapers reported that Amundsen didn’t want to hire any local men because the wages demanded by sailors in Nome were too high and he couldn’t afford them. Perhaps this was true: Amundsen had been shovelling money into the Maud’s maintenance and supplies for over three years and had not earned enough to compensate for those expenses. His fortune was quickly depleting as the Maud sat stranded in the ice in various locations along the Northeast Passage. This latest attempt to float north also proved fruitless—the ship was again imprisoned in the ice along the Siberian coast. Wisting and Sverdrup went on another 1,200-kilometre ski and dogsled expedition, leaving Amundsen the only Norwegian on board the Maud for a while. But that winter turned exciting in other ways.
The Maud was again wintering near a band of Chukchi, and Amundsen “became well acquainted with them.” One of the men brought his sick four-year-old daughter, Kakonita, “a charming bright eyed little creature,” on board. The girl’s mother had died, and the father felt he was incapable of taking care of Kakonita; in fact, she was nearly starving and clearly suffering from neglect, and likely would have died without Amundsen’s intervention. The man left her aboard the Maud. Once Kakonita had been nursed back to health, Amundsen devoted himself to her. Since her father had essentially abandoned her and claimed to be unable to take her back, Amundsen began teaching her how to speak English and Norwegian and introduced her to European customs.
This idyll soon ended. When the Maud’s propeller was damaged by ice, Amundsen was pushed beyond the limit of his patience. Restless and annoyed, and with Kakonita in tow, he left only three men to sail the three-masted Maud, set off with a dogsled south along the Russian coast and searched for a boat to take him across to Alaska. He and Kakonita caught a supply ship to Nome and another ship south to Seattle, arriving in July. (The Maud eventually sailed to Seattle as well, once the ice cleared, arriving on August 21 with help provided by some Chukchi boys and a coastguard vessel.) En route to Seattle, Amundsen brought along another girl, Camilla, the nine-year-old daughter of Clarendon Carpendale, an Australian fur trader and agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and his Chukchi wife, as a companion for Kakonita. Carpendale was eager for his daughter to receive a more formal education and be exposed to life away from the remote Siberian coast. Amundsen took on the role of devoted “grandfather” and eventually brought the two girls to Norway to be schooled.
In Seattle, Amundsen was quickly welcomed, particularly by the city’s large Scandinavian community. He was given accommodations and an office, and again was a featured guest at many public events—he was still popular. Soon after settling in, he received a telegram from Leon informing him that despite the voyage’s setbacks the Norwegian government had voted a large sum of money to overhaul the Maud and keep the expedition going. Relieved of his financial burdens, Amundsen bought himself a car and toured Seattle and the surrounding region throughout the fall of 1921, always accompanied by his foster daughters, who became known in the press as “Amundsen’s Esquimaux” and who “attracted the greatest attention.” Amundsen also met Haakon H. Hammer, a Danish American shipbroker and businessman who quickly became Amundsen’s confidant and agent in America.
While no doubt flattered by his increasing fame, Amundsen had other more prosaic matters to address. During all those years along the Northeast Passage, the expedition members had hunted and collected many specimens of interest to museums of natural history. To engender good will, he planned the disposition of some of the expedition’s more exotic booty, including mammoth teeth and various arctic birds, many of which he prepared to be shipped back to Norway as a gift to the state. There was also a large collection of prime furs he wanted to give to Kristine Bennett. Evidently he was still thinking about her, even though they had been apart for many years. He dedicated his hastily written book Nordostpassagen (which was not published in English) to her, albeit obliquely. Also, he had consigned his house to her in his will, though she was already quite rich. “[Amundsen] Says He Will Try Again,” claimed the New York Times in a dispatch from Nome—a claim that might be applied to his pursuit of Bennett as well as to his quest for the North Pole.
The expedition had dragged on far longer than planned and, even with the melodramatic reporting of the previous year, it lacked the competition and drama of his earlier exploits. As a result it was not earning him a great deal in endorsements or donations. Ever the optimist, Amundsen forged on, though his sense of his finances, never a strong suit, was inaccurate. He grossly overestimated the value of the furs and bird specimens that he hadn’t given away, and he had wildly optimistic projections of his book sales. Thus his prospects for additional funding did not look promising before Leon’s news of the Norwegian government’s latest donation to repair and refit the Maud.
Amundsen’s lofty dreams, however, were never tethered to his earthly finances. He was bored with ships and dogsleds, and now that the war was over and the economy was rebounding he returned to his love of airplanes. This time his goal would be to fly to the North Pole, without any scientific pretension at all. While his two remaining crew, Wisting and Olonkin, worked to repair the Maud in Seattle, and Sverdrup began an association with the University of Washington, Amundsen took a train across the United States. He planned to sail to Norway to secure more government support. In January 1922, the New York Times reported: “Amundsen Coming East.”