An Education at Gjøahavn

They waved long to us—probably a farewell for life; and if some traveller, many years later, pays this place a visit, the numerous tent-rings will remind him of the many happy days the Gjøa expedition spent here with their friends the Netsilik Eskimos.

 

 

 

FOR THE NEXT two years, 1903 to 1905, the Gjøa did not move, nor did the observatory. The Norwegian adventurers used the occasion to venture into the tundra on many expeditions, in all seasons. They launched excursions to survey and chart the unknown portions of the nearby Arctic coastline. As the months rolled on, they made daily measurements of the wind and temperature, the duration of sunlight and darkness, the quantity of snow and rainfall, the number of frost-free days and the types of plants and animals to be found in each season. The seven men lived long enough at Gjøahavn to become acclimated to the region. Somewhat astonished, Amundsen noted that he preferred the Arctic winter to the summer; “when during the winter the temperature rose to merely –30°C [–22°F] it was a lovely day, and curious as it may sound, felt quite summer-like.” Gjøahavn became the Norwegian adventurers’ home.

They watched their dogs die and other dogs be born, they experienced relief at the end of the long, dark winter and witnessed the stunning transformation of the land during the thaw into a startlingly brilliant, intense but brief frenzy of life in high summer, with a profusion of flowers, animals and birds. Amundsen was delighted when a group of Inuit decided to set up camp right near the Gjøa: not only would the Europeans gain companionship but also opportunity to learn from the masters.

He also made several attempts to reach the magnetic North Pole on the Boothia Peninsula. At first he was not particularly successful, but then he learned new techniques from the Inuit, including their methods of driving dogsleds and of surviving in the north. To Amundsen, the true value of the two years spent at Gjøahavn was his exposure to the cultural knowledge of the Inuit, not the tedious magnetic and meteorological measurements.

Indeed, as time passed, Amundsen’s lack of enthusiasm for scientific measurement became glaringly obvious. Ristvedt eventually noted with some resentment that “Wiik works continually on the magnetic north. The Governor [Amundsen] and the lieutenant read novels and smoke and go for walks from time to time. It is unbelievable that a man can change like the Governor has in the course of one year. Last year he worked constantly with his observations. This year he has done nothing and we achieved nothing on our sledge trip this spring that was sufficiently accurate.” In fact, the expedition gathered a vast quantity of magnetic and meteorological data that was later distributed to specialists to help understand the climatology of the region and to provide a better understanding of the earth’s magnetic fields. From a scientific perspective, the Northwest Passage expedition was far from a failure, but it wasn’t Amundsen who did this work, and the men assigned to perform it could not help but resent his lack of interest.

Amundsen was an ethnographer by disposition, yet his interest was not only cultural but also practical. Even so, many of his men couldn’t understand his preoccupation with the Inuit and disliked his hiring of local people as general labour and as instructors, thus encouraging several families to live near the Gjøa for months at a time. Second mate Helmer Hanssen, who felt that the Inuit “were lousy and smelled terribly,” admitted to playing various tricks to get them out of his cabin, because “we couldn’t chase them out . . . [and] we did not want them to go to Amundsen and say we had treated them unkindly.” He added that “Amundsen had asked us to treat them with the greatest kindness, so that we could depend on them as friends if we ever needed their help.” Wiik, who was the youngest member of the expedition and who least understood Amundsen, was most critical of his captain’s interest in the Inuit. He complained in his journal that “there were always many of them. I cannot comprehend why on earth he needs them; they eat for three, but he can’t afford to feed the dogs.” The young man, and to a lesser extent several of the older adventurers, failed to understand that Amundsen was not planning merely this one trip and then retirement: he was keeping the locals around to learn from them for the future, in addition to satisfying his natural curiosity. Amundsen probably already had dreams for trips to the North and South Poles, and he knew the knowledge of the Inuit would be indispensable. For him, the true treasure of the Northwest Passage voyage was the knowledge and technology of local people. His open-mindedness toward different peoples and new ideas contributed in no small measure to his ultimate success in the Arctic and the Antarctic, as well as to his ability to reimagine or reinvent his career as technology and public interest evolved.

Amundsen had no intention of studying the Inuit in a condescending manner, as if they were subjects in an experiment. He accepted their culture on its own terms, without romanticizing the people themselves or their way of life, and he viewed them as cultural equals. Perhaps unusually, Amundsen was very interested in the Inuit as individuals and was not content with assigning the stereotypical idea of the “race” to each individual. In fact, judging from his writings and the transcripts of his lectures, he seems to have been more interested in his Inuit visitors than in his own crew; this should hardly be surprising, since he had just spent many tedious months with his handful of men and had long tired of them, their stories and peccadilloes. The locals, on the other hand, were fresh, exotic and intriguing, with different ways of looking at the world and different ways of living. And their temporarily intertwined lives were sort of a soap opera. All this so impressed him that later in life, Amundsen harboured the wish to return to Alaska or the Canadian Arctic and visit the Inuit again.

“It is often said that the Eskimo are lazy,” he mused, “unwilling, and possessed of all other bad qualities under the sun. Certainly this was not true.” A significant number of pages in his book The North-West Passage are devoted to anthropological observations of Inuit customs and material culture, and tales of his own interactions with them. Later in life he donated his collections of Inuit material culture to the Norwegian state, becoming the centrepieces of museum collections.

The band of Inuit that spent the most time near the Gjøa were the Netsilik, or Netsilingmiut, “the people of the ringed seal.” Their main food sources were seals, reindeer, salmon, trout and cod. In the summer they caught birds as well: “swans, geese, loons, ducks, eiders, and many small birds.” Amundsen’s slide collections, which he used to accompany his lectures, include numerous images of these people in all manner of poses: fully clothed, holding long spears; standing near loaded sledges, with their dogs lolling about on the snow; children practising their bow-and-arrow shooting; men spearing fish; women lounging inside their snow houses or carrying babies on their backs; family groups posing in front of the ship with bundles of fur-covered goods for trade; hunters paddling in skin kayaks; the dead bundled for burial and laid out on the windswept barrens; men and women posing to display their clothing; and many of the Norwegians posing fully dressed in “Eskimo” style. But not all the people they encountered near Gjøahavn were friendly, and Amundsen does not shy from recording the negative attributes of other groups who occasionally were thieving, violent or untrustworthy. He met ten tribes during his sojourn and noted that although their material culture was identical, each group had its own distinct characteristics.

He spent many weeks in all seasons learning from the Netsilik visitors. After working with an elder teacher whom he had hired to teach snow-house building techniques to the Norwegians, the area around Gjøahavn was littered with dozens of snow houses of varying quality. Amundsen reported that “Old Teraiu, who could not understand what we were building all these huts for, shook his head pensively, evidently in the conviction that we had taken leave of our senses. Sometimes he would throw out his arms to indicate the overwhelming number of houses and exclaim, ‘Iglu amichjui—amichjui—amichjui!’ Which means, ‘This is a dreadful lot of houses.’ But in this, too, we arrived at what we wanted: we became at last good snow builders.”

On another occasion, during a sledding excursion, Amundsen wrote of his experience with Inuit clothing: “We were ready to leave on the first of March. The thermostat showed –55°C (–63°F). But through the months of February we had become so accustomed to the cold that it did not bother us much. We were also very well dressed. Some of us wore complete Eskimo costumes, others partly civilized clothing. My experience is that in these parts in winter the Eskimo dress is far superior to our European clothes. But one must either use it alone or not at all. Any combination is bad. Wool underwear gathers all perspiration and will soon make the outside clothing wet. Dressed entirely in reindeer skin, like the Eskimo, and with the clothing loose enough on the body to let the air circulate between the layers, one will as a rule keep the clothing dry. . . . Finally, skins are absolutely wind-proof, which is of course a very important point.” Within a short time after the arrival of the Netsilik during the first winter, all the crew had bartered for suits of the finest caribou-skin clothing.

Amundsen also learned the finer points of polar sledge running. During their first winter at Gjøahavn many of Amundsen’s dogs died from a mysterious disease. Rather than abort his plans to explore the surrounding territory, Amundsen decided to make an excursion using fewer dogs to haul the sleds. During this trip, the sledges stuck in the snow, which was “like sand,” and the animals were exhausted. Amundsen and two companions took to hauling one of the sledges themselves, which proved to be “terrible labour” to cover a slight distance. “After ceaseless toil from morning to evening, we managed to cover 3.5 miles. I realized now that this sort of thing was not good enough.” He soon learned to coat the sledge runners with ice for smooth running, and set out to learn all he could about the training and maintenance of dogs in the polar environment, which involved a different set of customs and practices from those used for raising dogs as pets in Norway. To the Inuit, the use of dogs was a matter of life and death, and they were working animals, not pets. Anyone accustomed to considering dogs as pets would have been appalled by the rough treatment and heavy work load of these animals.

Amundsen’s interest in Inuit culture was not limited to aspects he felt would improve his own career as a polar explorer. In The North-West Passage he detailed, through story and anecdote, many aspects of Inuit culture that were esoteric, spiritual or seemingly based only on custom (although customs and beliefs have their foundations in the environment and the need to survive). In addition to discussing their material culture—their houses, clothing, hunting and food preparation techniques and tools—he described Inuit religious practices, their songs, dances, stories and ceremonies. He was intrigued by the changes in lifestyle from season to season, especially the winter practice of constructing a giant communal igloo where the tribe gathered for dancing and drumming, and theatrical, spiritual and athletic displays. He also related events that were obviously disturbing and perhaps disgusting to him (to some of his men even more so), such as certain methods of food preparation. For example, Amundsen and Ristvedt joined a group of hunters one summer day. When a deer was shot, the blood was quickly collected and some of it was drunk by the hunters before they removed the animal’s stomach. “The Eskimo partook of a portion of the contents by scooping it up with their hands. When the stomach was half empty, they put the blood into it and stirred it round with a thigh bone. The dish thus prepared was blood-pudding á la Eskimo, which even Ristvedt had refused to partake of.”

In Amundsen’s telling, the Inuit are fully realized multi-dimensional people whose customs, personality traits and emotions cover the entire spectrum open to the human race. Amundsen manages to convey a great deal of information and insight about them without being stereotypically judgmental or condescending. He notes that the culture could be harsh and unforgiving; some of the punishments for crimes, in particular, could be very violent and severe. One incident Amundsen witnessed has a prominent place in his book and includes a sketch of the event based on a poor-quality photograph. Two brothers, one a man’s natural-born son and the other a foster son, were playing in a caribou-skin tent near the Gjøa during the first summer. The parents went visiting and left behind a gun, fully loaded and primed, in the tent. “Then followed what so often happens when boys play with weapons without having been shown how to use them properly; they were ignorant and the gun went off, and Umiktuallu’s son, who was only seven years old, fell down dead.” Hearing the shot, the father and a crowd of others rushed over. “At the sight of his own dead son, and the foster son sitting with the smoking weapon, he was seized with frenzy. He carried the horror-stricken boy out of the tent, stabbed him three times through the heart with his knife, then kicked him away.” Amundsen then related that the boys were buried, and the father, “with time and reflection,” calmed down and “was seized with remorse.” The family departed the next day, and Amundsen heard nothing more of them.

The Inuit women attracted a great deal of interest from the men of the Gjøa expedition. Amundsen wrote that “some of these women are absolute beauties. They are rather small but shapely.” He also recorded the prevalence of wife swapping and bigamy, and that for a small price husbands would offer to sell sexual access to their wives: “a wife must obey but I doubt whether she does it of her own free will.” Nevertheless, amorous liaisons between the crew and the local women were common, if not frequent, during their two-year stay, and the journals of several men make oblique references to this, although several published accounts of the voyage, including The North-West Passage, claim the contrary. In fact, Amundsen relates the story of how he discovered the open sores of syphilis on a sick boy in one of the tribes they encountered, a group that had had communication with European whalers. He then brought the crew together to “speak seriously. . . . I called the men together to inform them and added that I assumed the illness was probably rife in the tribe.”

In the official account of the voyage, Amundsen writes in a somewhat lofty and prim tone that he discouraged his men from giving in to their “baser passions” and that “I therefore took the first opportunity to have a most serious talk with my companions and urge them not to yield to this kind of temptation.” There was probably collusion among the men not to publicly discuss something of which all were aware, out of fear that it would ruffle the feathers of early-twentieth-century moralists. The issue is discussed, however, in an article in Above and Beyond: Canada’s Arctic Journal: “Indeed, there are a few people in Gjoa Haven today who are proud to declare that they are Roald Amundsen’s grandchildren, including Paul Iquallaq who is quoted as saying, ‘My father was the son of Amundsen . . . I’m one of the proudest people in Gjoa Haven.’” According to local tradition, Amundsen’s son, Luke Iquallaq, was born to a woman named Queleoq after the Gjøa departed, and his parentage was kept secret for fear of discrimination. Luke, who worked most of his life for the Hudson’s Bay Company, revealed to his own children only in 1979 that his mother told him just before she died that his father was Amundsen. Recent DNA testing of Luke Iquallaq and the descendents of Amundsen’s father, orchestrated by Norway’s Fram Museum, show that Luke is not the genetic descendent of Amundsen. The tests do not, however, show that Amundsen has no descendants in Gjoa Haven or that Luke Iquallaq is not descended from another member of the Gjøa’s crew.

Amundsen’s opinion of the Inuit was generally positive. “Evidently they enjoyed life,” he reported, “but on the other hand, they had not the slightest fear of death. . . . I must state as my firm conviction that the . . . Eskimo living absolutely isolated from civilization, are undoubtedly the happiest, healthiest, most honourable and most contented among them. . . . My sincerest wish for our friends the Nechilli Eskimo is, that civilization may never find them.” His attitude was unusual but not unique. Seven decades earlier, between 1829 and 1833, the British naval commander John Ross, captain of the expedition that first located the magnetic North Pole, wrote,

I believe that it is the Esquimaux alone who here knows the true secret of happiness and rational art of living. . . . He smells at no flowers, for there are none to smell at; but he prefers the odour of seal oil. . . . They could travel easier than we, could find delights where we experienced only suffering, could outdo us in killing the seal, could regale in abundant food where we should starve because we could not endure it. . . . The adaptation is perfect; his happiness is absolute. Had we been better educated, we should have done the same; but we were out of our element, as much in the philosophy of life as in the geography of it.

 

Amundsen was not an autocrat by nature—at least not a micromanaging autocrat. He wasn’t interested in interfering in the daily routines or personal lives of his men. But in order to avoid the possible problems of a dispersed power structure, he formed a hierarchy in which all the major decision-making authority was vested in one individual: himself. This arrangement at times engendered some resentment among his men. It also raises the question of whether it is possible to achieve perfect harmony in any group engaged in a dangerous, stressful and at times monotonous and isolated endeavour—an expedition of exploration—without the spectre of personal disagreements arising. Even the famed master mariner James Cook during his three epochal voyages dealt with incidents that resulted in anger, resentment and violent punishment.

Inevitably, disagreements arose between the six crew members of the Gjøa and their captain as well as among each other, and they intensified during the two years the ship was stationary in the middle of the Northwest Passage. Some of the crew’s private journals reveal irritation over Amundsen’s apparently harsh treatment of the dogs and overly friendly relations with the Inuit, but these remained minor incidents of personal grumbling and never metastasized into anything bigger. There was never any serious public quarrelling, and the expedition was never in danger from it. The men grew sick of each other, bored with each others’ jokes and stories, and irritated by each others’ quirks and foibles. But this was nothing more than the friction to be expected in a small group living far from home, with only themselves for companionship for years at a time.

Lindstrøm the cook was the pillar of stability throughout the Gjøa’s stay in Gjøahavn. Always in a good mood, and a superior cook who took pride in excellent meals, he had no interest in the local peoples or polar survival techniques. Indeed, he seldom left the ship for those two years, except for infrequent short excursions to trade or to retrieve animals he had shot. But his kitchen continuously produced roasts, pies, pancakes, stews, cakes, breads—all delicious and of high quality. It is said that an army marches on its stomach—so too does a voyage of exploration. Lindstrøm kept everyone happy in that department with an ever-evolving diet for every palate: seals, walrus, polar bear, geese and various fish. The abundant supply of fresh meat also kept scurvy at bay. Amundsen recalled fondly that although Lindstrøm liked to indulge in not insignificant quantities of alcohol, “when he sets his mind on something he never gives up. The others laugh at him, but he just laughs back and continues on his way. He usually succeeds.”

Lindstrøm was genuinely liked by all the crew, and was never the butt of criticism or the cause of quarrelling or frustration. “A funny chap,” Ristvedt noted in his diary, “fat as a pig but always happy and in a good mood, in spite of having every reason to be bad tempered.” Lindstrøm took great pleasure in hunting many of the animals for his meals and bartered with the Inuit to obtain others. On one occasion the other men played a practical joke on him. Two of them snuck across the snowy plain, perhaps 30 metres from the bow of the ship, and placed a frozen ptarmigan in the snow. “Lindstrøm! Lindstrøm!” yelled one, “there is a ptarmigan on the ice!” The cook rushed from the kitchen below deck with his gun loaded. “Where is it?” They pointed and he silently raised his gun, taking aim, and fired. The bird flopped over, and Lindstrøm scampered over the gunwales of the ship and trotted across the frozen plain to retrieve his quarry. He stooped to pick it up but then called out, bewildered, “Why, it is quite cold!” As he stood there, holding the frozen bird in his hand, the men on the deck of the ship laughingly let him in on the joke.

Lindstrøm was always working with a purpose and had daily responsibilities, which predisposed him for success in the Arctic winter, according to Amundsen’s philosophy that idle time led to lethargy and depression. For the other men, filling the hours was not always easy. To counter this, Amundsen was constantly devising tasks for the men, keeping them on a daily schedule that otherwise would have disintegrated during the ever-shifting balance of day and night—from total light to none. Some of the men began to resent Amundsen for his enforced ski jaunts every morning, yet they also constructed a large hill and practised downhill techniques for fun. There were complaints that Amundsen was seldom on board the ship and was too often taking trips with the locals. But others went on excursions too, either with Amundsen or in other groups.

Furthermore, the men were being paid, while Amundsen was the one paying: surely he should have some leeway to do what he wanted. If the expedition failed, the thirty-two-year-old captain stood to lose all his investment, human and financial, and to see his reputation destroyed and his career ended. He had the strain of trying to be the indomitable optimist and leader, never faltering in his assessment of things and never appearing to waver in his belief in inevitable success. The crew’s few disparaging journal entries were written in the moment, and reflect brief resentments—imagine working all day under difficult, stressful conditions and then eating dinner with your boss and sleeping in the same small ship with him, seeing all his sides, his temperamental episodes and moments of indecision. In such close quarters Amundsen could not conceal all his angers, frustrations, doubts and dilemmas. But Amundsen never had anything negative to say about his men; he always gave them credit and recognition, at least in public.

The second winter was the harder of the two, the novelty of the situation having worn off after they had experienced all four Arctic seasons. “It is extraordinary to see that already after only one year everyone has lost the desire to work and we all feel the need to get away from the vessel and camp out in the wilderness or even just to go to bed,” Amundsen wrote. John Ross had also begun to despair during his expedition’s second winter, and by the end of the third winter he was downright depressed about the climate of northern lands: “Amid all its brilliancy, this land, the land of ice and snow, has ever been and ever will be a dull, dreary, heart-sinking, monotonous waste, under the influence of which the very mind is paralyzed, ceasing to care or think.” Ross later wrote: “The sameness of everything weighed on our spirits, and the mind itself flagged under the want of excitement. In such a life as ours, even the capture of an Arctic mouse was an event. Everywhere was suffocated and paralyzed by the endless, wearysome, heartsinking, uniform, cold load of ice and snow.”

The crew of the Gjøa must have had similar moments. For them, the sole source of wonder and amusement was their dogs, who were the kernel of numerous amusing anecdotes. The dogs, Amundsen noted during the second winter, were “now turning their noses up at pemmican. They consider old pieces of fur a delicacy. ‘The menu of the Polar dog is comprehensive,’ said Ristvedt. ‘I think I can manage many dishes, but I don’t think I could have managed your old underpants.’ The dogs smacked their lips over them like a bear with honey.”

Amundsen perfected his polar survival techniques during the two years he spent in the Northwest Passage, including skills such as the prevention of frostbite by the use of proper clothing. The skills for which he lacked experience he had now mastered and adapted to his own life and plans. He was now in possession of a remarkable and unique blend of skills that would be the foundation of his success. Perhaps there was no other person on the planet better educated for geographical exploration and survival in its polar regions.

On August 13, 1905, when the sea ice was sufficiently melted, the obligatory scientific measurements completed, and Amundsen was confident that he had learned what he could from the Inuit, there was nothing left but to head west into the unknown. The Gjøa’s engines fired up, smoke blew from the exhaust pipes and the silence was shattered as the little ship pushed slowly westward through the ice. The Norwegian visitors left their local hosts priceless gifts, including the wood and materials from their on-shore huts. “I am not sure that the little brown-eyed people on the beach were quite cheerful that morning,” Amundsen related. “They waved long to us—probably a farewell for life; and if some traveller, many years later, pays this place a visit, the numerous tent-rings will remind him of the many happy days the Gjøa expedition spent here with their friends the Netsilik Eskimos.”

 

 

Simpson Strait is the narrow, labyrinthine ice-choked channel separating the northern part of Canada’s mainland from the innumerable islands of the Arctic Archipelago. Uncharted in Amundsen’s time—parts of it never before navigated—the strait is littered with hidden shoals and icebergs. After four days of slowly picking its way through the treacherous channel, the Gjøa passed Cape Colborne, the point beyond which no one had ever sailed east through Simpson Strait. Amundsen wrote in his memoirs that “time and time again it seemed certain we should be defeated by the shallowness of these tortuous channels. Day after day, for three weeks—the longest three weeks of my life—we crept along, sounding our depth with the lead, trying here, there and everywhere to nose into a channel that would carry us clear through to the known waters to the west.” They were saved by the motor that Amundsen had had installed in the ship, for with the erratic winds and currents, sail power alone would not have provided the manoeuvrability needed to clear the obstacles. On one particularly stressful day, the ship slipped over some jagged rocks with barely a few centimetres of water beneath the keel. Another time, they spent three days anchored behind barren islands, waiting for fog to lift.

The strain on Amundsen was enormous as the ship inched through the deadly waters. Here the voyage would either utterly fail or grandly succeed. “I could not get rid of the possibility of returning home with the task unperformed. The thought was anything but cheering.” He spent hours brooding in the bowels of the ship when he should have been sleeping. He craved food with “a devouring hunger,” but at mealtimes the food stuck in his throat. He was sick with worry. Afterward his appetite returned, and he later reported in The North-West Passage that “I would rather not mention what I managed to dispose of.” In his memoirs, however, written decades afterward, he was less concerned with propriety and ready to entertain his readers with a lurid tale. “Instantly, my nerve-racking strain of the last three weeks was over. And with its passing, my appetite returned. I felt ravenous. Hanging from the shrouds were carcasses of caribou. I rushed up the rigging, knife in hand. Furiously I slashed off slice after slice of the raw meat, thrusting it down my throat in chunks and ribbons, like a famished animal, until I could contain no more.” His stomach rejected this “barbarous” feast and he had to “feed the fishes,” but “my appetite would not be denied and again I ate my fill of raw, half-frozen meat.” This time his rude meal stayed down and his usual “sense of calm and well being” returned. The strain, however, left its “mark upon me in such a way that my age was guessed to be between fifty-nine and seventy-five years, although I was only thirty-three!”

Not until August 26 did the Gjøa slip into the safer waters of what has become known as Amundsen Gulf, where the crew spied the distant outlines of a sail in the hazy distance. The sail was flying the Stars and Stripes. It was the Charles Hansson, a whaling schooner from San Francisco. The Norwegians rushed below deck to change from their ragged working outfits into their best clothes—they had been saving them for years, for just this purpose. As the two ships neared, the Gjøa lowered a small boat and Amundsen and three others rowed across the icy sea to board the Charles Hansson. “How surprised was I not, when Captain McKenna wrapped his fist round mine and congratulated me on a brilliant success.” McKenna had been on the lookout for the Gjøa. After a couple of hours chatting and gathering information on ice conditions and exchanging sailing tips, the Norwegians bid farewell to the Americans and returned to the Gjøa with an armful of old newspapers as a precious parting gift. One of the newspapers contained a vague and unnerving article under the headline “War between Norway and Sweden.” The world had changed during the adventurers’ sojourn with the Inuit.

Amundsen still hoped to cruise west as far as Herschel Island near the Alaska-Yukon border and then, if ice conditions permitted, push further west along the Alaskan coast before turning south through the Bering Strait. But it was not to be. The little ship was iced in for a third winter about 65 kilometres east of Herschel Island at King Point in the Yukon. Nearby there was a wrecked schooner and its Norwegian second mate, some American crew and a cluster of Inuit. Several whaling ships were also iced in within sight of Herschel Island. The Gjøa’s crew began hammering together an on-shore shed to provide shelter for the winter and making the Gjøa ready to do some more magnetic measurements during the frozen months ahead. By September 7, 1905, the ice was thick enough to cross, and the small community of ship-bound men could visit each other and exchange news. It didn’t take long before they all knew about Amundsen’s historic feat.

Amundsen was filled with frustration and impatience—if he didn’t get out the news himself, he would risk losing the money to be earned from the first publication of his story. In late October, when two Inuit and a whaling captain said they would set off for a distant Alaskan outpost, Amundsen decided to go with them through the trackless wilderness of the Yukon and Alaska. The small community of Eagle City, about 800 kilometres south over a mountain range, was a fur-trading settlement along the Yukon River that boasted a telegraph link. Amundsen was bursting with excitement to relay his historic news to the world and let his family and the families of his crew know that they had succeeded and were safe.

Amundsen and Captain William Mogg brought one sled and five dogs, while the Inuit travellers, Jimmy and Kappa (husband and wife), worked a second sled with seven dogs. Mogg brought along supplies such as pork and beans, buns, butter, sugar, tea, chocolate, dried milk and raisins. “It was certainly a much richer list of stores than I was accustomed to, but I had my doubts as to whether in solidity this variety would compare with the simpler stores used for our sledge trips,” Amundsen fretted. He had proposed pemmican as the natural and best food for the journey but was rebuffed by Mogg, and he could barely conceal his contempt: “Even the most unskilled dweller in the Temperate Zone can imagine how much needless waste of water content in the beans we should be dragging over the weary miles of snow.”

The four travellers journeyed through a landscape that “suddenly appeared like a piece of genuine Norwegian scenery, timbered and rocky.” This brought on a bout of homesickness in the young captain, who hadn’t seen a tree since leaving Norway. As they reached increasingly more populated territory, they stopped each night in small cabins and “road-houses” that were spaced out along the shores of the Yukon River every 30 kilometres or so. Amundsen later related an incident that reveals a great deal about his character. The provisions they carried were inadequate for all but Mogg, who “sat on one of the sleds all day” while Amundsen “grew hungrier and thinner with every mile.” By then they had split up with their two Inuit companions, and Mogg informed Amundsen that they would now travel all day without stopping for lunch. Amundsen protested, pointing out the difference in their levels of exertion and his own greater need for food. “The captain angrily dismissed my protest and pointed out that as he was the commander of the expedition, and had all the money, his orders would prevail.” Amundsen said nothing, but “like the Irishman’s parrot, ‘I kept up a devil of a thinking.’” The next day about lunchtime, Amundsen stopped and told Mogg that he would continue only if he had three meals a day. He would hike back to the previous shelter on foot and let Mogg continue on by himself. The terrified Mogg, who was in no physical shape to do anything so strenuous and had no idea how to handle dogs, “piteously claimed that I was leaving him to perish in the wilderness.” Amundsen coolly informed him that his survival was his own responsibility and agreed to accompany the captain only after they had agreed on the increased food allotment.

On December 5 Amundsen and Mogg arrived at Eagle City, its rude log houses fronting the frozen river and “its blue smoke standing out darkly against the bright sky.” The gold mining town had sprung up in the wake of the Klondike gold rush a few years earlier. Amundsen went straight to the telegraph office and sent his famous telegraph announcing that the Northwest Passage had finally been navigated after centuries of fatal striving. As he had no money, he sent off his lengthy telegram collect, to Nansen in Norway. His rambling telegram cost Nansen a small fortune, the equivalent of thousands of dollars today, but Amundsen hoped to recoup the expense from the exclusive sale of the story to newspapers, including The Times of London. Unfortunately, the story was leaked to the press. The information passed through Seattle on its way to Norway, and by the time Nansen read the note, the news was already several days old in the United States and was no longer a scoop. Many American papers pirated the story, and The Times refused to pay—a severe financial blow to the indebted Amundsen. The theft of his intellectual property contributed to Amundsen’s penchant for secrecy and distrust of the press, as well as the realization that news was a commodity to be handled and sold like any other. He would not make this mistake again.

Nansen was nevertheless delighted with the news, and responded a few days later, informing Amundsen that Norway had achieved independence from Sweden. He offered Amundsen some advice on how to handle the politics of the situation, for Amundsen’s feat had become intertwined with Norway’s independence celebrations: Amundsen was the first hero of the newly independent nation.

The penniless but now famous explorer spent the next several months in Eagle City as the guest of Frank Smith and his family. Smith was the resident manager of the Alaska Commercial Company, and Amundsen wrote that “I shall ever be grateful for his hospitality.” So began Amundsen’s lifelong association with and love of Alaska: these months in Eagle City gave him “every opportunity to become acquainted with the generous hospitality of Alaska” while waiting for mail to arrive from Europe so that he could bring it back to his men, before the final push out of the Arctic. On February 3, 1906, Amundsen put on his skis again and set out on an uneventful return to the Gjøa at King Point. An encounter on the return journey is revealing of Amundsen’s character. Heading north, he encountered a solitary traveller hauling a toboggan without any dogs. It turned out to be Mr. Darrell, a Scot, who was hauling the mail alone through the wilderness “with not a soul to aid him in case of illness or accident, cheerfully trudging through the Arctic winter across an unblazed wilderness, and thinking nothing at all of his exploit. I was lost in admiration of this hearty and cheerful Scotsman.” Amundsen had a genuine respect for remarkable individuals who were quiet and unpretentious, and he was generous in acknowledging the skills and talents that he admired in others. Darrell and Amundsen became friends and kept in touch, and only Darrell’s accidental death prevented him from joining Amundsen’s South Pole expedition years later.

Amundsen arrived on March 12, having skied over 1,500 kilometres, to a “heartfelt welcome.” He was a hero again, delivering mail and news to his “splendid lads.” In a letter to his brother Leon, Amundsen commented with understatement that “I walked every inch of the way, so I am quite fit at the moment.” Then misfortune struck. Gustav Wiik, the young magnetic measurer, began to feel ill. He soon was stricken with severe abdominal pain. By the end of March, he was confined to bed with an erratic and racing pulse and soaring temperature. He died before Amundsen could transport him to Herschel Island. Perhaps it was a burst appendix; it happened so quickly and without any apparent reason that it stunned everyone. “Death must always be a gruesome guest, but to us, in our position far away from friends and relations, it was if possible, more depressing than it would otherwise have been,” Amundsen wrote. Some writers have implied that Wiik’s death was somehow Amundsen’s fault, because his medical skills were inferior and there was no physician on board. But it is hard to see what anyone could have done about a burst appendix in the isolated channels of the Northwest Passage, even if they had been able to diagnose the problem.

Its crew eager to move on, the Gjøa broke free of the ice on July 11, 1906, and slowly cruised the final stretch of coastline of the Northwest Passage. The ship passed Point Barrow, the northernmost part of Alaska, on August 21, when the coast was hemmed in by pack ice to the north, sailing through the Bering Strait during a storm on August 30. “I thought to celebrate our passage through the Bering Strait rather formally—but all we managed was to raise a quick glass on the deck; a flag up the mast was out of the question. . . . It was with great joy that we drained our cup. Whatever we might now encounter—we have carried the Norwegian flag through the North West Passage, on one boat.” On August 31, the ship slid silently into Nome, Alaska, a gold rush town that housed many Norwegian expatriates. The crew were received with enthusiastic cheers and the singing of the Norwegian anthem, followed by a raucous party. Before the Gjøa departed for the south, Amundsen had already received his first invitation for a speaking engagement—from the Geographical Society of Philadelphia. But Nansen urged him to return to Norway.