I had never had any opportunity to acquaint myself with business methods. I had always had to rely upon others for the management of any business details. Thus far my trust in others in these matters had never caused me any trouble.
IN 1903, WHEN the thirty-one-year-old Amundsen had set out for the Northwest Passage in the Gjøa, another milestone in the history of technology was achieved thousands of kilometres to the south and east. Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first tentative hops in a motorized heavier-than-air machine in a field in North Carolina. During the following two decades, the progress in flight was remarkable, yet the technology was still in its infancy. The Atlantic Ocean had been crossed, but only in the “easy” direction, from America to Europe. More aviators had crashed into the ocean than had succeeded in crossing it. A British dirigible floated west to America in 1919, and a German airship did so in 1924. These airships, while slow, stayed in the air for long periods and didn’t crash every time they had engine trouble or headwinds. They did, however, have their own set of problems, such as manoeuverability, their large size and the danger from the combustible gases they used for lift.
Engineers and pilots were designing and experimenting with new machines throughout Europe and the United States, trying to work out the practical aspects of long-distance flying. In the period of freedom from regulation during the 1920s and the 1930s, aptly named the “Golden Age of Flight,” private air flight was not yet common or regulated, so engineers could take risks with materials and designs, and pilots could challenge distances without interference. Flying in the Arctic was just another challenge—enduring remote locations, freezing temperatures, unknown and unpredictable winds—although many thought the exercise foolhardy and reckless.
Amundsen’s early success as an explorer was based primarily upon his mastery and adaptation of two historical traditions from different cultures—the Inuit use of dogs and light sleds, and the Scandinavian use of boots bound to wooden planks to travel over snow. But he was not nostalgic when he knew their time was over. He quickly perceived the advantages of air travel in exploring the frozen zones. In 1913, when he first observed primitive airplanes in France and Germany, he saw the future: “I stood with fresh memories of the long sledge journeys in Antarctica, and watched the machine in the air cover distances in one hour that would have taken days and cost fearful effort in the Polar regions.” He learned to fly and was only delayed in bringing airplanes to the Arctic by the war. “The future of Polar exploration lies in the air and I am cheeky enough to claim that honour for myself as I was the first serious polar researcher who realized this and who practically demonstrated this method’s potential,” Amundsen wrote in his autobiography. While this may have been an accurate boast, his early efforts to use airplanes in the Arctic were not always successful.
After his six-month sojourn in Seattle, organizing the repairs for the Maud and touring the countryside, Amundsen set out east across the United States with his two Siberian foster-daughters, Kakonita and Camilla. The girls eventually proceeded ahead of him to Christiania under the care of Oscar Wisting’s wife, Elise, who had travelled from Norway to meet the expedition in Seattle. In New York, Amundsen met with the directors of the Carnegie Institute to discuss polar scientific issues, conferred with airplane manufacturers about the possibility of a spring delivery of aircraft, and then crossed the Atlantic by ocean liner to Europe. He hadn’t been “home” for over three years, and he would be gone again in less than two months. He spent a few weeks in London first, ostensibly to consult a prominent physician about his heart, but he had a personal motive as well, with Kristine Bennett living so near. He left London at the end of February 1922 and arrived in Christiania secretly. He went directly to Uranienborg and settled his foster daughters in his brother’s home, registering them in school and other activities. He and Leon began planning the next expedition while holed up in Uranienborg, the snowy hills behind them and the icy fjord visible through the front window.
Around this time, Amundsen began referring to himself as the Norwegian counterpart to the Flying Dutchman, “doomed to lifelong travels in the Arctic Ocean.” In fact, after so long away from his homeland he didn’t really have a home or a stable base of family and friends. His personal life took place on his ship and in various hotel rooms. His house still stood where it always had, the view from its windows was the same, but there was no real spirit to the place. Amundsen was an aging bachelor who didn’t want to face his situation; constant travelling, meeting and planning allowed him to avoid confronting the deficiencies in his life. So long had he been away from urban life, from any semblance of a stable routine, that he had become unmoored from the rhythms of a settled life, unable to fit in or to find satisfaction when at Uranienborg. To whom could he relate as a peer? He stayed only long enough to meet with some government officials, sign papers and enjoy a few family dinners. He was anxious to get going. He was already dreaming of the fulfilment of his long-held dream of polar flight.
Only when Amundsen left Norway on March 17 was a press release circulated revealing that he had been in the country. A great crowd turned out to see the famous hero as he embarked on the ship that would take him across the Atlantic again, and he dutifully waved from the bridge while the crowd sang the national anthem. In the United States, Amundsen embraced his public role, or at least he was comfortable with it; in Norway, he seemed to shun it and travelled in disguise, doing the bare minimum to generate positive press for his latest venture.
Leon had ordered two airplanes to be picked up in New York. On board the ship with Amundsen was a young pilot, Oscar Omdal, a lieutenant on leave from the Norwegian navy, whom Leon had selected to be the expedition’s chief pilot. The airplanes would be “more important to the expedition’s economic profits than anything else,” Amundsen speculated. He understood publicity, even if he did not understand business—airplanes were expensive whether they were exciting or not.
Newspapers in the United States were quick to report the details of Amundsen’s latest expedition. His plan, as he informed reporters, was to “drift from Alaska over the roof of the world to Norway” in his quest to “seek the sources of storms.” But, as exciting as he tried to make it sound, that is only what the new crew members of the Maud would be doing. Amundsen had decided on something altogether more daring for himself. In January, when he was in Norway, he had heard of the new record-breaking flight of a Junkers aircraft that had remained in the air for twenty-seven hours without stopping. This gave him a bold—some would say crazy—idea: to “fly from continent to continent across the Polar Sea,” from Point Barrow in northern Alaska to Spitsbergen—something that (naturally) had never been done before. Amundsen put aside the goal of reaching the North Pole itself, claiming that “the crossing of the Arctic Ocean was still a virgin opportunity.” It was, after all, as he stated in an interview in the New York Times, the “largest of the earth’s surfaces (land or water) that yet lay unexplored.”
As always, Amundsen was in need of new attention-generating schemes to finance his lifestyle. He no doubt enjoyed the respect his fame brought him, even though he was fed up with the monotony of the lecture circuit, unless it was a prestigious engagement; but he felt humiliated to have to fall back on talking-up past exploits. Leon was a master at dreaming up new schemes to capitalize on his brother’s fame. He had done a fine job of putting Roald in the spotlight after his triumph at the South Pole, and now he extended it even further. One of the fundraising initiatives they again employed for this latest adventure involved postage stamps. The brothers decided that since Roald would be flying over the top of the world, he could easily deliver air mail over the North Pole. They created a postcard, North Star Air Post, Amundsen North Polar Expedition, and arranged for it to be sold through various newspapers, with the papers doing their own advertising and keeping a commission for their efforts. Some of the postcards had the word “air” replaced with “ari,” perhaps to create the aura of a rare and extra valuable collector’s issue.
Amundsen calculated that his flight would be about 3,200 kilometres through a frozen, fog-ridden area that had never been thoroughly explored. Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole, but the larger Arctic region was essentially terra incognita. An advance expedition led by Godfred Hansen, who had sailed with Amundsen on the Gjøa two decades earlier, had already sailed to leave a supply depot for Amundsen on Spitsbergen. Leon had already sold exclusive newspaper rights to the event, which was portrayed as merely a reconnaissance of the region, which would later be thoroughly and scientifically explored by the crew of the Maud. Amundsen was only interested in the sporting side of the expedition, but he had to justify the Norwegian government’s financial backing. He publicly claimed that his new scheme would have scientific merit too, as the mysterious poles were “climate makers.” He speculated confidently that “the air currents that wheel about the ends of the earth have more effect on the temperature day by day in New York or Paris than any other influence except the sun alone.
“My interest, therefore, in this North transoceanic flight was not in mere adventure,” he hastened to add. “It is geographical and scientific.” Certainly this was true—geographic exploration is scientific in itself—but with Amundsen the emphasis was always on adventure, on something stirring and unusual to generate publicity and to help with fundraising. “Captain Amundsen prefers to talk more of the adventure that is to come than the perils of the last expedition,” reported the New York Times. “He looks to this as the supreme effort of his life, because the discoveries may be of immense value in the charting of the weather of all the continents.” Whether Amundsen believed his own press or not, he, in consultation with his brother, certainly knew how to put a lofty spin on his plans: he wouldn’t merely be searching for a way to gain public attention in order to finance his dream of cruising in airplanes in the Arctic—he would be working to unravel the mysteries of the global weather machine. This was an altruistic act of incalculable benefit: scientists would be able to “prophesy” the weather “for a long time in advance.”
Before Amundsen had even crossed the Atlantic, the newspapers from Seattle to New York began reporting these latest plans. The New York Times announced, “Explorer May Fly to Seattle to Test His Arctic Machine.” As usual, regular updates followed, telling the story of the man who “has the imagination of all great explorers and an invincible optimism.”
As soon as he arrived in New York, Amundsen set about visiting the offices of two airplane manufacturers. He purchased a large German-designed Junkers, which had a passenger capacity of nine and a great cruising radius, and a smaller American-made Curtiss Oriole—a gift from the manufacturer, which was gambling on the publicity it would generate. The Oriole would be used for shorter reconnaissance flights. Amundsen named the Junkers Elizabeth and the Curtiss Kristine, the two names of his married paramour. No explorer before had so utilized his position to promote products in this way. Roald and Leon Amundsen had stumbled on a business model that would drive professional sports for generations: create a public spectacle that draws media attention—in Amundsen’s day, newspapers and magazines, public speeches and ceremonies, slide lectures and, by the mid-1920s, some live radio broadcasts—and then, with the presumption that the public eye will be turned on them for their exploits, sell the attention as advertising. Amundsen sometimes endorsed products directly, but usually products and individuals received their publicity by public association with Amundsen and his exploits.
Amundsen decided that rather than transport both of his new flying toys across the country by rail, he would fly across the country to Seattle to test the Junkers and ship only the smaller Oriole, landing in key cities to generate news coverage. After all, “a railroad train is too slow for Roald Amundsen,” noted one newspaper. Four people would accompany him on this series of test flights: a pilot from the aircraft company, an engineer, Oscar Omdal, and Amundsen’s long-time friend and benefactor Fredrik Gade. The route would take them through Cleveland, Chicago, Omaha, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Reno, Sacramento and then north to Seattle, where the Maud lay waiting. On April 10, 1922, the Junkers took to the air from a field on Long Island. After cruising for about 550 kilometres, the plane’s engine began to overheat and stall, and the pilot glided down from an altitude of 2,000 metres for an emergency landing in a rough field in northwestern Pennsylvania.
The plane clipped the top of some trees and then bounced on its huge rubber tires a few times before hitting a tree root and flipping over, which bent the wings and tossed the five men around. As they crawled out from the wreckage, they determined that none of them were seriously injured. Amundsen and Gade were “stiff front and back. It might be our age,” Amundsen admitted. After a day of waiting, he boarded a train to Seattle while some of the men tried to repair the plane in order to ship it west. The damage to the plane proved to be extensive, however, so a new, even larger, Junkers was packed up and shipped west from New York to Seattle. Not surprisingly, the exciting near-disaster made the international news—probably not the sort of publicity the Junkers company was banking on.
In Seattle, Oscar Wisting was overseeing the provisioning and victualling of the Maud. He welcomed the new crew in May. Including Wisting and Sverdrup, who took a leave from the university to continue his polar research on the Maud, the expedition now had eight crew, including three pilots, one of them a young Canadian officer from the British Royal Air Force, Elmer G. Fullerton. After a last infusion of money arrived from Peter Christophersen in Argentina in early June, all was ready and the Maud lurched out to sea with the two airplanes stowed in several crates on the deck. Amundsen, who suffered from seasickness, decided to take a passenger ship to Nome and meet the Maud there, avoiding the corkscrewing and heaving of the unwieldy and overloaded vessel. On the SS Victoria, he met an attractive Alaskan woman, Winnipeg-born Bess Magids, who was to occupy an increasingly important role in his life in the coming years.
In Nome, Amundsen gave a final press conference; the mayor had declared a holiday in honour of the explorer’s visit, and for days dogsleds had been bringing people to town to see the famous man off. With his voice “deep with feeling,” Amundsen gave a speech that concluded: “I want to thank the citizens of Nome for many kindnesses and courtesies and the generous hospitality they have always extended to me. Four times I have sailed to the north from Nome.” Asked about their chances of success, the Canadian pilot, Fullerton, then smiled and answered: “It’s either success or death for us.” Even this local ceremony on the northern fringe of the “civilized world” made news headlines.
A few weeks later, on July 16, near the village of Deering on the north Alaskan coast, Amundsen celebrated his fiftieth birthday. The Maud had also proceeded there. Not coincidentally, Deering was where Magids lived with her husband, Sam, the proprietor of a series of remote trading stations. Amundsen wanted a greater spectacle, perhaps to impress the young and beautiful Bess, so he and his crew spent a week flattening a landing field for a test flight of their little Curtiss airplane. (The flights were filmed by Reidar Lund and titled “With Roald Amundsen’s North Pole Expedition to the First Wintering Place.”) Apparently Fullerton then had a dispute with Magids, whom Amundsen was flirting with, and with other members of the expedition. When Amundsen told him that his services as a pilot were no longer required, since there was only one plane to fly, Fullerton declined to do the polar drift on the Maud and Amundsen sent him home. In Vancouver, Fullerton reported to the press that, to his “regret and disappointment,” Amundsen’s plans had changed and there was no more need for him, as his only goal was to fly to Spitsbergen. After a few weeks in Deering, Amundsen and Omdal took passage on the supply ship Holmes north to Wainwright, Alaska, along with the new Junkers, while the Maud, carrying the small Curtiss, which they planned to use to scout ice conditions, continued into the ice near Wrangel Island and was frozen in for the drift, with Wisting in command. The Maud would now be on an expedition of her own, frozen in the ice and out of communication with Amundsen for several years, until October 1925, when it would sail south to Seattle for a shocking welcome.
For Amundsen and Omdal, the winter of 1922–1923 was one of great physical exertion and, unexpectedly, social outings. When they arrived in Wainwright, it was too late in the season; high winds and storms prevented them from attempting their audacious polar flight. Since Point Barrow, which had only a few hundred inhabitants, seemed too small a place for them to spend the winter, Amundsen and Omdal settled in Wainwright for the long dark season—Amundsen as cook, Omdal as carpenter. The two men built a small two-bedroom house with a dining room and a kitchen, as well as a primitive airplane hanger for storing the valuable Junkers. In November 1922, Amundsen left Omdal to work on assembling the Junkers while he set off on an overland adventure south to Nome.
The previous fall, a London physician had minced no words: “No more expeditions! If you expect to live more than a few years longer you must avoid all strenuous exercise.” Amundsen proudly paid no attention to this advice and wrote, “I started on foot from Point Barrow through the snow with a native mail carrier and made the run of 500 miles to Kotzebue in ten days, at an average speed of 50 miles a day. The next two days I ran 90 miles from Kotzebue to Deering to Nome; and in the following four days, I ran 200 miles from Deering to Nome. In other words, after having been ‘counted out’ by a heart specialist in February, I did the hardest travelling of my life in November, covering practically 800 miles through the snow at an average speed of nearly 50 miles a day, stopping only a few hours every night to sleep.” He wrote this not to “boast,” he claimed, but to demonstrate the result of “a conscientious regimen of life from youth onward to preserve it in the prime condition in which nature intended it to function.” This account was written five years later, when Amundsen was in his mid-fifties and showing a preoccupation with his continued strength—the concern of an athletic man in later middle age worried about the inevitability of physical decline. In 1921, many of Amundsen’s teeth had been pulled and replaced with gold teeth, so “my mouth looks like a true Klondike man’s unfortunately” (probably the reason why Amundsen is seldom seen fully smiling in any photographs from this time).
Amundsen briefly visited Magids on his way through Deering, but he spent most of the winter in Nome, taking advantage of the free accommodation on account of his celebrity and enjoying festivities that included dancing, drinking and dogsled races. In Nome, he also had to face the realization that once again his finances were in trouble. He had burned through his modest fortune and most of the new government funds, and his expedition was again in debt, particularly in the United States. Haakon Hammer, Amundsen’s new American business agent, wrote a letter to Leon in Norway and asked for funds to cover the U.S. debt, but he was rebuffed; Leon did not trust the man, even though Hammer claimed to be paying various ongoing costs from his personal funds. Even if Hammer was not entirely trustworthy, Amundsen was notorious for racking up expenses without a care for how they would be repaid; it was a strategy that had worked so far in his life. The problem was that he was now trying to finance two expeditions—a scientific voyage with the Maud and a daring polar flight—but with financing in place for only one. As usual, he was sanguine, believing that his flying stunt would vanquish any problems that presented themselves. He sold a small property in Norway and used the proceeds to satisfy the immediate claims of various U.S. creditors who had contacted him through a bank in Nome.
While Amundsen was essentially incommunicado in Alaska during the winter of 1922–1923, a scandal was developing in the southern United States. A rival explorer, Edwin Fairfax Naulty, a man of lofty ambitions who had never been to the Arctic, claimed that Amundsen had stolen his plans for the polar flight. Naulty pronounced that Amundsen was a foreign agent bent on deceiving the United States by using its territory to launch an expedition to claim new land for Norway. He also complained that Amundsen was stealing an “American” plan—that is, his own—in the same manner, he falsely claimed, that Amundsen had stolen Scott’s plan and route to the South Pole. Although Naulty’s was a strange and illogical argument, he was getting coverage in newspapers, probably for this very reason, and because Amundsen was a celebrity.
Amundsen had no idea that he was being slandered, but Hammer responded to the challenge for him in a special to the New York Times. Hammer wrote about the absurdity of someone claiming priority in the idea or concept of a polar flight, something Amundsen had been considering for nearly a decade, and something that Peary had also mused about for many years. In his final paragraph, Hammer wrote,
I know the real American admires a true sportsman, regardless of nationality; admires the man of daring, the man of action, the man who really does things and thereby proves that he is a two-fisted, red-blooded human; that is Amundsen, the man who is now about to attempt one of the most daring feats in exploration annals, and I am quite sure that in spite of Mr. Naulty’s talk a large majority of Americans are proud to regard Captain Amundsen not as a citizen of any specific country, but as a citizen of the world. . . . His discoveries, geographic or scientific, are the property of the world and not the property of a specific country.
Certainly Amundsen spent far more time in the United States than he did in Norway. Legality aside, Amundsen was more American than Norwegian at this point in his life.
Naulty’s claims were also quickly discredited by Henry Woodhouse, president of the Aerial League of America, who pointed out that he was with Amundsen, Peary and the explorer Robert Bartlett in 1916 when the three of them had discussed the logistics of a polar flight. Amundsen never bothered to personally reply to Naulty’s claims, and the issue faded from interest after a few months. But it was also around this time that Leon sent his brother a telegram detailing Hammer’s shady business dealings in Denmark. However eloquent the Danish American businessman appeared to be, his history was enough for Amundsen to hastily rescind Hammer’s power of attorney over his expedition and return it fully to Leon, at least temporarily.
In the spring of 1923, excitement was building for the polar flight, and Amundsen was making the final preparations. Many people wrote letters to newspapers offering their opinion on how he should proceed or organize his expedition, while others complained that he had wronged them or made other spurious claims. One writer advised him to use walrus-skin pontoons, another predicted his failure, and yet another advised him on how much fuel to take. One writer of a letter to the New York Times wondered “just what [Amundsen] expects to accomplish, outside of a long-distance airplane flight under ideal weather conditions.” A New York woman claimed to be Amundsen’s long-lost daughter (this was proven false). A report, following an X-ray he had in Nome, announced that “Arm Troubles Amundsen.” One day the papers reported that he was about to leave on his flight, and a few days later the report was that the flight had been delayed. One day the Norwegian government was supposedly planning a “relief expedition” and a few days later, the relief expedition had supposedly been called off. Amundsen was in the media circus, part of a never-abating commentary on his life and actions. Fortunately for him, he was insulated from most of the hoopla by the remote regions of his endeavour and the lack of efficient communications technology.
Amundsen set off from Nome to Wainwright by dogsled in April 1923, travelling over the snow of early spring with a handful of stories for his planned book and the foreboding knowledge of his foundering finances. He arrived on May 9, and after consulting with Omdal fixed the date for the great trans-polar flight, announcing that it would take place on June 20. During the winter, Omdal had assembled the Junkers from the parts that had been shipped in three giant crates and had replaced the landing wheels with skis. On May 11, he fired up the engine while the plane rested on a flat patch of ice out on the bay. The propeller roared to life, and the machine taxied along the icy expanse before lifting into the air. Omdal cruised in circles over the village of Wainwright for a while and then steered the plane back to the cleared runway. As soon as it touched the ice, the left ski “crumpled like a piece of cardboard” and the Junkers spun in a circle over the ragged frozen surface of the water, scraping a wing. Omdal was uninjured, but an investigation of the inner structure of the airplane revealed that it was severely damaged. Worse, the structure of the airplane was so ill-suited to the impact of landing on skis that Amundsen and Omdal feared it would never work as planned. The company that designed the airplane in Germany knew of Amundsen’s plans and should have warned him of the risk, but Amundsen should have done a better job of inspecting it before testing it. He was no longer adhering to the philosophy guiding his earlier expeditions. So much planning and testing had gone into his Northwest Passage and South Pole ventures, but so little into this polar flight scheme, and the results confirmed that. In his defence it must be said that aviation technology was primitive, although rapidly evolving, and Amundsen was attempting something never accomplished before.
In frustration, Amundsen initially blamed Omdal for the crash, even though as the leader he was more to blame for attempting a polar flight without first checking his equipment. Omdal and Amundsen attempted to repair and reinforce the landing structure with the limited supplies on hand, but when they tested the airplane again on June 10 it again crumpled. The entire scheme had to be called off. All the air mail that had been pre-sold would now remain undelivered. Added to this was the disappointment of all the other sponsors, the numerous creditors and the Norwegian government, which had sent a ship to Spitsbergen to await the historic arrival of Amundsen’s airplane from across the top of the world. Amundsen had finally failed. The next year would bring what he later described as “a series of events that led to the most distressing, the most humiliating, and altogether the most tragic episode of my life.”
Although he might have been feeling dejected and humiliated, the public fascination with Amundsen did not abate. People were as interested in his failures as his successes. Newspaper articles continued to detail his plans, to print defences of him and attacks against him. One article mocked him, saying he orchestrated the crash because he was afraid, that it was all just for publicity; another accused him of abandoning his ship for the attention-seeking stunt of a polar flight. What is true about celebrity culture now was true about the activity surrounding Amundsen in the 1920s: interest in celebrities is greater when they are experiencing personal setbacks or in the midst of a scandal. Seeing a great man fall, and recording his ordeal and his actions, are all part of the story. The newspapers, and therefore presumably their readers, were caught up in the ongoing Amundsen saga. What would he do next? How could he possibly recover from this humiliating failure? When Amundsen retreated ignominiously to Seattle in September 1923, newspaper reporters had their proverbial knives out, and were looking for a story to carve.
The events that Amundsen described as the worst in his life began with his association with Hammer in Seattle, and he attributed them to his “lack of business experience.” Of course, he could not admit defeat. He had not lost faith in his scheme; he knew it could be done with the proper equipment. He planned another polar flight and just needed money to purchase the proper planes. Hammer had written him en route to Spitsbergen, where he had travelled to await Amundsen, about the possibility of getting several new Junkers aircraft from Germany, but Amundsen now knew that they were unsuitable for Arctic flying. He needed money for new machines that suited his plans: he wanted “flying boats,” airplanes equipped with pontoons rather than skis or wheels. Amundsen met Hammer in Seattle, and Hammer promised he would raise the money; in desperation Amundsen believed him. “I had never had any opportunity to acquaint myself with business methods,” he wrote in his own defence a few years later. “I had always had to rely upon others for the management of any business details. Thus far my trust in others in these matters had never caused me any trouble. I did what I was told and everything came out all right.”
While Hammer went to work searching for financing, Amundsen rode the train from Seattle to New York, and then sailed to London before making his way back to Norway in November. He again handed over his business affairs to Hammer, along with power of attorney. This time, his reception in Norway was frosty. Once the man who could do no wrong, he was now attacked for mismanaging the Maud expedition and for failing in his ridiculous stunt of a polar flight. Under Hammer’s management, Amundsen, with the bad press, seemed amateurish, and the financial support provided by the Norwegian government and people appeared to have been a bad investment. As usual, Amundsen kept a low profile at home, researching airplanes and visiting with his foster daughters—whom, he was pleased to note, were doing excellently at school. Despite the general antipathy toward him in Norway, he was able to persuade the government to issue a special stamp to commemorate the new polar flight, from which he would gain additional financing: most of the stamps would never be used, but would be kept as collector’s items. Back in the United States, Hammer printed about seventeen thousand postcards advertising “The Trans-Polar Flight Expedition,” with an image of a chart projection of the North Pole and an airplane zooming toward it. The caption read “In commemoration of Amundsen’s trans-Polar flight, 1924.” Hammer sold about ten thousand of them for a dollar each. He also went ahead with signing newspaper and magazine deals, and even film rights.
After a few weeks, Amundsen departed for Copenhagen to meet with aircraft manufacturer Claud Dornier at his factory to discuss the possibility of using his planes in the Arctic. At first, Amundsen liked the Dornier Delphin, but he soon calculated that its range was too limited. He settled on the larger, newly designed and more expensive Dornier-Wal flying boat. Equipped with two 360-horsepower Rolls-Royce Eagle engines, mounted in tandem (one pulling and the other pushing), it had twice the range of the Delphin, enough for him to fly to the pole from Spitsbergen. The design element that interested Amundsen was that the Dornier-Wal had no landing gear; the aircraft was like a giant metal tube that had wings and engines bolted to its exterior. By his calculations, he would need three flying boats, one of which would carry extra fuel that would be pumped into the other two planes before being abandoned on the ice so that the remaining two flying boats could continue on to Alaska. On January 7, 1924, Amundsen signed a contract for the delivery of three planes, to be built in Pisa, Italy, to his specific requirements, at a price of $40,000 each. They would be ready for pick-up in June. Hammer negotiated a minimal down payment, using Amundsen’s celebrity and good name as assurance. He then convinced Amundsen that the funds would be in place by spring. Ever the optimist, Amundsen went to work on planning the expedition and hiring the crew, apparently unaware of the old maxim, “If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.” Another truism comes to mind: “What we wish to be true, we readily believe.” Amundsen was merely the latest in a great parade of the optimistically deluded, a gathering that would include a great many famous explorers as well as military commanders, gamblers, lovers and investors.
His partnership with his brother Leon was an ideal match. Roald’s daring and preoccupation with the details of an expedition’s field were was balanced by Leon’s tact, diplomacy, gravitas and responsibility: piratical gambling and a mastery of hardship, balanced against caution, respectability and social standing. But with the portly Hammer, who had pretensions to call himself a polar explorer and who was mocked for it in the press, the partnership was a disaster. To make money from an expedition as a business enterprise, more was needed than just the execution of the deed—someone had to be the face and the voice of the expedition when the explorer was incommunicado. The “Amundsen” enterprise was indeed a business, and if the explorer himself wanted to participate in only half of it, he needed someone else to manage the other aspects of the expeditions, such as paying wages and dealing with creditors, quietly and confidently reassuring officials, and pursuing new fundraising and advertising opportunities. Amundsen provided the daring spectacle, but he needed someone else to ensure that money was being made while everyone was paying attention.
An awkward situation arose relating to the possible discovery of new land during the flight. A great swath of the Arctic was essentially unknown. It was still a realistic possibility that a yet-to-be discovered landmass existed somewhere in the Arctic. If so, it would be the last great undiscovered and uncharted land on the planet. Who would own it? Which flag would be planted when the airplanes landed on the ice? Amundsen let it be known in Norway that he would of course plant the Norwegian flag; after all, he still depended upon some government financing, and the expedition planned to fly from Spitsbergen. Yet in the American papers he intimated that he would not claim any new land for Norway, and he let this vague, noncommittal statement stand. Hammer, meanwhile, was promising potential American backers that of course the new lands would belong to the United States. The American and Norwegian foreign officers began talking about the theoretical new land. Amundsen, however, had not lost his touch for diplomacy. He had arranged special permission to enlist Lieutenant Ralph Davison of the Naval Air Service, selected from over thirty American applicants, to be one of his pilots, a move that not surprisingly generated positive press in the United States.
In April 1924, Amundsen rode the train to Pisa to inspect the new aircraft during their construction. Although Dornier-Wal was a German company, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War, Germany was prohibited from constructing large airplanes at home and had to contract out the work. Everyone at the factory seemed optimistic and excited about the new airplanes, but Amundsen heard some rumours about Hammer that began to disturb him. Apparently Hammer was bragging to the Italians about his flying prowess, claiming to be an Arctic explorer and boasting that he would be included in the flight party to the North Pole. “Nothing could have been more absurd than the idea of taking such an utterly inexperienced person as he upon an expedition which at best was fraught with the greatest hazards.” At first Amundsen found the claims hard to credit, but then they were confirmed by some of his Norwegian compatriots, at which point Amundsen began to suspect (or finally admitted that he suspected) that all was not well as far as Hammer was concerned. Because the stories were “so numerous and explicit,” Amundsen fired Hammer and publicly announced that their business relationship had ceased. Hammer quickly fled to Japan, and Amundsen was left to unravel the tangle of strange and complicated business dealings that he left behind. Hammer had “made commitments far beyond any resources I could possibly muster,” Amundsen related, and had set the entire expedition upon a fraudulent foundation, leaving Amundsen, in his own words, “humiliated beyond my powers to express it.”
The commitments that Hammer had made in Amundsen’s name were numerous and outrageous. No amount of profit from the expedition could ever hope to pay for them. There remained in the expedition’s funds nothing to pay for the three Dornier-Wal flying boats. Amundsen was forced to issue a public statement that must have galled him: “As it has been impossible to secure sufficient financial backing the expedition will have to be postponed until further notice.” Without the airplanes, he had no expedition; without an expedition, he had no way of earning money; and with no money, he couldn’t hope to repay his debts.
The discovery of even greater debts from other sources, about which Amundsen had no idea but for which he was legally responsible because of Hammer’s power of attorney, were so high that Leon became fearful that he would never be able to claim his own repayment from his brother—of a debt that ran to a considerasble sum. Leon had been paying the wages of the Maud’s crew when Roald’s finances no longer permitted it, with an unwritten assurance that the money would eventually come once the expedition was a success or the ship was sold. In the past a solution had always presented itself, yet now it all seemed doomed. Amundsen was still responsible for financing the continuation of the Maud expedition, which was stuck in the ice somewhere, yet he knew there would be little profit to be made from publicity on that front—there was nothing dramatic about that endeavour, and he wasn’t even on board the ship.
An unseemly and bitter feud erupted between the brothers over their collapsing financial affairs. Amundsen aired his one-sided version of events publicly in his autobiography in 1927. But as usual with feuds, whether within families, between former business partners or during a divorce, reality becomes distorted as each side retreats to an unreasonable defence of its actions and its version of the truth. Such was the case with Roald and Leon. Although some records of their correspondence exist, they reveal only part of the story. Anyone who has ever written a diary knows that its entries are unreliable as proof of one’s attitude or opinion, since they reflect a brief moment in time, a conversation with oneself. Letters to others, on the other hand, reflect how one wants to be perceived by the recipient or how one feels at the moment of writing, even if that opinion later mellows. Harsh words were evidently spoken between the brothers, but the precise nature of their quarrel remains a secret. But it was no doubt related to the fact that Roald wanted to sell his properties to free up money, and Leon blocked the sale, fearing the loss of his own unsecured debts. And Roald blamed Leon for some accounting deficiencies. When times are good, these types of minor disputes between siblings or business partners are easily overlooked, but when both the present and future look bleak, years of grievances and feelings of inadequate support come to the surface.
Amundsen still had considerable assets in the Maud and in his house, and he could have pulled through financially if he had sold them—although it was impossible to sell the Maud while the ship was stuck in the ice. He was also too proud to beg for more assistance from the government and so, once he had settled upon the idea of bankruptcy, in September 1924, he seems to have refused to give it up. It seemed the easiest thing to do, especially since Amundsen was estranged from both of his business managers and didn’t have a good understanding of either his debt obligations or the surrounding legal issues. Nor did he want to begin learning about these things now that he was in his fifties; he was still dreaming of airplanes and undiscovered Arctic lands. He claimed that he was declaring bankruptcy in order to gain access to the books and do a full accounting of all his financial obligations. Out of pride or spite, he did not want his property to be owned by his brother. As a result, the legal wrangling with Leon continued for months, even after Amundsen had left Norway.4
Following his announcement of insolvency, the press turned against Amundsen. “Now that I was helpless and embarrassed,” he wrote in his memoirs, “the same lips that described my career as a glory of the nation did not scruple to repeat lies of the most transparent fabrication, in a cruel effort to besmirch my private character and tarnish my name.” He saw his whole life and legacy implode before his eyes, a slow-motion train wreck over which he had no control, even if he had precipitated it. There were spurious claims that the bankruptcy and public quarrel with Leon were part of a conspiracy to defraud creditors. There were suggestions that his two foster daughters were his own biological children—an impossibility, easily countered by comparing the dates of their birth with Amundsen’s whereabouts around the time. And there were other hurtful and false accusations about his morality and his skills as an explorer. At least in the United States, Amundsen received some understanding: a lengthy article in the New York Times in the fall of 1924 offered sympathy “for the gallant Amundsen in this perhaps cruellest stroke of destiny.”
The besieged explorer remained holed up at Uranienborg for the summer and fall of 1924, brooding and hiding from the press. He became a lonely and bitter man, wounded by the attacks of his countrymen and not on speaking terms with his brother, sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, who lived nearby. It was a miserable time. His companion Sverdrup later claimed that “he had to pay a high price for his success. His faith in human nature.”
Amundsen’s behaviour, particularly his fight with Leon over the expedition’s finances and his readiness to declare bankruptcy, seemed so erratic that some of his few remaining friends questioned his sanity. He later devoted many pages of his short autobiography to a detailed litany of abuses he suffered. “Undoubtedly, I was guilty of a grave mistake in trusting my business concerns so implicitly to others,” he wrote, referring specifically to Hammer, “though I do not see how I could have done otherwise than to trust somebody. For that mistake I deserved the punishment of bankruptcy, but certainly I did not deserve the contumely and ingratitude of my countrymen.” All of this is true, but he appears not to have been willing to take responsibility for choosing Hammer to represent him or for so willingly shuffling all the responsibility of the business over to him.
Ever the indomitable spirit, however, Amundsen refused to entirely give in to despair. In the fall of 1924 he set off for the United States, where he knew he would get a positive reception. He would undertake a lengthy lecture tour to raise funds for a new project and to help pay the wages of the men still stuck on the Maud. He was down but not out.