1. The Gjøa was later presented as a gift to the city of San Francisco, remaining on display in Golden Gate Park until 1972, when it was returned to Norway. It now resides in Oslo harbour, next to two other famous Norwegian ships, Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki.
2. The sensational news that did soon dominate the newspapers was the April 15, 1912, sinking of the RMS Titanic.
3. Leon Amundsen did once express the opinion in a letter that it was fortunate that Amundsen had prevailed; otherwise, the British would have continued to send out one doomed expedition after another, condemning dozens to horrible fates, similar to what had occurred in the wake of Sir John Franklin’s demise in the mid-nineteenth century.
4. The Maud, which had been drifting in the ice north of Siberia, eventually cruised into Nome in August 1925 and was promptly impounded for debts. Temporarily freed, the ship continued south to Seattle and was again impounded, eventually being sold to the Hudson’s Bay Company.
5. In 1925—twenty years after Norway gained its independence from Sweden—the Norwegian capital, Christiania, was given its original medieval Norwegian name, Oslo.
6. Much later, Amundsen received a letter from Clarendon (then known as “Charles”) Carpendale informing him that the family had kept both girls instead of sending Kakonita to her negligent father, and that eventually they had all fled the arrival of the Bolsheviks and escaped from eastern Siberia to Nome. By November 1927, the Carpendale family had moved to Surrey, Vancouver, British Columbia, where Kakonita married and had three children.
7. Archival film footage of the event, restored by the Norwegian Film Institute, shows N25 skidding down an incline and wobbling on the uneven ice while a crowd of enthusiastic onlookers waves and cheers: “Roald Amundsen-Lincoln Ellworths Flyveekspedisjon 1925.mp4,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEHmD-FD UEU.
8. The most famous airship disaster occurred much later, in 1937, when the German airship Hindenburg burst into flames in New Jersey after successfully crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Europe. Over a third of its ninety-seven passengers and crew died in the accident. The disaster was caught on film, thereby ending commercial passenger airship service.
9. Bess Magids returned to Alaska and eventually took over Magids Brothers Trading Co., becoming a noted figure in early-twentieth-century Alaskan history. In 1931, she married a younger man, Arthur Chamberlain, with whom she had a daughter, and in 1937 she married John Milton Cross. In 1945, she was elected to the Alaska Territorial Legislature, where she voted for Alaska statehood. She died in 1971.