Andrée’s balloon after foundering (illustration credit 12.1)
By the mid-1890s, Brigadier General Adolphus Washington Greely had come to the conclusion that his Scandinavian counterparts were demented. One, a Swede named Salomon Andrée, was proposing to fly off to the North Pole in a balloon, of all things. Another, a Norwegian named Fridtjof Nansen, had already set out in a tub of a boat and was planning to get himself purposely stuck in the ice and drift – yes, drift – across the polar basin.
In 1890, when Nansen first unveiled his mad project, Greely had had his say. “It is doubtful,” he declared, “if any hydrographer would treat seriously his theory of polar currents, or if any Arctic travellers would endorse the whole scheme.… Arctic exploration is sufficiently credited with rashness and danger in its legitimate and sanctioned methods, without bearing the burden of Dr. Nansen’s illogical scheme of self destruction.”
By the summer of 1895, when Greely was turning his guns on Andrée, the balloonist, these words seemed to have been more than prescient. At that point Nansen had been out of touch with the world for almost two years; if he was not dead, he might as well be dead. But Greely was wrong. Nansen was very much alive in a kayak off Franz Josef Land, having made a daring if unsuccessful assault on the North Pole and reached a higher latitude than any explorer in history – 200 statute miles farther than Greely’s own expedition.
Thirty-five months after his departure, Nansen returned to civilization like a ghost rising from the grave, to be hailed as the greatest explorer of his day – greater by far than any of his detractors – and the founder of a new school of Viking explorers whose crowning ornament would be Roald Amundsen, the future conquerer of both the North West Passage and the South Pole.
The Scandinavian explorers were a different breed from the hidebound British and the impetuous Americans. They were, after all, a subarctic people, used to cold weather and high winds, familiar with skis, sledges, and dogs. They were also immensely practical. Nansen was daring but never rash; bold but never impulsive; fatalistic but never foolhardy; poetic but never naïve. A cool professional, he admired the British explorers for their grit, but he also learned from their mistakes and lack of experience. He believed in careful preparation. He watched every detail himself, leaving nothing to chance. He scorned men like Kane, whose polar expedition he called a “reckless, unjustifiable proceeding.” Nansen was the first explorer to take a ship into the Arctic that was custom-built to his own specifications – neither a whaler nor a naval bomb vessel. This was the Fram, perhaps the most famous vessel in Arctic history and certainly the most practical.
Nansen was thirty-one when he set off on his extraordinary journey – a Norse demi-god, tall, fair, blue-eyed, and physically tough. He had become an explorer by design. As a young science graduate he had, at twenty-one, shipped aboard a Greenland sealer to gain experience in zoology. At that point the Arctic captivated him. By 1888, after completing his scientific studies, he was prepared for his first adventure – nothing less than an attempt to ski across the unexplored Greenland ice cap, from coast to coast.
Skis had never before been used for such a journey. Nansen was later to write that “most people considered it simple madness … and were convinced that I was either not quite right in the head or was simply tired of life.” His hero, Baron A.E. Nordenskiöld, who had failed in his attempt to cross the ice sheet in 1866, was one of the early sceptics. Nansen’s enthusiasm and confidence won him over. The risk, Nordenskiöld finally decided, was worth it. But the Norwegian government thought differently and refused to fund the venture.
Nansen was determined to keep the risks to a minimum. He designed his own equipment, ranging from a new kind of portable cooker to flexible new sledges, running on skis and equipped with sails. He took lessons in the Eskimo language. An expert skier himself, he recruited five other experts, the toughest he could find, including Otto Sverdrup, the future master of the Fram and later a notable Arctic explorer. The party landed on the bleak, unpeopled east coast of Greenland both because Nansen wanted the prevailing wind behind him as he moved west across the great ice cap and because he wanted to cut off all lines of retreat. Behind was nothing but rock and ice; ahead lay the inhabited coastal strip on the shores of Baffin Bay. There could be no turning back.
The zigzag journey through this lifeless land covered four hundred miles over highlands that exceeded eight thousand feet. The conditions were so severe that one of Nansen’s companions, a Laplander, teetered on the verge of madness. Nansen, a born leader, managed to calm him down, and the party confounded the experts by succeeding. Unable to get a ship for home out of Disco Bay that fall, the industrious young man spent the winter in Greenland studying the Eskimos. When he returned to Norway he was famous – a popular hero. In the welcoming crowd that day, “with beating heart” stood a young seventeen-year-old student, Roald Amundsen. “All the dreams of my boyhood woke to storming life,” Amundsen was later to recall. “And for the first time I heard, in my secret thoughts, the whisper clear and insistent: ‘If you could do the North-West Passage!’ ”
For all of this time, a second adventure had been percolating through Nansen’s brain. The catalyst was an odd throwback to the past – to 1875, when Allen Young, M’Clintock’s sledgemate on the Franklin search, had set off in his little ship Pandora to try to force his way through Peel Sound and complete the Passage. Young had failed, and eventually the Pandora was sold to James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald to be refitted and renamed the Jeannette, the vessel that took the ill-fated De Long expedition north to the Bering Sea to try to reach the Pole. The Jeannette foundered off the coast of Siberia, but in 1884 pieces of the wreckage began turning up on the coast of Greenland. This suggested the presence of an Arctic current leading from Siberia around the Pole toward North America. There were other clues: Nansen, on his own expedition, had collected traces of sediment from the drift ice east of the island that, on examination, proved to have come from Siberian rivers. Eskimo throwing sticks, peculiar to Alaskan natives along the Bering Strait, and driftwood from Siberian trees had also been found along Greenland’s east coast. Why not, then, put a ship into the floes off east Siberia and let the ice carry her westward across the unknown polar basin toward Greenland – perhaps across the Pole itself?
In short, instead of fighting the ice as other explorers had done, Nansen proposed to use the moving ice stream as a propellant, albeit a sluggish one. For that he would require a special kind of craft with straight sides, like a tub, which the ice could not grip or crush, and with a reasonably flat bottom – a ship that, in his words, could “slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice.”
He would also require a special breed of explorer – men who could withstand three or four years of sheer monotony without going mad or resorting to violence. Only Norwegians, he felt, were equal to that ordeal. As he put it, with dry humour, two Norwegians, alone of all other nationals, could sit face to face on a cake of ice for three years without hating each other. Nansen had learned the art of patience from the Eskimos. He liked to tell the story of one group of natives who had travelled up a fiord seeking grass for hay. When they arrived at the field and found the grass too short to cut, they simply sat down and waited for it to grow.
Greely was not the only critic of the Norwegian’s scheme. When Nansen addressed the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1892, he found many old Arctic hands highly sceptical. George Nares, “in a friendly spirit,” indicated that he didn’t think there was such a thing as polar drift. Allen Young, knighted in 1877, believed there was land around the Pole that would frustrate Nansen’s plans. Sir Joseph Hooker, who had been to the Antarctic with James Clark Ross, thought the risks not worth taking. Another naval veteran, Admiral Sir George Richards, called it “an amateur nautical expedition.” Leopold M’Clintock, on the other hand, praised Nansen and called the project “the most adventurous programme ever brought under the notice of the Royal Geographical Society.”
Nansen himself was supremely confident. This time he got the financing he needed, most of it from his government but some from private subscribers who included the king himself. On June 24, 1893, from Christiania, Norway, to the cheers of the multitudes on shore, the little Fram set off. Everything about this tightly organized, carefully streamlined journey was in sharp contrast to the cumbersome expeditions of the British Navy. The Fram carried only thirteen men, each hand-picked by Nansen himself. There would be no feeling of rank or hierarchy. The work was to be apportioned evenly among Nansen, his captain, Otto Sverdrup, and the others.
The day was dull and gloomy, and Nansen’s own feelings matched the weather as he left his home and took the little launch out to the ship. He knew he faced years of exile in the frozen world. “Behind me lay all I held dear in life. And what before me? How many years should pass ere I should see it all again? What would I not have given at that moment to be able to turn back!” He could see his little daughter, Liv, framed in the window of his home, clapping her hands. How long would it be before he saw her again?
But in Nansen’s journal there are no entreaties to a protecting Deity, no fevered calls to ambition or even to national sentiment. “If, after all, we are on the wrong track, what then?” he wrote. “Only disappointed human hopes, nothing more. And even if we perish, what will it matter in the endless cycles of eternity?”
After coasting around Europe and Asia, the Fram, loaded with dogs, provisions, and equipment, entered the ice off the northeast coast of Siberia and was frozen into the pack on September 25, 1893. There followed two and a half years of monotony, uninterrupted by any of the hardships associated with so many earlier Arctic journeys, as the little vessel slowly drifted in a zigzag course for four hundred miles across the polar sea. The crew grew fat “like prize pigs,” in Nansen’s phrase. He was, he said, almost ashamed of the easy life “with none of the darkly painted sufferings of the long winter night, which are indispensable to a properly exciting Arctic expedition.”
The main worry, he wrote in a bantering aside, was that they would have nothing to write about when they got home. In spite of the hours spent in scientific study – soundings and temperatures to be taken, magnetic observations to be recorded – there was a sense of lassitude that Nansen found hard to shake. “Here I am whining like an old woman,” he wrote. “Did I not know all this before I started?” At one point he dreamed that he had got to the Pole – but had taken no accurate observations! To Nansen, a dedicated scientist, the dream was close to being a nightmare.
To while away the time, he read Darwin, Schopenhauer, and the published journals of the earlier explorers, and edited a weekly journal, Framjaa. He agreed with David Hume, the English philosopher, that “he is more excellent who can suit his temperament to any circumstances”; that, he wrote, was the philosophy he was practising at the moment. It wasn’t always easy: “I long to return to life.… The years are passing here.… Oh! at times this inactivity crushes one’s very soul; one’s life seems as dark as the winter night outside; there is sunlight on no other part of it except the past and the far, far distant future. I feel I must break through this deadness, this inertia and find some outlet for my energies.”
How ironic that Nansen, in the indestructible Fram, almost hoped for something close to a catastrophe to break the monotony in the same way that the earlier explorers had prayed for a break from the grinding ice and screaming storms that threatened to wreck their vessels! “Can’t something happen?” he asked. “Could not a hurricane come and tear up this ice, and set it to rolling in high waves like the open sea?” But no untoward incident marred the voyage. The ice could not nip or crush the round-sided vessel. When the pressure built up around her she was simply squeezed upward to ride easily over the surrounding floes.
One thing was becoming clear: she would not pass over the Pole. With that knowledge Nansen found the excuse he needed to shake himself free of inaction. Scientific considerations were thrown aside as he prepared for another audacious exploit. He could no more resist the lure of the Pole than could his predecessors. In January 1895, he made plans for a dash by dogteam to the top of the world. Nansen, the pragmatic scientist, had been replaced by Nansen, the romantic adventurer.
The “exulting feeling of triumph deep in the soul” that swept over him when he realized his ship had reached a record latitude was tempered by “a wave of sadness … like bidding farewell to a dear friend” – the Fram. Never again, he wrote, “shall I tread this snow-clad deck … never again sit in this friendly circle.” Nor would he be on hand when the ship burst the bonds of ice and turned her prow homeward.
He well knew the danger he faced in setting off across that ravaged and frozen sea with a single companion. He wrote that a chill crept over him every time he gazed upon the map of the polar world. “The distance before us seems so long and the obstacles in our path may be many.” Yet he remained both optimistic and philosophical. In the immensity of the polar night, under the glittering vault of stars, bathed in the light of the flaming aurora, he felt his own insignificance. “Toiling ant,” he wrote, “what matters it, whether you reach your goal … or not!” On the other hand, he reassured himself that “everything is too carefully prepared to fail now.”
He fashioned his own snowshoes: “smooth, tough and light … they shall be well rubbed with tar, stearine and tallow, and there shall be speed in them.” He had no doubt his legs were up to the test. His companion would be Hjalmar Johansen, “a plucky fellow [who] never gives in.” They would take three light sledges, twenty-eight dogs, three kayaks, and food for one hundred days. On March 14, after a couple of false starts, they set off across a hummocky desert that no man had trodden before.
By early April, the going was so hard that Nansen began to have doubts about continuing. He had already recognized that they couldn’t reach the Pole. As Parry had discovered almost seventy years before, the ice was moving south as Nansen and Johansen struggled north. Yet he hated to give up. On the verge of despair, he almost turned back, but something impelled him to go on. He gave himself one more day – and then another. He had already gone farther north than any previous explorer, but he wanted to squeeze out the last possible mile for his record. At last, on April 8, 1895, he quit. He had reached 86° 13′ N.
Nansen’s Arctic drift and polar attempt, 1893-96
Now began a race with time. The closest wintering point would be Franz Josef Land, more than four hundred miles to the southwest. Could they make it before they starved or dropped from exhaustion? The prospect was horrifying, for there was no straight or positive path to their goal. Lanes of water known to the whalers as “leads” opened up before them, making it impossible to reckon the length of a day’s march. “What would I not give,” Nansen wrote, “to have a certain way before me … and be free from this never ending anxiety and uncertainty.… I am so tired that I stagger on my snowshoes, and when I fall down, only wish to lie there to save myself the trouble of getting up again.…”
He was forced to kill his dogs, one by one, as food for both men and beasts, using a knife to save precious bullets. Yet there was no use for bullets; for almost three months they saw no living creature – only an endless expanse of drift ice. In May they began to scan the horizon longingly, seeking land. A fortnight passed; nothing.
Nansen couldn’t understand it: they should have reached Franz Josef Land by this time. Perhaps they were farther east than they had thought. “We do not know where we are and we do not know when this will end,” he wrote on June 11. And later: “Shall we reach land while yet we have food …? A quarter of a year we have been wandering in this desert of ice, and here we are still. When we shall see the end of it. I can no longer form any idea.…”
The snow turned wet and “as soft and loose as scum,” clinging like glue to the sledge runners and to their boots, slowing their march to a crawl and exhausting the dogs. By June 16 there were only three animals left. More leads of water barred their way. That meant that the two men were forced to launch their kayaks, unload the sledges and place them across the little boats, and repeat the process in reverse when they reached the far side. On the last day of June, Nansen grimly surveyed their position: “Here we lie far up in the north: two grim, black soot-stained barbarians, stirring up a mess of soup in a kettle and surrounded on all sides by ice; by ice and nothing else – shining and white, possessed of all the purity we ourselves lack.…”
For days they were immobilized by the stickiness of the snow. Then, in mid-July, when the temperature rose, they began to push forward again, climbing pressure ridges that seemed as high as mountains with clefts between, splashing through ponds and puddles, and paddling across the dark, jagged leads in their kayaks. At last, on July 24, Johansen remarked on a curious black stripe on the horizon. At first he thought it was a cloud, but as they drew closer Nansen thought he saw something rising above the never-ending white line on the horizon. Could it be land?
As they approached, they realized that for the first time in almost two years they were seeing something other than the endless ice-choked sea. To Nansen it was like a vision, a fairyland. “Drift white, it arches above the horizon like distant clouds, which one is afraid will disappear every minute.” But it took the pair another month to reach it in their kayaks. It was some time before they realized they had reached one of the islands north of Franz Josef Land.
Their ordeal was not over. The island was uninhabited; winter was closing in. They dug a three-foot hollow in the ground, piled stones above it, roofed it over with walrus skins, and, in this hovel, prepared to sit out the winter.
Since the land was teeming with walrus and polar bear they had plenty to eat. But the monotony was maddening. There was nothing to read but Nansen’s navigation table and pocket almanac: “… the sight of the printed letters gave one the feeling that there was, after all, a little bit of civilized man left.” They had exhausted all conversation and were reduced to playing fantasy games, talking of life at home and how they would spend the following winter. Most of the time they slept. Formal to the end, in the Norwegian manner they did not address each other by their Christian names.
On May 19, 1896, they headed south, hoping somehow to reach Spitzbergen. A month later they had crossed a frozen sound and reached one of the southern islands of Franz Josef Land. There, on the early morning of June 17, Nansen, having set a pot on the fire for breakfast, was about to creep back into his sleeping bag when he heard a sound from out of the mist above the screeching of auks and kittiwakes, a sound that reminded him of a barking dog. He dismissed it, but then he heard it again – a succession of barks. He woke Johansen, who didn’t believe him. Nansen, however, set off in the direction of the sound, finding what looked like dog tracks in the snow. Soon, he heard a series of canine yelps. For a moment, he thought he was in a dream, but then the sound of a human voice and a series of halloos caused his heart to pound and the blood to rush to his brain.
He stumbled forward through the ice ridges and saw in the distance, picking his way between the hummocks, the dark figure of a man approaching. This apparition wore an English checked suit and a pair of high rubber boots. The contrast was startling as the two raised their hats and greeted one another. The Englishman, shaved and well groomed, brought with him, in Nansen’s description, “a perfume of scented soap, perceptible to the wild man’s sharpened senses.” The wild man, clad in dirty rags, black with oil and soot, with long, uncombed hair and a shaggy beard, was unrecognizable.
But Nansen recognized the Englishman as Frederick Jackson, who had been commissioned by Alfred Harmsworth, the future Lord Northcliffe, to seek a land route to the North Pole by way of Franz Josef Land. During the brief conversation that followed Nansen took it for granted that Jackson knew who he was and was quite taken aback when the Englishman finally asked, “Aren’t you Nansen?”
Nansen acknowledged that he was, whereupon Jackson cried out, “By Jove, I am glad to see you!”
This unexpected and miraculous meeting was not without its ironies. For Nansen, in proving that the North Pole was surrounded by frozen ocean, had dashed all his rescuer’s hopes for a land expedition. The two Norwegians returned to Norway on Jackson’s ship to a hero’s welcome. The Fram arrived a week later in almost perfect condition. By drifting from Siberia to Spitzbergen she had proved Nansen right and his detractors dead wrong. En route home, Sverdrup in the Fram had stopped at Spitzbergen, where Salomon Andrée, the Swedish balloonist, was making his first attempt to reach the Pole by air. That winter, Nansen, who now knew more about ice conditions in the polar sea than any living man, tried to dissuade him from that mad project. But like so many others before him, Andrée had gone too far on his personal quest to be deterred by cold reason.
On July 29, 1895, while Nansen and Johansen were paddling desperately toward land, a solemn-looking man with a vast walrus moustache rose to his feet in the Great Hall of the Royal Colonial Institute in London to propose to the Sixth International Geographical Congress his audacious scheme to reach the North Pole by air.
Salomon Andrée’s audience, which included some of the most distinguished geographers and Arctic experts of the day, was mesmerized by his contagious enthusiasm, his mastery of scientific facts, and his bluntness. When a French scientist asked what Andrée would do if his balloon collapsed in the water before he had time to assemble his boat, Andrée replied with one word: “Drown.” But there was considerable scepticism. A.H. Markham, the veteran of the Nares expedition, now an admiral, opened the discussion on Andrée’s paper to point out that in a balloon nobody knew exactly where he was or what was under him. Even if he returned safely and said he had reached the Pole, he wouldn’t be able to say exactly where he’d been travelling. And what would happen if the balloon came down? How would he survive?
Adolphus Greely, now a general, engaged in a spirited debate with “our ballooning friend,” as he called him (just the slightest hint of condescension there), and tried to appeal to Andrée’s common sense, urging him to explore something more important. Greely was sceptical of the ability of any balloon to reach the Pole. He pointed out that the escaping gas – a perennial problem with all balloons at that time – would cause the canopy to lose half its carrying power before the voyage was over.
Andrée listened carefully to his critics and, when they were finished, met them head on. Staring down at the old Arctic hands, he asked, “When something happened to your ships, how did you get back? I risk three lives in what you call a foolhardy attempt and you risked how many? A shipload?”
Having thus twisted the knife in General Greely, Andrée now proceeded to extract, like a rabbit from a hat, his answer to a patronizing hint from Greely that he would have trouble raising funds for such a venture.
“He hopes I may succeed in trying to raise the money and at least make the attempt.”
He paused and gestured triumphantly with a swing of his arm.
“Well I haf got the money!”
This dramatic statement brought cheers from the assembly. Foolhardy or not, Andrée had convinced them that he would carry his scheme to completion.
Salomon Andrée was forty-one years old; he had been obsessed by aeronautics for most of his life. As a boy of ten he built a paper airship, which he set off by means of a percussion cap from a hill above his home town of Grenna. That was a mixed success. The balloon soared beautifully over the community, but when it landed it almost set fire to a neighbour’s house.
A prize-winning scholar with a degree from the Royal Institute in Stockholm and two years’ experience as a draughtsman, the prodigy, aged twenty-two, “bold, proud and just a little cocky,” went off to North America to the great Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In his spare hours he learned aeronautics from John E. Wise, an experienced aeronaut with four hundred balloon ascents to his credit.
Andrée was very much a child of his time – a dedicated believer in the scientific method, an optimist who had a burning faith in the future of science as the saviour of mankind, which, he wrote, “is still only half awake.” He wanted no truck with the supernatural; science, he was convinced, could explain everything. Back in Sweden, he was appointed to help staff his country’s polar station at Spitzbergen during the International Polar Year of 1882 – the year that saw Adolphus Greely stationed at Lady Franklin Bay.
Here the industrious young Swede investigated everything from the mysteries of electromagnetism to the properties of whirling snow. The tiniest problems fascinated him; nothing would do but that he try to solve them empirically. Was it, for instance, the polar darkness that affected the colour of the face after a long winter cooped up in a sunless realm? Or was the yellow tint that seemed to suffuse the features due simply to the fact that the investigators themselves were dazzled by the light? To prove his point, after the sun emerged, Andrée shut himself up indoors during the daylight hours for an entire month. “Dangerous? Perhaps; but what am I worth?” he asked. At the end of the period he came out to discover that his face really was a yellowish green, while those of his companions had begun to take on their normal hue.
On another occasion he decided to see how many eggs he could eat at a sitting. He ordered twoscore, boiled, along with bread, butter, and milk. “And now,” the waitress asked, deadpan, as she served this monstrous repast, “would you like something else to eat?”
This restless curiosity, this determination to demonstrate the truth or falsity of a theory by personal experimentation, lay behind Andrée’s obsession with a balloon voyage to the North Pole. One suspects that unlike his fellow explorers, he wasn’t driven so much by the dream of reaching the Pole as by his own curiosity. He wanted to find out if such a trip was possible.
He was a supreme optimist – anybody who thought a balloon would soar over the North Pole would have to have been – but there wasn’t a sentimental bone in his body. A cool rationalist, he was also a social reformer, not because his heart bled for the less fortunate but because he believed that technology would make the world a better and more efficient place. He lost his brief appointment to the municipal council of Stockholm because he advocated a reduction of the twelve-hour day to ten hours for men and eight for women. He was convinced that the new technology could and would eventually reduce the length of the work week, and he was right.
A rationalist, he was anti-war, anti-conservative, anti-organized religion. He was also strong willed, ruthlessly self-critical, and a thorough individualist who spoke of egoism as a principle of life and wrote that “to be one’s self is, according to my experience, one of the chief conditions for a relatively happy life.”
He was both energetic and imaginative, if humourless, but he was never impulsive. Everything must be carefully investigated, each step meticulously worked out. His drives were never sexual. He had a horror of romantic entanglement, ruthlessly stifling the smallest twinges of affection. He abhorred the idea of marriage because it involved “factors which cannot be arranged according to plan.” When he felt a “few heart leaves sprouting,” he said, “I resolutely pull them up by the roots.… I know that if I once let such a feeling live, it would become so strong that I dare not give in to it.” He channelled his affections toward his mother, who had been widowed when he was ten. A queer fish indeed – but then only a queer fish of Andrée’s boundless curiosity, self-confidence, iron will, and single-minded drive would have mounted such an expedition as took off from Spitzbergen in August of 1897.
In hindsight, Andrée’s balloon trip seems the most romantic and madcap of all Arctic adventures – romantic, because balloons were about to become all but obsolete and so are seen today as part of the nostalgia of a vanished era; madcap, because the expedition was clearly doomed from the start. Greely and Markham were right; but as the months wore on and Andrée prevailed, enthusiasm mounted and the world began to think them wrong. In the nineties, Andrée’s voyage was not seen as romantic but as futuristic. Then, the balloon represented the cutting edge of technological advance, along with the automobile, the wireless, the X-ray machine, and the bicycle. Sailing ships were already outmoded in this age of steam. But the balloon! Soaring majestically above the crowd, its canopy bulging with hydrogen gas, it heralded the dawn of a new age of flight. Ships had failed to reach the Pole; now science would take over.
Andrée spent three years between 1893 and 1896 testing himself by making nine balloon ascents. His craft, which he bought through a grant from a Swedish foundation, was named Svea for his native land. In it, he rose as high as three miles and, on a record trip, travelled for 240 miles. None of this, for Andrée, was sport. While other balloonists floated about, swilling champagne and enjoying the view, Salomon Andrée was taking observations – four hundred in all – on weather, air currents, humidity, and temperature while applying himself to the problem of steering. If he was to seek the Pole, he must learn to direct his vessel, a feat he solved in part through experiments with sails and trailing guide lines.
His polar project was born in March 1894, following a discussion with the great polar explorer Baron Nordenskiöld. The following year, he broached it to the Swedish Academy. The balloon, he announced confidently, would replace the sledge as the main method of Arctic travel. He followed that statement with a formidable set of statistics. He had worked out the principle of dirigibility; he knew exactly how his balloon should be made and what its volume should be (212,000 cubic feet), its construction (varnished double silk), the point of departure (Spitzbergen), the month (July), the exact route to the Pole, and the time required for the balloon to stay in the sky (thirty days). Andrée also had a careful budget: the journey could be made, he reckoned, for $34,500 – and that included the cost of his scientific instruments.
He pooh-poohed critics who were concerned that the weight of the snow or rain that would fall on the canopy would force the balloon to land. He had studied these conditions with his usual thoroughness and was convinced that they presented no problem. The weather was relatively warm in July; the precipitation was light; snow, if it fell at all, would quickly melt; rain would evaporate in the high altitudes.
Andrée finished his speech by appealing to the national honour of his audience – a device that so many previous explorers had used with effect. “Who, I ask, are better qualified to make such an attempt than we Swedes?” The world, he said, expected it of his country, which “must maintain the best traditions in the field of natural science in general, and, not least, in that of polar research in particular.”
He did not yet have the money, but he had the backing of Nordenskiöld and other scientists. Soon there appeared at his door an unexpected but welcome visitor in the person of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who contributed half the cost – an example that soon promoted the rest of the sum, including a handsome personal gift of eight thousand dollars from King Oscar himself. Thus Andrée was able to inform the sceptical General Greely the following year, “I haf the money!”
He reached Spitzbergen in the summer of 1896. The canopy of the great balloon, named the Eagle, was spread out on June 23. It took four days to inflate it with hydrogen gas, produced on the spot from sulphuric acid and zinc. Now it towered seventy-five feet above the heads of the small group of men who had come to help. When the observation platform and wicker gondola were added, the total height was just under one hundred feet.
Andrée and his two companions were ready to leave. But the wind was wrong, and as the days went by gales sprang up. He began to despair of taking off. Suddenly, on August 14, to the astonishment of all, a strange ship arrived out of the fog. This was the Fram. From Otto Sverdrup, Andrée learned that Nansen was somewhere to the north, heading for the Pole by dogteam. It was clearly too late, at this point, to attempt the journey by balloon. The Eagle was deflated and the party returned to Stockholm, later to learn that Nansen had been unsuccessful. The prize still remained to be gained.
That winter Andrée sought out Nansen for meteorological advice. Nansen told him bluntly that the prevailing winds were not favourable nor were the weather conditions. He wrote a subtle letter to his fellow explorer, praising him for his courage in abandoning the project and suggesting that he display the same courage again “to await the favorable moment and not start until you are sure it has come.”
Nansen, in fact, thought the project foolhardy and was trying to tell Andrée that he should have the guts to quit, but Andrée was now trapped in the momentum of his own enthusiasm. He told Nansen that he would not be able to show the same courage a second time; people were calling him a coward for abandoning the flight in 1896 – or at least he thought they were. Now he was determined to press on. Ballooning was very much in vogue, as the stampede to the new Klondike gold fields would soon demonstrate. All sorts of imaginative schemes would be hatched in 1897 to reach the gold fields by air. In New York, one Leo Stevens, Jr. (who called himself Don Carlos Stevens), was planning to build the largest balloon in the world. In Kalamazoo, another entrepreneur would announce a regular fortnightly balloon route to Dawson City. In Dublin, an Irish gold seeker claimed to be building a balloon big enough to take fifty passengers to the Klondike. In the long run nothing came of any of these schemes – but ballooning, as a practical method of travel, was very much in the public mind. How could Andrée call it quits?
He arrived in Spitzbergen in May 1897, much earlier than the previous year. It did not help that one of his crew from the year before – Nils Ekholm, his former boss on the International Polar Year Expedition – had declined to sign on again. Ekholm didn’t think the Eagle would retain enough of its gas to complete the journey; recently married, he was also reluctant to leave his wife. But Nils Strindberg, a twenty-five-year-old physicist from an old Stockholm family, stayed with the expedition even though he too was engaged to be married immediately on his return. Ekholm’s place was taken by Knut Frankel, a twenty-seven-year-old sportsman, gymnast, and civil engineer.
The Eagle was inflated early in July. Forty tons of iron filings, thirty-nine tons of sulphuric acid, and seventy-five tons of water were required to produce enough hydrogen to inflate the canopy. By July 11, everything was ready. A stiff wind from the east was rattling the slats of the wooden structure in which the balloon was held captive. Andrée and his two associates were eager to be off. When the wind changed direction at last, Andrée gave the word to prepare for takeoff.
The balloon was ready in a few hours. Thirty-two carrier pigeons, which would relay messages to civilization, were taken on board. Twelve cork buoys with Swedish flags that could be dropped into the sea were also loaded. The scientific instruments hung from a wooden ring three feet above the observation platform. Three hundred canvas pockets in the netting held enough provisions for four months as well as a collapsible boat, a sled, and a cookstove that could be lowered into the gondola.
In the words of his French assistant, Alexis Machuron, Andrée remained, as always, “calm, cold, and impassible, not a trace of emotion … visible on his countenance, nothing but an expression of firm resolution and an indomitable will.” Andrée’s enthusiastic young companions could not know that for some time the explorer had been assailed by doubts and forebodings. He had prepared his will, the preamble to which was uncharacteristically gloomy. “I have a premonition,” he wrote, “that this terrible journey will lead to my death.” Otto Sverdrup, who was on hand that day, was one of the few who sensed Andrée’s uncertainty. It seemed to Sverdrup that the balloonist had little faith in the success of the expedition.
But the die was cast. Andrée was the prisoner of his own publicity. As Sverdrup put it, “he felt he ought to start as he and his companions had made all preparations.” He could not in honour turn back. The absolute certainty with which he had planned and expounded on his aerial Odyssey had convinced the lay world, if not the scientists, that he could bring it off. “The departure is decided upon,” he said, and that was that.
There were a few last farewells. Strindberg was suddenly overcome with emotion as he consigned to a friend his last letter to his fiancée, whose photograph he carried next to his heart. Andrée dispatched some hasty telegrams. Then he tore himself away from the embraces of his comrades, took his position on the wicker bridge of the gondola, and shouted, “Let’s go.”
The group on the ground watched as the three men cut away the ballast bags. A few minutes later, all ties were severed and the great vessel soared into the sky. Dragged by the wind a mere hundred metres above the sea, it suddenly dipped in the onslaught of the air currents pouring down from the mountains behind. The onlookers watched with horror as the gondola touched the water; then, to their relief, the balloon slowly began to rise. There was one unfortunate portent: the guidelines that had been designed to help the vessel tack in the wind caught on some rocks and were torn away. But to this the ground party paid little attention as they waved handkerchiefs at the disappearing sphere, travelling straight north. Machuron, the balloon expert, was sure that if the balloon kept that direction it would reach the Pole in two days.
The Eagle travelled on, its size diminishing to that of an egg in the eyes of the onlookers, until it cleared a low ridge of hills where it stood out clearly for several minutes against the frost blue of the northern sky. Then it was gone, never to be seen again.
Andrée and his two companions were swallowed by the Arctic. Apart from a single pigeon, which returned with a brief message of his position on July 13, no hint of their fate was revealed for another thirty-three years, in spite of a series of relief expeditions. Then, in the summer of 1930, a whaling ship discovered a trio of skeletons on an ice-sheathed rock known as White Island, just off the main island of the Spitzbergen archipelago. From Andrée’s diary and other records, members of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography were able to piece together and publish most of the story of what happened to Salomon August Andrée and his two companions.
Balloon travel is one of the most peaceful of all pursuits. When the three explorers set off from Spitzbergen they must have felt the sense of elation that comes over every balloonist as he slides silently through the skies. Because the balloon is moving with the wind, there is no wind, not even the sound of the wind. Andrée once remarked that from the distance of a mile in the sky he could easily hear the barking of a dog on the ground below.
Andrée’s ill-fated balloon expedition, 1897
But he had not reckoned on the sensitivity of the Eagle – indeed of all balloons – to changes in temperature and to the moisture content of the surrounding air. In the sunlight, when the inflating gas heated and expanded, the balloon rose half a mile. But when the Eagle entered clouds and mist began to gather on the canopy, the weight of the water and the change in the temperature caused it to drop to a point where the broken guidelines touched the sea – a circumstance that would doom the expedition within three days.
By early morning on July 12, the Eagle had taken on a character of its own. It dropped; it rose; it stood still; it gathered speed, slowed down, moved on, changed direction. The lack of guidelines made it difficult to steer. The only real control that Andrée and his comrades had was when they jettisoned some ballast to cause a temporary rise. Before the flight ended, they had thrown out 680 pounds.
At one point when they were caught in the dead centre of a cyclonic disturbance (the so-called “eye” of the cyclone) the balloon didn’t move at all. When it dropped and the shortened guidelines touched the ground, the weight was automatically decreased by that portion of the lines dragging on the ice. That caused the balloon to rise again briefly. It also meant that the period of free flight was over. From this point on the Eagle was bumping along above the ice, dragging the lines below it.
As the journey progressed through fog and cloud, both water and snow began to weigh down the canopy. By the afternoon of July 12, the gondola was also being dragged along the ice. By dinnertime, Andrée was recording eight touches in thirty minutes. Soon the wicker gondola was leaving its mark on the ice every five hundred feet. At ten that evening, the heavily weighted-down Eagle came to a dead stop, with everything dripping wet. At midnight her three exhausted passengers decided to grab some blessed rest.
Now Andrée allowed himself a few rare philosophical musings. “Is it not a little strange,” he wrote, “to be floating here above the Polar Sea. To be the first that have floated here in a balloon. How soon, I wonder, shall we have successors? Shall we be thought mad or will our example be followed? I cannot deny that all three of us are dominated by a feeling of pride. We think we can well face death, having done what we have done. Isn’t it all, perhaps, the expression of an extremely strong sense of individuality which cannot bear the thought of living and dying like a man in the ranks, forgotten by coming generations? Is this ambition?”
For thirteen hours, the balloon hung motionless, anchored by a guide rope hooked under a block of ice. Here was irony. The wind had changed direction during the night. Had the guide rope not been caught, the Eagle would almost certainly have been blown back to northern Spitzbergen. But at 10:55 on the morning of July 13, the wind reversed again; the balloon loosed itself with a jerk and resumed its northerly flight. The latitude at that moment was 82° N.
The fog increased. Heavy with hoarfrost, the balloon dragged its car along the ice hummocks. The concussions were so frequent that Strindberg became seasick. More ballast went over the side, and the balloon rose. With the fog growing thicker, the car was again pounded violently against an endless expanse of ice, veined by dark channels and pocked by pools of melt water.
Andrée realized that this desperate journey could not continue. He began to search about for a place to land, but it was past seven on the morning of the fourteenth before he found one. His diary entries, which were becoming increasingly brief, simply reported: “We jumped out of the balloon.”
Exhausted, they could not afford to rest for another seven hours. There was packing to be done; a camp must be set up; careful scientific records had to be kept. They had reached latitude 82° 56′ N. Two hundred miles from the nearest land, they were precariously camped on a sea filled with drifting ice. From the roof of the car of the fallen Eagle, Andrée looked out on a fearful expanse of white. Peering through the mist, in all directions he could see only a chaos of twisting, moving, shifting ice blocks, connected into vast fields, each one honeycombed with dark channels and small lakes. The balloon would have to be abandoned.
By evening, the fog had closed in so tightly they were marooned for a week. They had packed each of the three sledges with four hundred pounds of provisions and equipment, and there was also the collapsible boat. When the fog lifted on July 22, 1897, they set off, hoping to reach Cape Flora on the Franz Josef Land archipelago, some two hundred and ten miles to the southeast. There, where Nansen had wintered successfully, was a large supply depot. On July 25, the birthday of his fiancée, Anna, Strindberg wrote an optimistic letter. His only worry, he told her, was that they would not reach home by autumn and then she would worry. “You can imagine how I am tortured by the thought of it, too, but not for my own sake, for now I do not mind if I have hardships, as long as I can come home at last.”
The going was dreadful, the fog sometimes so thick they could scarcely spot the dark leads that blocked their passage. On July 31, in one six-hour period they were forced to ferry the sledges over ten such channels. Even on solid ice they were often floundering through snow up to their knees. By that time they had jettisoned part of their load. Five days later they realized that the intervening sea current made it impossible to continue eastward toward Cape Flora. The ice drift was taking them west faster than they had been able to march toward the east. On August 4, Andrée decided to abandon the attempt to reach Franz Josef Land and change direction in hopes of reaching Seven Island off the north coast of Spitzbergen, where, he knew, a smaller depot was available. The journey westward, he figured, would take six or seven weeks.
Their meals were spartan, even when they shot an occasional gull and, on one memorable day, a fat bear cub. Before them, the frozen world stretched endlessly to the blurred line of the horizon. Here were mile-wide leads that took four hours to cross. Here were vast jungles of ice hillocks, separated by frozen pools, stretching for miles. And then, by contrast, a webbing of melt-water ponds, so shallow that the boat could not be launched. The travellers, suffering now from dysentery, hunger, and lameness, were forced to splash their way through.
The early August days had been so warm that Andrée wished he could remove his jumper. But as the month dragged on the temperature dropped. Frankel injured his left foot and couldn’t haul his sledge; the others took turns shuttling it forward. Worst of all, the sea currents refused to co-operate. By September 9 the drift had again taken them eighteen miles in the wrong direction. They had lost all hope of reaching their goal.
Worn out and ill, their sledges broken down, their inadequate clothing in tatters, they decided to seek out a level floe, make camp, and let the drift take them south. Strindberg found a hollowed-out piece of ice, which he converted into a hut by building a ramp of ice blocks. There, fortified at last by fresh seal and bear meat, some of which they devoured raw, they rested.
On September 17, they spotted land – a low, whalebacked island, almost completely smothered by a vast glacier. As the weather grew worse and the Fahrenheit thermometer registered eighteen degrees of frost, the drifting floe took them round to the island’s south side. On the night of October 4, in the bitter cold, their precarious raft broke into splinters not far from shore.
From the fragmentary and almost illegible notes left by Andrée and Strindberg, the investigators pieced together a brief account of the expedition’s last days. Somehow they made it to shore. They put up a tent on a rocky hill above the beach and crouched in it, half protected from the howling wind, snow, and sleet that whirled about them. They tried to build a snow house and managed to pull some driftwood up near the tent. But after October 7 there was only silence.
In 1930, when the skeletons of the missing men were discovered on White Island, it was clear that none had had the strength to build a proper shelter or to unload the boat, which was found, with one of the sledges, drawn up on the beach. Cold and exhaustion had done for all three. Strindberg had apparently died first; his body was found, buried by his surviving comrades in Arctic fashion between two rocks. The other skeletons were found not far from the beached boat. The investigators guessed that Andrée had been the last to die. He had, apparently, sat down quietly in the snow, leaned back against a rocky projection, and, impassive and unemotional to the end, quietly and perhaps gratefully awaited death.
Early in October the following year – 1898 – Otto Sverdrup, still the captain of the Fram, had a chilly and oddly revealing encounter on the shores of a fiord in the east coast of Ellesmere Island.
Sverdrup was a dedicated explorer. The race to reach the North Pole was growing in intensity, but to Sverdrup it was little more than an international sporting event. He had a more positive program in mind. With Nansen’s blessing, he had set off in the Fram to chart the maze of unknown islands west of Ellesmere – an undertaking that would occupy four years, unlock the secrets of 100,000 square miles of unexplored territory, enshrine his name on the map of the High Arctic, and make his reputation as one of the greatest explorers of his era.
On this cold, clear October day, Sverdrup and his companions were preparing a meal in a tent pitched on the bank of the fiord. The Fram was nearby, not far from the entrance to the frozen waters of Kane Basin. Suddenly, in the distance, somebody spotted two fur-clad figures seated on an Eskimo sledge drawn by eight dogs. Who could they be? No natives lived on this inhospitable island. Sverdrup guessed at once that this must be Robert Peary, the American explorer, whose name was already becoming a legend in the North.
A few moments later Peary and his native companion drew up. It was not a propitious encounter.
“Are you Sverdrup?” Peary asked, curtly.
Sverdrup acknowledged that he was.
“My ship is frozen in at Cape Hawks,” said Peary. “There is no way of getting through Robeson Channel. It has frozen fast.” Peary, who was obsessively jealous and secretive, volunteered no further information. He was planning to go north to Fort Conger, Greely’s old headquarters, to use it as a base for an assault on the North Pole, but he had no intention of telling anything to Sverdrup. Peary wrote to his wife that the meeting between the two was short “but not effusive.” The lack of cordiality was all on Peary’s part. The genial Sverdrup would have been astonished to know that the American considered him a rival in his drive to the Pole. He offered Peary a cup of coffee. One of his own men was already grinding the beans. Peary refused, and a moment later he was off. The meeting was so short that Sverdrup later said he’d hardly had time to take off his mittens.
Later, aboard his ship, the Windward, pacing angrily up and down his cabin, Peary turned to his black servant, Matthew Henson, and cried, “Sverdrup may at this minute be planning to beat me to Fort Conger! … I can’t let him do it! I’ll get to Conger before Sverdrup if it kills me!” It almost did.
No other explorer in Arctic history was ever as single-minded in the pursuit of his goal as Robert Edwin Peary, no other as paranoid in his suspicion and even hatred of those he considered rivals and interlopers, no other as ruthless, as arrogant, as insensitive, or as self-serving. Of all the bizarre and eccentric human creatures who sought the Arctic Grail, Peary is the least lovable. He toadied to his superiors and rode roughshod over those beneath him, some of whom – as even an admiring biographer has admitted – reached the finish of an expedition with murder in their hearts. Yet it may be that these very qualities were the key to Peary’s success. Relentless ambition drove him on where others might have faltered. Even aside from the North Pole, he must be given his due as one of the greatest explorers of the period.
But it was the Pole that had obsessed him since early manhood and perhaps even before that. He was not really concerned about scientific discoveries or in charting the unknown. He had little interest in flora and fauna. His prime purpose was to reach this single goal before anybody could “forestall” him – a much-used Peary word that, with its suggestion of underhanded tactics, hints at his paranoia. And even the conquest of the Pole was not, in Peary’s view, an end in itself but only a means to an end. Peary hungered for fame and fortune; he made no bones about that. The Pole, he knew, would give him both.
When Sverdrup encountered him in October 1898, Peary was far from attaining his life’s ambition. At forty-two he was a formidable figure, six feet tall, erect and strapping, big chested and hard muscled. There was an animal fierceness about him – the shaggy red beard, the tangled mat of hair, the steely grey eyes, the flared nostrils and strong, almost wolfish teeth – enhanced by the furs that enveloped him. He loved to be photographed in those furs, glowering fiercely into the camera, the quintessential Arctic explorer. These were studio portraits, carefully posed often in the heat of summer; but there was nothing phony about them, for they caught the real Peary – implacable, relentless, savagely ambitious.
As a child he had been inspired by Elisha Kane and the tales of the polar regions in Kane’s “wonderful book.” In those early years he had spoken with a lisp; he fought hard to rid himself of this seemingly effeminate affliction and almost succeeded, so that in his manhood he was able to conceal it by speaking slowly and distinctly. Only in his rages did the impediment betray him. It was one of many examples of his drive toward self-improvement.
He joined the U.S. Navy as a civil engineer. In spite of the fact that he would later be called “Commander Peary,” and finally “Rear Admiral Peary,” he was never a line officer. His proper title was always “Civil Engineer Peary,” but he didn’t care for that.
From the beginning of his career he knew what he wanted. At twenty-four, he wrote: “I would like to acquire a name which could be an open sesame to circles of culture and refinement.” At twenty-five he told his mother, “I must be the peer or superior of those about me to be comfortable.…” Peary was not a team player; he, and he alone, must always get the credit.
In 1886, after a stint in Nicaragua, Peary the civil engineer obtained a summer’s leave from the Navy and some funds from his mother, set aside his plans for an advantageous marriage, and attempted the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap at its widest point.
It was a failure. After twenty-six days he had managed to travel less than one hundred nautical miles and was forced to return. But it was not in his nature to countenance failure. In all of Peary’s Arctic adventures, he always managed to emerge with some trophy, real or imagined, that would carry with it the aura of success. He was later to downplay this first effort by calling it merely a “reconnaissance.” But he also claimed that he had penetrated the ice cap “a greater distance than any white man previously.” That was a shaky boast and a mean-spirited one. Baron Adolph Erik Nordenskiöld had attempted the crossing three years before Peary. Two of his Laplanders had gone farther than the American. Peary, who hated giving credit to anyone else, no doubt felt they were not “white men.”
When he returned, Peary boasted in a letter to his mother that the trip had “brought my name before the world.” He explained: “I will next winter be one of the foremost in the highest circles in the capital, and make powerful friends with whom I can shape my future.” And then he added the phrase so often quoted by admirers and detractors alike: “Remember, Mother, I must have fame.”
He would have it at anyone’s expense. In 1889, when he learned that Nansen had made the Greenland crossing at a narrower point farther south, he minimized the Norwegian’s achievement and tried to claim publicly that Nansen had, in effect, stolen his plan, which he had published in 1886. Nansen, however, had published his own theories about the crossing as early as 1882 and in more detail in 1883. Nansen’s achievement, Peary wrote to a friend, “in forestalling my work was a serious blow to me.” As for Nansen’s book, Peary dismissed it as a pretentious affair. The original material it contained, he said, “was hardly greater than I obtained … Nansen profited much by my experience.”
Peary married his fiancée, Josephine Diebitsch, the daughter of a Smithsonian savant, and immediately set about planning a more ambitious expedition. He would cross northwest Greenland over the ice cap and continue into unknown territory to the north. It was not known for certain at that time that Greenland was an island. For all anybody knew, that mysterious realm might extend all the way to the Pole. Peary meant to find out and in the process scout a possible polar route.
He had immersed himself in Arctic lore. He had read all the journals of the explorers and was prepared to learn from them. He had already concluded that the time had arrived for an organizational change in polar exploration. “The old method of large parties and several ships has been run into the ground.… The English, with true John Bull obstinacy, still stick to the old plan.” Peary was more struck by the example of Frederick Schwatka of the U.S. Cavalry, who in 1878 had found further Franklin relics on King William Island and had adopted the idea of a small party depending largely on native techniques. (One of those natives was Ebierbing, Charles Hall’s old companion Joe.) That, Peary wrote, “deserves to be recorded as the American plan.” It was, of course, not new. Rae, Kennedy, and Hall, among others, had helped to pioneer it. But Peary, with his meticulous preparation and his use of hand-picked and personally trained natives, took it several steps farther.
By June 1891, he was ready to go north again. He had spent the intervening years raising ten thousand dollars for the venture – not an easy task after the twin tragedies of the Greely and the Jeannette expeditions. He sailed on June 21 with seven companions, including Matthew Henson, his black body-servant, John Verkoeff, a young geologist who contributed two thousand dollars to the venture, Eivend Astrup, an enthusiastic young Norwegian who hero-worshipped his leader, and a genial Brooklyn doctor, Frederick Albert Cook, whose name would forever be intertwined with Peary’s. The most controversial member of the party was Josephine Peary, the explorer’s tall, attractive, and strong-willed wife, the first white woman ever to venture into the Arctic. Many disapproved of a woman accompanying a dangerous expedition, but Peary believed, as the Eskimos did, that women were an important source of morale on any journey. Indeed, he advocated that his men take native women with them whenever possible.
The party wintered on the Greenland coast. On April 30, 1892, Peary set off on a sledge journey that more than equalled any earlier one. With only Astrup as his companion for most of the way, he cut across the northwest corner of the great island – a distance of some five hundred miles – to reach what he believed to be its northernmost point. In doing so he established its insularity – or so he thought. He reached a large indentation in the coast, which he named Independence Bay, and climbed an escarpment he called Navy Cliff. From here, he claimed, he saw a channel marking Greenland’s most northerly boundary and beyond that a vast new land. He named the channel Peary Channel and the new land Peary Land. Astrup, in his own account of the arrival at Independence Bay and the scaling of Navy Cliff, made no mention of the Peary Channel – and with good reason: it did not exist. But a generation passed before Peary’s error was discovered. Greenland actually continued on for some distance. Peary, in spite of his claim, had not crossed the island.
These phantom discoveries may have been the results of wishful thinking, a weakness that dogged more than one Arctic explorer. Even without them, Peary had made a remarkable trek. In a singular feat of endurance he and Astrup had managed the longest sledge journey of its kind – more than 1,100 miles over a period of eighty-five days. Nansen, by contrast, had gone 235 miles in forty days, and Peary’s speeds were double those of Nansen. With this one feat, Peary had vaulted into the ranks of the world’s leading explorers.
Peary’s two expeditions across Greenland, 1892 and 1895
The excursion had not been without its tensions. The independent-minded John Verkoeff had chafed under Peary’s authoritarian command and even more under Mrs. Peary’s domination. “I will never go home in the same ship with that man and that woman,” he told Dr. Cook. That was to be his undoing. During a winter trip around Inglefield Gulf, he left the main party, never to be seen again.
Peary reached the United States determined to return to the Arctic as soon as feasible. He set himself a gruelling pace on the lecture circuit, giving 165 speeches in 103 days. The sizable fees – as much as two thousand dollars a day – augmented by additional contributions from wealthy supporters funded the expedition that left for Greenland in the summer of 1893. This time the amiable Dr. Cook declined to be a member of the Peary party; he had asked his leader’s permission to publish a report on his ethno-biological studies, but Peary, who wanted no rival for the public’s attention, turned him down. So Cook quit. Like all members of all of Peary’s expeditions, Cook’s contract was specific: Peary, he had agreed, would be sole commander, his instructions and directions would be law, no one but Peary would write or lecture or give out any information about the expedition, and all journals and diaries were his property and must be turned over to him.
Peary’s ship, the Falcon, slipped across the treacherous Melville Bay in an astonishing twenty-four hours and dropped the party off at Bowdoin Bay in Inglefield Gulf on the Greenland coast. There Peary set up his headquarters, which he named Anniversary Lodge; and there, on September 12, Jo Peary gave birth to a blue-eyed baby girl, Marie Ahnighito, a curiosity for the Eskimos, who travelled for miles to see the “Snow Baby,” as they called her.
These were the same Etah Eskimos that John Ross in 1818 had named the Arctic Highlanders and who had, over the best part of a century, aided and succoured so many exploring parties. Peary called them the Polar Eskimos and adopted a proprietary attitude toward them. They were “my Eskimos” or sometimes “my children.” He boasted that he had trained them in what became known as the Peary System. But if Peary trained the Eskimos, it was also true that the Eskimos trained Peary.
Peary’s attitude toward these natives was ambivalent. He liked and admired them. He did not believe, as the early explorers had believed, that they should be Christianized or civilized – quite the opposite. Nor was he in the least offended, as others had been, by their morals. In fact, he took an Eskimo mistress. She bore him a child, and he even published a nude photograph of her in one of his books, horrifying several of his wealthy benefactors.
On the other hand, Peary always thought them an inferior race. Like the dogs who pulled his sledges, they were a means to an end. “I have often been asked,” he wrote, “ ‘Of what use are the Eskimos to the world?’ They are too far removed to be of any value for commercial enterprises; and furthermore they lack ambition. They have no literature, nor, properly speaking, any art. They value life only as does a fox, or a bear, purely by instinct. But let us not forget that these people, trustworthy and hardy, will yet prove their value to mankind. With their help, the world shall discover the Pole.”
Like Matthew Henson, his black servant, whom he once upbraided for failing to call him “Sir,” the Eskimos, to Peary, were no more than tools. Henson had learned to speak their tongue, even though he was paid less than his white companions (forty dollars a month in contrast to eighty or one hundred). But Peary, in all his years in the Arctic, never learned the language of “his” Eskimos, although from time to time some of his supporters hinted that he was fluent. Nor did he produce a single useful ethnographical or archaeological study.
On the other hand, Peary must be credited with adapting native methods to modern sledging parties to a remarkable degree. More than any previous explorer, he understood the value of dogs. Others had been forced on occasion to eat their animals; Peary planned to eat his, thus extending the range of his light, flexible sledges. Like Rae, he carried no tents, relying entirely on snow houses. He didn’t pack a sleeping bag, either; he wore it, as the fur-clad natives did. He lived off the land wherever possible, with the help of experienced native hunters. And he even improved the quality and the flavour of the pemmican that was still the staple food in polar exploration.
None of these techniques, however, was very effective in March 1894, when he tried and failed to cross the Greenland ice cap. He managed 128 miles and then was forced to give up with nothing to show for his efforts. But he refused to admit defeat. The others might return gratefully to America when the ship arrived, but he, Peary, insisted on staying another winter to try again – alone, if necessary. He had a brief reunion with his wife when he returned to the Greenland coast and then bid her and all his crew good-bye, save for the faithful Henson and a young man named Hugh Lee, who volunteered to remain.
It is impossible not to admire Peary’s strength of will during these last moments of leave-taking. It could not have been an easy parting. On that melancholy morning of August 26, when the ship left, he wrote that he had “eyes only for the white handkerchief fluttering from the port of Jo’s cabin.” But those last good-byes were to him no sadder than his recent failure. “So ends with the vanishing ship the ill-omened first half of my expedition.…” he declared. That night he found he could not bear to sleep in the room that the two had shared; instead, he rolled himself up in a couple of deerskins in the dining room.
On April 1, 1895, Peary set off again for the northwest tip of Greenland, again seeking a possible route to the North Pole. “The winter has been a nightmare to me,” he wrote to Jo before taking off, “… the cold, damp, frost-lined room has made me think of the tomb. The only bright moments have been when I was thinking of you.… I have kissed the place where your head rested, have kissed my blue-eyed baby’s socks, and I carry with me next my heart your last letter.…”
The struggle would be gruelling. Almost at the outset he discovered that the caches he had laid out for the journey could not be found. At the foot of the great ice cap he sent his four native companions back to the coast. With Henson, Lee, and forty-two dogs, he would attempt the main journey alone. When the trio reached the crest, five hundred miles from Anniversary Lodge, they had eleven animals left and not enough food to ensure a return journey. Peary determined to continue towards Independence Bay. Lee was forced to drop out; the other two pushed on. At last, fortified by a kill of muskoxen, they reached Independence Bay and climbed Navy Cliff, which Peary and Astrup had first climbed in 1892. In the distance, Peary declared later, he could see a line of black, precipitous cliffs and a towering mountain, seventy-five miles due north, which he named Mount Wishtar.
But where was Peary Channel, which he claimed to have seen on that previous expedition? He made no mention of it in his later reports, although, he said, the day was clear – clearer, in fact, than it had been on that previous occasion. Later explorations would confirm that there was no Peary Channel. Was Peary confused by another mirage? Was it a figment of his imagination? It is hardly possible that he could have made the same mistake twice, but if he realized that it was a mistake he kept quiet about it. The territory occupied by the “Peary Channel,” which in his words “marked the northern boundary of the mainland of Greenland,” was later found to contain high land. On two separate trips Peary didn’t mention seeing that. Instead, he again insisted that he had confirmed the insularity of Greenland and for that the world had only his word. Henson, who was “as loyal and responsive to my will as the fingers of my right hand,” could not read instruments. Was Peary actually where he claimed to be on two occasions? If so, was he indulging in a form of wishful thinking? Or, realizing his previous error, did he now gloss over it rather than admit failure? Whatever the answer, he was dead wrong.
A race to the west coast followed – a literal race with death in which they made incredible speeds, travelling more than twenty miles a day. Lee, whom they picked up on the return journey, found it difficult to keep up the pace. He urged Peary to leave him to die, but Peary would have none of that. “We will all get home or none of us will,” he declared. It was a close thing; they stumbled into camp half starved and demented, with just one dog left alive. Lee later said he thought Peary seemed to want to avoid having to go home a failure; he had been strangely reckless about the great crevasses that could easily have swallowed him.
For he had failed. His only real discovery was negative. This was obviously not the route to the North Pole. Peary’s mind seemed to have been affected: he actually toyed with the suspicion that Henson was trying to poison him. He rid himself of that fantasy, but his shattered dreams could not be dismissed so easily.
He must bring back some sort of trophy to show that these two years had not been in vain. In the summer of 1894 he had set out to find the mysterious “iron mountain” that had been a legend among explorers since John Ross’s day. Ross, in 1818, had discovered that of all the Greenland Eskimos he encountered, only his “Arctic Highlanders” were using implements made of iron. The iron came from a “mountain” some twenty-five miles from his anchorage, but although Ross learned the exact latitude and longitude of the find, he was unable to take the time to seek it out. A piece of this iron, brought back to England and analysed, proved to have come from a meteorite.
There was, in fact, very little real mystery and no “mountain,” in spite of the legends. Peary, too, was convinced that the iron was meteoric. There appeared to be three sources, shaped, according to the natives, like a woman, a dog, and a tent, and all hurled from the sky by a supernatural power. The Eskimos were reluctant to take Peary to the site; it was to them a sacred spot and, until traders arrived, had been their only source of metal. In the end, however, they revealed the secret. Digging in the snow, Peary found the “woman,” a shapeless mass of brown ore. He scrawled his initials on it and, with his polar route attempt a failure, was able in the summer of 1895 to raise both the three-ton “woman” and the three-hundred-pound “dog” meteorites and take them back to the United States.
These prizes were not enough for Peary. The only real purpose of his two-year absence from civilization, the route to the Pole, still eluded him, and he was now forty years old. “I shall never see the North Pole unless some one brings it here,” the dispirited explorer told the press on his return. “In my judgement such work requires a far far younger man than I.”
Nonetheless he went back to Greenland on two summer journeys in 1896 and 1897 and in the second year managed to bring back the largest meteorite of all, the one the Eskimos called “the tent.” It weighed 37.5 tons. Peary explained away his apparent theft of three priceless relics by pointing out that the natives no longer needed the iron, thanks to the presence of white traders (of whom he was the leading figure). Besides, he explained, he had rewarded “my faithful Eskimos” with biscuits, guns, knives, and ammunition. It was certainly a profitable bargain. Some time later Jo Peary sold all three meteorites to the American Museum of Natural History for forty thousand dollars.
Nor were these Peary’s only trophies. Dr. Franz Boas, the famous anthropologist, then assistant curator of the museum, had suggested that Peary also bring an Eskimo back for study. Peary, who in 1896 had thought nothing of digging up the graves of newly dead natives (some of whom were his friends) and selling the bodies to the museum for profit, obliged in 1897 with no fewer than six. These included Nuktaq, son of the great Kalutunah (Hayes’s friend), and Qisuk, whom Peary called the Smiler, two of his best hunters and dog drivers, together with Nuktaq’s wife, Atanga, his twelve-year-old daughter, Aviak, Qisuk’s son, Minnik, and a sixth youngster, Usaakassak.
As Minnik was later to describe it, “they promised us nice warm houses in the sunshine land, and guns and knives and needles and many other things.” These promises were not kept. The six Eskimos were housed in the basement of the museum, where they soon developed colds that turned into pneumonia. By May 1898, Nuktaq, Qisuk, Atanga, and Aviak were dead and their bodies had been turned over to the museum for examination and study. To keep this knowledge from young Minnik, the museum’s scientists held a bizarre “funeral,” using a log in place of a corpse, in Boas’s words “to appease the boy, and keep him from discovering that his father’s body had been chopped up and the bones placed in the collection of the institution.” Peary appears to have paid very little attention to these tragedies. Certainly in the book he published about his two-year stint in Greenland there is no mention of the incident; on the contrary, he referred to his two male hunters as if they were still alive in the Arctic.
Usaakassak managed to get home, but it was years before Minnik returned. At first he didn’t want to go; later, Peary refused to take him in the belief that it was too late for him to acclimate himself to Eskimo life after the long term in New York. Certainly when Minnik finally reached Greenland, some years after the New York World broke his story, he found he could not fit in. He went back to the United States in 1916, drifted from one job to another, and died of influenza in the fall of 1918.
While his Eskimo friends were dying in Bellevue Hospital, Peary was preparing for another onslaught on the Pole. The gloom he had expressed to the press on his return from Greenland in 1895 had been at least partially dissipated when the American Geographical Society in January 1897 awarded him its first Cullom Gold Medal for establishing the insularity of Greenland. The Royal Geographical Society followed in 1898, awarding him its Patron’s Gold Medal. Thus inspired, Peary prepared for a new assault on the Pole. His plan was to sail as far north as possible and establish a base from which he could make spring drives to his objective.
As early as 1897 he had tried for a five-year leave from the Navy, a delicate proposition in the light of the threat of war with Spain. Active naval officers were jealous of Peary’s political wire-pulling, but it got him what he wanted – not only leave but also funds for the venture (in spite of the war that was declared in April 1898). His chief supporter was Morris K. Jesup, a philanthropist who had made a fortune in banking and railroad supplies. One of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History and also president of the American Geographical Society, Jesup through his support of Peary would soon have his name stamped on the northernmost point of land in the world.
Jesup persuaded a group of prominent businessmen to back Peary’s newest attempt to reach the Pole. In London, Alfred Harmsworth, the London newspaper magnate, offered his steam yacht, Windward, the same vessel that had rescued Nansen in Franz Josef Land.
Shortly thereafter, Peary learned that Otto Sverdrup was planning to take the Fram into the same area of Smith Sound and Kane Basin. Peary was furious. This was his territory and Sverdrup was poaching on it! He could not believe that Sverdrup had no interest in the Pole. The proposed expedition, he told Jesup, was “an unprincipled attempt … to appropriate my route, my plans and my objects.…” Accordingly, he accelerated his own plans to go north.
The captain of the Windward would be John Bartlett, an experienced Newfoundland skipper. Bartlett offered the post of first mate to his nephew, Bob.
“What sort of a man is Peary?” young Bartlett asked his uncle.
“He’s like a T-square, Bob. He thinks in a straight line. And you can’t bend him any more than you can bend steel.”
“Does he know his business?”
“He’s the kind that doesn’t make it his business unless he does know it.”
“Is he a rough handler?”
“Not by our way of thinking. He doesn’t ask a man to go where he wouldn’t go himself.”
Bob Bartlett took the post, and for the next decade his career was inextricably bound up with Peary’s.
In the spring of 1898, the nucleus of what would soon be called the Peary Arctic Club was forming around Jesup. This powerful organization, which would finance, protect, and defend Peary in the turbulent years to come, included among its members Herbert L. Bridgman, part-owner of the Brooklyn Standard Union, Henry W. Cannon, president of the Chase National Bank, and James J. Hill, the man who built the Great Northern Railway. The name was not adopted officially until January 1899, when Peary was in the Arctic. The club was incorporated in 1904, and by then it numbered among its members company directors, presidents of insurance companies and banks, manufacturers and transportation magnates (from the founder of the Remington Typewriter Company to the chairman of the Erie Railroad).
Why would a group of millionaires band together to finance and support a decade of polar exploration by one man? A letter that Peary sent out in 1900 soliciting further funds supplies one answer: “… if I win out in this work, the names of those who made the work possible will be kept through the coming centuries floating forever above the forgotten and submerged debris of our time and day. The one thing we remember about Ferdinand of Spain is that he sent Columbus to his life work.” In short, Peary was offering these self-made men something that money usually could not buy – a chance at immortality. And there was one more appeal to the pocketbook. Sverdrup, a foreigner, was apparently after the same prize as Peary. The “race to the Pole,” as it was called, was on. It was imperative that an American should win.
Peary rushed his plans forward and left hurriedly on July 4, 1898, in order to forestall Sverdrup, whose four-year plan had nothing to do with any kind of race. Sverdrup’s view – that an attempt on the Pole was a useless adventure – was echoed by other explorers including the veteran Sir Clements Markham, who declared that “since Nansen’s discovery that the Pole is in an ice-covered sea there is no longer any special object to be attained in going there.”
But to Peary and the men who backed him, the Pole was the one great geographical prize remaining in northern exploration. The Windward forced its way through Smith Sound, past Cape Sabine, and into Kane Basin as far as Princess Marie Bay. It was blocked by ice off Cape Hawks, and there, on a scouting trip, Peary encountered the man he considered his rival. In his published account of the expedition, Peary made no mention of the meeting, though Otto Sverdrup did in his. Peary’s only reference to the Norwegian explorer appeared indirectly in his preface when he referred to “the introduction of a disturbing factor in the appropriation by another of my plan and field of work.…”
With Sverdrup already on Ellesmere, Peary was frantic to get as far north as possible. From Fort Conger, Greely’s old headquarters on Lady Franklin Bay, he had two possible routes to the Pole: either from the tip of Ellesmere Island on the west or from the tip of Greenland on the east.
Convinced that Sverdrup had the same idea, he refused to wait for better weather. It was a foolhardy undertaking, as Matt Henson realized: “But, Lieutenant, this is the dead of winter. It’s stormy and damned cold on the trail. Wouldn’t it be better to wait until spring?”
Peary was adamant. “No! I can’t possibly afford to lose my one chance of a northern base to a competitor.…”
In December, the worst possible month, he set out on the twentieth with Henson, Dr. Tom Dedrick, four Eskimos, and thirty-six dogs. The thermometer dropped below –60° F. Most of the journey was made in utter darkness. The nightmare ended in the early hours of January 7, when the party stumbled into the barn-sized hut that the Greely party had left. By then Peary was close to collapse.
Now, in the gloom of an Arctic morning, he gazed by candlelight on a scene that had been frozen in time for almost two decades. The floor was littered with boxes, pieces of fur, cast-off clothing, and rubbish of every description – just as the departing Greely expedition had left it. Partially consumed tins of provisions, tea, and coffee were scattered on the table and floor. Dishes set out for a final meal remained as they had been when Greely left the fort. Biscuits were strewn about in every direction. Peary found them tough but edible. Even the coffee was drinkable.
While he was sipping Greely’s coffee, Peary became aware of a wooden feeling in his feet. When Henson ripped off the sealskin boots he saw that the explorer’s legs were bloodless white to the knee. As he tore off the undershoes, two or three toes from each foot clung to the hide and snapped off at the joint.
“My god, Lieutenant!” he cried. “Why didn’t you tell me your feet were frozen?”
“There’s no time to pamper sick men on the trail,” Peary told him, and added, “besides, a few toes aren’t much to give to achieve the Pole.”
Peary’s almost maniacal urge to beat Sverdrup to Fort Conger had crippled him permanently. Dr. Dedrick was forced to amputate seven of his toes. For a month Peary couldn’t move; then the others strapped him onto one of the sledges and dragged him back on a winding 250-mile trip to the Windward, a journey they completed in a remarkable eleven days. All this time Peary suffered excruciating pain but uttered not a whimper. On the walls of Fort Conger he had scrawled a quotation from Seneca: Find a way or make one. The adjective “indomitable” has been used to describe more than one polar hero, but it fits no other so neatly as it does this single-minded and desperately driven forty-two-year-old American, who would for the rest of his life hobble on the stumps of his feet, yet feel it a small price to pay for the fulfilment of a dream.
After he reached the ship, Peary underwent a second operation that left only his little toes. He still couldn’t believe the Norwegians weren’t seeking the Pole, even when, on March 13, Victor Baumann, Sverdrup’s second-in-command, paid him a visit. Baumann explained that Sverdrup wanted to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort with Peary, but Peary, ever suspicious, hid from him the fact that he’d already been to Fort Conger. When Baumann sympathized over the condition of Peary’s feet, he received a laconic answer. “You must take your chances up here, you know,” said Peary. Baumann returned to report to Sverdrup, who set off across Ellesmere to investigate the unknown land to the west – the archipelago that would be called the Sverdrup Islands.
The Windward crossed over to Etah on the Greenland coast in August 1899. There Peary encountered the relief ship Diana, financed and sent north by the newly formed Peary Arctic Club. And there a letter told him that the previous January, while he was at Fort Conger, his wife had given birth to another baby girl, Francine. Life, Jo Peary wrote, was slipping away; he had been absent for a year and was planning to be gone for three more.
Peary agreed glumly, but there was nothing he felt he could do. “You are right, dear, life is slipping away. That cannot come to you more forcibly than it has repeatedly to me in times of darkness and inaction the past year. More than once I have taken myself to task for my folly in leaving such a wife and baby (babies now) for this work. But there is something beyond me, something outside of me, which impels me irresistibly to the work.…”
He returned to Fort Conger, decrying the folly of Greely for abandoning such a base – “a blot upon the record of Arctic exploration,” he later called it – a remark that, when it reached the general, caused a breach between them that was never healed.
The following spring – 1900 – he set off on another extraordinary journey across Greenland, hobbling and shuffling on his mangled feet or riding in one of the sledges. On May 8 he reached Lockwood’s farthest point and picked up from a cairn the record that Lockwood and Brainard had left eighteen years before, still in prime condition. The two men had reported sighting in the distance to the northeast a headland that they called Cape Washington. Would this turn out to be the most northerly point of land on the globe? If so, Peary would be robbed of a first. To his immense relief when he reached it, he saw farther on another headland surrounded by twin glaciers. “It would have been a great disappointment to me,” he wrote, “after coming so far to find that another’s eyes had forestalled mine in looking first upon the coveted northern point.”
Five days later he did reach the top of Greenland. He named it for his benefactor – Cape Morris Jesup – one of several landmarks that would bear the names of his backers. And now, for the first time, Peary set his eyes on the awesome polar sea – a forbidding realm of broken ice and open water. He ventured out for a few miles, enough to convince him that this was not a good route to the Pole.
He had yet to achieve a Farthest North. Unknown to him then, Umberto Cagni, an Italian naval officer with the Duke of Abruzzi’s North Pole expedition operating out of Franz Josef Land in 1899, had already exceeded Nansen’s record by twenty-three miles, losing three men to starvation in the process. But the ultimate prize eluded the Italians as it had everybody else. Cagni stopped 237 miles short of the Pole.
Peary made the 400-mile trip back to Fort Conger in nineteen days. He spent the following winter at Greely’s old headquarters not knowing that his wife and daughter were only about 200 miles to the south and that his second child had died in infancy. The Windward had returned to the United States and brought the pair back to Etah in August 1900. Jo Peary had no way of communicating with her husband – had no idea, indeed, where he was. The Eskimos thought he had gone to Payer Harbour off Cape Sabine, and so the Windward fought its way across Smith Sound, only to find there was no sign of him. Worse, the ship was driven against the rocks and imprisoned in the ice. Mrs. Peary was condemned to a winter in the Arctic.
She was also faced with an embarrassing situation. A comely young Eskimo woman, Allakassingwah – “Ally” for short – was also aboard the ship. She made no secret of the fact that she was Peary’s mistress and that he had fathered the baby she carried with her. It did not, of course, occur to her that this intelligence might have a devastating effect on Josephine Peary; the natives had a different set of morals. Now the two were destined to spend an entire winter together. Peary’s strong-willed wife was clearly aghast at the revelation, even though she was aware of her husband’s earlier declaration that he considered “the presence of women an absolute necessity to keep men contented.” A letter that she wrote at the time – it would not reach him until the following spring – merely hints at the depth of her despair: “Today I feel as though I should not see you this year.… You will have been surprised, perhaps annoyed, when you hear I came up on a ship … but believe me had I known how things were with you I should not have come.”
Peary was still at Fort Conger, faced with problems of his own. Dr. Dedrick was jealous of Matthew Henson and was demanding that Peary make it clear both to him and to Henson that he, Dedrick, was the party’s second-in-command. Peary prepared a set of notes for a heart-to-heart talk with his black servant:
… you have been in my service long enough to show me respect in small things.
Have a right to expect you will say sir to me always.
That you will pay attention when I am talking to you and show that you hear directions I give you by saying yes sir, or all right sir.…
That April of 1901, while moving down the Ellesmere coast from Fort Conger, Peary encountered a group of natives who were sledging north to meet him and there, for the first time, he learned that his wife and daughter were at Payer Harbour, cooped up with his friend Ally and the baby. If there was a breach with his wife when he reached the ship, it was papered over; she was not one to show her feelings to strangers. The two women had got on reasonably well during the winter, and Peary’s extramarital arrangements in the Arctic (and those of Henson, who also fathered a child) remained a secret for years.
In August, another relief ship, the Erik, financed again by the Peary Arctic Club, arrived with devastating news. Peary’s mother – his friend and closest confidante – was dead. This blow drove him further into a state of melancholia. Also aboard the Erik was Dr. Frederick Cook, who had been persuaded by the explorer’s backers to come north in the belief that another doctor might be needed. Cook examined the despondent Peary, told him he was suffering from anemia, and urged him to return to New York. “You are through as a traveler on snow on foot,” Cook told him, “for without toes and a painful stub you can never wear snowshoes or ski.” Peary ignored him.
He had, meanwhile, fired his own doctor, Dedrick, who was, in his view, becoming a nuisance. Dedrick refused to leave. Cook, by no means an unbiased witness, was later to declare that Dedrick stayed with the Eskimos over the winter of 1901 at Etah, “living in underground holes as wild men do,” because he felt the natives would be needing him. When an epidemic sprang up at Cape Sabine, Dedrick crossed the sound to help out. According to Cook, Peary sent him back. Cook, who saw the unburied bones of the victims in 1908, called this “one of the darkest unprinted pages of Arctic history.” By the time that was written (a decade later) Cook and Peary were bitter enemies. Peary never mentioned that summer nor did his official biographer, who wrote simply that the natives died of dysentery and that Peary did his best to nurse them, giving no thought to summoning Dedrick, to whom he was to refer as his “crazy doctor.”
Peary, meanwhile, was preparing to make one more attempt to reach the Pole. In March 1902, he started up the Ellesmere coast with Henson and a few natives. He reached Cape Hecla, the northernmost point of the island, in early April. On the sixth they set off across the frozen surface of the Lincoln Sea, heading for the Pole.
Peary’s Farthest North in 1902
It was a nightmare journey. He had already endured a month of travel before he took to the ice and had come four hundred miles. But the Pole was more than that distance to the north. The ice was often impassable. The exhausted party was forced to follow a wavering course over the hummocks and around open water, to hack a roadway using pickaxes through frozen barriers, to hoist their sledges over walls of broken blocks. Finally, a vast open lead barred their way – a semi-permanent channel in the ice, marking the edge of the continental shelf, to which Peary gave a variety of descriptive names: the Big Lead, the Hudson River, the Grand Canal, the Styx. They were forced to wait for it to freeze, but as their daily mileage continued to decrease they had no choice but to give up on April 21. The Pole was still 395 statute miles to the north. Moreover, when Peary determined his latitude and longitude, he discovered that, in spite of his compass readings, he had not been travelling due north. The ice drift had taken him twelve degrees to the west.
Peary was disconsolate. “The game is off,” he wrote in his diary. “My dream of sixteen years is over.… I have made a good fight but I cannot accomplish the impossible.” He was back at Fort Conger on May 3 and three days later, on his forty-sixth birthday, wrote finish to his Arctic adventures: “I close the book and turn to others less interesting but better suited for my years.… I accept the result calmly.… The goal still remains for a better man than I, or more favourable conditions, or both.”
In spite of these fatalistic words, he was merely at a low ebb. Later he described himself as “a maimed old man, unsuccessful after the most arduous work, away from wife and child, mother dead, one baby dead,” and asked, “Has the game been worth the candle?” In his secret heart, of course, he knew that, for him, it had been. “I could not have done otherwise than stick to it… [but] when I think of the last four years, and what I have been through as I think of all the petty details, it all seems so small, so little worth the while that I could cry out in anguish of spirit.”
The anguish of spirit did not last. Peary would not have been Peary if he had not contemplated another try at the Pole. There was still one bitter moment to come. On August 5, 1902, the Windward returned to Payer Harbour to take him home. His wife and daughter were aboard, and then he learned for the first time that Captain Cagni of the Italian Navy had established a new Farthest North (“We have conquered! We have surpassed the greatest explorer of the century,” his men had exulted, meaning Nansen.).
Matt Henson, who was present when Peary got that news, saw him wince as he learned that Cagni had beaten him by 158 miles. Then he saw Peary’s jaw tighten and listened as he spoke with something very close to a snarl. “Next time I’ll smash that all to bits,” said Robert Edwin Peary. “Next time!”
When the seventeen-year-old Roald Amundsen stood in the crowd on that sunny summer’s morning in 1889, cheering Fridtjof Nansen, he had felt again the revival of a childhood ambition – to become the first man to navigate the North West Passage.
Now, in June of 1903, the year following Peary’s return from the Arctic, Amundsen set out to do just that and succeeded brilliantly – succeeded where all of those predecessors whom he worshipped so enthusiastically – Parry, Franklin, Collinson – had failed. In the same environment where others suffered hardships and death, Amundsen survived and thrived. It was no picnic, of course, but next to the accounts of earlier struggles it sounds like a picnic. None of the afflictions that had bedevilled earlier explorers – scurvy, starvation, exhaustion, semi-madness – were visited upon him and his comrades. He knew what he was facing and prepared for it. Because he made it look so easy, because he suffered few of the privations that plagued the ponderous British school of navigators, history has tended to downgrade Amundsen.
It has been said of him, quite unjustly, that he merely climbed a ladder set in place by others. Yet the errors of his predecessors, manifest long before he came on the scene, were still unacknowledged by the Royal Navy, for one. In 1889, Sir Clements Markham was still championing the outmoded practice of manhauled sledges. The use of dogs “was a very cruel system,” Markham told the International Geographical Congress in Berlin that year, to which Nansen responded tartly, “It is also cruel to overload a human being with work.” It was no accident that the better-trained and better-equipped Norwegian beat Markham’s protégé, Scott, to the South Pole. Scott was always an amateur. Amundsen, like Nansen and Peary, was a professional.
He had prepared himself for the task since childhood. Long before he heard that secret voice urging him to conquer the Passage, he had been devouring the works of the explorers. John Franklin was his first hero. Franklin’s account of starvation on the Barren Grounds of northern Canada “thrilled me as nothing I had ever read before.” He credited this single volume, which he had read at fifteen, with shaping the course of his life. At that point he decided, irretrievably, to become an explorer. Oddly, in view of Amundsen’s later unblemished record, it was Franklin’s account of his sufferings that appealed most to the fifteen-year-old. “The idealism of youth, which often takes a turn toward martyrdom, found its crusade in me in the form of Arctic exploration.”
But Amundsen’s admiration of Franklin didn’t extend to emulation. When Amundsen set out in 1903 to conquer the Passage, he had no intention of suffering the way Franklin had. He had spent half his life preparing for just such a journey. He had, by then, read every word of every journal published by every Arctic explorer, and he had talked to several face to face. He knew the vicissitudes that awaited him; he also knew how to cope.
As a teenager he hardened his muscles by playing football (which he didn’t like) and skiing (which he adored). He went on ski trips and clambered up the mountains around Christiania (Oslo) to toughen himself. In order to acclimatize himself to the chill blasts of winter, he insisted on leaving his bedroom window open in the otherwise hermetically sealed house. Eight years of conscientious exercise developed him so well that when he took his medical for compulsory army service, the doctor ignored his myopia and called in his colleagues to exclaim over his muscles.
His mother refused to allow him to volunteer to go with Nansen on the Fram; she wanted him to be a doctor. That same year – his twenty-first – she died, and he was free to follow his chosen profession. In his study of the various Arctic journals, he had been struck by two fatal weaknesses common to many expeditions, especially the American ones. First, he noted, the commander often had no navigational experience and had to defer to the advice of others. Thus each expedition had, in effect, more than one leader – Charles Hall’s case was the extreme example – and that led to tension, disagreement, lowered morale, and indecision. Secondly, there had often been friction between the scientific staff on one hand and the captain and crew on the other. That had been apparent on the Kane, Hall, and Greely expeditions and to a lesser extent on earlier ones. Armstrong, the doctor and scientist on board the Investigator, had never got on well with McClure, for instance. To these twin problems, Amundsen had an indisputable solution. He would study navigation and science until he had mastered both. On his expedition there would be no divided command.
His first task was to get a skipper’s licence, a lengthy and difficult procedure. For two summers he shipped as an ordinary seaman aboard an Arctic sealing vessel. Then, in 1897, he became first mate aboard the Belgica, carrying a Belgian expedition seeking the South Magnetic Pole. The Belgians were not prepared for polar travel. Their clothes, equipment, and food were all inadequate. The captain’s aversion to fresh meat amounted to a mania. He not only refused to eat it, he also kept it from the crew until everybody came down with scurvy, the captain and commander so ill they took to their beds and made their wills.
Here Amundsen developed a lifelong admiration for the ship’s doctor, the same Frederick Cook who had been on an earlier expedition with Peary. With Amundsen’s help, Cook saved the day, digging in the snow around the ship for carcasses of seals, sewing warm clothing into blankets, and goading the emaciated men into sawing a channel through the ice that had trapped them. At one point, the ingenious Dr. Cook carefully collected a cache of specimen penguin skins, which he sewed into a mattress to use as a buffer to protect the ship’s sides from the pressure of the ice.
Amundsen returned from the Antarctic after two years with the practical experience he would need to get his skipper’s papers. He was still studying both navigation and the work of the Arctic explorers, notably that of Frederick Jackson, the man who had rescued Nansen, and James Clark Ross, who had discovered the North Magnetic Pole. In the Antarctic, Amundsen had listened to his scientific colleagues arguing whether or not the magnetic poles were fixed or whether they moved. He was fired then by a new idea: if he could discover the secret of the North Magnetic Pole, that would be a coup almost equal to the conquest of the Passage. More, it would give him a scientific cover for his main objective, providing a guise of respectability to cloak the raw romance of exploration.
Scientists who cared not a whit for the Passage tended to brighten when the young Norwegian mentioned the North Magnetic Pole. Amundsen had no intention of taking along experts in magnetism when he made his voyage. Instead, he would become a scientist; he would make himself proficient in taking magnetic observations. He approached the British for aid; when they refused his request, he turned to the Germans.
And so, late in 1900, Amundsen, virtually penniless, took a cheap room in a poor quarter of Hamburg. Armed with an introduction from an Oslo scientist, he rapped unannounced on the door of the acknowledged authority on terrestrial magnetism, Professor George Neumayer, director of the German Marine Observatory. He explained his mission. To justify further explorations, he told the professor, he must acquire scientific knowledge. Neumayer, who reminded Amundsen of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, stared hard at the lanky young Norwegian with the long, morose face. “Young man,” he said, “you have something more on your mind than this! Tell me what it is.”
Amundsen mentioned the Passage. That did not satisfy the professor. “Ah,” he said, “there is still more.” At last Amundsen mentioned studying the North Magnetic Pole. At that Neumayer flung his arms around him, crying, “If you do that you will be the benefactor of mankind for ages to come. That is the great adventure.” He took Amundsen under his wing. The precise young man calculated that in the forty days that followed, he had spent two hundred and fifty hours studying the theory and practice of magnetic observation.
His next move, in Norway, was to secure Nansen’s backing for his proposed expedition. With more than a little trepidation, he went out to his hero’s villa at Lysaker and knocked on the door of his study, humbled by his own insignificance in the presence of the greatest Norwegian of his day – a man who to him seemed almost superhuman. Nansen, as a result of the journey of the Fram, had acquired a towering reputation, fuelled by a burgeoning Norwegian nationalism that in five years would cause a permanent break with Sweden. The Norwegian independence movement required a pantheon of heroes, and Nansen stood on the pinnacle. In Amundsen’s eyes, he was as terrifyingly austere as the Arctic itself. But now he was happy to lend his support and prestige to the venture, for he saw the younger man as the British and Americans had seen their polar adventurers – as a future hero who could give his country a new sense of pride by carrying its flag through uncharted channels. Amundsen said later that he dated the actual realization of his expedition from that moment.
That winter of 1900-1901, he went off to Tromsoe, the headquarters of the whaling captains. There, with funds borrowed from his brother, he bought a little wooden square-sterned sloop, the Gjöa. Compared to the three-hundred- and four-hundred-ton British ships that had butted vainly against the Arctic ice, it was a cockleshell. But Amundsen was an advocate of smallness. The Arctic archipelago was a skein of shoals, channels, and ice barriers. Only a small ship, Amundsen believed, could thread her way through this maze. “What has not been accomplished by large vessels and main force,” he said, “I will attempt with a small vessel and patience.”
His crew too would be small, all handpicked and prepared to live off the land. There might not be game enough for 129 men, as Franklin’s officers had discovered; but there would be enough, Amundsen was convinced, for seven. That would be the total complement of the Gjöa. They would all go native, wearing native clothing, sleeping in native snow houses. Rae had done it, he reminded the Norwegian Geographical Society, and at trifling cost.
For the next two years, Roald Amundsen was caught up in a flurry of fund-raising and preparation. He learned from everyone – from the whalers at Tromsoe and also from the Lapps, who taught him the insulating properties of sennegras. He took the Gjöa on a training cruise. He got his master’s certificate. He had long sessions with Otto Sverdrup, from whom he learned the mystique of Eskimo dogs and dog driving: how to treat dogs as equals, how to use dogs in concert with skis, why Greenland huskies were better than the Siberian breed. Nothing escaped him; he even rejected commercial pemmican in favour of his own recipe. Late in 1902 he went off to England to talk to other Arctic explorers – Sir Clements Markham, Sir Allen Young, and the aging Sir Leopold M’Clintock, who was still in bed the morning Amundsen knocked on his door – and then on to Potsdam for more work on terrestrial magnetism.
At last he was ready. He had everything he needed, except money. On June 16, 1903, with the thirty-one-year-old herring boat loaded with five years’ provisions and equipment, all tightly sealed in large, oddly built provision boxes, he and his crew of six cast off from the docks at Christiania in a torrential downpour. Underfunded and in debt, he left on the stroke of midnight, it was said, to escape his creditors. As a scientific explorer Amundsen had no peer; in financial matters he was always a child.
Within two months the Gjöa had pierced the heart of the Arctic archipelago. On the evening of August 22 she arrived at Franklin’s last safe wintering place, Beechey Island. For the explorer, this was hallowed ground. Standing on the deck of the little schooner, he tried to picture the scene: the splendidly equipped ships with the British colours flying at the mastheads, all abustle; the officers in their dazzling uniforms; the boatswains with their pipes; the blue-clad sailors scrambling ashore; and the commander himself, his round face beaming with gentle amiability. At least, that is what Amundsen says he thought. But he wrote those words in 1908 when international hero-worship of Franklin was at its height and every writer, whether English, American, or Scandinavian, paid lip-service to the mythic stature of the commander of the Erebus and the Terror. No one interested in raising funds for a new expedition, as Amundsen then was, would have dared to puncture the Franklin legend. By his own actions, however, Amundsen showed that he was totally at odds with the Franklin school of exploration, though he had no intention of being ungracious. “Let us raise a monument to them, more enduring than stone,” he was to write, “that they were the first discoverers of the Passage.”
Which route should he now follow? To the northwest the hunting fields of Melville and Prince Patrick islands, with their vast herds of muskoxen, beckoned invitingly. But Amundsen was not a slave to personal sentiment. When he took his magnetic observations, the needle pointed stubbornly south, so south he determined to go. He left Beechey Island, with its three grave markers, its ruined depots, and its monuments to faded glories – Lady Franklin’s marble slab, Belcher’s memorial column, and the little plaque in memory of young Bellot – and with “the heaviness and sadness of death” hanging over that lifeless, fog-shrouded shore, he headed into “waters never sailed in … hoping to reach still farther where no keel had ever ploughed.”
He moved down Peel Sound and into Franklin Strait. Here, in the vicinity of the North Magnetic Pole, the compass was useless. Like the Vikings of old he steered by the stars. He passed the point where Allen Young had been forced to turn back by the ice. Would this be his fate, too? M’Clintock had once said that in his opinion, the sound was navigable no more than once in every four or five years. Pacing nervously back and forth along the deck, Amundsen tried to hide his inward agitation from his comrades. The ship lurched under his feet, increasing his concern. But the sea was calm; he felt irritated by his own skittishness. Again he felt movement beneath him and again he looked over the rail at a glassy sea. The irregular motion continued until he realized at last what it was. He would not, he said later, have sold that slight motion for any amount of money! What he was receiving was a message from the open ocean – a swell that told him there was no wall of ice to block his way to the south. Fortune, which had defeated Allen Young, was on his side.
On August 31, after he had passed Bellot Strait, where M’Clintock had been trapped, the engine room caught fire. Disaster faced the Gjöa’s company. Twenty-two hundred gallons of oil lay directly in the path of the flames. At any moment the ship might be blown to bits. But the crew worked smoothly and without panic to quell the blaze before it reached the oil.
Amundsen navigates the North West Passage, 1903-1906
The following day, the sloop ran aground on a reef. Amundsen and his men pitched ten thousand pounds of dogfood overboard in a vain attempt to free her. A gale sprang up, flung the Gjöa against a rock, and splintered her false keel. Holding fast with all his strength to prevent being thrown into the boiling sea, Amundsen cursed himself for not keeping watch in the crow’s-nest. As the vessel blundered ahead under full sail (Amundsen’s decision), dancing from rock to rock (Amundsen’s description), he wondered whether she might break up. Should they lower a boat and escape with a few necessities? Or should they take a chance and drive on to possible destruction?
He ordered the small boats to be cleared and loaded. As that was being done, the others began to throw the rest of the deck cargo into the sea. The schooner was being driven toward the shallowest part of the reef when suddenly she was hurled upward and flung bodily onto the rocks with a series of thumps that caused Amundsen to pray to his Maker for succour. One final thump occurred, and then, to everyone’s amazement and relief, she slid off the reef into deep water.
Amundsen had learned his lesson. From that moment on he would keep one man always aloft and another at the prow testing the depths with a lead. They were moving down the east coast of King William Island through James Ross Strait and into Rae Strait – the route Franklin had not known existed. Suddenly, Godfred Hansen cried out from aloft, “I see the finest little harbour in the world.” Here, on the southeast corner of King William Island, they anchored. Amundsen christened it Gjöa Haven. It would be their home for the next two years.
The Passage beckoned invitingly. Simpson Strait was open; the way seemed clear to the west. But Amundsen was mindful of his scientific responsibilities. He must build an observatory, explore the unmapped neighbourhood, and locate the North Magnetic Pole, which he figured was some ninety miles to the northeast. When that was accomplished there would be time to follow the channels westward.
He had developed an ingenious form of prefabrication by using the big packing boxes as building materials. With these boxes, filled with sand, he constructed two buildings for magnetic observation (using copper nails to prevent magnetic interference), a supply hut, an astronomical observatory, and another small hut in which two of the crew lived for two winters. The rest bunked down on the Gjöa.
The buildings were scarcely completed before a band of Netsilik Eskimos arrived. These were pure aborigines, untainted by recent white contact. Seventy-five years before, their grandparents had briefly encountered James Clark Ross on his trip to the site of the North Magnetic Pole, and this folk memory remained with them as clearly as if the meeting had taken place that month. To the Netsiliks, the arrival of the legendary white men was like the coming of supernatural beings. When, in November, Amundsen visited one of their camps, there was pandemonium: men, women, and children rushed forward to grab at his clothing, to stroke his face, and to feel the contours of his body. An affectionate bond developed between the explorers and these primitive people – the merriest human beings that the sombre Norwegians had ever encountered. A gregarious lot, they moved to Gjöa Haven in a body. At one point Amundsen discovered there were eighty women and children camped there.
This eighteen-month contact with the Netsiliks had profound effects. Amundsen was not a trained anthropologist, but he was on the ground and able to study their lifestyle before civilization changed them. The results, when published, were invaluable. He approached them with humility in the belief that they had a great deal to teach him. Commander Robert Scott and his men were in the Antarctic on their first expedition at this same time, stubbornly manhauling 240-pound loads on heavy sledges in the old British naval tradition, starving and freezing because of improper clothing and inadequate food. Amundsen, meanwhile, was flourishing in a similar environment. Here on King William Island, where Franklin’s followers had perished, he was honing the techniques that would make it possible for him to conquer the South Pole and live to tell about it.
The Eskimos became his teachers, and Amundsen and his comrades were willing pupils. A jocular old man, Teraiu, whom Amundsen befriended and gave a berth aboard the Gjöa, showed them all how to build snow houses, using a long-handled knife and a forty-inch caribou horn. In his memoirs, Amundsen cheerfully described one of these earlier attempts: “They, no doubt, hardly thought that a ‘Kabluna’ (foreigner) could manage a piece of work, which was their own specialty. But they did not wait very long before very audibly expressing their views on the point. Hansen and I did something or other they were not used to, and in a trice the whole crowd burst into noisy exultation. Their laughter was uncontrollable; the tears ran down their cheeks; they writhed with laughter, gasped for breath, and positively shrieked. At last … they took the whole work in hand, but had to stop now and then to have another laugh at the thought of our stupidity.…”
But the Norwegians persevered because, as Rae had discovered before them, and Peary too, the snow houses they could build on the trail were vastly more comfortable than any tent. There were other discoveries: the Netsiliks scoffed at the white man’s attempt to stop frostbite by rubbing the skin with snow. Snow against frost? It was nonsense. The right way, the white men learned, was to remove a warm hand from a glove and rub it vigorously against the affected spot.
These were no ordinary gloves; these were Eskimo gloves, with long cuffs tied tightly to prevent snow creeping up the arm. Three weeks after his arrival, Amundsen was wearing a full set of deerskin clothing and for the next twenty months continued to dress as a native. The secret, which was still eluding the British Navy, was air circulation. Tight wool clothing caused men to sweat. The native parkas and trousers were loose, fast drying, and windproof. It was essential, too, that the undergarments be made of deerskin. Unlike wool, deerskin sheds dirt; unlike wool, it is warm to the touch when it is put on. As Amundsen remarked, “in woollen things you have to jump and dance about like a madman before you can get warm.”
The Netsiliks taught Amundsen the value of deerskin stockings, with the fur turned inward, and deerskin footgear stuffed with sedge grass, which absorbed moisture and dried out quickly at night. Again, as Peary had learned, this added to the flexibility of polar travel. Amundsen noted how quickly an Eskimo could leap out from under the covering of his sleeping bench in the morning and jump into his loose clothing; it took but an instant. It was the same at bedtime. Amundsen published all this detail in his book The North West Passage, which was available in English in London by 1908. More than three years later, Apsley Cherry-Garrard recounted in The Worst Journey in the World – the story of the second Scott expedition – that British naval officers required half an hour to thaw themselves into their frozen sleeping bags each evening.
There was more to learn, ranging from the secret of operating a kayak (Amundsen took a chilly ducking on his first try) to the native system of coating the sledge runners with a film of ice, which Amundsen found allowed them to “slide like butter” over any kind of snow. The Netsiliks also helped the Norwegians grasp the art of dog driving – a technique that requires humility, for this is in no sense a master-servant relationship; there must be a rapport between man and beast.
Finally, from the Eskimos Amundsen, like Nansen, learned the value of patience in the Arctic. Earlier explorers, reckless to achieve record mileages, had derided the natives for their sloth. But the natives understood the value of maintaining proper pace. Sweat in the Arctic can kill. To overtax one’s strength can be fatal, for that leaves the human body with no resources for an emergency. M’Clintock’s sledgers had exhausted and crippled themselves, sometimes permanently, for no other reason than vanity, as their published boasts make clear. The Eskimos arrived at their destinations more slowly but with minds and bodies unimpaired – able to move forward, day by day, without collapsing. For this, they were often reviled for “laziness.”
Certainly, two winters at Gjöa Haven required monumental patience. The North West Passage continued to beckon. Who knew whether Simpson Strait would be free of ice when the scientific work was finally done? Amundsen “burned at the thought of the time when we should show our Norwegian flag to the first vessel on the other side.…” But having clothed his plans in the garment of science, he was determined to fulfil his pledge. He knew that idleness, especially under these conditions, could be demoralizing; he had read the works of the earlier explorers. That was one reason why he had kept his numbers small: as he said “there can always be work found for a few.” Actually, he found his comrades prepared to make their own work. He had brought along no fewer than seventy-five games to play; significantly, they were never used except by the Eskimos, who didn’t understand them but played them anyway – and with great enthusiasm.
In the spring and summer all seven were occupied with expeditions to map the northwest coastline of Victoria Land and also to find the site of the North Magnetic Pole. When Amundsen reached the spot where James Clark Ross had located the pole, he discovered that it had moved some thirty miles. He did not reach that site, but that didn’t matter. Science would recognize his discovery that the pole was not fixed as his major achievement.
He came to another realization: the unnavigated portion of the North West Passage was no more than one hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies. It lay between Cape Crozier, the most westerly point of King William Island, and Cambridge Bay, where Collinson had wintered. One old man with whom Amundsen had developed a close friendship confided to him that one of Franklin’s ships had drifted to Cape Crozier where he and his friends looted it before it was crushed by the ice.
The time for departure was rapidly approaching. In May, 1905 the first mail in two years arrived by native dogsled from the west. On June 1, the self-regulating instruments that had been operating for nineteen months were stopped. The houses were taken down and the ship was painted. By the end of June, with the last of the exploring parties back at Gjöa Haven, the channels were beginning to open. But it was August 12 before the coast of King William Island was free of ice.
It was time to leave. They had spent two years in relative comfort, growing fat on game and fish. To pass the time, Amundsen had founded a society to taste all the products of the land – from fox steaks to caribou tripe. “Thanks to my comrades,” he wrote, “I left Gjöa Havn with nothing but happy memories. We never had a misunderstanding or a dispute of any kind.” Few other Arctic explorers could have made that statement. But few other expeditions had operated as Amundsen’s had – with no social or disciplinary gap between the members. Amundsen treated his six crew members as equals and shared their labours. It was the same with the Eskimos; if anything, he treated them as his superiors, unlike Peary, who saw them as chattels.
But like Peary, he held no brief for the popular notion that by Christianizing or “civilizing” them, they would somehow become better human beings. Quite the contrary: “During the voyage of the ‘Gjöa’ we came into contact with ten different Eskimo tribes in all, and we had good opportunities of observing the influence of civilization on them, as we were able to compare those Eskimo who had come into contact with civilisation with those who had not. And I must state it as my firm conviction that the latter, the Eskimo living absolutely isolated from civilisation of any kind, are undoubtedly the happiest, healthiest, and most honourable and most contented among them.”
Amundsen urged (vainly, as it turned out) that the natives be guarded from “the many perils and evils of civilisation” by strict laws, thus following the example of Denmark. “My sincerest wish for our friends the Nechilli Eskimos is, that civilisation may never reach them,” he declared.
On their part, the Eskimos had been studying the illustrated papers and magazines that Amundsen had brought along, many of them depicting terrifying battle scenes from the Boer War. Understandably, they showed no interest in emigrating to the land of the white man – a realm they visualized as one of unlimited violence. “Good-da! Good-da! (Good-day),” they shouted cheerfully as the sloop cast off into the thick fog and left them behind. In truth, Amundsen said, they had learned his language more easily than he and his comrades had learned the Netsilik tongue.
The Gjöa groped its way through the fog into the shallow, island-dotted strait named for Thomas Simpson guided by some of the natives in their kayaks, who seemed to know exactly where they were heading in spite of the murk. These were totally unknown, totally unpredictable waters; no white man had sailed through them before. The soundings jumped from seventeen fathoms to five, then back again. Sandy bottoms suddenly turned ragged and stony. They were in the midst of what Amundsen called “disconcerting chaos.” Sharp stones faced them on every side. Low-lying rocks loomed up just above the surface of the channel. “We bungled through zigzag as if we were drunk,” he said. The lead continued to fly up and down in dismaying fashion. Standing at the helm, Amundsen found that he was shuffling his feet out of sheer nervousness while the lookout in the crow’s-nest flung his arms about like a maniac indicating sudden shifts to port and starboard. There were so many rocks ahead that “it was just like sailing through an uncleared field.”
Somehow the Gjöa got through, then slipped between the ice floes in Victoria Strait to reach the flat, monotonous coastline of Victoria Land, and anchored at last in Cambridge Bay. The date was a historic one: August 17, 1905. Roald Amundsen and his crew had managed to bring their ship through the hitherto unnavigated link in the North West Passage.
What Amundsen had shown was that there was no practical passage here for large ships. Nor could any vessel of his time, no matter what its size, force its way through the ice stream that swept round Banks and Prince Patrick islands from the Beaufort Sea. And only a tiny craft of shallow draft, such as the Gjöa, could hope to make it through Simpson Strait.
The truth was now revealed: even if Sir John Franklin had known that King William Land was insular, even if he had been able to slip past its east coast by Rae Strait, he would certainly have foundered among the rocks and shoals that almost did for Amundsen’s little ship. The Erebus and the Terror were too big and too awkward, and it is more than probable that the expedition’s fate would have differed only in degree from the tragedy of 1848.
For Amundsen, the rest of the journey was comparatively easy. He had Collinson’s charts and descriptions to guide him. Every fibre urged him to press on, now that he was on the threshold of success; but the waters were shallow and hazardous, and he knew that it was better to sacrifice a few hours rather than jeopardize his vessel. Once again the Norwegian practised patience.
One last set of rocks and shoals barred the entrance to Dolphin and Union Strait. Once through that hazard, Amundsen found himself breathing more easily. In spite of a devouring hunger, he had not been able to swallow a morsel of food or snatch a moment’s sleep during this critical passage. Now, having regained his calm, he had “a most rapacious hunger” to satisfy.
At eight on the morning of August 26 he was awakened by his second-in-command, Hansen, crying “Vessel in sight!” These were memorable words, for Amundsen realized that the ship in question must have come from the Pacific. His childhood dream had been fulfilled; the North West Passage had been conquered at last.
He was not an emotional man, but now he experienced a peculiar sensation in his throat and felt unexpected tears starting in his eyes. “I suppose it was a weakness on my part,” he wrote later – always the phlegmatic Scandinavian. He dressed himself quickly and before going out on deck paused for a moment to look at Nansen’s picture on the wall of his cabin. For a moment he thought that it had winked at him. Then, smiling broadly, he strode out to meet the strange sail from the west.
She was a two-masted schooner, the Charles Nansen of San Francisco, her decks jammed with a cosmopolitan group of well-wishers – Eskimo women in red dresses and black American seamen in variegated costumes, all “mingling together just as in a land of fable.”
Out of this throng stepped a corpulent and jovial figure with wrinkled, copper-coloured features – Captain James McKenna, the ship’s master and an old Arctic trader. “Are you Captain Amundsen?” he asked. The explorer was surprised that he was known. When he answered, McKenna seized his hand and asked if his was the first ship he had encountered. He brightened when Amundsen told him she was. “I am exceedingly pleased,” he said, “to be the first one to welcome you on getting through the North West Passage.”
Amundsen was hungry for news. The only newspapers on board were old. One carried a dismaying headline suggesting that Norway was about to go to war with Sweden, an eventuality that was happily averted. But he was delighted to find that McKenna had a set of up-to-date charts and plenty of information about ice conditions to the west.
Amundsen’s goal was Bering Strait, but as the Gjöa moved west and the ice grew thicker, her passage became more sluggish. She passed the mouth of the Mackenzie, tried to make Herschel Island, but was blocked by ice on September 9. She was not alone; some dozen ships were in the vicinity, all stuck fast. On the shore, at King Point, the schooner Bonanza was grounded and beached, and here a little colony had sprung up – sailors from the wreck and Eskimo families building huts. Here the crew of the Gjöa, too, was destined to spend a third winter – ten more months – in the Arctic.
Amundsen was eager to get the news of his triumph to the civilized world. That would not be easy. The nearest telegraph post was at Eagle, Alaska, on the Yukon River, five hundred miles to the south on the far side of the nine-thousand-foot Ogilvie range. Captain William Mogg of the Bonanza was also anxious to get to San Francisco to outfit another ship and get back to the Arctic before losing another whaling season. Both men knew that the mail run from Herschel Island was due to leave for the Yukon by way of Fort McPherson in late October. They decided to go with it.
There was a problem: Amundsen, who had left Christiania one jump ahead of his creditors, didn’t have a cent. That meant that Mogg, with no experience of Arctic land travel, would be in charge. He was short and he was fat and he couldn’t run with the dogs, so he would have to ride on one of the sledges – a dead weight for the entire trip. Moreover, he positively refused to take any pemmican – the ideal nourishment for such a journey – because he considered it dog meat. Amundsen had no choice but to eat Mogg’s beans, cooked, dried, and packed in sacks – beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, day after day, a daunting and unpalatable prospect. But there was no help for it. Equipped with two sledges, twelve dogs, and two Eskimo mail carriers, they set off from Herschel Island on October 24, 1905, growing hungrier and thinner on their bean diet.
Amundsen’s overland trek to reach the telegraph at Eagle, Alaska, in the late fall of 1905
The Eskimos left them at Fort Yukon. Amundsen trotted ahead of the single dogsled bearing Mogg, who was now so eager to reach Eagle that he refused to stop for lunch. Amundsen hungrily protested; Mogg was obdurate; after all, he pointed out, he had the money and he was in charge. The trail along the Yukon River was dotted with roadhouses, each a day’s travel apart – a legacy of the Klondike gold rush. Amundsen took advantage of this to bring Captain Mogg to his senses. He stopped the team at the exact halfway point between two roadhouses. Then he turned back to Mogg and told him he could keep the team and the provisions. He, Amundsen, would trudge on alone.
Mogg was terrified. He cried out that he knew nothing of northern travel; Amundsen was leaving him to certain death. The explorer replied that he could not continue without three meals a day; if Mogg didn’t feed him properly, he would abandon him. At that Mogg surrendered. The pair reached Eagle on December 5, 1905, with the Fahrenheit thermometer reading –60°. At the U.S. Army telegraph station Amundsen dispatched a one-thousand-word message to Nansen, whose letter to the Norwegian Consul at San Francisco had helped publicize the expedition. Since Amundsen had no money, he was forced to send the telegram collect, a circumstance that caused so many complications that the story reached the press before it reached Nansen, thus frustrating his chance to sell it as an exclusive for Amundsen’s benefit.
The following March, 1906, Amundsen arrived back at King Point to discover that his second engineer, Gustav Wiik, was dangerously ill, apparently from pleurisy. He died a few days later before help could reach him from Herschel Island. In Amundsen’s absence, his men had constructed a crude observatory to continue their magnetic studies. In July, the instruments were taken down and placed on board, ready for departure. The mail from Edmonton arrived on August 9, bringing news of the great San Francisco fire and the massive relief arrangements organized by General Greely. The following day, the Gjöa slipped through a channel in the bay ice and resumed her passage westward.
There was one last struggle with two large masses of ice off Point Barrow. The six Norwegians attacked the great blocks with ice hooks, and the vessel charged through. With that barrier breached, the Gjöa moved on to meet that portion of the whaling fleet that had not been frozen in and had come up from San Francisco for the summer season. With it came Captain William Mogg and a large packet of mail.
At Nome, early in September, a huge celebration awaited them. An enormous searchlight played on the little vessel as she came in sight and a roar of welcome issued from a thousand throats, followed by a sound that brought tears to Amundsen’s eyes. It was the national air of his country.
For more than three centuries, since Martin Frobisher’s day, the North West Passage had defied the efforts of the world’s best seamen, to become a graveyard of broken ships. John Barrow had once thought it could easily be conquered in two seasons. But eighty-eight years had gone by since John Ross, glimpsing a phantom range of mountains, had failed to penetrate the mysterious archipelago at the top of the world. Parry had almost made it in 1819 – only to be blocked by an implacable wall of ice. Franklin’s men had actually located the Passage, only to die before they could reach it. McClure had managed to get through – but only by sledge. For three decades, since Allen Young’s last failed attempt in 1875, the Arctic had been silent and the Passage remained unchallenged. Now, through careful planning, some luck, great common sense, and, perhaps most important, the example of the Eskimos, Roald Amundsen had snatched the prize of centuries from the greatest navy in the world. But another thirty-four years would pass before another little ship – the St. Roch – would be able to repeat Amundsen’s triumph.
