Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (30 page)

Only two were non-Norwegians. First engineer Knut Sundbeck was a Swede who had helped design and build the
Fram
’s diesel engine in Stockholm. He had come on board late, after Amundsen fired the previous engineer. Amundsen knew Sundbeck personally and was well aware of his brilliance and skill with the new marine diesel technology. Alexander Kutschin, a twenty-four-year-old sailor from northern Russia, had come to Bergen to study oceanography under Dr. Bjørn
Helland-Hansen, an associate and friend of Nansen. Eventually, acting on Nansen’s high recommendation, Amundsen hired him as oceanographer for the trip. (There had been one other scientist along, another non-Norwegian: a bespectacled German oceanographer named Adolf Hermann Schröer. Early on Schröer was hired for a two-month oceanographic cruise around the British Isles, and did not continue on the
Fram
.)

Amundsen intentionally did not have a doctor on board. Amundsen was well aware of the checkered history of doctors on polar expeditions, mostly due to the opiates they had access to for treating pain but all too often used on themselves. Amundsen chose instead to have others on the crew, in this case Gjertsen and Wisting, learn to yank teeth, set broken bones, sew up gashes, and treat maladies.

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As he did with the
Gjøa
seven years earlier, Amundsen took the
Fram
quietly and almost unnoticed out of Christiania in the middle of the night, adding to the veil of secrecy. One man did see it leave, as polar writer Roland Huntford tells it: “In the small hours of June 7 he was sitting up in the tower of his home to watch as the
Fram
, in perfect northern summer twilight, emerged from the inner arm of the fjord where she had been anchored . . . and, with bare masts over windless waters, moved for the third time down the channel to the sea, like a Viking ship slipping out on a raid.”
³

This witness, of course, was Nansen, but the raid he saw beginning was not for gold or jewels but for a single point on earth, a name, and a reputation. It was
also a raid of another kind, when Amundsen would try to scale the high walls of the Nansen fortress of exploration and take a place next to him.

Except for the man he had chosen to be captain, Thorvald Nilsen, none of the crew knew at that time the real destination. Two months later, after a test trip for the oceanography work in the north Atlantic, ending in Bergen to repair the new diesel, then another to Kristiansand to pick up the dogs and more supplies, Amundsen unveiled the plan to his other officers, second-in-command naval Prestrud and third mate Gjertsen, both polar novices, but swore them to secrecy with a formal, signed agreement. Later, on the way to Madeira, he also told Hassel, with the same binding agreement. They, as others of the crew, had scratched their heads over some of Amundsen’s actions, particularly building such an elaborate
meteorological station and taking all the sledge dogs on the long (and hot, when in the tropics) journey around South America, when they could have been picked up in Alaska, just before going into the ice. Now they knew why.

On September 6, they reached the Portuguese island of Madeira, more than two thousand miles away and safely out of reach of any upset or disgruntled authorities or creditors. Three days later, just as the
Fram
was set to leave, Amundsen called the entire crew on deck. His two first officers, Nilsen and Prestrud, were holding rolled-up charts. The men darted nervous glances at one another. What was going on? Then Amundsen dropped
his
bomb.

Nilsen and Prestrud unrolled the charts of the southern hemisphere and Antarctica. Amundsen, pointing to the charts, told the assembled his plan. The men looked on in bewilderment and shock, as Amundsen’s words sank in.

When done, he gave them all a choice, staying on or returning home. His timing was perfect: a captive audience, on a ship about to leave that was a very long way from home. Just in case, he had a backup. If someone declined, he could find a replacement in Madeira. When Amundsen asked each individually, one by one they all agreed to stay with the
Fram
.

Amundsen had not yet decided who would go where when they reached Antarctica, but most assignments seemed obvious. About half would be the “shore party” on the continent; half, the “sea rovers” on the
Fram
. The shore party would have the best sledgers, skiers, and polar veterans; the sea rovers, the savvy sailors and engineers. One group to make it to the pole and back and one to bring them home safely. The rest would be history. Amundsen, of course, would lead the charge to the pole.

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TERRA NOVA

O
n October 3, 1910, back in Christiania and almost a month after the
Fram
left Madeira, Leon Amundsen sent this telegram, written earlier by his brother Roald, to Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the
Terra Nova
, Christchurch, New Zealand. “Beg inform you
Fram
proceeding Antarctic.”
⁴
It was signed “Amundsen,” sent from “Christiania.”

Those clipped few words must have sent chills down the spine of the intended reader, who actually received it on October 9 in Melbourne, Australia, before he reached Christchurch. The telegram was Amundsen through and through: brief, terse, unequivocal, yet slightly oblique and vaguely mysterious. Though the telegram stated its origin as Christiania, the
Fram
had left that city four months and thousands of miles ago, long and far enough on its way south to give away its position. Why had he sent it anyway—out of politeness and as a gesture of respect, or as a gauntlet thrown down to a competitor?

Captain Scott was already well known for the first ever, albeit unsuccessful, attempt on the pole during the
Discovery
expedition in 1901–4. Now, feeling pressure from Ernest Shackleton and his near miss there in 1908–9, he was going back for another try. Sixty-five men in the reinforced and elegantly named
Terra Nova
had left Cardiff, Wales, on June 15 and, not thinking there was any great urgency at stake, took their time, stopping off along the way for rest, scientific collecting, and resupply, in addition to being delayed by problems. Scott had not been on the ship for the first long leg of the voyage but met it in Cape Town, South Africa, for the trip across the Indian Ocean to Australia. He again made his own way from Australia to New Zealand, where he reboarded for the final run to Antarctica.

Lyttelton, New Zealand, is a picturesque town on the slopes of an extinct volcanic caldera on the east side of New Zealand’s South Island. Its protected, deepwater harbor made it one of the main shipping hubs on the South Island, as the port for the city of Christchurch eight miles to the north, and it was attractive for larger, deep-draft trade vessels crossing the Pacific. It also happened to be
strategically positioned as a “launching pad” for expeditionary ships heading to the Ross Sea side of Antarctica over two thousand miles away. In their previous voyages, Scott and Shackleton (and Australian Douglas Mawson) had chosen Lyttelton as their last stop before heading to the great white unknown to the south. Now Scott was there again.

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Amundsen, by contrast, never stopped for eleven thousand miles. He never went anywhere near New Zealand but took a route different than the
Terra Nova
’s: across the Atlantic and down along the east coast of South America; then across the South Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean; past Kerguelen Island; and southwesterly to Antarctica’s Ross Sea. He did not need to stop for food, provisioned as the
Fram
was for seven years, nor for science or rest. When it left Madeira, the
Fram
was almost three months and four thousand miles behind the
Terra Nova
. It arrived at the Great Ice Barrier (now Ross Ice Shelf) of Antarctica on January 14, 1911, a mere ten days after the
Terra Nova
.

Amundsen marked the moment, recounted in
The South Pole
: “We came in sight of the Great Ice Barrier. Slowly it rose up out of the sea until we were face to face with it in all its imposing majesty. It is difficult . . . to give any idea of the impression this mighty wall of ice makes on the observer who is confronted with it for the first time. It is altogether a thing which can hardly be described; but one can understand very well that this wall of 100 feet in height was regarded
for a generation as an insuperable obstacle to further southward progress.” But Amundsen was in the race of his life, and it would not stop him. He had come sixteen thousand miles. There was another eight hundred to go to the finish line.

The
Fram
made the long way from Madeira without major incident; the four-month passage led the crew over towering waves or across flat calm; through storms or in fair weather; to run free with the trade winds or poke along in equatorial doldrums; and from wilting tropical heat to polar cold. The ship had proved many times before that it was a superb ice ship and would do so again. Now it had shown its colors as a sea ship, able to handle any condition any ocean could throw at it, though the ride would not always be pleasant for passengers caught in the dramatic slewing, wallowing, and rolling it was famous for in big winds and seas.

The men had fared well, despite the months at sea without a break. The dogs also did well; so much depended on them for the land journey to come. For the
trip south a temporary, removable deck had been laid down over the main deck and elevated on blocks a few inches. This deck was washed down twice a day (one hundred dogs can make quite a mess) and taken up once a week for cleaning the main deck. Moreover, the space between the temporary and main decks kept the dogs dry, above any seawater sloshing over the ship’s sides, while in the tropics it allowed circulation of cooling air. An awning the length of the foredeck provided shade for the dogs (at first chained and then let loose once they got to know each other).

The dogs were everyone’s responsibility. Each man had a group of ten or so to look after, and during the long voyage close bonds developed between the men and their charges. The dogs were also companions, diversions from monotony, and a source of entertainment and, at times, exasperation. Amundsen wrote that sometime all the dogs, one hundred strong, might begin howling like wolves all at once, for no apparent reason, in a strange and deafening chorus (such an image, to see and hear from afar a ship powered not by wind or by motor but by the howls of dogs).

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Scott had had a different idea about getting to the pole. Whether out of tenacious but out-of-place British tradition, unfamiliarity with the ways to travel efficiently over ice and snow, or simply belief that there was a better way, he would not rely on dogs to pull the sledges. Instead, he would use primarily northern ponies (supposedly cold and snow adapted). There was a precedent: Ernest Shackleton had used them, with qualified success, in 1908–9 to reach “farthest south” up till then, which was 112 miles from the pole. Scott would also use new “motorized sledges,” the heavy and insufficiently tested precursors of today’s snowmobiles (now the vehicle of choice for transportation in frozen, snowy regions of the world).

In Lyttelton, they had brought on board the
Terra Nova
two Siberian and seventeen Manchurian ponies, tons of grain and bales of fodder (both scarce in Antarctica), and, Scott’s secret weapon, three petroleum-powered motor sledges made just for this purpose but never before used in such extreme circumstances. Almost as an afterthought, thirty-three Siberian sledge dogs were loaded, less than one-third of what Amundsen brought along on the
Fram
; no one on board had worked with sledge dogs. There were skis, but few knew how to use them
skillfully, or at all. There were also harnesses for men, so they could pull the sledges themselves, in staunch British fashion.

Crammed with men, animals, food for all of them, coal by the ton to heat their base station, barrels of other fuel, and mountains of equipment and supplies, the
Terra Nova
slogged away from New Zealand but almost never made it to Antarctica. It was caught in a violent storm soon after leaving New Zealand and, top-heavy, nearly capsized. Then it took on water and almost sank; two ponies died. Somehow it stayed afloat and managed to limp south and into the pack ice. Without an ice pilot like the
Fram
’s Beck to guide it through, it became trapped and remained so for three weeks. Finally, it broke through and made it the rest of the way to the western corner of the Great Ice Barrier, at the end of McMurdo Sound.

Unbeknownst to Scott, the
Fram
would reach Antarctica a week and a half later, easily slipping through the ice and arriving, as Amundsen intended, in the Bay of Whales at the opposite corner of the Great Ice Barrier. The
Fram
lay some four hundred miles east of the
Terra Nova
and, more importantly, a whole degree of latitude, sixty-nine miles, closer to the pole. Although only sixty-nine miles, it would make all the difference in the long run.

Both expeditions, ignorant as yet of the other’s whereabouts, immediately began preparations to set up their respective base stations. Scott chose, as he had on his previous expedition, the eastern side of big Ross Island, with its twin volcanoes Mt. Erebus (active and smoking) and Mt. Terror (extinct) rising in the east. He favored this spot for its accessibility for unloading the
Terra Nova
and because, being solid land, it could not calve at any time as could the barrier. The location of the “Hut,” a wooden structure large enough to house twenty-seven men, did have a liability: it was separated from the mainland where the real expedition would begin, across several miles of pack ice, which was unpredictable in thickness and stability, at the head of McMurdo Sound. This liability showed itself right away. One of the motor sledges, just as it was being unloaded from the
Terra Nova
, broke through the pack ice and sank, gone before it ever had a chance to start. It would cost them even more dearly a few weeks ahead, when eight ponies fell through and drowned.