Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (35 page)

The tour was to be long and unrelenting, taking him to key towns and cities in Scandinavia, Europe, Great Britain, and finally, in the new year (1913), North America. He intended to wrap up his presentations in San Francisco and there
reunite with the
Fram
. Thanks to Christophersen’s largess and his own replenished coffers from talks and his newly released book, a fresh and full
Fram
would have come from Buenos Aires up the Pacific coast. After picking up Amundsen in San Francisco, it would continue on to the Bering Strait and plunge into its next polar venture. Such was the plan, or professed plan. It was not to unfold that way.

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A WANDERING ALBATROSS

I
n the evening of January 3, 1913, as Roald Amundsen headed to New York on the passenger liner
St. Paul
, Hjalmar Johansen went from a cheap hotel in a gritty part of Christiania, west down Karl Johans Street, past the Royal Palace, to Solli Square, a small park where several main streets converge. There he took out his army revolver, put it to his head, and shot himself.

His physical life ended suddenly, but his fragile nature had died earlier, by degrees. He had fallen out with Amundsen and been relegated to anonymity. Fridtjof Nansen had become increasingly distant and inaccessible. He had no money, no job. He was excluded from the
Fram
and all its recognition. He drank more heavily; his depression deepened. His wife left with the children, all being too much for her. Ultimately, it was all too much for him. He hit bottom, its darkness absolute. Polar cold and polar nights were nothing by comparison.

At Solli Square there is a bronze statue of Winston Churchill, commemorating him for helping Norway during the Second World War. There is none of Johansen, at least that anyone can see. But there is another kind of monument to him there, cast in memory, silent and invisible except for those who know, and an everlasting testament to the soul.

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Johansen’s sometimes drinking buddy Jørgen Stubberud, along with Leon Amundsen, accompanied the coffin from the hospital to the train station for the trip to his hometown Skien, southwest of Christiania. Five days later he was buried, and Thorvald Nilsen, who was back from Buenos Aires, Kristian Prestrud, and Sverre Hassel were there. Roald Amundsen, on his way to America, sent a wreath via Leon. Nansen sent another, but his absence was not purposeful, mean-spirited, or because he was away. He was at home, a distraught widower tending to his youngest son, Åsmund, who was critically ill. His son died a short time later, at age ten, in February of that year, about the time that the
Terra Nova
returned to New Zealand from McMurdo Sound, bringing the news about Robert
Falcon Scott and his companions. Two months later the
Titanic
sank, sliced open by a glancing swipe of a single iceberg, and 1,500 people lost their lives. It was a time of grieving for many people, of different nations, for different reasons.

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Amundsen spent an exhausting six months in the United States and Canada, going from city to city across the continent delivering his well-worn talk over 160 times—one a day. The backbreaking schedule was only part of his stress. As usual, money was another. For all his public appearances and sales of his new book, he was not bringing in as much as anticipated. Also, back in Norway the leadership of government had changed, and the new prime minister informed Leon that it had no intentions of continuing to fund the
Fram
expedition.

Amundsen was livid, saying the previous administration had made promises that must not be broken: permanent government jobs to members of the
Fram
when they returned from the Arctic one year hence; state honors to Don Pedro Christophersen’s son (and, by association, to Don Pedro also); and straight-out cash to keep the
Fram
in business. These commitments must be carried forward, he demanded through Leon, who was caught in the crossfire, or else he would stop the expedition. Amundsen also appealed to Nansen to bring his weight to bear on the prime minister.

Nansen, however, did not jump to do his bidding. He was angry at Amundsen for jeopardizing the most important goal, the Arctic drift and its harvest of precious scientific information, for the sake of what he, Nansen, considered “trifles.” Nansen, always careful not to criticize his younger colleague in public, fired back with a letter, with the most pointed words he had ever used: “You might not have realized it, but for your sake I have made a bigger sacrifice than for any other living being, in that I abandoned my trip to the South Pole, the keystone of my life as a polar explorer, and gave up the
Fram
in order that you could drift across the Arctic Ocean.”
¹⁹

Amundsen, though chastened by Nansen’s reproach, did not give up his resentment of the government’s position. He even threatened to renounce his Norwegian citizenship in favor of American if he did not get what he felt was his due. Finally, the government extended an olive branch, one with several leaves: for him, an annual stipend and an academic position of professor of oceanography; for each of the crew, a lump-sum award of cash; and for Christophersen’s son, the prestigious medal of recognition. Amundsen accepted all but the professorship, feeling it would take too much time away from what he really wanted to
do, explore. The government’s offer was not everything he wanted but enough to assuage his damaged pride and keep the
Fram
expedition going, at least for the time being.

In the fall of 1913, most of the
Fram
’s crew members, having signed on for the Arctic trip, made their way back to Buenos Aires to reunite with their ship. Missing were Amundsen, Nilsen, and Olav Bjaaland. Amundsen was now on the lecture circuit in England and Europe, Nilsen would make his way to the ship later, and Bjaaland had started a ski-making business back home. While the North Pole was still the ultimate destination, the planned way to get to the Arctic had changed over the last year. The new plan, an idea guaranteed to get the world’s attention, was for the
Fram
, instead of going around South America, to be the first ship through the Panama Canal, now in its last stages of construction. It was to be a grand procession, full of symbolism, with the giants of polar exploration—Norwegian Amundsen and American Robert Peary—aboard the
Fram
, escorted by an American naval ship. The passage through would also save a great amount of time and money, not insignificant considerations for Amundsen.

So from Buenos Aires the
Fram
sailed to Colon, Panama, the eastern entrance to the canal, under the temporary command of a lieutenant in the Norwegian navy, Christian Doxrud, who had spent time sailing off Chile. He had actually taken command the year before, when Nilsen departed in the fall for Norway. While the ship remained idle in Buenos Aires, Doxrud took the time to learn to fly airplanes, an odd thing to do even if he was eager to learn, given the interim nature of his job, the
Fram
’s mission, and the remote geographical location. The most curious part of all, at least at first blush, was that Amundsen had
asked
him to do it. This all began to make sense when it was revealed that Amundsen had been hatching another novel idea: to take a plane aboard the
Fram
and fly over the North Pole.

Doxrud, by his own admission, had a tenuous grip on the salty, self-assured, and at times cocky veterans of the Antarctic expedition. They had been too long and too far together to yield submissively to a newcomer, even one in charge. Nonetheless, they arrived at Colon on October 3, where Nilsen took over command and Doxrud, probably with great relief, became first mate (and would-be air pilot). But in Colon, the
Fram
went nowhere. The canal was not ready to open, and work was far behind schedule. Days turned into weeks, and weeks to two months, when word came that the canal would not be opened for another year. Amundsen, now on tour in Germany, gave the order: abandon the plan.

So it was back to the original route around South America, the long way. The balky ship would have to fight prevailing winds and currents for a good portion of the trip, and time was of the essence now, with so much lost waiting for the canal to open. To make sure the tight schedule would not be delayed by the whims of wind or sea, Amundsen proposed a rather outsized, some would say ignoble, solution: a diesel-driven, ocean-going tug would
tow
the
Fram
through the Straits of Magellan and up the Pacific, all the way to San Francisco. As before, Amundsen would meet it there, in time to take it into the Arctic basin the following summer (1914).

But first the
Fram
had to get to the Straits of Magellan, some eight thousand miles away—no mean feat, even in the best of circumstances. However, the
Fram
was not at its best. Two years in the warm, humid tropics had taken a toll on the cold-weather ship. Algae carpeted its hull below the waterline, slowing its already slow progress. Mold and rot had crept into its interior. It was never rid of the rats that had come aboard in Buenos Aires, and cockroaches had joined the crowd. Then fish stored in the hold began to stink and were found full of maggots, so all had to be tossed over the side, along with hundreds of pounds of other contaminated food. Many of the maggots had metamorphosed into hard-backed beetles that invaded the crew’s cabins by the droves, so many that they crunched underfoot. The
Fram
had turned into somewhat of a garbage scow.

The men became cranky, trapped in the sultry, fetid environment, and grew impatient with the snail-like progress south. Some quarreled, some fomented discord, and some merely sulked and brooded. Then Andreas Beck became ill and died on March 18, his body buried at sea the next day. The big, amiable ice pilot from northern Norway was the only man since Ove Braskerud to die aboard the
Fram
over all its years and miles. Neither had the benefit of a doctor to diagnose the ailment or prescribe treatment. On the second expedition fifteen years earlier, the doctor Johan Svendsen had committed suicide on Ellesmere Island; on the third, Amundsen refused to carry one.

A week later, after months of plodding east then south down the coast of South America, they were in Montevideo, back into the financial oasis of Christophersen. They needed to make repairs, restock lost goods, and get the ship’s fuzzy bottom scraped and cleaned. They still had 1,500 miles to go just to reach the tip of South America, and it was already spring in the northern hemisphere. It was simply too late to get to San Francisco to begin the Arctic trip as planned. Amundsen sent a telegram to Nilsen, postponing the trip for another year, until 1915. Amundsen cancelled his own passage to San Francisco and stopped the shipment of supplies going there, including the airplane he had bought. He ordered the
Fram
back to Norway. He would take it through the Northeast Passage instead to reach the polar basin and begin the drift, just as Nansen had done two decades earlier.

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In July 1914, after another four months at sea, the
Fram
was back in Norway, slipping quietly into the naval shipyard at Horten some forty miles down Oslofjord from Christiania. It had been a wandering albatross of a ship for the last four years, crossing oceans, hemispheres, and time zones. This, its third homecoming after a long absence, was far different from the others. The harbor was not crowded with boats out to greet it, the shores not lined with people cheering and waving flags. There was no mythic Viking figure of Roald Amundsen at the helm to guide it in, as had Otto Sverdrup and Nansen in their day. Now, instead, two hundred sailors dutifully stood at attention as the king stepped aboard to give the official welcome. Of the three commanders of
Fram
expeditions, only Sverdrup was there to pay respects. It almost seemed that the
Fram
, with age and decay creeping into its bones, had become too old, tired, and world-weary to bother with a party.

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Amundsen would never take the
Fram
to the Arctic, nor would anyone else sail it away on other expeditions, north or south, east or west. He had physically left the
Fram
two years earlier and now was done with it completely. Though the Norwegian government had finally offered to pay at least some money to continue the Arctic expedition, Amundsen called the whole thing off. The world was on the eve of war, the Great War that would cost so many lives, and most of the
Fram
’s crew,
certainly out of patriotism but perhaps also for a much-needed change of scene, went off to prepare for battle.

Amundsen himself had taken flying lessons and had become a pilot, in anticipation of his new way of exploration, but now, as war broke out, he offered both his plane and himself to the Norwegian military, should either or both be needed in service to the country. Could it be that this man, poker faced and always holding his cards so near his chest, never really wanted to go north and now had the perfect excuse?

Oscar Wisting, Amundsen’s faithful companion to the South Pole, was left in charge of unloading the
Fram
in Horten. It would become, in short order, an empty ship, a mothballed relic tied to a pier, a burned-out, darkened star of times gone by.