Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (36 page)

IV ››› LAST VOYAGES

29 ›
SHIPS IN ICE, SHIPS OF AIR

T
hough Roald Amundsen never took the
Fram
north, or anywhere else, he did have one more use for it. It was, by his own assessment, a “wreck,” no longer fit for the arduous undertaking of an Arctic passage. So with funds still in reserve for the expedition—from the Norwegian government, Christophersen, other donors, and his own coffers—he set out to build a new ship to take its place. It would look very similar to the
Fram
, both inside and out, but shorter by ten feet, a little wider in the beam, shallower in draft, and more comfortable for a smaller crew, with each member having a private cabin. Always on the lookout to save money, Amundsen succeeded in getting permission from the government (which still owned the ship) to strip the
Fram
of certain structures and equipment for his new ship, named the
Maud
, after the queen of Norway, wife of King Haakon, one of his biggest supporters. Amundsen’s choice of names, as in other things he did, was mindfully strategic.

Off the
Fram
came masts and rigging, sails, boats, ground tackle, rudder, helm, doors, and even furniture, and to the new vessel, still under construction, they went. A salvage operation, it would seem to some, of a derelict ship that was no longer serviceable. To others, particularly those who had spent so much time on it, it may have seemed more like cannibalism.

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In July 1918, the
Maud
left Christiania, to follow Fridtjof Nansen’s route to and along the Siberian coast. It would go further east than the
Fram
before heading north into the ice, through the entire Northeast Passage to the Bering Strait, to reach and more likely to cross over the pole. In true Amundsen fashion, the ship departed in the predawn hours, slipping away from would-be crowds and fanfare. Aboard were eight men besides Amundsen, four of them returnees from the Antarctic expedition: Oscar Wisting, Helmer Hanssen, Martin Rønne, and Knut Sundbeck. The first two were Amundsen’s most dedicated disciples and his
companions to the South Pole (a ninth crew member would be picked up later, in Siberia). It was the start of a long, difficult, disjointed, and unfulfilled trip.

It would last seven years, all told, with four winters stuck in the ice. It took the
Maud
two years just to make it through the Northeast Passage. While beset the first winter off the coast of Siberia’s Cape Chelyuskin, two of the crew left on a sledging trip to take the mail to Dickson, never to return; their remains were found far apart, and both were apparent victims of accidents and freezing to death. When the ship reached Nome, Alaska, the thinned-out crew became even thinner: once-favored Hanssen, whom Amundsen had appointed skipper, and Rønne left or, by Amundsen’s account, were dismissed for unsatisfactory performance and went home. Sundbeck followed suit, much to Amundsen’s disgust. Of the once-loyal South Pole veterans, only Wisting remained with the Boss.

The
Maud
then went north, to find the east-west current that would take it on the drift across the North Pole. However, before the ship got very far it encountered ice that gripped it and drove it west across the Bering Strait to the coast of Siberia’s Chukchi Peninsula, where it stayed for another winter, its third. Instead of heading north when freed the next summer, it had to go south to Seattle for repairs to its severely ice-damaged screw and shaft. By the time it arrived, Amundsen was already there.

Not one to hang around while the ship was locked in ice, he had had Wisting drive him by dog sledge to East Cape (the easternmost settlement in Russia) where he caught a ride on a ship to Seattle. He did not stay there long, either, leaving for Norway. The
Maud
, once it got to Seattle, remained under Wisting’s care there for a whole year.

When Amundsen returned to the
Maud
in May 1922, he came with two airplanes, dismantled and stuffed into many big crates, and men to fly and fix them. They all sailed forth from Seattle on June 3, 1922, and headed north once again, with a more crowded scene on board—the remnants of the old crew; two scientists; two pilots and two mechanics; a Chukchi native who had come on to assist; Amundsen; and the boxed-up airplanes on deck. Amundsen, one of the pilots, and one plane were transferred to another ship and taken to Wainwright (now Ulguniq), on the north shore of Alaska. There they would assemble the plane, test it, and then take off for their flight over the pole. The
Maud
kept going northwest, under Wisting’s command and carrying the other plane and pilot, to find the frozen sea above Siberia, begin its long-anticipated drift, and use the plane for ice reconnaissance.

The flights and the drift never happened. Ice conditions and the weather around Wainwright were too bad for flying that summer, and during the next the plane crashed while on trials and was too severely damaged to fly again. (Over the winter, the ever-restless Amundsen sledged south to do more “business” in the more lively, cosmopolitan Nome, a town of perhaps two thousand people [down from twelve thousand during the Gold Rush at the turn of the century], leaving the pilot to his own devices in a small house in Wainwright.)

The
Maud
became snared in the ice north of Wrangel Island, in an eerie coincidence almost exactly where the
Jeannette
had been entrapped more than four decades earlier. For the next two years, it drifted with the floes, northwesterly, but not toward the pole. It was headed to the New Siberian Islands when Amundsen telegraphed Wisting, instructing him to abort the mission, break out of the ice, and return to Nome.

It was easier said than done. For several weeks they struggled to free the ship, finally succeeding in early August just north of the New Siberian Islands. It curled back, south then east, along the open water of coastal Siberia but was locked in again in September. It spent yet another winter, another ten months, in the ice before breaking free and going on to Nome.

It was a hard accounting. The
Maud
had not even reached the
southernmost
point of the
Fram
’s start on its own icebound voyage. One man had died of unknown causes. The Chukchi native had abandoned the ship when frozen in off Siberia and gone home. The flying experiment had failed, as it had at Wainwright. The plane, having had difficulty taking off and landing in irregular pack ice, was disabled permanently after several short test-flight crashes.

The
Maud
never made it back to Norway but ended up in Seattle, recalled there by Amundsen, where it was seized by his creditors for unpaid bills. Eventually, the Hudson’s Bay Company bought it to serve as a supply ship to its outposts in the Canadian Arctic and, its final job, to be a floating radio station in Cambridge Bay (now Inuinnaqtun) at Victoria Island. It is still there, at least its battered remains, sunk in the bay’s icy water, its hull just showing above the surface. The
Fram
’s masts have gone to scavengers and the weather; the
Fram
’s windlass went to rust and rot. At least it is not yet only a memory. Some still hope that one day it will be raised, taken back to Norway, be restored, and take its place next to the
Fram
and
Gjøa
.

From the rearview of history, the
Maud
expedition, for all its failures, had some glowing successes: collection of abundant, revelatory scientific data (especially by Harald Ulrik Sverdrup on oceanography and meteorology); preliminary insights into and lessons learned about flight in polar regions; and the first surface circumnavigation of the Arctic (by Amundsen and Hanssen). But even as the
Maud
lay immobile in the ice, and even before it would be taken from him, Amundsen had moved on. He would leave the dogs and sledges on the ice, leave ships to the sea, and take to air to capture that one last place he wanted, to add to the ones he already had.

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Despite his abortive and almost calamitous attempts off Alaska, Amundsen remained committed to flying as the future of polar exploration. Aviation, and planes, had improved by leaps and bounds during and after World War I, an all-too-familiar story of boons to technology coming out of terrible upheavals in society. In the meantime, however, Amundsen had gone bankrupt, despite his fame and selling of assets (including the
Maud
), and he desperately needed money to continue his plan to fly over the Arctic basin. Through good fortune and good timing, help arrived at that moment. When he was in New York on a lecture tour of the United States to raise money, a wealthy polar enthusiast and admirer came calling. Lincoln Ellsworth offered his own money (and that of his millionaire father) to the cause, with one big string: that he himself would not just be a bystander to watch and cheer but also go along as a participant.

In the spring of 1925, two German Dornier Wal seaplanes, unnamed and referred to only by their prosaic registration numbers, N24 and N25, took off from Spitsbergen and headed north. Aboard N25 were pilot Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen; Amundsen as navigator and the expedition commander; and a German mechanic, Karl Feucht. The pilot of N24 was Leif Dietrichson, with copilot cum mechanic Oskar Omdal (of one of the planes on the
Maud
), and as navigator, the American Lincoln Ellsworth.

They figured that eight hours of flying would get them to the pole. After flying eight hours they came down to check. Riiser-Larsen picked a narrow lead between floes and landed N25 safely, while Dietrichson, under orders to keep the planes together, guided N24 to another lead some distance away.

Their calculations were a bit off. Instead of being at the pole, they were 156 miles away from it. N24’s fuselage had been damaged on takeoff at Spitsbergen, and it now began to take on water. Its crew quickly unloaded fuel and supplies and then on skis began transporting them over the ice toward the sister ship. The ice was thin, and both Dietrichson and Omdal fell through into the frigid water. Ellsworth, using his skis as poles, reached out to the floundering men and pulled each out before the coldness and currents took them away. It took nearly a week before they got to N25.

The lead around N25 had begun to freeze and close, so they rushed to get it up on the ice before it was too late. Getting to the pole was out. If the remaining one seaplane were to get back to Svalbard, it would have to take off from the ice, carrying the extra weight of three more men. However, the floe on which it sat was too small, so they found another and, with great difficulty, maneuvered the plane across the uneven pack to reach it. Next, they had to make a runway on the new floe, long enough to allow the overweight plane to become airborne. At first they scraped and hacked at the ice with what few tools they had, trying to flatten the uneven surface and make a runway out of shifting pack ice, but then Omdal suggested it would be much easier—for both their labor and the plane’s glide—to pack down snow.

After three and a half weeks, the runway was finally ready. They left most everything on the ice: fuel, food, sledges, extra clothes, and even the canvas boat, with only enough fuel to get back to Svalbard and food to last but one day for each of them. With the five other men crammed into the fuselage, Riiser-Larsen opened the throttle full, and N25 began to move down the runway. It was all or nothing now, success or failure, one try only. Gå fram!

It gained speed, and then, with a great jumble of pack ice and the Arctic Ocean awaiting them if they could not get high enough, it struggled into the air just before reaching the end of the runway. Eight and a half hours later, almost out of gas, with Svalbard in view, N25 developed steering problems and Riiser-Larsen had to bring it down and drive it like a boat across the water the remaining few miles to land. They had returned, after twenty-six days on the ice and given up for lost.

Later, with Riiser-Larsen at the controls, N25 took Amundsen to Oslo, where great crowds eagerly waited. It was the first and only time he accompanied a vessel of his own back home to Norway, and into public adulation, after a momentous voyage. It did not matter that he had not reached the pole, had not crossed the polar basin, or had lost a plane. It was more about the actors and the drama played out on this world stage.

Even as the celebrations went on around him, Amundsen had his mind on something else. Riiser-Larsen had suggested to Amundsen that, instead of planes, they should take an airship (dirigible) across the pole. Riiser-Larsen had already flown airships in England and was convinced of their utility for this purpose: they were big, could be repaired in flight, were fast (by using the wind as well
as engines for propulsion), and did not have to land. Amundsen agreed, and together they approached Italian airship designer, builder, and pilot, Umberto Nobile. Ellsworth again offered his ample money to drop in the yawning till, again with the proviso of being one aboard.