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Dan Snow's History Hit
Roald Amundsen
00:47:58
Roald Amundsen was the Norwegian explorer to beat Scott to the South Pole.
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- [00:01]
Dan Snow
Hi, I'm Dan Snow and if you would like Dan Snow's History Hit ad free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe in the middle of January 1912, a British team led by Captain Scott finally reached the South Pole. It had been a horrific journey and they were appalled to discover that they'd been beaten to that most sought after destination. As they arrived at the Pole, they found the remains of a camp, a tent, abandoned equipment and a letter. The letter was addressed to Captain Scott. It must have been the last thing he was expecting to find in the most remote place on Earth. It read simply, Dear Captain Scott, as you are probably the first to reach this area after us, I will ask you kindly to forward this letter to King Haakon vii. If you can use any of the articles left in the tent, please do not hesitate to do so. With kind regards. Wish you a safe return. Yours truly, Roald Amundsen. With this stunning, outrageous flex, Amundsen let Scott know that he'd been defeated in the race to the Pole. And whilst we often focus, particularly in the English speaking world, on Scott's heroic attempt to get back to his camp, his death on the ice alongside that of his four comrades. I don't think we talk enough about Amundsen, who is certainly one of the greatest explorers in history. This was the man who not only got to the South Pole first, he was also the first to reach the North Pole and the first to traverse the perilous Northwest Passage, the stretch of ocean that runs across the north of Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The goal that had obsessed explorers for 400 years. He broke some of the most significant records in the world of exploration. And in doing so, he stared death in the face several times over. He was attacked by a polar bear. He was trapped in the ice a few times. He sustained significant injuries, including smashing his shoulder. He nearly killed himself through asphyxiation and sustained lasting heart damage. He was as tough as they come, and perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. As a young boy in Norway, he deliberately slept with his window open to acclimatise his body to prepare it for freezing temperatures. Amundsen was pragmatic, he was adaptable. He was an innovator. He chose the right platforms, tools and equipment for all the various challenges. He went by ship, by aeroplane, dog sled and airship. He used both the latest technologies and tried and tested centuries old techniques borrowed from Inuit cultures of the high Arctic. His death, when it came, was as mysterious as the life that he'd lived. And today on Dan Snow's history hit, I want to look at that life and place it firmly where it belongs amongst the pantheon of history's greatest explorers. Joining me to talk through Amundsen's life is Stephen R. Baum, author of the Last the Life of Roald Amundsen. So pull that chair closer to the fire and that rug tighter around your shoulders because we're going to be venturing into high, high latitudes now following Amundsen. Enjoy. T minus 10.
- [04:04]
Stephen R. Baum
Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black white unity till there is first and black unity never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.
- [04:22]
Dan Snow
Steven, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
- [04:25]
Stephen R. Baum
It's my pleasure to be here.
- [04:27]
Dan Snow
Was Amundsen always the complete exploiter? Like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus? Was he just ready to go from the off? Is that what happens in Norway, or was he a city boy and had to get into it?
- [04:36]
Stephen R. Baum
Well, he was a bit of both. I mean, his father was very peripatetic ship captain, late 19th century, sailing all over the planet delivering cargoes. That was his life. His wife even came on the ship with him for many of these voyages. So when Amundsen was a child with his other brothers, they lived on the outside of town and they had plenty of opportunity for exploring both the city of Oslo or Christiania as it was called, or the backwoods. I mean, these places were kind of smaller, much smaller at the time. So he even had a foot in both worlds. He was exposed to the greater intellectual currents of the world at that time, as well as, you know, a great knowledge of geography and philosophy and ideas. But he also spent most of his time exploring in the woods. And he really devoted himself to Norwegian style backcountry skiing and adventures. And from a very young age his mother wanted him to be a physician and doctor and pursue that career like that very opposite of his father. But he always had his own ideas. You know, he spent a year or two struggling and ultimately failing out of university and then more or less devoted his entire life to endless wandering adventures.
- [05:52]
Dan Snow
We know that in the English speaking world, adventuring was very much part of the Victorian, Edwardian sort of masculine makeup. Is the same true of Norway? Was he raised on stories of explorers hacking their way through jungles and deserts and cold wastes. Was it an elite Norwegian thing as well?
- [06:13]
Stephen R. Baum
Well, it's kind of unusual in the sense that maybe even a bit ironic. Amundsen was raised on stories of great explorers and heroic exploits and danger and adventure, but his great interest was in all the British explorers and adventurers and going all the way back for centuries and, you know, frank expeditions. He was interested in, you know, all the early Elizabethan adventures. And I don't know that Norway has. Other than going back to Viking sagas, which is thousand years. So that's not really relevant. I mean, they don't really have the same history of global exploration and adventure. I mean, that was. Well, it was and still is a very British thing and an American thing later, too.
- [06:56]
Dan Snow
But he seemed to know he wanted to do it. He wanted to be part of that world, didn't he? Because the stories of him as a teenager, sort of preparing himself physically.
- [07:03]
Stephen R. Baum
Yeah. I mean, he must have been a very unusual character. I mean, he would just be constantly training of all different natures, whether it was skiing or practicing with equipment or doing weights or, you know, he just wasn't interested in a lot of the traditional things that people of his age in Norway were interested in. Now, of course, Norway at the time was a bit of a backwater country, and it wasn't even entirely independent. It was ruled from Sweden at the time, and it was not a very cosmopolitan place. It was, you know, a lot of rural, you know, fishermen. And it wasn't an intellectual center, that's. That's for sure. And it wasn't entirely a very prosperous nation.
- [07:41]
Dan Snow
Does that mean there was just less. He thought there might be less opportunity. There was less sort of expeditions like this being mounted, less scientific endeavors.
- [07:49]
Stephen R. Baum
There was hardly any science being practiced at that time in Norway. That was more of a British thing and to a lesser extent, other European countries. The first famous explorer that came out of Norway was Fridolf Nansen. You know, he had that expedition crossing the Greenland ice cap. You know, he rightly became famous for that. It was quite a daring undertaking and, you know, proved a bunch of knowledge about Greenland. And he was a very good public speaker, and he wrote books about it, and he became very knowledgeable. Nansen was much more scientifically oriented and went on to a diplomatic career and was a very influential and respectable person, you know, operating at the upper levels of politics and society. That was quite rare in Norway. Nansen stands out as one of the only ones. Amundsen was not like Nansen at all. He had no interest in the Political or economic or social elite of any society anywhere, whether it was in the US where he spent a lot of the time, or in Britain or in Norway. He was uncomfortable with the role. He was more or less constantly dreaming of new adventures. His entire life was taken up with that. It wasn't a stepping stone onto a different career for him. He never lost his interest in adventures.
- [09:01]
Dan Snow
That's very interesting because sometimes I think it is a stepping stone to fame and fortune back home and society back home. But for him, he just loved the salt air in his face. Did he?
- [09:10]
Stephen R. Baum
Yeah, pretty much. Or the polar wind on his face. I mean, he just never gave up. You know, it's a bit unusual. The early 20th century was of course, on the cusp of great technological change as well as social change. And he was constantly making use of this new technology throughout his career to plan new and daring adventures. You know, sometimes with the slim veneer of a scientific goal, but really it was just a disguise for his desire for adventure and just to be able to tell his story and just picking.
- [09:41]
Dan Snow
Up on the change there, because there certainly was, I mean, the change in our understanding of the world, of the size, scale and nature of Antarctica. For, I mean, he was on the first expedition to overwinter there, wasn't he?
- [09:52]
Stephen R. Baum
His first official expedition that he went on, not as a leader or anyone that conceived of one, just as a member of an expedition, was on the ill fated Belgica expedition, which was, oddly enough, a Belgian scientific expedition to Antarctica, which is just kind of odd. It had an international crew and an international leadership and there were a lot of problems with that expedition. It was not very well planned, it was not very well conceived, it was not very well led. But Amundse was part of it and he did get to see the conditions, the polar conditions. And it was just as a very, very junior officer on that expedition that, well, he got experience with how not to lead an expedition and how not to command an expedition and how crews can descend into infighting and quarreling and the chain of command, if it's unclear, can lead to a great deal of problems. How poor diet can lead to scurvy, how poor decisions can endanger everyone's life. I mean, that was his, his big wake up call. He'd been trying to get on an expedition for a while, but that was the first one where he was exposed for several years to serious dysfunction and near failure, but not complete disaster.
- [11:05]
Dan Snow
It's amazing how many soldiers, sailors and explorers become great because they go on failed expeditions and they really Learn what not to do early on in their career.
- [11:15]
Stephen R. Baum
Yeah. I mean, who wants to read a. Yes, we went there. There were no challenges to overcome. We just. We waltzed to the victory line and accomplished everything. No story. I mean, the great drama, of course, is always massive problems to overcome. Huge disaster, huge suffering. And how we retreated to the place of darkness and psychological horror and terror and physical deprivation. We managed to triumph in the end. I mean, this makes for great storytelling. And Amundsen, throughout his career, was more successful at avoiding some of that than others.
- [11:50]
Dan Snow
So he escapes from the Antarctic sea ice on board the Belgica in 1899. They've spent the winter locked in that sea ice aboard that ship. He's seen dysfunction, but he's learnt a lot. He sees the importance of eating what, seal blubber, seal meat, to ward off scurvy.
- [12:08]
Stephen R. Baum
I mean, scurvy was such a prevalent problem for all of these maritime expeditions. Going back centuries was a huge, huge effort. It was the British Navy that managed to find a way to defeat scurvy in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. And that's where the term lime use comes from. With a daily dose of lime juice that would prevent mariners from, well, just completely collapsing and dying, always. The problem with lime juice was that production quality could vary and using too much heat while making the concentrated solution resulted in a. A loss of all the effective properties of the vitamin C. And so although the Belgic expedition had this lime juice, which everyone did at that time, it wasn't effective. It was, you know, had been. Obviously the vitamin C had been destroyed in the manufacturing process. And it turned out that eating the fresh meats raw or rare, has a lot more nutrition and particularly in vitamin C in it. So there was Amundsen and a few other people were eating that, and they didn't come down with scurvy. While many of the other crew members were on death's door. Body sinews collapsing, the bleeding gums, the loss of mental capacity. And only after seeing that Amundsen and some of the others were doing well by eating this, you know, uncooked meats, which had the nutrition in it, that brought the whole crew up a level of paying more attention to their diet and they managed to stave off scurvy mostly.
- [13:28]
Dan Snow
He eventually ends up taking on the. The Northwest Passage. Talk about being inspired by English explorers. People have been trying to get through the Northwest Passage since Tudor times. The idea that you can get to Asia from northern Europe in a much shorter distance than going all the way around Cape Horn Around South America, you can go over the top of Canada. Trouble is, it's full of ice, full of sea ice. What was his plan to succeed where others had failed?
- [13:53]
Stephen R. Baum
Well, it was actually his big dream was to do the Northwest Passage. And it was from reading, you know, centuries of exploration literature of the British explorers, it was a great dream. If you could achieved the sailing of the Northwest Passage, you could open up a route to the Spice Islands and the great wealth that would come there. But, of course, no one knew anything about the geography at the time. They didn't even know that North America was much more than a couple of islands. So it's only a slow process by which the idea of the Northwest Passage was conceived. And it was one of the great geographical mysteries that had not been conquered yet in the early 20th century. And Amundsen figured correctly, as it turned out, that a large expedition was never going to be successful at that because you couldn't carry enough food with you, the ship would have to be too large, which would increase its chance of being locked in the ice. And so he, you know, used an inheritance that he received when his parents had died, and he devoted it to acquiring his own ship and interviewing and selecting his own small crew. And of course, in a story that plagued Amundsen throughout his career, even with this inheritance and even with some funding, he was always short of funds, and the creditors were trying to impound the ship and prevent it from sailing because he owed huge sums of money. Anyway, Inam's storm, he cut the rope, and they all set off as almost like a bunch of pirates fleeing Norway, and they went to cross the Northwest Passage in this tiny vessel. The veneer of scientific accomplishment was going to be the searching for where the North Magnetic Pole had recently moved to, because, you know, these things are always moving. Amundsen was never really interested in that. He wanted the conspicuous achievement of just being the first person to, you know, conquer this geographical mountain. So the ship set off. Of course, it was locked in the ice for several years, but Amundsen took great use of this time not just to send some people out on the scientific expeditions for which they, you know, had done a bit of training and received some financing for. He was more interested in Inuit culture, specifically the use of dog sleds and the construction of snow houses and how to build and work with snow and how to live off the land and how to prepare food. And, you know, it turns out that those were extremely valuable skills throughout the entire rest of his career, particularly on the South Pole expedition. And so he learned these skills from the people during the time that he was there. They didn't really have any serious problems, medical problems. They didn't encounter any true disasters. But the one thing that he did learn on this three year expedition was how to have his story not be stolen from the media sources. You know, on this third winter of being locked in, it was near the coast of Alaska. They hadn't quite cleared the Northwest Passage yet. He really wanted to get his story out to the world. So he set off on an 800 kilometer journey down to a town in Alaska, Eagle City. It was just a gold mining, fur trading town, but of course what happened was during his attempts to telegram the story through Seattle and San Francisco to the outside world, in order to get paid, he'd made some deals with the London Times and the New York Times and some other newspapers to get the scoop on his epic historical accomplishment. The news was stolen en route and leaked out to places without him ever receiving the money, which was a severe financial blow. So on one hand he learned all about polar and arctic survival techniques and how to, how to feed and train and work with dogs and sleds and how to accommodate Norwegian skiing technology along with those survival strategies and the food and everything from the Inuit. On the one hand, he also learned how not to get screwed over by the media.
- [17:34]
Dan Snow
He would get frozen in, in the winter in his little ship, but didn't, didn't worry about it, relaxed about it. They'd make some progress the following summer and then they, they'd get frozen in again. It's extraordinary.
- [17:43]
Stephen R. Baum
Yeah, it's a weird life. It's not for me. I read about the time these people just spent there and I just scratched my head going, who would sign on for that? But I guess they don't know what they're signing on for at the start because maybe they would have sailed right through in one season. Although Amundsen himself never intended to get through that passage as quickly as he could. He had his objectives, he had things that he knew he wanted to learn. And he did learn them. You know, because of the local people that were there, there was no great hardship that they suffered.
- [18:15]
Dan Snow
Wow.
- [18:16]
Stephen R. Baum
Those people helped them with hunting and helped them with food preparation and helped them with survival. So they didn't really encounter any disaster or death.
- [18:24]
Dan Snow
Not like the fabled British expedition to get through the Northwest Passage with Erebus and terror commanded by Franklin. That's a very different story. So Amundsen's famous. He made it. He's made the Northwest Passage what's he set his sights on next?
- [18:40]
Stephen R. Baum
Yeah, I mean, this is a curious part of the story. I mean, obviously he began his career trajectory to become an explorer as a business enterprise, which means he had to make money. And the only way to make money back then, in the era before TV and radio and Internet and everything was public appearances. So he began lecture touring in the United States, and then he was going over to do lecture touring in Great Britain and over parts of Europe. You know, back then, it would be a live performance. He would come with his slideshow and, you know, the whole theaters would fill up. That was the only entertainment. Everything was done in person. There was no other venue to make any money. So, I mean, this was a bit of a. It was a gravy train, but it was also a treadmill, if that makes any sense. I mean, he was making a lot of money from doing it, but he hated it. After a while, after a few lectures, it becomes just routine and irritating, especially to him. He was already conceiving of his next adventure because the publicity would help him raise finances and help some get some government funding and help derive interest in an expedition that was going to go towards the North Pole. Because he had already been so close to it in the Northwest Passage, he figured that, well, that hasn't been done yet either. And oddly enough, the famous controversy between Peary and Cook and which one had achieved the North Pole first happened just a few weeks before he was departing from Norway to New York on a publicity tour to help drum up interest in his own voyage up there. So that kind of took the wind out of his sails.
- [20:09]
Dan Snow
Although it turns out that both those two men were fraudsters. Right. So no one, in fact, had made it to the North Pole.
- [20:14]
Stephen R. Baum
Yeah, of course, people didn't know that at the time, but they were both swindlers. And Amundsen had known Cook from his time on the Belgic expedition, where Cook was one of the physicians on board or the physician on board. And so he had a bit of a friendship with him. And he got embroiled in a bit of a scandal by at first appearing to be overly friendly with Cook. But of course, the American scientific establishment was behind Peary and not Cook. And this was also part of his media learning skill, how to avoid public controversy and how not to be caught up. Because throughout his life, he. And after the South Pole, too, he was always caught in these. In between these forces where people were treating a lot of these expeditions as sporting matches, where you were supposed to pick one side over the other. Side and cheer unreservedly for the success of your team and against the other team. And it was a funny time. I mean, it's hard to imagine that people would care that much or to disregard the actual information out there to just pick a team and cheer for them. So managing publicity is one of the key things for any expedition. And these were skills that he just did not have. And he wasn't a native English speaker either. And he was learning the skill at the time of how to both control the media and how to speak in public and how to avoid getting lambasted. And I mean, a lot of people would just get completely blackballed if they were on the wrong side.
- [21:38]
Dan Snow
So they were both saying they'd got to the North Pole. Neither of them had. So in the end, Amundsen decides to skip the North Pole and just turn 180 degrees, head south.
- [21:48]
Stephen R. Baum
Yeah, but he had to keep it secret. As soon as those guys announced that they had already been to the North Pole, how was he going to continue doing fundraising for his own expedition, which was going to do something similar? Floating around, taking some scientific observations, et cetera, et cetera? The Republic's not interested in that. And he kind of knew that they wanted some more adventure and something great and exciting, so he just kind of figured, well, both these poles are cold, miserable, dark, horrible places. Why don't I just pick one over the other one? And so he had, without telling anyone, just resolved that he would turn south instead. Scott was, of course, going to the South Pole, but he knew he couldn't tell Scott that he intended to go there as well. You know, he never met Scott or knew anything about this expedition, but he knew that they had the similar objective and he knew that they were going to be using different techniques. And Amundsen, you know, correctly as it turned out, thought a very small expedition that doesn't need to carry a lot of food, doesn't need to carry a lot of equipment. Skiing with dogs to pull sleds could get there very quickly without the burden of, you know, slow moving, hard transportation of heavy equipment that was going to bog down. And so his idea was to do a lightning quick strike on the Pole, in and out as fast as possible using these survival techniques that he perfected and learned on the Northwest Passage. So, yeah, he began preparing the expedition. People started to wonder, why is he having 100 dogs at his property in Norway getting ready for the ship, and why is he loading all this lumber on board here when he could much more easily do it in the United States before you set up north. And so there was a bit of suspicious activity going on, but the crew didn't even know until they were in Portugal. They stopped in Portugal and announced that, by the way, we're actually not going north. We're not going to go to the United States and head north from there. We're going to go south. And anyone who wants to return home can return home. They all voted to go.
- [23:49]
Dan Snow
And the race was on.
- [23:50]
Stephen R. Baum
And the race was on. Yeah.
- [23:54]
Dan Snow
You're listening to Dan Snow's History. One of history's greatest explorers, Roald Amundsen. More after this. Scott ends up. Various members of expedition end up either on the verge of death or actually dying, including Scott himself. Amundsen dashes to and from the Pole. They were ahead of schedule, I think, when they got back. And I don't think they'd lost any weight either. I think some of them even put weight on. They'd eaten so well. I mean, you've gone into a bit. But what. Just explain what was the secret of the success there?
- [24:28]
Stephen R. Baum
I mean, Amundsen, I mean, let's give credit to him. He could be an irritating person, a bit of an overbearing, an autocrat, you know, I wouldn't want to sign on to an expedition with someone like that as the leader. I mean, you'd be reasonably secure in the idea that you'd probably survive. But he would make it unpleasant as a project leader. He would spend infinite amount of time testing every last piece of equipment over and over and over again and changing the designs and repeatedly planning for any possibility, anything, that could go wrong. He would try and think of it and pre determine what the solution to that problem would be before ever leaving and have equipment and have design and have the certain skills by people on the expedition trained up to deal with it. So I think he was obsessive in looking for problems before they arose and planning for them. So it seems that they just sailed the ship down there. I mean, it takes many, many months of hard sailing in dangerous conditions just to get there. And dealing with the dogs aboard the ship for the entire time. It was not an easy. It was not an easy expedition, although it seems like they just sailed there. They unloaded and they spent the first summer practicing and setting up their houses and their equipment and their dog facilities and their, you know, ski testing equipment and packing and planning all of their food for all the years. And then they hunker down for the winter and then. And then the next year they just dash there and it's all done so easily, and that's the way that he wanted it. He presented it that way in the book that he wrote where he downplayed the interpersonal disagreements and some of the early brushes with frostbite. But the actual accomplishing of the task, everything kind of worked the way that he had planned it, which is just quite remarkable. You know, they didn't get lost. He set up a system of flags perpendicular to the line that they were going to take. So if they missed their actual route or they strayed off from fog or wind or darkness or whatever, they would encounter one of the flags and know where they were. Like, he had a bunch of solutions to problems already planned out. And so it seemed like they just kind of rushed in there. And of course, controversially, many of the dogs died on the expedition. The dogs pulled all the sleds while the people skied. And they famously ate their dogs, you know, killed a bunch of them at a place called Slaughter Camp and fed the dogs to the other dogs and ate some of the dog meat themselves. And then getting to the Pole was anticlimactic. They just kind of skied up to it and of course, there's nothing there. It's more of a symbolic gesture to achieve this. I guess you could say that they saw the land around it, but Shackleton had already been there. The British expedition from two years earlier had already been within 100 km, I think, of the Pole. So it's not like the observation of the land was going to change all that much. A featureless white wind lashed plain in the middle of nowhere. A bit of anticlimactic. They turned around, they set up a little tent that announced that they were there. They marched perched all around so no one could say that they hadn't been exactly on it. And then they. They more or less skied back very quickly and got on their ship and sailed to Hobart in Tasmania. So it all seemed to go off without a hitch. Didn't really have that many problems, you.
- [27:42]
Dan Snow
Know, as you say, that used the dogs, the sleds, the skiing. They wore furs inspired by the Inuit rather than modern fabrics. And they made it back safe. Unlike Scott, what was his next adventure? Because, as you said at the beginning, he was not interested in resting on his laurels. What do you want to do next?
- [27:59]
Stephen R. Baum
I mean, of course, he would have loved to have continued going up north. I mean, he wanted to go back. Not to the South Pole, he wanted to go back to the Arctic. But of course, he knew and he was pressured by everyone that the time for doing a next adventure would have to wait. He was sent on the lecture circuit. Of course he was in debt, and it was only through the intercession of very wealthy businessmen in Argentina, a Norwegian, Argentinian businessman helped fix and repair the ship multiple times. Helped the crew, you know, by feeding them and giving them supplies. I mean, even despite all this effort, he was massively in debt by the time they finished the expedition. So they did manage to sell the first announcement rights and then the detail rights to various newspapers, principally the New York Times and the London Times to get the scoop on it. They were recouping money by this and managing the media through Amundsen and his brother Leon was helping to arrange all of that. And they were generating money, but it was still massively in debt. So he spent a significant amount of time going on the lecture tour of Europe and England and all over the United States and up into Canada. I mean, this was how money was made back then. And then he was supposed to head back up and do another polar drift, maybe along the Northeast Passage this time. And of course he didn't really want to do that because it didn't seem like it would be as dramatic or interesting enough the way that they had planned it. But of course World War I happened and that expedition was put on hold for many years. One interesting thing is though, just before he'd even finished all his lecturing, he had just seen airplanes when he was on this lecture tour of the United States and when he was in California, he actually set out to purchase one and learn how to fly it. And he sort of correctly surmised that that would be a game changing technology from at least two points of view. I mean, one, if you could get up into the sky, you can travel at massive distances over and avoid all the complicated, dangerous terrain. You get a huge perspective overview of land that can go on for hundreds of kilometers from up there in the sky. And it would be an extremely dramatic and new way of going on an adventure, which means you have. He's raising the finances to pay for it and you'd probably get a lot of media attention for doing it. And so he was exposed to that. But then of course, World War I intervened and people weren't very, very interested in civilian exploration as an adventure and form of entertainment for, you know, until the war ended, more or less.
- [30:33]
Dan Snow
Before he takes the skies, he does do one more arctic voyage, as you say, adrift, which seems just involves sailing your ship and getting frozen in and then just letting the ice pack take you where it will and doing readings and seeing where you get spat out. 1918 to 1920. He doesn't manage to get through the Northeast Passage, does he? Doesn't manage to get to the North Pole. Is that one of his least successful episodes?
- [30:56]
Stephen R. Baum
I'd say so. I mean, the book that he wrote about the expedition wasn't even bothered to be translated into English for the English market. So from a career point of view, it was not very lucrative or successful. He'd used a lot of his money that he'd made from the South Pole to pay for his own new ship for this expedition and to outfit it in the salaries of the crew. You're correct, it was boring. I mean, he sailed north, get stuck in the ice, and he spent several years floating along with ocean currents. I suppose you contribute in some small way to science by observing where the currents are and maybe taking some, you know, temperature and observations or mastronomical observations or whatnot. But, I mean, his heart wasn't really in it, and he ended up getting injured severely on that expedition when it took him many years to recover from these injuries. He slipped and fell off the gangplank at the top of the ship and landed on his shoulder, which caused a huge amount of damage. And then soon after that had started to heal, he was attacked and mauled by a polar bear, which re injured his shoulder and obviously not very happy to be attacked by a polar bear and almost killed by that. And then later on the expedition, he was also in a hut doing some kind of marginal scientific work that he had been contracted to do. And there was a malfunctioning kerosene lamp, and the fumes almost knocked him out. It killed him. And he managed to just get outside with his heart racing before the poisons got into his body. And that ended up taking years to recover. He couldn't do any physical activity. His heart was severely damaged by that. Eventually, he just left the ship and went to Alaska himself ahead of time. That must have been a pretty low point in his life.
- [32:41]
Dan Snow
He came roaring back, though, in the 1920s, the roaring twenties. He did take to the air. And tell me about this next expedition to the North Pole.
- [32:49]
Stephen R. Baum
Yeah, I mean, his time with airplanes, I mean, it's been so overlooked in history. You know, he gets overshadowed. The Northwest Passage, of course, is very famous. The epic story of the South Pole, you know, framed as a battle or a duel with Scott. I mean, it's very dramatic, and you can see why people latch onto that. But often Amundsen's completely Overlooked for his role in pioneering the use of air for exploration, and once again used his private finances to buy a bunch of two airplanes, and he had them shipped up to Alaska. By this time, Amundsen was becoming quite famous in the United States. I mean, he hardly spent any time in Norway. He was not really there. Most of his life is either spent on an expedition or traveling, giving lectures and tours. So he was a very peripatetic lifestyle, unstable, unsettled. So that's how he ended up in the United States. Was just doing lecture tours constantly to get some more money to help buy these airplanes. And of course, he and this other fellow and a small crew went up to Alaska. And their plan was to go to as north as they could get in Alaska and have the ships drop the airplanes off and reassemble them on the shores there, take off from Alaska, fly to the North Pole, report what they had seen, and then come back. The reason they chose Alaska rather than from Spitzbergen is because, you know, if Cook and Peary had gone to the North Pole, which by now people suspected, there might have been some chicanery going on with that. They had done it more from going north of Greenland. And so that area would have at all where Amundsen figured. Well, the area from Alaska to the North Pole is completely unknown. It's not where either of my ships have gone. So if there's another landmass up there that no one has claimed yet or discovered, then that's where it's got to be located, because that's the one area where no one has actually ever been. But of course, these airplanes were ill suited to the Arctic. You know, as they tried to put skis on them to help with the landing on the snow, it damaged the internal frame of the airplanes and some crashes, and the whole thing was just awash. He managed to get a different American business partner who turned out to be a bit of a swindler. But he was a big talker, and Amundsen was not. He had no facility for business or any of the common sense things at all. He was a dreamer and an expedition planner. And he did not understand finances. He didn't understand debt. He didn't understand any of it. He didn't even care. He didn't pay attention. He signed over power of attorney to these. These fellows to manage his affairs and to help organize this expedition and pay for everything, which, of course, was a very bad thing to do. Amundsen was forced into a situation where he was going to be declaring bankruptcy and There would be the sale of his properties and the impounding of a ship for debts. I mean it was a. Financially, it was a disastrous time in his life. He was still doing lecture tours of the United States to raise any money. So he personally was able to live. But you know, he reported at this rate of financial accumulation it was going to take him 110 years to be able to finance his next expedition. His credibility was severely damaged by that episode. It was only through the intercession, the unexpected intercession of the son of a very wealthy American, Lincoln Ellsworth, a much younger man than Amundsen. Well, not much younger, maybe 10 years younger than Amundsen, who had always admired Amundsen and had pretensions of becoming an explorer himself. That they. The next expedition which was much more well thought out and well planned, Lincoln Ellsworth placed a lot of the money of the financing to buy two more airplanes. And they were going to be pontoon planes, could either go on ice or go on water. And they were going to launch from Spitsbergen this time and sail towards the North Pole, fly around as far as they could. That expedition, you know, falls into the great tradition of the heroic return from the doors of death. You know, the great disaster that they managed to surmount and return home as heroes. You know, it falls into that sort of literary genre. The planes of course took off without any problems from Spitzbergen. They flew towards the North Pole. But I almost forgot to mention, I mean these planes are very, very primitive. The ones in Alaska and these new ones, these were the type of planes where they didn't have cockpits, they were outside in the air. So you go around to the front of it and you pull on the propeller to get it started and then you run back on, you put your goggles on and you pull your fur lined hood on and you sit in the open cockpit. I mean this is what they were going to fly to the North Pole. Open cockpit planes flying at 100 km an hour with their goggles and their equipment on. I mean, can't be very pleasant. Anyway, the two planes, these extremely primitive contraptions flying towards the North Pole. One developed engine trouble and had to crash land and the other one had to try and find a place to put down to try and rescue them. You can't just abandon the other plane on the ice and the men to die. So one of the planes ended up crashing and damaging itself and had to be abandoned. The others regrouped across the Arctic ice flow and they spent weeks trying to level the uneven ice to make a Runway that they could then get one of the planes back into the air and try and return home and survive. And, you know, after a while, it was dangerous. They were running low on food. It was. They could easily have just died. In fact, it was probable the world had already believed that they were dead because they didn't return when they were supposed to, which meant, of course, that they had run out of fuel and likely crashed somewhere. But they managed to pull it off and return back and, of course, be hailed as heroes for triumphing. What did they actually accomplish? Well, from a scientific view, basically nothing. From a geographical point of view, basically almost nothing either. And yet their books were big best sellers, and they filled all the lecture halls, and everyone was leaping onto the bandwagon of the drama of this famous explorer's life. Interestingly enough, the genesis of the next adventure was born from this adventure. When they were in Italy picking up the planes, they actually saw an Italian dirigible airship and met the person who had designed it, Colonel Nobile of the Italian military, who's also an engineer. And that. That became their next idea. In the back of Amundsen's mind, you know, this crashed airplane expedition was just, oh, yeah, this is just an adventure. We're going to go tour and talk about how brave we were to recover and what a disaster it was and blah, blah, blah, and make a pile of money. He was already dreaming of the next adventure at that point.
- [39:22]
Dan Snow
You're listening to Dan Snow's history. One of history's greatest explorers, Roald Amundson. More after this. Him and Nobile took this dirigible airship and went back to the North Pole or went back to the Arctic.
- [39:44]
Stephen R. Baum
Yep. The next year. The flight itself was somewhat anticlimactic in the sense that they just set off, they floated over the North Pole. They dropped a bunch of stuff out of the airship to mark that they had been there. But it was an unremarkable patch of ice, a featureless expanse extending in all directions. And then they continued on to Alaska. And there's a bit of, you know, it took several days and they couldn't really sleep, and they sort of had a bit of a crash landing in Alaska. But for the most part, the journey over the Pole itself was not very dramatic. The drama occurred afterwards because of the conflicts between the Norwegians and the Italians while The crew was 50. Fifty, of course, the Norwegians knew all about polar survival and they knew how to set up the camps. And, you know, in Spitzberg. It takes a long time to get the ship up there and to build all the facilities from which it could launch successfully and to have it all provisioned and organized, whatnot. I mean, that's what Amundsen was involved with. And Aylesworth was there with him, too. And the Italians, of course, Nobile was the engineer who designed the ship. He was the one who piloted it and knew how to work it. The Italians were the crew members of this ship. They had to teach the Norwegians the most, you know, the most basic things about an airship. Because airship was a new technology at that time. Extremely dangerous, as it turned out. We know from these Hindenburg, you know, disasters of Hindenburgs and other explosions. But, yeah, so the conflict was between Norwegians and Italians, and each had different ideas of what the expedition was going to accomplish. Of course, at that time, Mussolini, Fascist conquest of the Italian government, you know, just several years beforehand. And Nobili was, of course, a senior officer. Nobili himself was not a fascist, but he was an officer in the fascist military apparatus of Mussolini's Italy at that time. That, of course, was not something that Amundsen was particularly interested in. But Nobile had been secretly ordered for all the crew members to bring their military uniforms with them on the expedition. And when they were returning, not in the airship, the airship, they had to leave in Alaska to be shipped down later. But when they got on a ship and they sailed to Seattle after their successful crossing of the Polar Sea, the Italian contingent of the crew and Nobile all put on their military dress uniforms and were giving the Fascist salute as they sailed into the harbor and were overshadowing and claiming all the publicity and claiming it was a great conquest of, you know, Mussolini's conquest of the Polar Sea and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And, of course, Amundsen, to him it was, hey, this was my expedition. It was my idea. I just hired an Italian designer to help get me there. But of course, Amundsen didn't look the part. He was still wearing his work clothes and kind of shabby, and all these people in their shiny military uniforms giving crisp salutes, and then were going on their own publicity tour. So at the time in the United States, there was dueling publicity tours, one by the Italians, one by the Norwegians, and they started slandering each other as a whole bunch of bad blood. And of course, some people were attempting to inflame the controversy and get them to say bad things about each other. And the fight itself didn't have a lot of drama. The drama all came afterwards in the publicity tour.
- [42:51]
Dan Snow
But from 100 years distance, it still is an astonishing achievement. The first Arctic crossing, Arctic Ocean crossing and the first verified human beings at the North Pole. Pretty extraordinary. And the drama with Nobile wasn't over. Tell me about 1928. Tell me about that final, final operation of Amundsen's.
- [43:13]
Stephen R. Baum
The conflict between the two was unresolvable. Each had their own inflexible idea of what had happened, what the objectives were and who was claiming the credit for it. And, you know, Amundsen wrote his autobiography at the time, which was a bit of an erratic, deranged thing, where he's kind of reminiscing about the perceived slights that he endured over the course of his life by people. So he was kind of losing his cool a little bit. And he was not as warmly regarded as he once was or not as infallible. And then Nobile wanted to go back to the Pole or. I don't know if Nobile wanted to. Mussolini wanted Nobile probably to go back to the Pole and undisputedly claim it for Italy and with a different expedition, in a different airship, and do it only with Italian crew and only with Italian planning and not have anything to do with Amundsen or the Norwegians that had participated in it before. It's very odd. I mean, what does Italy have to do with the North Pole or the polar region? They don't have any historical connection to it or any practical connection to it either. It was just a publicity stunt at that point. But of course, the dirigible had some kind of a. The winds got it and had a malfunction and it lurched to the ground and exploded and spun off into the distance trailing some smoke and flames. And there was a. You know, they were trapped on the ice and it was. Some people died, and it was a bit of a tragedy. And the international community, such as it was at the time, was going to be mounting rescue operations to go up there and see what they could do. Of course, Amundsen couldn't officially be asked to do it because of the bad blood between him and Nobile. But he managed to get, once again, a privately financed expedition to go on a rescue mission. I don't know why Amundsen felt that he wanted to be on that rescue expedition. Possibly because maybe he felt guilty about his conflict with Nobile. Maybe he just couldn't step back from his role as the polar hero that his entire life had Sort of become at this point, in any case, there was two airplanes, you know, two people in each plane. And they flew off to see if they could find some survivors and contribute in some small way to the rescue expedition. And they were never seen again. And some of the wreckage of the planes turned up, but all four of them died. And so that's how Amundsen died, in a way.
- [45:47]
Dan Snow
Is that the fitting place for him?
- [45:49]
Stephen R. Baum
It is very fitting end for Amundsen. I mean, it bookends his life. I mean, he died in the environment that he spent his entire adult life, well, even his childhood was dreaming of spending his entire adult life working in this environment. And as an explorer, as a dramatic adventurer, a professional adventurer, earning his income, his money, his fame, his acclaim, everything about his entire decades long career and life had to do with, you know, dangerous undertakings in polar regions. And for him to die trying to rescue someone who he had had a conflict with. And maybe he wanted to resolve that somehow. You know, by this time, of course, he's getting older, in his late, his late 50s, and there's some rumors that he had health problems, maybe some form of cancer, it's hard to say. Anyway, it's a fitting end to his life for sure. He suitably dramatic, suitably poetic in the sense that in the same regions dealing with the same people and the same disagreements that had happened over his life, maybe it just was all sort of the tendrils of his life, the strands of his, of his entire existence were coming together to this one point and he just disappeared dramatically. So I don't mind it that Amundsen died that way. He understood all the risks and challenges in his whole life was in this sphere. He could have died on any of these expeditions quite easily. He always had a bit of a luck. He could have died at the South Pole. You know, a bad weather event shifted by a couple of days could have easily killed him and some of his men instead of pushing them onto sort of seemingly easy success. But he managed to survive all this time and then he died. And there's nothing wrong with that, but I always think there's three other young people on the airplanes with them and they don't even get mentioned by history. In fact, you know, here's me, the biographer who even wrote about them. I don't even remember their names. I know that two of them were French and one of them was German, I think. But they died too. And it wasn't a poetic end to their life. They were young, they hadn't even started their life yet. So these are the kind of things historians always think about, I guess, the different paths everyone can be on and how fortune and luck can either propel you to great fame or just kill you.
- [47:57]
Dan Snow
Well, that's the place to end it. Thank you very much indeed for coming to the podcast. Tell everyone what your book is called.
- [48:02]
Stephen R. Baum
It is called the Last Viking the Life of Roald Amundsen.
- [48:06]
Dan Snow
It's an astonishing story. It's tough for a Brit to admit that, but it's an astonishing story. Thank you so much, Stephen R. Bound, for coming on. I really appreciate it.
- [48:13]
Stephen R. Baum
It's been my pleasure. Thank.