Chapter 1Hvidsten

Foreword

The South Pole was won in a harbour on King William Island, six years before anyone got there.

That is the argument of this book, and it is why the Pole itself does not arrive until Chapter 15.

Between October 1903 and August 1905, a Norwegian sea captain in a seventy-foot converted herring sloop spent two winters iced in at a place his hosts called Uqsuqtuuq, on the same island where Sir John Franklin's men had died walking. The Netsilingmiut came, and something almost unprecedented happened: a European expedition stopped improving and started learning.

Dog-driving. Snow houses. Reindeer and wolfskin clothing cut loose so that sweat can escape, which is the whole secret of staying warm in the Arctic and which no Royal Navy outfitter in three centuries had grasped. What to eat, how much of it, and how often.

Everything the British afterwards called cheating — the dogs, the furs, the fresh meat, the secrecy, a base camp pitched on floating ice — was the accumulated technology of people who had solved the problem centuries earlier, and to whom Roald Amundsen was the only European of his generation willing to submit.

If a reader has not sat through those two winters, the fourteenth of December 1911 looks like luck.

Seven of these twenty-one chapters happen before Antarctica for that reason. Chapter 11 is a workshop in the dark: Olav Bjaaland, a champion skier from Morgedal turned carpenter, cutting nearly a third off the weight of the shipped sledges through a polar winter while nobody moved. The Pole was won there too.

But this book will not end at Polheim, and it will not let the humility off the hook.

The same faculty that made Amundsen abolish his own vanity — an absolute, unembarrassed willingness to use whatever worked — made him use people the way he used equipment.

Nansen's ship. Frederick Cook's medicine. The Netsilingmiut's knowledge. His brother Leon's money and Leon's twenty years of handling it, ended by a quarrel over accounts that was never repaired. Bjaaland's legs. And Hjalmar Johansen's silence, which he purchased by destroying him.

Johansen is the chapter that decides what kind of book this is.

On 8 September 1911 Amundsen started for the Pole too early, on the first day the thermometer lifted to minus twenty-seven, with eight men, because he could not stop thinking about Scott. Within days it was minus fifty-eight. Dogs froze. The party broke up on the run back, and Kristian Prestrud, who could not keep up, would have died on the Barrier if Johansen had not turned back for him.

On 16 September, in front of everyone, Johansen — who had been nearer a pole than any living man, and had done it with Nansen while Amundsen was still a student — said that the leader had abandoned his men.

He was removed from the polar party, placed under the command of the young lieutenant he had saved, reported to Nansen as violently insubordinate, paid off at Hobart and written out of the story. He shot himself in Christiania on 3 January 1913.

That is the cost of the machine, paid by one man, in full, and it is in this book at full length.

Two more things I want to set out before the reader starts.

The first concerns Chapter 6, which is the hardest chapter here and the one that decides whether the book's central claim is about apprenticeship or about extraction.

Amundsen took a great deal out of Uqsuqtuuq: trade advantages, an ethnographic collection crated for Oslo, and knowledge that made him the most successful polar traveller in history. What he left has been argued about at Gjoa Haven for a century, including a paternity claim that popular retellings still repeat and that a Y-DNA test in 2012, conducted with the families' permission, quietly settled — the line was not his. Six crew members have never been tested.

The chapter refuses to resolve the larger question cleanly, because I do not think it resolves. He took everything he was given and gave back nothing that could be spent, and he also, alone among the Europeans of his generation, treated those people as teachers rather than as scenery.

The second concerns the moral centre of the title.

At 85°36' South, on 21 November 1911, at the top of the Axel Heiberg Glacier, forty-five dogs had made the climb and eighteen were going on. The rest were shot by the men who had driven them, butchered, and fed to the survivors and to the men. It was decided in Norway two years earlier, costed in calories, and written into the plan from the first page.

Set that beside Robert Falcon Scott, who held in print that no journey made with dogs could approach the fine conception of men going forth on their own unaided efforts, the conquest more nobly and splendidly won.

Two men looked at the same fact, and one of them decided that a willingness to do it was a disqualification from honour.

This book does not close that argument. A hundred and fifteen years later it is still running, and the reason it will not close is that both sides are describing the same thing.

Five chapters are held back for the sixteen years afterwards, because the second half is where the argument gets tested.

A man built entirely as an instrument for reaching a place, in a world that had run out of places. Seven years in the Maud that almost nobody read about. Two girls brought back from Siberia to his house at Svartskog and sent away again when the money ran out. Bankruptcy. The rupture with Leon. A memoir so bitter about Umberto Nobile that his own admirers winced.

And on 18 June 1928, a fifty-five-year-old man getting into a French flying boat at Tromsø to go and look for the rival he had spent two years insulting, and vanishing.

A torn-off float was found off Troms on 31 August and a fuel tank at Haltenbanken in October. No wreck, no bodies, no cause.

There is no death scene in the last chapter of this book. There is not enough evidence for one, and staging it would be the exact failure the whole method exists to avoid.

Eleven dogs came home out of fifty-two, and every man did.

Chapter 1 · Hvidsten

The farm is usually named Hvidsten. It stood in the parish of Borge, near Sarpsborg, in the south-eastern corner of Norway, and there, on 16 July 1872, a fourth son was born to a shipowner named Jens Amundsen and his wife, Hanna Sahlqvist. The name of the farm is precisely the sort of detail a biography likes to open on, and it should be said at the outset that this book has not confirmed it against a primary document. It comes down through the accounts the way the names of birthplaces usually do, repeated rather than checked. The date is fixed. The parish is fixed. The ground is what people have long called it, and until somebody reads the deed it is only that.

What the family did is fixed, and it matters a great deal more than where they did it. The Amundsens were in shipping, and shipping on that coast was a particular trade that made a particular kind of household. They did not, in the main, own what went into their holds. They owned the carrying. A Norwegian shipowner of Jens Amundsen's sort made his living out of other people's goods and other people's urgency — the charter, the freight rate, the sailing date, the standing risk that the vessel would not arrive — and what he sold was movement itself. He was paid to get a thing from where it was to where it was wanted, on time, in weather, for a price agreed in advance of the voyage.

It is not a romantic business. It is a logistical one, and every part of it lives or dies on the accuracy of a plan made before anybody leaves harbour. That is worth holding on to through everything that follows, because the argument of this book is that the South Pole was won by arithmetic completed long before the sledges moved, and the first household Roald Amundsen ever knew was one in which arithmetic completed in advance was the family's entire income.

There is a temptation, writing about an explorer, to go looking for the sea in his blood and to find it somewhere in the first paragraph. It is worth resisting. What a freight house teaches a child is not adventure. It teaches that a voyage is a set of costed decisions taken at a desk, that the ocean is an obstacle standing between a contract and its fulfilment, and that an owner who guesses is shortly an owner of nothing. Romance was for the people who took passage. The people who owned the vessel were doing sums.

How many ships Jens Amundsen owned, what they were called, in what order he bought them, worked them, lost them and sold them, is not something this book can set out. The sequence exists in registers somewhere; it is not established here, and no honest account of the childhood should pretend otherwise. This is the first place in this chapter where the record thins to almost nothing, and it is not the last. A reader who wants the ships named will have to wait for somebody to go and read the papers.

While Roald was still an infant, the family moved to Kristiania — the capital, the city now called Oslo. The move is a small fact with a long reach. It meant that the boy did not grow up in a fishing village or on a working quay. He grew up in a town, in a house, in a family whose money came off the water but whose youngest members did not live on it. The sea arrived at that address as a subject rather than as a surrounding: as accounts, as correspondence, as news of arrivals. He inherited a maritime life without ever having to be wet.

He was the fourth son, which is a position with its own quiet arithmetic. Three brothers had come before him. In a family business, the fourth son is not the one the business is being kept for, and while nothing in the record says what any of them expected of him, the structure of such a household tends to produce a boy with fewer obligations and less supervision than the ones ahead of him. That is a reading, and it is offered as one. What can be said flatly is that of the sons in that house, this was the one whose future his mother had strong opinions about.

Jens Amundsen died in 1886, the year his fourth son turned fourteen. What took him, and where, this chapter does not say, because the material behind it does not fix it. The consequence is what can be established: a shipping family without its shipowner, and a widowed mother who now had the entire say in what her fourth son became.

Hanna Sahlqvist had made her decision, and she held it. This one, at least, would be a doctor, and this one, at least, would stay on land. The formulation is the interesting part, and it is worth turning over slowly. A mother does not have to insist that a son remain ashore unless remaining ashore is the exception in that family. The wish tells you what she thought the alternative was, and what she thought it cost. It also tells you something about ambition of a particular kind: a family that had made its money moving other people's cargo, buying with those profits a son who would belong to a profession. Medicine was upward. Medicine was respectable. Medicine was, above all, indoors.

He did as she asked. He went to study medicine, and the fact that he obeyed is more revealing than any refusal would have been. He did not run away to sea, which was the available gesture and which any number of boys in that city made. He enrolled. He bought the books. He carried on inside her plan, doing the thing she wanted done, while the thing he actually wanted was already fixed and already private.

Here the chapter has to stop and say something about its own evidence, because almost everything anybody knows about Roald Amundsen's boyhood comes from Roald Amundsen. The famous set-pieces — the bedroom window left open through the winter, the Franklin narratives read at fifteen, the medical books disposed of within weeks of his mother's funeral — are self-reported. They were told long afterwards, by a man who understood publicity as thoroughly as any explorer who ever lived, and told in full knowledge of how the story had come out. Nobody kept a diary of this boy. No schoolmaster's note survives in the material behind this chapter. What exists is one man's later account of his own formation, and the corroborating detail simply is not there.

The asymmetry is worth stating plainly, because it governs what this chapter is allowed to do and what the ones after it will be able to do. From the Belgica's Antarctic voyage onwards there is contemporaneous paper: the diary he kept aboard her, published in an edition by Hugo Decleir in 1999, is the young Amundsen unedited, writing before he had a reputation to manage. The earliest of his own book-length narratives, The North West Passage, his account of the years in the Gjøa, did not appear until 1908 — thirty-six years after his birth, and by then he was a famous man writing for a public that already knew how it felt about him. For the boy at the window there is neither of those things. There is only the grown man, remembering, in front of an audience.

That does not make the stories false. It makes them a particular kind of evidence, and the particular kind is worth naming, because it is more useful than the flat version would have been. A man's account of his own childhood is not a record of what he did. It is a record of what he wants understood about himself: which qualities he believes were there from the beginning, which he claims as native rather than acquired. Read that way, the boyhood of Roald Amundsen is not a set of anecdotes at all. It is a statement about method, made retrospectively by the man who used that method to win, and it says: I was doing this before anyone was watching.

The window, then. Through the Kristiania winters, by his own account, he slept with his bedroom window open, to harden himself. That is the whole of the story as it comes down, and it repays being imagined properly rather than repeated as a charming fact. A Norwegian city in winter, a room with the air of the street in it, a boy under whatever blankets he had, waking cold and choosing to wake cold again the following night, and the night after that, and through the season. This was not one heroic night. It was a habit, sustained through winter after winter, in a house where somebody must have noticed and where nobody, so far as the record shows, stopped him. What his mother said about it is not preserved.

It is also, and this is the point of it, the only part of the regimen that comes down in any detail. Whatever else he did to make himself durable in those years is not itemised in the material behind this chapter. There is a window, an open window, and a boy who would not close it, and that single image has had to carry a great deal of interpretive weight ever since, because there is nothing standing beside it.

He was fifteen when he read Sir John Franklin.

The Northwest Passage — the thing Franklin had gone looking for — is a sea route through the ice-choked islands north of the North American mainland, joining the Atlantic to the Pacific across the top of the continent. Ships had been going into it for a very long time. No ship had ever gone through. Franklin's expedition, the last one he led, went in and did not come out: 129 men, all of them dead, some of them on the low ground of King William Island, where they died walking. The name carried, and it carried a long way from London: a Norwegian schoolboy in the eighteen-eighties knew it.

A small precision is owed here about what the boy actually held in his hands. Franklin did not return from the expedition that killed him, and a man who does not return does not write the book. The narratives available to a fifteen-year-old were the ones Franklin had written about earlier journeys and lived to publish. Which volumes he had, in which edition, and whether he read them in Norwegian or in English, is not established here. What the accounts agree on is the age and the effect.

And the effect is the thing that ought to stop a reader, because it has stopped everybody who has written about him. Boys read disaster narratives constantly, and have always done so, and what they generally take from them is the rescue: the ship on the horizon, the return, the survivor telling it afterwards by a fire. This boy read a story in which everybody died and decided that he wanted that. Not the fame at the end of it, which in Franklin's case went to a corpse. Not the flag. The thing itself — the cold, the distance, the hunger, the walking — presented to him in the form of an account of what it does to men, and he read the account and concluded that this was the life he intended to have.

It has to be said again that the evidence for what a fifteen-year-old wanted is that same fifteen-year-old, grown up and speaking for the record long afterwards. This book will not claim more. But the shape of the decision is consistent with everything he subsequently did, and consistency is not proof but it is not nothing either. What he took from a story of dead men was not horror and not warning. It was a specification.

Consider, too, what he had chosen to want. The Northwest Passage had been attempted by a great naval power, and the attempt had ended with 129 men dead on ground that nobody could reach in time to help them. A sensible boy reading that concludes the problem is insoluble and takes up something nearer home. An ambitious boy concludes that he personally would have been braver. This one appears to have concluded something stranger and a good deal more exact: that the problem was soluble, that the men who had failed at it had failed for reasons capable of being identified, and that identifying them was itself the work — the actual task, the thing to be got on with. It is the difference between wanting to be a hero and wanting to be right, and that difference is what the rest of this book is about.

There was, of course, nowhere to take it. This is the part of the chapter that has no incident in it, and it may be the part that matters most. Nothing in Kristiania constituted a route to the Arctic. There was no course to enrol in, no application to make, no office where a boy could present himself and be told what the requirements were. The men who got onto the ice in those years generally got there because a navy sent them, or a scientific society paid for them, or they had money of their own, and a fourth son in a shipping family without its shipowner, enrolled in medicine at his widowed mother's insistence, had none of those. He was training for a life nobody had offered him and nobody was going to. What a boy in that position can actually do about it is almost nothing, and what this one did about it was to keep the window open.

No letter of application survives in the material behind this chapter, and it is not obvious to whom such a letter could have been sent. He was not assembling a case for himself, because there was no committee to put it to. He was assembling a body, and waiting.

He also, and this is characteristic to the point of being diagnostic, told no one. His mother went on believing she had a medical student. The double life was not dramatic; it consisted of doing the required thing adequately in daylight and being cold on purpose at night, which is not a rebellion so much as a long, patient wait. He was not going to argue with her. He was going to outlast the argument.

Hanna Sahlqvist died in 1893, the year her son turned twenty-one. Within weeks, the medical books were gone.

It is told both ways — that he burned them, and that he merely put them away — and this book has not found the document that settles which. The difference is less important than the interval, which is very short. Whatever he did with the books, he did it within weeks of burying his mother. There was no period of reflection, no attempt to complete the year, no compromise by which he might have qualified first and gone north afterwards with a profession behind him. The plan had been fixed since he was fifteen. The only thing that had ever been holding it was a woman's wish, and the wish had just stopped being enforceable.

That is a hard sentence and it should be allowed to stay hard, because a book that softens it will be unable to explain the man later. He had not defied his mother. He had waited for her, kept her comfortable in a fiction, and moved the instant she could not be hurt by the truth. There is real tenderness in that reading and real coldness in it, and both are correct, and the two are not in tension: they are the same faculty. He was already, at twenty-one, what he would remain — a man capable of holding a decision entirely unspoken for as long as holding it took, and of acting on it the moment the obstacle was removed. He would do it to Fridtjof Nansen. He would do it to his own crew. He did it first to his mother, and he did it, so far as anyone can tell, without a moment of visible struggle.

It would be easy to build a prosecution on that, and just as easy to build a defence, and both would be premature. What can fairly be said in 1893 is that the pattern is already complete, before a single achievement has been attached to it. Everything the world would later admire in him, and everything it would later hold against him, is present in a young man closing a book in a house where the person who wanted that book open has just died. Nobody watching could have told the two apart. Nobody watching was watching.

In that same year, 1893, Fridtjof Nansen took a ship north to be frozen deliberately into the Arctic pack and carried by the ice across the top of the world. He would be gone until 1896. It is not recorded what Amundsen said, or whether he said anything, when that ship sailed. He was twenty-one, unqualified for anything, in possession of no ticket, no berth, no patron, no expedition and no offer, and the thing he had been reading about since he was fifteen had just sailed out of his own country without him.

What he had was a reading list and a habit. He had read the disasters. He had made himself cold on purpose, winter after winter, in a bedroom in Kristiania, for reasons he had explained to nobody. He would eventually stand on the ice of the island where Franklin's men had died walking, and spend two winters there learning from the people who lived on it, and the sum of that education would take him to the South Pole. None of that was visible in 1893. In 1893 there was only a young man with no qualifications, a shut book, and an open window.

It is worth being exact about what sort of asset that was, because the temptation is to call it destiny and stop. It was not destiny. It was a private preference, held in silence for years, secured against nothing that any bank or society or navy would have recognised as collateral. He was not the only young man in Europe who wanted to go to the ice, and most of the others never went. What separated this one was not the wanting, which was common enough, but a willingness — not yet tested, not yet visible to a living soul — to do whatever the problem should turn out to require, including a good deal that would later be produced as evidence of a defective character. That willingness is the whole of him. It starts in a cold bedroom in Kristiania, and at this point in the story it is not yet distinguishable from ordinary stubbornness.

He told nobody. He would go on telling nobody, for the rest of his life, whenever telling would have cost him anything. In time it stopped being shyness and became a method.