by Jeremy Scott
Nobile had selected his Italian crew from men he knew well among the workforce in the factory.
They must be hardened against fatigue, indifferent to danger, calm, resolute … I must have the most complete confidence in them and they in turn must have the blindest faith in me, who had prepared the flight and would now have to lead it.
The international mix of the crew gave rise to certain difficulties, not the least of which was communication. In the control cabin the official language was English, ‘but there were times when English did not suffice to make my orders clear, and then I spoke Italian…’ However the Norge crossed France without mishap to land at Pulham the following evening. Nobile was glad to meet the Crown Prince of Norway and Sir Samuel Hoare, British Air Minister, who had been waiting there rather a long time for the pleasure of welcoming him. From there they flew to Oslo; on arrival they found the whole city en fête in welcome. The King himself was at the foot of the mooring mast to greet them. That midnight they took off for Leningrad, and ran into fog. At dawn next day, while crossing a wide colourless plain they saw a group of peasants staring up at them. Nobile scribbled a message: ‘WHAT COUNTRY IS THIS? FINLAND? IF SO, RAISE YOUR ARMS IN THE AIR,’ and threw it down… no one picked it up. Completely lost, they followed a road to an intersection, then descended to read the signpost; they were in Estonia. They reached Gatschina, the airfield outside Leningrad at 6 p.m. Their welcoming committee had been awaiting their arrival since that morning. Snow covered the ground and the temperature was -4°C.
‘I was exhausted,’ Nobile writes. ‘For sixty hours I had been awake, without closing my eyes for a moment … I could hardly stand. They put me (and Tintina) into a sledge and took me to the Imperial Palace, where I was a guest of the Russian Government…’ Throughout his stay Nobile was looked after by an old servant. He fell ill and had to remain in bed for a couple of days. ‘How wretched it was to be so far from home, without any of my dear ones near to me!’ he says. ‘I knew that I should not see them for months, perhaps for years, perhaps never again.’
Colonel Nobile, with his dirigible and crew, were celebrities in Leningrad. ‘But I was impatient,’ he says. ‘I urged them [in Spitsbergen] to concentrate on getting the hangar ready to receive us: I warned Amundsen that I intended to start at the earliest possible moment…’
At Kings Bay a heavy blizzard had brought the work to a standstill. Nobile received a cable from Amundsen proposing their attempt on the Pole be delayed until June. ‘I was completely taken aback … if we were to postpone the flight it would, in my opinion, be equivalent to giving it up.’ ‘In consequence Amundsen changed his mind again,’ Nobile reports.
‘On the morning of the 5th May, I said goodbye to the Russian authorities. I ordered the ropes to be let go.’ A cry rang out, ‘Viva L’Italia!’ The soldiers took up the cheer in their powerful voices, ‘Viva L’Italia!’ Cradling Tintina under his other arm, Nobile threw up his right hand stiffly in salute and the Norge rose free while the military band struck up the Italian national anthem.
14.
THE RIVALS MEET ON STAGE
This is Kings Bay, Spitsbergen, the starting line for the polar race. The landscape is deep in snow and the dark waters of the fjord scattered with broken ice floes. Winter still rules here, yet Amundsen, just as much as Ellsworth, is hugely relieved to have reached this unpropitious spot. The discomforts of the shanty-built slum where they are living do not bother him, here stands the gateway to the Pole.
Getting here was arduous. Not on account of physical danger – Amundsen can handle that – but debilitating to the spirit. Most of the autumn and winter he’d passed lecturing in the US on a schedule set up by his agent Lee Keedick. He’d endured weeks of train travel and hotel rooms, same food, same functions, same material, same people. And not so many of those. On the evening he spoke in Carnegie Hall – built to hold thousands – the audience numbered less than 200. After Keedick had taken his percentage and expenses paid, the results of the tour were disappointing. Most of the money had gone on dealing with immediate problems. He’d been so close to ruin he’d had to ask Keedick for an advance of $2,700 to settle a pressing debt. ‘I had a court decision go against me, and would have been arrested if they hadn’t been paid,’ he writes.
Amundsen was mortified that Ellsworth had had to cover the cost of the airship’s insurance, and most recently to cough up a further $10,000 to the Aero Club. The expedition required an administrator, but the Club had proved disappointing, even venal in the role; Thommessen and others on the committee had made several quite unnecessary trips to Rome, always putting up at the best hotels. And the weakness they had shown in dealing with Nobile and the Italians was infuriating.
Yet Amundsen and Ellsworth had made it to Spitsbergen and the expedition was in good shape, apart from its inner frictions. The work of putting up the mooring mast and hangar was complete, and the Norge was standing by at Leningrad to fly here as soon as the weather improved. Gales had refilled the fjord with broken ice and cloud covered the sky but the season was on the cusp of Arctic spring. It would show in the next few days and, when it did, Amundsen would summon the Norge and start for the Pole.
He was in lead position in the line-up for the race – and race it had now unequivocally become. The giant Zeppelin commanded by Professor Eckener was equipped and ready to take off from Germany to head north. That Nansen was chief adviser to its expedition was an uncomfortable thought to Amundsen. Nansen had been his early mentor and benefactor, had lent him a ship. Amundsen regretted bitterly that the man believed he had betrayed him in not informing him he was sailing it south not north. But he’d had no choice. At the bottom of the schism was jealousy; Nansen had coveted the South Pole for himself. Amundsen understood, he knew how disappointment could corrode the soul.
Also lined up on the starting grid was the Australian Hubert Wilkins. The radio operator at Kings Bay had picked up one of his transmissions asking for weather information around the Arctic rim. Amundsen knew he was already positioned at Point Barrow with his two single-engined Fokkers. He’d be a brave man to attempt the Pole in those vulnerable aircraft, but Amundsen had met him and knew his hardihood and determination. He’d recognised elements of himself in him; Wilkins was a contender.
Since arriving in Kings Bay Amundsen and Ellsworth had been staying as a guest at the house of the mining settlement’s superintendent; their support party lodged among the miners and their families in the hamlet’s wooden huts. The arrival of the Heimdal, the expedition’s support ship now moored at the jetty, had added its crew to the Norwegian work party resident here throughout the winter. Engineer Vallini and his mechanics, who had come in the ship, swelled the Italian presence to twenty-four.
Between the national groups there existed a north/south divide: rivalry, incomprehension, exasperation, and a very different taste in food. Circumstances had placed these two tribes together in this outlandish spot where there was no diversion or entertainment of any kind, not even domestic radio, least of all sex, superimposing both intruder groups upon the indigenous inhabitants of miners’ families. And now to these three clans occupying the tiny frozen territory in this 1920s ethnological mix was shortly to be added a fourth. Another warring tribe superior in numbers, wealth and technology was about to descend upon them…
A sailor aboard the Heimdal was the first to spot it around 10 a.m. His shipmates on deck gathered around him to stare at the smudge on the horizon and the men busy unloading supplies on the jetty below, noticing their stillness, stopped to gaze in the same direction. One of them cupped his hands to his mouth to yell at the mechanics up the mooring mast on shore. The word spread; soon everyone in the settlement had ceased what they were doing and stood watching that plume of smoke far out to sea.
It could be a supply ship for the mining village, it might be a sealer intent on refuelling before heading into the hunting zone among the ice-pack, or… Viewed through binoculars, the vessel appeared on a direct course to King
s Bay. A sense of disquiet, unexpressed but palpable, spread among those observing it.
At noon the ship was clearly visible to the naked eye. The operator came out of the settlement’s radio shack, a message in his hand, and hurried through the scattered groups, headed for the house higher up the hill where Amundsen had his headquarters. He told them its content as he went by: the signal was from the approaching ship, the Chantier, which carried Commander Richard Byrd and his expedition. Also his plane, ready to fly and with twice the speed of the Norge – which had not even arrived here yet. Disquiet crystallised into dismay. The positions on the race’s starting grid had changed – and so had the odds on the contestants.
Among the men watching from the shore one turned and nudged another. He too turned, then so did the rest. All looked up the slope of the hill behind them to where a lone figure on skis stood outlined upon its icy crest. He stood straight-backed and tall, leaned forward slightly on his ski sticks, looking intently at the scene below. Raising one hand, slowly he pushed back the visor of his ski cap from his eagle face the better to view the rival expedition. Then, without speaking, Amundsen pivoted on his skis and poled away with long strides back to his headquarters.
By 4 p.m. that afternoon the Chantier was in the fjord, pushing her way slowly through the brash ice which filled the bay. Fifty yards from the jetty the ship came to a stop and its captain hailed the Heimdal, requesting it to move so the Chantier could tie up at the quay to unload.
What happened next set the tone of subsequent press accounts of the competition existing between the two expeditions (for, along with Byrd’s support party, the Chantier carried reporters, photographers and news cameramen, and from now on every move made by the rival groups would be covered by the media). For it seems that the captain of the Heimdal replied that it was not possible to move his vessel from the quay. Not only were they still taking on coal, but the ship’s boiler was cold and under repair. The Heimdal was powerless to shift over to make room for the newcomer.
So the Chantier steamed out into the bay to anchor among the brash ice 300 yards from shore. In the village all pretence of work had ceased. The Norwegians and Italian riggers looked on in silence at the drama unfolding in the fjord. A shift had just come off duty at the mine and the workers in their filthy clothes, faces blackened by coal dust, had joined their women and kids on the shore to watch. Every man with access to binoculars had them to his eyes.
The Chantier was seen to be packed with crates – and with people. Its decks were crowded with a mass of them, colourfully dressed and all, almost without exception, staring back at them through binoculars. A boat was lowered, four men came down a ladder and got into it. It was rowed to shore and nosed into the scum of ice rimming the beach. They leapt to solid ground. Their leader waited while the boat was pulled up onto the shingle and secured. He was in Naval uniform, a long overcoat with twin rows of brass buttons, his trousers tucked into rubber sea boots. In his late thirties, his face was very handsome, clean shaven, his dark hair short and carefully combed. While he led his men up the beach it was noticed that he walked with a limp.
The miners and their families pulled back wordlessly to let the group pass. The only sound was the howling of sledge dogs chained behind the huts. As the group climbed the path into the village they went by the Norwegian/Italian members of the opposing expedition, who studied them in the same hostile silence. A Norwegian Air Force officer named Balchen (who later will play a critical role in this story) stepped out of the machine shop as they passed and the leader of the intruding group addressed him, ‘I’m Commander Byrd. Can you tell me where I’ll find Captain Amundsen?’ Wiping his hands on a ball of cotton waste, Balchen led him and the others up the hill to Amundsen’s headquarters.
Dressed in a fur blouson and leather trousers, the explorer was alone in the room, seated at a table spread with maps and charts, and as Byrd was shown in he rose to receive him, his lean hard old man’s body crowned by a haughty face attempting a smile. He extended his hand. ‘Glad you’re here safe, Commander. Welcome to Spitsbergen!’ he greeted his opponent.
Byrd was in a furious temper at being refused the quay for the Chantier to unload, and Amundsen knew well that he was furious. And Amundsen too was coldly angry over Byrd’s presumption at muscling in on the base he had chosen for himself (and was paying for in hard cash to the coaling company). Both had their reputations and their futures, financial as well as professional, staked upon this race. Yet neither betrayed their hostility by so much as a flicker; both were rigidly self-controlled, their manners faultless. The conventions of the period and the code they both subscribed to meant that neither could let his true feelings show. But a deadly subtext underlay their conversation as they unrolled maps and discussed plans and weather. Amundsen was a man of rigid principles, fiercely committed to his honour… yet he was very conscious that his honesty had been questioned in the past. By creditors; in England by the charge that in reaching the South Pole before Scott he’d somehow cheated by using and eating dogs. And by his mentor, Nansen, who believed Amundsen had betrayed him by going south without informing him, in his ship.
The Knight may perform no mean or ignoble deed, for in it he forfeits honour. Amundsen was flawlessly polite throughout their exchange, suggesting an area by his house for Byrd’s airstrip. ‘You are being very generous to a rival,’ Byrd remarked, and Amundsen told him, ‘We are not competitors, we are collaborators in a joint assault … partners in this venture together.’
Nothing could have been further from the truth – and both men knew it.
15.
FIRST POSITIONS
It is twenty-four hours later at Kings Bay. In his cabin on board the Chantier, Byrd is still tense with anger. His two aircraft still lie in the hold with dismounted wings. His ship remains anchored in the bay among the ice, he is unable to unload the planes and get them ashore. Denying him the jetty is a low move on Amundsen’s part, he considers. Yet despite his indignation Byrd has not played entirely above board himself. Three months ago, he attended one of Amundsen’s lectures in New York and afterwards dined with him and Ellsworth at the Waldorf. During the evening he told them of his own plans for an expedition to the Arctic in the coming summer – but deliberately misled them about his intentions for the Pole. These stories about him trying for it were journalists’ fantasies, he informed them. It was unknown lands he was searching for, a new continent to claim for America. He fed them the same line he repeated soon after in a press release: ‘The clean sport and adventurous side of this expedition appeals to every man going on it … The men, all great fellows, are going from a spirit of adventure and patriotism … We are trying to keep the expedition on a sporting and high plane.’
Well, things had changed now. The Heimdal’s refusal to allow him to unload had redefined the rules of contest. It was clear to Byrd that he would be hampered and impeded in every move. The race for the Pole was about to start and the Heimdal could maintain the fiction their ship was immobilised for days. Byrd determined to construct a raft and transfer his aeroplane to the beach upon it. It was a bold and dangerous decision, potentially catastrophic, but ‘It was either get our personnel and equipment ashore this way or come back to the States ignominious failures,’ he writes, going on to express the fear which had preyed on him for months, that if he failed to win this race he would be unable to pay his debts on the attempt and become bankrupt.
A large raft was built by fixing all the Chantier’s lifeboats together and decking over them with planks. The expedition’s scout plane, the little Curtiss Oriole, was lowered onto it and successfully rowed to shore through the floating ice floes, then manhandled onto the beach. The raft was paddled back to the Chantier and secured to the ship’s side while the fuselage of the Jo Ford was winched down onto the floating platform. As the 74-foot wing was being hoisted from the hold a squall blew up and almost tore it from the grasp of the men holding it before they could tie it down on deck. The wind increased to a 6
0-mph gale and it began to snow. The raft with its cumbersome precious cargo was moved into the dubious shelter of the ship’s lee, but an iceberg now bore down upon them, threatening to crush it. On Byrd’s orders, members of his team scrambled onto the berg, drilled holes, into which they stuffed dynamite, and blew it apart.
The gale continued for six hours. Only when it died down could they attach the plane’s wing and attempt to scull the raft ashore through the churning ice. When they finally succeeded the Norwegian crew watching the precarious manoeuvre from the Heimdal gave them a reluctant cheer of admiration.
While they were engaged in this, other members of Byrd’s large support team had been using axes to hack an incline in the shore ice and chop a 200 yard path up to the level ground by Amundsen’s headquarters. Now the entire party set to the ropes and for four hours slowly hauled the big plane to the top, using block and tackle. They did so with a will, noisily and enthusiastically. The raucous group was fifty strong, composed of young doctors, lawyers, Naval officers, but mostly college boys. All were dressed in a colourful motley of lumberjack shirts, school sweaters, items of uniform, skating caps, boots or sneakers. All were volunteers, rowdy, exuberant and young. And, recording their efforts were the media who had come with them, reporters, photographers and news cameramen equipped with the quaint movie apparatus of the day. The sombre Norwegians of the rival expedition and the badly clothed miners watched their antics in grim silence.
