by Lynne Cox
“Do you want to get out?” he said.
“No, I want to finish,” I said. But I thought, Oh, I really don’t like this at all.
Staring down into the clear sea, I saw hundreds of red jellyfish. They were exquisitely beautiful, like flowers blossoming in an underwater garden. And they were terrifying. As some rose toward the surface, I pulled my hands in tight under my body to gain lift in the water so I wouldn’t touch one of those searing tentacles.
A tentacle grazed the soft underside of my arm, and it felt like a combination of a bad beesting and fire burning my arm. Reacting to the sting, I swung wide and hit something else that wiggled. I jumped, turned, and looked. It appeared to be a small clear jellyfish, but it had four creased sides that were edged with deep purple and glowed. It looked magical. I stopped to examine it more closely, treading water as I tried to understand how it was propelling itself. I couldn’t see any form of cilia or jet, but I saw another clear jellyfish. This one was edged with glowing pink, and another one was edged with neon green. I was concentrating so intently that Bob later told me that he was afraid that I might be going into an advanced stage of hypothermia, and he was on the verge of pulling me out. He had never seen me swim so erratically.
The red jellyfish were oscillating and swimming up to the water’s surface. Their tentacles were fanning out. I swung wide and just missed one. Then I noticed the big purple-striped ones that were being flipped over in the Zodiac’s wake. In a few minutes, I thought, these jellyfish would be on the surface.
“How long have I been swimming?” I shouted to Bob.
“Twenty minutes, but with the current you’ve swum much more than a mile. Do you want to go farther?”
“Let’s go ashore,” I said.
At Barrow, Amundsen turned the Gjøa south and sailed through the Chukchi Sea. He had traveled seven thousand miles, from Christiania to the Bering Sea. On August 30, 1906, he passed through the Bering Strait. The Gjøa and its crew had made it through the Northwest Passage. Amundsen caught sight of the Diomede Islands, and just when it seemed that the Gjøa had entered calmer waters, the ship was hit by a squall, and its gaff broke again. Then a dead calm set in, and the Gjøa sailed slowly into Nome, Alaska. Amundsen wrote:
Suddenly a steam launch appeared in front of us, and we heard whistling, shouting, and cheering, the Americans’ mode of expressing enthusiasm. Dark as it was, we could still discern the Norwegian flag floating side by side with the Stars and Stripes on the launch. So we had been recognized.… The Heartiness with which we were welcomed, the unbounded enthusiasm of which the Gjøa was the object, will always remain one of my brightest memories of our return.… The boat touched land. I really cannot say how I got ashore, but a jubilant roar of welcome issued from a thousand throats, and through the darkness of the night a sound burst forth that thrilled me through and through, bringing tears to my eyes; it was the strains of our national air.
As I climbed out of the Chukchi Sea, I felt a sense of elation. These weeks in Greenland, Canada, and Alaska had taken me into waters that few had ever entered or swum. I had traveled through the same Arctic world as Amundsen had, a place where one misstep could mean disaster. And at the same time I felt as though I were exploring a different place. I thought of the frozen waterways that were opening to exploration, the areas farther north than Amundsen had traveled, and they were alluring, but, as I thought about Amundsen and his Northwest Passage triumph, I realized that there was so much more to learn and understand about how he had built upon what he had done before, and how he had succeeded. At first I thought that I was mostly interested in his early beginnings, of how he became a great explorer during his early expeditions, but then I realized that following him through the Northwest Passage wasn’t enough. To understand him more fully, to see the challenges he had faced, and to see his successes and failures, and to understand how he had handled them, I needed to follow him through the course of his life.
In 1906 Amundsen became the first to sail through the Northwest Passage but his success was overshadowed by the San Francisco earthquake.
In some ways, I realized, Amundsen’s Northwest Passage success was like my first English Channel crossing. Those journeys were starting points and places where our learning curves weren’t curves at all, just straight lines. So much was learned in the beginning for each of us. But there was much yet to achieve. Amundsen set the goal of becoming the first man to reach the North Pole, and he knew that he would compete with Dr. Frederick Cook, his friend from the Belgica expedition, and Robert Peary, the polar explorer who had explored Greenland with Cook shortly after the Belgica expedition.
When Amundsen returned to Norway after the Northwest Passage crossing, he received a hero’s welcome, but he was still financially in dire straits, just as he had been when he first began the Northwest Passage journey with his band of “pirates.” Amundsen had made an agreement with a London newspaper to write an exclusive for them, and in turn Amundsen would be paid for his reports, but his telegrams were intercepted and news of his achievement was transmitted around the world in numerous newspapers. With the exclusive broken, Amundsen didn’t receive any money for his story, and when he returned to Norway, he went to work to pay back his creditors.
CHAPTER 15
South Pole
Amundsen’s initial plan was to sail through the Bering Strait, drift across the Arctic Ocean, and become the first man to reach the North Pole, but he changed his plans without telling anyone, not even his greatest supporters, Nansen and the king of Norway.
Nansen had lent Amundsen his ship, the Fram, for his attempt to reach the North Pole. Amundsen reconditioned the Fram, secured provisions, selected a crew, and even chose an aviator for the attempt. But during these preparations, Dr. Frederick Cook, Amundsen’s friend who had helped him survive the Belgica expedition, claimed that on April 21, 1908, he had become the first man to reach the North Pole.
Robert Peary, however, claimed that on April 6, 1909, he reached the North Pole first. This touched off an enormous controversy played out in the newspapers, in geographic societies, in court, and in public for years to come.
Amundsen sidestepped the controversy. He believed that the North Pole had been achieved, and he thought it would be more difficult to secure funding for his original plan. He decided to postpone that and do something far more captivating. He only told his brother, and Captain Nilsen, the commander of the Fram.
In August 1910, Amundsen and his crew sailed on the Fram from Norway to the Madeira Islands. They believed they would be sailing around Cape Horn to reach the Bering Strait and north to the North Pole, but when they reached the Madeira Islands, Amundsen announced that the North Pole had been discovered, and he had decided instead to go for the South Pole.
The crew excitedly agreed to the change of course. Amundsen sent a letter to Nansen and King Haakon dated August 22, 1910. Amundsen explained that in 1909, after he heard about Cook and Peary’s successes, he believed the parliament would not give him the money he needed for the North Pole attempt, so he had decided he would go south instead. Amundsen wrote that he wished that he had been able to inform Robert Falcon Scott, the British explorer, about his decision so it did not seem like he was trying to sneak down to the South Pole ahead of him, and he hoped that he would meet Scott in Antarctica to inform him of his decision so Scott could act accordingly. Amundsen felt guilty for deceiving Nansen, but he wouldn’t discover until later that he had done something even worse.
Amundsen laid out his plan: They would
sail south from Madeira to South Victoria Land and with nine men go ashore there, and let the Fram go out to do oceanographic examinations. The Fram will be able to take two trips from Buenos Aires and over toward Cape Verde when the Fram is leaving the ice, it will go east to Puenta Arenas and from there to Buenos Aires. Lieutenant Nilsen, who is in command onboard, will probably together with Kutschin be able to do a good job. I can not at this point make any decision as to where we will go as
hore down there, but my intention is to avoid landing right at the same place as the English. They have the first right. We will have to be content with what they do not want. February–March 1912 the Fram will come back to pick us up. We will first go by Lyttelton in New Zealand to send telegrams and from there to San Francisco to continue the interrupted work.
Amundsen also sent a telegram to Robert Falcon Scott, the British naval officer and explorer who had attempted to reach the South Pole on the Discovery expedition from 1901 to 1904 and had begun the Terra Nova expedition to the pole (1910–13), to inform Scott of his plan.
Amundsen and his crew sailed southward on the Fram from Madeira through the Atlantic, then to the east, passing the Cape of Good Hope and Australia and arriving in the Ross Sea at the beginning of the new year 1911. Most Antarctic explorers believed that it was best to attempt the South Pole from McMurdo Sound, on the western side of the Ross Sea, but Amundsen had his sights on another start point. He had studied charts of Antarctica dating back to 1842, when James Clark Ross had first sailed with his crews aboard the Erebus and Terror into and discovered the Ross Sea. They had mapped the barrier now known as the Ross Ice Shelf (Ross called it the Victoria Barrier for Queen Victoria; later it was called the Great Ice Barrier).
Most explorers had avoided creating a base camp on the barrier for fear it would break off while they were camped there, but Amundsen had Ross’s charts and noted that the barrier, the inner part of the Bay of Whales, had not moved in sixty-eight years. Amundsen also studied Ernest Shackleton’s more recent account.
In January 1908, on Shackleton’s second attempt to reach the South Pole, he and his crew reached the ice pack off Antarctica, and they sighted the Ross Barrier. They planned to go ashore once they reached Barrier Inlet, near King Edward VII Land, to establish a base station. But what they discovered gave them pause. Barrier Inlet had calved away. All that remained was a wide bay that Shackleton named the Bay of Whales.
Shackleton was convinced that the barrier was far too unstable for a base station. Instead, he headed west to McMurdo Sound and wintered over on solid ground on Ross Island. In October 1908 Shackleton and three of his crew, Jameson Adams, Eric Marshall, and Frank Wild, set out from Ross Island with four sledges and four Manchurian ponies for the South Pole. The ponies died, the men had to drag the sledges themselves, and their food supplies dwindled. They crossed the Beardmore Glacier, and Shackleton and his men surpassed Scott’s southernmost point of exploration, 82 degrees, 17 minutes, south. Shackleton and his crew reached the farthest south at latitude 88 degrees, 23 minutes, and longitude 162 degrees east, and they wisely turned back for McMurdo before their food completely ran out.
Amundsen thought that if Shackleton had sailed deeper into the bay, he would have recognized that at that point the barrier wasn’t moving, and Shackleton could have succeeded at reaching the South Pole before Amundsen made his attempt.
There were additional factors that made the Bay of Whales attractive to Amundsen. The bay was a whole degree—sixty miles—farther south than McMurdo. If he started from the Bay of Whales, he was already closer to the South Pole before he began his journey than Scott was, about 350 miles to the west. From the unobstructed vantage point on the barrier, Amundsen believed he could easily monitor the weather and ice conditions. He knew from reading Shackleton’s and Scott’s accounts that the winds in McMurdo Sound were relentless and frigid, and that they often blew through the area at more than forty knots. He knew that these winds made working in McMurdo physically and mentally exhausting for Scott and his men.
After five months of sailing and struggling to get south and reach Antarctica, and years of preparation and planning, on January 11, 1910, at around 2:30 p.m., the southern sky brightened, and the sun illuminated the great ice barrier—the Ross Glacier. The edge of the Ross Glacier rose a hundred feet above the sea ice. This wall was nature’s ice fortress, and to early explorers it seemed insurmountable. But Amundsen had read that there was an opening in the wall, about one hundred miles east of their position.
They arrived on January 14, a day earlier than they expected. From the high stable deck of the Fram, Amundsen looked across the sea ice and studied the juncture between the sea ice and the thick irregular wall of the Ross Glacier and saw the lay of the land: giant ridges and hollows spreading in every direction. He estimated that the ridges were up to five hundred feet high, but he wondered how much higher the ridges beyond this would be.
Amundsen and his crew of three skied into the bay with alpine ropes in the calm bright sunlight under a light blue sky to see what they would face. As they skied south on new light snow, they reached the connecting point between the sea ice and the glacier ice—the barrier. Would they be able to climb it, and what would it be like up on the other side?
Apprehensively, Amundsen and his men climbed from the sea ice up the edge of the Ross Glacier. It was only twenty feet high, and the edge had been softened so there was a gentle slope to the top of the barrier. Without any great effort, they climbed, and in those few moments, all their initial fears of the unknown dissolved. They smiled at one another. The shimmering silver and white world of Antarctica opened and rose gently before them.
CHAPTER 16
The Heroic Dogs
Amundsen knew from his experience in the Arctic that no crossing of Antarctica could be possible without the Greenlandic Eskimo dogs. He believed that one reason Shackleton and Scott had not reached the South Pole was because they had not carried enough food, and the Manchurian ponies that were used to pull their sledges weren’t suited for Antarctica. The ponies were heavy, they fell through the ice and were injured so badly they had to be shot.
Amundsen figured that the Eskimo dogs were best suited for the job. Not only would they pull the heavy six-hundred-pound sledges laden with provisions, equipment, and sometimes the men, but the dogs would also be sacrificed along the journey for food. Amundsen calculated that each carcass would provide fifty pounds of meat to supplement their food supplies.
Ninety-seven Eskimo dogs that sailed aboard the Fram from Norway to Antarctica were selected for this purpose. Some dogs had puppies and by the time they reached Antarctica there were 110 dogs. The dogs had been handpicked, they were well trained, and each one of the crew had the personal responsibility to attend to ten dogs.
Tents were quickly set up on the barrier between Mount Nelson and Mount Ronniken, and the dogs were tethered to prevent them from fighting. Over the five-month-long voyage the dogs had gotten out of shape and had to be retrained. They were used to transport from the ship to the shore everything the party would need for the southward journey. They dragged the loads on sledges to the camp on the barrier while two crew members built a warm, well-ventilated hut that would serve as their winter quarters, which Amundsen named Framheim.
The crew was divided into two parties, a sea party that would be composed of nine men under Captain Thorvald Nilsen’s command, and the land party composed of Amundsen, Kristian Prestrud, Hjalmar Johansen, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, Olav Bjaaland, Jørgen Stubberud, Adolf Henrik Lindström, and Oscar Wisting. The sea party would conduct oceanographic studies, and sail to 78 degrees, 41 minutes, the farthest south a ship had ever reached, and then the crew would sail back to Buenos Aires while Amundsen and his land party remained in Antarctica. Amundsen needed to establish depots, places where they could cache food so they wouldn’t have to transport the extra food to the South Pole and back, and so they would have access to the food on the return journey to Framheim. The nine men who made up the land party were divided into groups. Kristian Pestrud, Hjalmar Johansen, and Jørgen Stubberud would explore King Edward VII Land. Amundsen and Helmer J. Hanssen, Sverre H. Hassel, Oscar Wisting, and Olav Bjaaland and their dog teams would set out for the South Pole. Adolf Lindstrom would maintain Framheim.
On February 10, 1911, they began creating the depots to supply food for their journey to the South Pole the following austral spring. Prestrud, Hanssen, Johansen, and
Amundsen, with three sledges and six dogs for each sledge, carried their first load of provisions to the first depot and then continued laying caches further south. The provisions included seal meat, blubber, dried fish, chocolate, biscuits, and margarine as well as black flags attached to long bamboo poles.
Their start was shaky. The dogs took off from Framheim at full speed, then the going got tough. Fog moved in, the snow was flat, and there were no landmarks or horizon to guide them and help them stay on a straight course. The compasses didn’t work, and the sledge drivers were constantly checking their course by making astronomical observations. They established depots and used the long bamboo poles every ten miles to mark their route. Once they reached their predetermined last depot at 80 degrees they sledged back toward Framheim.
The route back wasn’t easy to follow. Amundsen made an adjustment; he asked Prestrud to sit beside him on the last sledge and watch the sledge meter. Every time they had traveled a quarter mile, Prestrud yelled out, and Amundsen marked the position with a dried fish stuck into the snow. He knew that the dogs would be famished on their return journey from the South Pole and that they would smell the fish.
About three weeks later they arrived back at Framheim, and Amundsen was convinced his dogs were champions. On the last day of their journey to Framheim, the dogs had sledged sixty-two miles.
They wintered in Framheim and tweaked their clothing and equipment, improved the dog harnesses, repacked the sledge provisions, and removed extra weight from their sledges.
In early spring, on September 6, 1911, Amundsen and his crew noticed that the weather had warmed and the temperature was up to minus 7 degrees Fahrenheit. They made a false start. They harnessed the dogs and began their attempt for the South Pole, but the dogs did not obey. One dog team raced off without a driver; a second driver tried to catch them and lost his team as well. Hours later, the men got them under control, but the ninety-six dogs fought whenever they got a chance, and the temperature dropped again. By September 12 it was down to minus 61 degrees Fahrenheit. The dogs were so cold they were constantly shivering, and for the next three days Amundsen and the crew camped as the temperature dropped to minus 68 degrees Fahrenheit. On September 15, while Hanssen was in the tent he felt something strange. He took off his stocking, and a clump of flesh that had been his heel had frozen and fallen off. Stubberud realized that a chunk of his heel had frozen off, too. Amundsen decided that they had to return to Framheim for medical treatment.
