Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
132
as “explorer” from the time he dropped out of medical school at the age of twenty-two.
After his success through the Northwest Passage, Amundsen promoted his next expedi-
tion to the Arctic, where he would sail the Fram around Cape Horn and take her into
the Arctic Basin through the Bering Strait, there allowing her to be frozen into the ice
and then to drift west, emerging ultimately in the North Atlantic. This voyage would be
similar to one undertaken in 1893-1896 by Fridtjof Nansen, for whom the Fram had been
designed and commissioned. The stated purposes were oceanographic and magnetic ob-
servations. Although a traverse to the North Pole was not publicly announced, to plant
the Norwegian flag at the pole was a strong incentive for support from the donors whom
Amundsen approached, and was the single feat that would assure his widening fame.
When the announcements came that the North Pole had been reached, some of the
backers withdrew their oVers, and new funds stopped coming in. It was the pole, not the
science, that most of the patrons cared about. The same was true of Amundsen. In secret
he hatched a plan that would ensure his fame in the history of exploration. His only confi-
dants were his brother Leon, Professor Bjørn Helland-Hansen, and Lieutenant Thorvald
Nilsen, the commander-designate of the Fram. He announced publicly that plans were
moving forward for the Arctic expedition, undertook a shakedown cruise in the North
Atlantic, and on August 9, 1910, slipped quietly out of the harbor in Christiansand. It
had seemed strange that the ship carried ninety-seven dogs when they could have been
bought in Siberia at the end of the Pacific voyage, but the pointed questions were ducked
well enough to distract those who suspected that all might not be as it seemed.
The last landfall for fresh food and water before the long voyage was Funchal, Ma-
deira. After the ship was loaded, Amundsen called together the eighteen men of his party
and oVered a challenge, to sail south to Antarctic waters, and from there to vie with Scott
and the British in a race to the South Pole. Every man was for it! That night they wrote
excited letters to family and friends and gave them to Leon, who would post them once
the party was on the high seas and no one could stop the renegades. Leon also handled
the press, releasing the story on October 2. Professor Helland-Hansen spoke to Nansen
personally about the change in plans. And Amundsen broke the news to Scott with his
famous Madeira cablegram.
The Fram sailed south from Madeira around the Cape of Good Hope and eastward
toward the Ross Sea, aiming to cross latitude 65° S at longitude 175° E. The Norwegians
sighted their first iceberg on New Year's Day 1911. By the following evening they encoun-
tered the pack just south of the Antarctic Circle and headed into it. After only four days
of relatively smooth passage they cleared the pack, and by the afternoon of January 12
lay at the entrance to the Bay of Whales on the eastern edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. From
the descriptions of others who had been there, Amundsen guessed that the Barrier was
grounded toward a rise to the east of the bay, providing a site for a base that would not
on a whim of Nature calve into the Ross Sea.
A site for the base, named Framheim, was chosen on the east side of the Bay of
Whales about two and a half miles in from the ice edge on a level névé between large, but
old, pressure ridges. They used the dogs to sledge the supplies from the Fram to a staging
area, began construction of the hut on January 17, and finished it on the 28th, while stores
