Roald Amundsen’s My Life as an Explorer - an adventure is merely a bit of bad planning

One last book for Norwegian November, Roald Amundsen’s My Life as an Explorer (1927), a memoir covering the polar explorer’s entire career.  It’s a good book, full of adventure.

To the explorer, however, adventure is merely an unwelcome interruption of his serious labours.  He is looking, not for thrills, but for facts about the unknown.  Often his search is a race with time against starvation.  To him, an adventure is merely a bit of bad planning, brought to light by the test of trial. (237)

To the reader, however, adventure, the times Amundsen is almost killed but for some reason is not, is much of what makes the book good.  To this reader.  I know that many readers are searching for characters like themselves.  I read books about exploration to meet people utterly unlike me.  I mean, these folks are nuts.

Amundsen had written an earlier (1912) book about his expedition to the South Pole, so there is less of that in My Life as an Explorer than I had expected.  He had become more interested in polar aviation, so there is a lot of that, including perhaps too much detail and score-settling about his recent dirigible flight over the North Pole in the company of Umberto Nobile, an incompetent blowhard Italian pilot.  Nobile is a hilarious character, as if from an Evelyn Waugh novel, although I understand how Amundsen has trouble seeing him that way.  The scenes where the characters are trapped in Nome, Alaska, arguing by telegram with the Aĕro Club of Norway about the wording of contracts is almost comedy, even in Amundsen’s exasperated account.

Still, the book, beginning with Amundsen’s teenage inspiration to explore the poles, is mostly about expeditions: preparation and skills (skiing, navigation), multiple brushes with death (“adventure”), then survival and celebrity.

Richard Halliburton called his first two books The Royal Road to Romance (1925) and The Glorious Adventure (1927) – I have read the former but not the latter.  Twenty-eight years younger than Amundsen, he had no interest in exploring and went straight for the adventure.  Perhaps he just had no interest in science.  But I think he understood that the celebrity explorers like Amundsen, with clear accomplishments – first expedition to the South Pole, first flight over the North Pole – had prepared the way – created the market – for the celebrity adventurer.  The two men’s books look like evidence in the cultural shift form glory to celebrity.

Amundsen’s memoir is the real Norwegian literature, the place to find something essential about Norwegianness.  I got this sense visiting the extraordinary campus of ship museums in Oslo, one holding a Viking ship, on the Kon-Tiki, and the largest containing the Fram, the ship Fridtjof Nansen built for Arctic exploration that Amundsen later took to the Antarctic.  The ship is itself a celebrity, for a time holding both the “farthest north” and “farthest south” records.  You buy a ticket and they let you walk around on it, with no risk of freezing to death or starving.  There’s an ice cream stand right outside.

Nansen’s book, Farthest North (1897) is, I should say, better than Amundsen’s.  Maybe next year I will read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Expedition (1948).  Norwegians love madmen at sea. 

I assume the book was written in Norwegian and translated by someone, but there is no information in the 1927 edition.  Maybe Amundsen wrote in English, what do I know.  The photo of the Fram is borrowed from the Fram Museum website.

where the snow smells like whales - Tess's vegeto-human pollen - Hardy, the great fantasy novelist

Where The Return of the Native (1878) burrowed into a single strange landscape, Egdon Heath, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) takes its heroine on a tour of central Wessex, so Hardy can describe a series of weird places.  I am reading William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (1896), which is entirely invented, and there has not been anything nearly so weird.  Early going, I hope.  Hardy’s fantasy novel is much more fantastic.

A valley that is a center of dairy production, sending cans of milk to London by train, I suppose a pretty ordinary place, is turned into a biology experiment:

Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate.  The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by their surroundings.  (Ch. 24)

The milkmaids “writhed feverishly” in a landscape “which sent up mists of pollen at a touch” (I’m mixing chapters – 23 first, then Ch. 19).  People mate like plants.  In an earlier landscape, a hay harvest, the “floating, fusty débris of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers” form “a sort of vegeto-human pollen” (Ch. 11).

The contrast is so strange, the Anglo-Celtic level of the story, the milk and turnip level, wrestling with the educated narrator who has a sharp enough ear to note that the sound of the dancing is muffled “from their being overshoe in ‘scroff’” – peat dust – “They coughed as they danced, and laughed as they coughed” – but also can’t stop himself from dragging in the satyrs and nymphs, “Lotis attempting to elude Priapus.”

Ah, just a page earlier is that beautiful sunset, “when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hair-like lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from more solid objects, except the innumerable winged insects that danced in it.”  I rarely understand what is meant when a book is described as “atmospheric,” but in Tess of the d’Urbervilles the atmosphere is a constant presence, a motivating force.

The masterpiece is the description of Flintcomb-Ash, the turnip farm, “a starve-acre place” where the fields are full of “bulbous, cusped, and phallic” rocks, the migrating birds come direct from the North Pole, “gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes – eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being has ever conceived” and the snow that follows the birds like a “white pillar of cloud,” a Biblical snow, “smelt of icebergs, arctic seas, whales, and white bears” (Ch. 43).

The snow smells like whales.  What were those idiots in the previous post talking about?  Hardy is awesome.  How could Robert Louis Stevenson, of all people, not experience some pleasing surprise when reading about that blizzard under a palm tree?

How this all fits together is still a puzzle to me.  Another piece tomorrow.

Oh, how the snow refreshes one’s soul - Fridtjof Nansen explores the Arctic

Now, a whole ‘nother kind of travel book, Farthest North (1897) by Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, zoologist, oceanographer, innovator in skiing, pioneer of polar exploration (that’s this book), symbol of the Norwegian nation, and humanitarian. 

Nansen had the idea, based mostly on the fact that Siberian driftwood washes up in Greenland, that if he built the right ship he could sail it east along the Siberian coast then let the ship be frozen into the icepack after which the ship would slowly drift across the pole towards Greenland.  Slowly meant several years.  Nansen turned out to be right about everything except that the ship did not drift far enough north to reach the pole itself, so after a year and a half Nansen decided he and another crew member would try to walk to the pole.  How would they get home, since the ship would have drifted who knows where?  Oh don’t worry, they’ll just walk home, or at least to one of the frozen Arctic islands where someone will probably find them.

Nansen and his men were all obviously insane.

Everything worked pretty much as planned.  Nansen and his companion reached 86° 14' N, the farthest north anyone had ever been, before turning back.  The ship reached 85° 57' ̒N, which would have been farthest north if Nansen and his partner had not wandered off on their own.  Nansen arrived back in Norway just a few days before the ship with the rest of his men.  No one died; no one was ever even seriously ill or injured.  They were national heroes for the young Norwegian state.  Later, Nansen would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with World War I refugees, so Farthest North just covers his lesser achievement.

The ship, the Fram, can be inspected at the Fram Museum in Oslo.  Please see the museum’s website for photos and a map which may help make sense of my gibberish.

The book is a mix of action and tedium.  Polar bears attack (right), or a crushing ice shelf threatens to overwhelm the ship – very exciting.  Or, for days the trapped Fram slowly drifts “[s]teadily southward.  This is almost depressing” (Ch. VI, Oct. 16).

Ugh! that was a bitter gust – I jump up and walk on.  What am I dreaming about! so far from the goal – hundreds and hundreds of miles between us, ice and land and ice again.  And we are drifting round and round in a ring, bewildered, attaining nothing, only waiting, always waiting, for what?  (VI, Nov. 5)

On the other hand:

Oh, how the snow refreshes one’s soul, and drives away all the gloom and sadness from this sullen land of fogs.  (Ch. 5, Aug. 23, still off the Siberian coast)

Nansen and his men are where they wanted to be.  Most of them even gained weight.  The quantity and variety of foodstuffs they had brought along in tins is astonishing.  No more scurvy with all of that lemonade and pineapple.  In an environment like this, the most mundane details of life and landscape become of interest.

The most exciting part of the book is the hundred days on foot (and dogsled, kayak, and skis).  Hampton Sides covers that story in a superb January 2009 National Geographic piece, much of which is about his own trip to the Arctic island where Nansen spent an entire winter in a tiny hut.  I borrowed the photo from him; the other illustrations are copied from the electronic text.

I read the Modern Library Exploration edition of Farthest North which is intelligently abridged.  I actually checked, reading sections of the complete edition on Google books (Vol. 1, Vol. 2).  The only advantage of the complete version is that it has more of Nansen’s illustrations: