Canmore author Stephen Bown rediscovers greatest Arctic explorer, Roald Amundsen

Eric Volmers, Calgary Herald 




But there’s one article that sticks out in Bown’s mind. This is not because it chronicled any great feat or offered any insight into the Norwegian’s character. Quite the opposite.

It seems, at some point in 1925, Amundsen had the flu. He wasn’t dying, or even seriously ill. He just, you know, had the sniffles. This was considered news.

“A paper in Los Angeles wrote the story, which was of course picked up by the New York Times because everyone in New York needs to know that Amundsen had the flu and that his physician had told him that he would be OK in a few days,” says Bown, on the publicity rounds for his fifth historical book, The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen (Douglas & McIntyre, 357 pages, $32.95) “That’s how famous he was. It’s ridiculous.”

On the surface, this may not seem particularly surprising. In the early 20th Century, the public had a seemingly insatiable appetite for hearing about the exploits of explorers venturing into what was then the still mysterious terrain of the polar regions.

But Bown discovered that, while still regarded a national hero in his native Norway, Amundsen seemed to have more or less faded from the official annals of explorer lore.

For someone who was so famous and universally admired in North America, the official records of his conquests seemed rather paltry, Bown said.

“I’m always interested in the Northwest Passage,” he says. “You know, the hundreds of years of all the British ships trying to batter their way through the ice. All the sailors dying and starving and scurvy-ridden in the Arctic. And always in the end of that massive saga, there’s the little story that Roald Amundsen sailed through between 1903 and 1906. So what did he do? Was it an adventure? It seems to have taken three years, something must have happened. But it was always thrown in, that little statement in the end.”

Similarly, when Bown looked into chronicles about early attempts to conquer the South Pole, he found most of the material focused on Robert Falcon’s Scott’s expeditionary team. Scott arrived at the South Pole in 1911 only to discover Amundsen had already planted the Norwegian flag there five weeks earlier.

The Brits, it seems, were not amused. Nor have they been particularly forgiving over the years, Bown theorizes.

“In that story, Amundsen is always presented as this dour, ruthless, evil Norwegian who is driving his men, lashing them onto victory,” says Bown. “ I think it’s because the South Pole as an idea, and the race to the Pole, has been taken over by British writers. Because the story is primarily being told from that point of view, in Britain Amundsen is not particularly a hero. They don’t care that he did the Northwest Passage. That’s almost seen as traditionally a British quest: ‘Who was this foreigner coming in and stealing it from us?’ And the same with the pole: ‘What? The same guy who stole the Northwest Passage now steals the South Pole from us!?’ He was never particularly admired there.”

So Bown was delighted to find this untapped bounty of long-forgotten information, mostly in the Times, about Amundsen. It follows a pattern of sorts for the author, who admits he gets excited when discovering something or someone of monumental importance to history that has nevertheless not been fully explored.

Last year, his book 1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval Spain Divided the World in Half, laid out the story and far-reaching implications, for the first time, of the explosive skirmish between monarchs, clergy and explorers that split the globe in half between Spain and Portugal.

“I’m drawn to things where I think there’s more to the story than has commonly been presented,” Bown says. “Like with Amundsen, you just do a little bit of reading and you realize he did a lot more than race to the South Pole. I mean, you could write a whole book just about his one adventure through the Northwest Passage if you wanted to get down into the details of what happened each day. All their expeditions looking for the North Magnetic Pole and the day-to-day routine they had with the Inuit who were up there that they lived with. It’s absolutely fascinating.”

So a broader picture of Amundsen began to emerge during research. He was far from perfect. He was a womanizer and, despite making lots of money over the years, never seemed able to manage his finances. But he also had an endearing side to his personality, which went a long way in explaining his massive popularity and “rock-star” status in the early part of the 20th Century. The New York elite, for instance, would flock to see him tell stories at Carnegie Hall and other venues.

“When he was on expeditions, he was quite goal-directed,” Bown says. “He could be a hard commander to work with. Everything had to be just so. He knew what the objective was and all the team had to be working toward that goal and no other thing. But when he wasn’t, he was this charming, eccentric storyteller doing the lecture circuit. You see the photographs of him when he was travelling, he was always dressed in double-breasted suits, bowler hat. He was an entirely different person when he was on an expedition than when he wasn’t.”

And he certainly has ties to our country’s history. Unlike others of the period, he had a healthy respect for the natives he encountered while attempting to conquer the Northwest Passage in 1903. In what would later be named Gjoa Haven after Amundsen’s ship, the explorer and his crew spent nearly two years among the Inuit on King William Island, a settlement that still survives today in Nunavut.

“He had an incredibly open mind,” Bown says. “When he went there, he didn’t see primitive, annoying savages living in the ice. He saw a bunch of people with incredible cultural and technical adaptations to their environment. He said ‘These are the masters. This is who to learn from.’”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Amundsen’s story ends in a suitably melodramatic convergence of action, tragedy and irony. He vanished in 1928 while on a rescue mission to save one of his enemies — Umberto Nobile. Nobile, who was an officer in Mussolini’s Italian Armed Forces, had earlier joined Amundsen on his North Pole expedition but had been part of what Bown describes as a “politically motivated attack” to downplay the Norweigin’s accomplishments. Nobile was attempting his own expedition to prove he didn’t need Amundsen when his airship crashed on the way back from the North Pole.

Amundsen and a small air crew set out on a rescue mission. The plane is believed to have crashed somewhere in the Barents Sea.

As for what drove Amundsen psychologically, Bown isn’t altogether sure. He doesn’t believe it was competition with other explorers, although he may have seen that as a good hook to get publicity. Bown suggests it was something deeper that originated in his childhood.

“I think his motivation was that he was just really curious, he just wanted to go there,” Bown says. “He wrote in his memoirs later in life that from the earliest age he (set that) goal to discover what was in the North Pole. He came of age right when there were other famous Norwegian explorers who would return from the first crossing of Greenland and they were celebrated when they came home. He saw that and wanted people to be cheering (him.) So maybe public acclaim was part of it. It wasn’t money. He earned a lot of money and blew every last penny of it.”


Spotlight: Stephen Bown will hold a book launch Oct. 26 at Cafe Books in Canmore at 7 p.m.

