When one thinks of the great American polar explorers in history, names like Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, Donald Macmillan, and Richard Byrd come to mind immediately. A lesser known but significant figure in the annals of the polar exploration is Lincoln Ellsworth, who accompanied Norwegian Roald Amundsen on two major expeditions from Kings Bay (Svalbard) in 1925 and 1926. His exploits during these daring flying adventures (and misadventures) were courageous, lifesaving, and changed the course of Roald Amundsen’s life. Author Buddy Levy shares their adventures with The History Reader below.
Ellsworth’s meeting with the great Amundsen could not have come at a better time for the Norwegian. In October of 1924, Amundsen was 52-years old, and although he’d been the first man to the South Pole and the first through the Northwest Passage, poor business dealings had left him nearly bankrupt. He’d traveled to the United States on a lecture and writing tour to try to recoup some of his losses, but the audiences were sparse, and his articles garnered little income. The venture was a financial disaster.
Sitting in his hotel room in New York, he was deeply depressed. “It seemed to me,” he wrote of that dark time, “that my career as an explorer had come to an inglorious end … I was nearer to black despair than ever before.” As he pondered his uncertain future, the phone in his room rang. Fearing creditors, he almost didn’t pick it up, but something compelled him to answer. The voice on the other end of the line was Lincoln Ellsworth’s.
“I met you several years ago during the war, in France,” Ellsworth began. “I am an amateur interested in exploration …” Amundsen winced and nearly hung up, not wanting to deal with some obscure wanna-be adventurer with whom he’d once shaken hands, but he kept listening. “I might be able to supply some money for another expedition.”
That piqued Amundsen’s interest, and he invited Ellsworth up to his room to talk. Amundsen encountered an inquisitive and ambitious 44-year-old man with tightly cropped hair, a beaming, clean-shaven face that was chiseled and handsome as a movie star’s. Ellsworth admitted that his previous exploration was limited to having led a trans-Andean expedition from the Amazon Basin to the shores of the Pacific Ocean—but he had trained as an aviator, serving in WWI for the U.S. Army.
Amundsen was intrigued, since he’d come to realize that manned flight—either by airplane or airship—was replacing the traditional dogsled method of polar exploration. Then Ellsworth added that he had “… a strong thirst for adventure and an independent income.” The independent income was all Amundsen needed to hear, and in very little time, Amundsen had traveled to Ohio to meet Ellsworth’s father James Ellsworth, a wealthy industrialist and coal magnate. Soon, all three men were shaking hands and signing contracts. The elder Ellsworth had pledged $85,000, enough to finance the building of two amphibious airplanes Amundsen planned to use for an unprecedented trans-polar flight. Ellsworth’s phone call had changed the trajectory of Roald Amundsen’s exploring life.
By the afternoon of May 1925—just over a half-year later—Amundsen and Ellsworth were at the snowy shoreline of Kings Bay, Svalbard, about half-way between northern Norway and the North Pole. Clad in thick fleece leather jackets, fur hats and gloves, they buckled their parachutes tight and climbed into the two Dornier-Wals “flying boats,” the N24 and N25. Each airplane weighed four tons, was fifty-two feet long, and had a sixty-eight-foot wingspan. Their 360-horsepower Rolls Royce engines thundered as the aircraft sped across the ice toward the mountains and glaciers beyond, rising in a trail of swirling spindrift.
The Amundsen-Ellsworth Expedition had officially taken flight. Ellsworth, craning his head from his position seated next to his pilot, was awed by power and the scene as his N24 lifted and banked into the sky: “I felt like a god,” he said, “and I found myself looking over the wall of the fjord into the North—looking over a fleecy sea of fog.”
Travelling 80-90 miles per hour at up to ten thousand feet of altitude, if all went well, they would be landing these state-of-the-art aircraft at the North Pole by midnight. But fate, the Arctic, and mechanical failures had other plans for the pioneering aerial explorers.
Eight hours into their flight, after traveling an estimated distance of approximately six hundred miles, one of the engines on the N25 began misfiring, prompting a forced landing by pilot Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen into a narrow lane of open water lined on both sides by high icebergs.
Seeing the N25 make an emergency landing, the pilot of the N24 made a water landing a couple of miles away, hydroplaning between forty-foot high berg and smashing nose-first into a jagged wall of ice at the end of the water lead. Ellsworth hopped out of the aircraft and saw nothing but “white and blue chaos.” He climbed a high ice ridge to look for the N25, remarking, “In the utter silence, this place seemed to me to be the kingdom of death.”
Then the pilot, who was furiously working a hand pump, yelled up to Ellsworth, “The plane is leaking like hell!” The N24 had been damaged and was now beyond repair. Ellsworth knew he must locate Amundsen and the N25 and somehow cross the broken ice and open water leads to reach him and help solve their predicament.
The next morning, after a freezing night camped on the ice, Ellsworth climbed a high pressure ridge and glassed the ruptured expanse with binoculars. There—two or three miles away—Ellsworth saw men moving around on the ice, and behind them he could make out the wing of the N25.
Ellsworth struck out on skis with pilot Leif Dietrichson and mechanic Oskar Omdal. Bearing heavy rucksacks, they moved slowly over the treacherous, shattering and shifting ice that was blanketed with a few feet of new snow. En route to Amundsen, they encountered a large, open lead of water with a few sections of recently frozen ice that appeared crossable.
It was precarious and the men took off their skis for the maneuver. Omdal went first, followed by Ellsworth and then Dietrichson spread out behind to disperse their weight as they crept along. Suddenly there was a loud crack life a rifle blast, and the ice collapsed, plunging both Omdal and Dietrichson into the freezing seawater. Ellsworth managed to leap onto a floating ice cake and extend his ski toward Dietrichson, who was flailing and gasping for air. Dietrichson caught the end of the ski tip and Ellsworth pulled him close and managed to haul the pilot out of the water and onto the floating ice cake, where he flopped onto his side, hyperventilating and shivering.
Ellsworth turned to see Omdal bobbing nearby, only his head above water. Again, Ellsworth reached out his ski. Just before submerging entirely, Omdal lurched, catching hold of the ski. In the torrent of moving floes and sloshing water, Omdal’s legs were pulled under the ice, but Dietrichson had recovered enough to crawl over to help. Together, Ellsworth and Dietrichson yanked Omdal from the water and up onto firm ice.
He was barely breathing and hardly conscious. Blood poured from his mouth and five of his front teeth were broken from contact with the rough ice. He was hypothermic, but he was alive.
Ellsworth knew that the soaked men must move now, or they would freeze to death. One at a time, they slinked across an ice bridge using Ellsworth’s skis, managing to reach a large, firm ice floe. There, they were met by Amundsen, who had heard their cries and hurried toward them. Together, they guided the two soaked, half-frozen men through waist-deep snow to the N25, where they quickly got them warm clothes and wrapped them in blankets, then plied them with hot chocolate and whisky.
As Omdal and Dietrichson revived, Amundsen told Ellsworth his assessment of their situation, and his plan. They were 150-miles short of the North Pole, and the nearest land—the northern tip of Greenland—lay 400-miles away. Even at half-rations, they had only a month’s worth of food. Their only hope was to somehow carve out runway on the polar ice, get all six men into the N25, and by some miracle takeoff and fly back to Svalbard. By June 15, 1925, they would run out of food. On that day, they must either fly away or begin plodding into the vast whiteness toward Greenland. It was dire, he told them. “Truly a race with death.”
***
On July 5, 1925—after surviving a month-long ordeal on the desolate ice—Lincoln Ellsworth stood in Oslo before King Haakon VII of Norway, who was placing a gold medal around his neck for his heroic deeds. In his own speech, Roald Amundsen praised Ellsworth as truly worthy of the medal:
When Lincoln Ellsworth saved Dietrichson and Omdal from drowning, he saved the whole expedition; and I, therefore, deeply appreciate the King’s act in conferring on Ellsworth, without whose generosity the expedition would never have taken place, the gold medal for the saving of life.
Nome after their triumphant transpolar
flight. Photo copyright: National Library of Norway
The Amundsen-Ellsworth Expedition had not reached the North Pole, forced from the sky just shy of 88-degrees north. But by now Amundsen and Ellsworth were more than just partners, they were bound in shared hardship and suffering, having forged a kind of brotherhood.
In just over a year, the two men would be back in Kings Bay—this time attempting to fly the Norge, a 350-foot airship (or dirigible), to the North Pole and beyond, all the way across the Arctic Ocean to Alaska.
If successful, together they would achieve a heroic first and gain polar exploration immortality …
TO BE CONTINUED …
Excerpt from an article originally published on Buddy Levy’s Substack.
Sources:
Quotes taken from Buddy Levy’s Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue, chapters 16-18.
Article by:Source: Sara Beth Haring
