Our polar flight

by Roald Amundsen; Lincoln Ellsworth

Felt her lift and felt her sag, betted when she’d break;

Wondered every time she raced if she’d stand the shock.”

The N 25 started leaking so badly from the pressure she received the other night that Captain Amundsen and I were obliged to pitch our tent on the floe upon which the N 24 was resting. We were wondering how much more she could stand. N 24 still lay with her nose on the ice floe, as we left her, but she had now listed sideways, so that the tip of one wing was firmly imbedded in the freshly frozen ice around her. During the past few days the ice had been freezing in from both sides, forming a long, narrow lane in front of N 24, but parts of this lane have bent into a curve. It was a narrow, crooked passage, but Riiser-Larsen felt that it offered one more opportunity for a take-off. He taxied N 25 forward, narrowly escaping an accident. As he slowed up to negotiate the curve, the nose broke through the ice with the reduced speed. The plane suddenly stopped and lifted its tail into the air. We jumped out and hacked away the ice until the plane settled on an even keel. We dared not remain where we were because the main body of the pack was fast closing in upon us from both sides.

At two o’clock the next morning we commenced work on an extension of our previous course and continued on throughout the day and on into the following night. It was a tremendous task, as the ice was covered with tightly frozen lumps, old pressure-ridges of uptilted ice cakes. Hacking away with our short-handled pocket-ax and ice anchor was such back-breaking work that we were compelled to work on our knees most of the time. The sweat was rolling down my face and blurred my snow-glasses, so that I was compelled to take them off for a couple of hours. I paid the penalty by becoming snow-blind in one eye. Dietrichson was not so fortunate. He was badly attacked in both eyes, and had to lie in the tent in his sleeping-bag for two days with his eyes bandaged and suffering acutely from the intense inflammation.

We awoke on the morning of June 5th, tired and stiff, to look upon the level track we had so frantically labored to prepare, but saw in its place a jumbled mass of upturned ice blocks. With the destruction of our fourth course our position was now desperate. But we would hang on till the 15th, when the vital decision would have to be made as to whether or not we should abandon N 25 and make for the Greenland coast while there were yet sufficient provisions left. But we had come here on wings, and I know we all felt only wings could take us back to civilization. If we could only find a floe of sufficient area from which to take off. That was our difficulty.

In the early morning of June 6th Riiser-Larsen and Omdal started out into the heavy fog with the grim determination of men who find themselves in desperate straits, to search for what seemed to us all the unattainable. We saw no more of them till evening. Out of the fog they came, and we knew by their faces, before they uttered a word, that they had good news. Yes, they had found a floe! They had been searching through the fog, stumbling through the rough country. Suddenly the sun broke through and lit up one end of a floe, as Riiser-Larsen puts it, which became our salvation. It was a half mile off, and it would be necessary to build a slip to get out of the lead and bridge two ice cakes before reaching the desired floe.

The main body of the pack was now only ten yards away. Immediately behind the N 25 a huge ice wall was advancing slowly, inch by inch, and fifteen minutes after we started the motors the solid ice closed in over the spot where our plane had lain. We were saved.

We worked our way slowly up to where we meant to build the slip, using a saw to cut out the ice ahead where it was too heavy for the plane to break through. After six hours of steady toil we had constructed our slip and had the plane safe up on floe No. 1. That night of June 6th we slept well, after the extra cup of chocolate that was allowed us to celebrate our narrow escape.

The next morning began the most stupendous task we had yet undertaken: cutting a passage through a huge pressure-ridge,—an ice wall fifteen feet thick which separated floe No. 1 from floe No. 2,—and then bridging between floe No. 1 and floe No. 2 two chasms fifteen feet wide and ten feet deep, separating the two floes from one another. In our weakened condition this was a hard task, but we finished it by the end of the second day. Crossing the bridges between the floes was exciting work. The sustaining capacity of such ice blocks as we could manage to transport and lay in the water could not be great. The heavier blocks which we used for a foundation were floated into place in the sea and left to freeze—as we hoped they would—into a solid mass during the night. When the time came, we must cross at full speed, if we were not to sink into the sea, and then instantly stop on the other side, because we had taken no time to level ahead, so great was our fear that the ice floes might drift apart during the operation of bridging. We made the passages safely and were at last upon the big floe. In order to take advantage of the south wind, which had continued to blow ever since the day of our landing, we leveled a course across the shortest diameter of this cake, which offered only 300 meters for a take-off. But before we completed our work the wind died down. Nevertheless we made a try, but merely bumped over it and stopped just short of the open lead ahead. Our prospects did not look good. The southerly winds had made the deep snow soft and soggy. But it was a relief to know that we were out of the leads, with our plane safe from the screwing of the pack-ice.

It was June 9th, and now began the long grind of constructing a course upon which our final hopes must rest. If we failed there was nothing left. My diary shows the following entry for June 10th:—“The days go by. For the first time I am beginning to wonder if we must make the great sacrifice for our great adventure. The future looks so hopeless. Summer is on. The snows are getting too soft to travel over and the leads won’t open in this continually shifting ice.”