IV.

Later Expeditions

Amundsen was still making plans for another Arctic expedition when World War I began in 1914. Eventually, despite the threat of German submarines, he set out in July 1918 in the Maud, voyaging along the Arctic coasts of northern Norway and Russia and reaching Nome, Alaska, by the spring of 1920. This made him only the second person to navigate the Northeast Passage.

In the following years Amundsen became interested in the use of air transport for polar travel. In May 1926 he embarked on a flight in an Italian dirigible balloon, the Norge, accompanied by its designer and pilot Umberto Nobile and the American aviator Lincoln Ellsworth. They succeeded in crossing the North Pole during a flight of more than 70 hours from the Svalbard islands to Teller, Alaska. American aviators Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett claimed to have flown over the North Pole a few days earlier. However, Byrd’s diary, which came to light in 1996, suggests that they may have turned back a considerable distance before reaching the pole. In any case, the Norge was the first to cross from Europe to North America via the North Pole.

Nobile and Amundsen subsequently quarreled, each claiming that the credit for the flight belonged to his respective country. In 1928, however, when Nobile’s airship Italia was wrecked during a polar flight, Amundsen, who had retired, volunteered to search for him. Nobile was eventually rescued, but Amundsen was last heard from on June 28, 1928, a few hours after he and five others had left Tromsø, Norway, by airplane. The remains of the airplane were found near Tromsø on August 31.