Most of Amundsen’s companions did not see how sad he was after his wife’s sudden departure, only noticed that he started bringing Sara on board with him more often. Little Sara’s childhood was spent at sea. Maybe this was one of the main reasons why she would go on to have the talent and the confidence to become a marine ecologist many years later.
Amundsen insisted on hunting one whale a year, but only one. He usually only selected such titanic adversaries as fin whales or sperm whales to uphold his modest pride and dignity as a Norwegian fisherman. Fin whales are rorquals, and most people would assume that rørhval, the Norwegian word for rorqual, meant “groove whale,” rør meaning “groove” and hval meaning “whale.” This made sense, because the rorquals have throat grooves. But Amundsen often told people he thought this was wrong. He read rør as cognate with rød, meaning “red,” because when a rorqual’s throat grooves expand they fill with blood and appear red. For him, the true meaning of rørhval was a great red-bellied whale in the deep blue sea. And Amundsen found the idea of hunting such a whale irresistible.
The international community had put quite a lot of pressure on Norway’s whalers, but Amundsen remained his old self. He would often tell people, “I hunt with a traditional harpoon, not with a whale gun or a bomb lance. It’s like a struggle for survival. What’s wrong with that? Not to mention that I only hunt one a year!” Amundsen practiced the art invented more than a thousand years ago by the Basques and improved by the Norwegians. When the lookout up in the crow’s nest spotted a whale, the harpooners would row out in smaller boats, surround it and launch their harpoons into its back. A rope on each harpoon was attached to a big hollowed-out gourd, which increased drag and caused the fleeing whale to exhaust itself more quickly. When the whale started spouting blood, the harpooners would aim at its weak spot and end the life of a great spirit.
Some environmental protection organizations believed that the use of the harpoon was even crueler than modern weapons as it would cause the whale greater pain. Amundsen found this impossible to accept. “All life must feel pain in the face of death. To live without pain is to live without dignity. We venerate the whales and don’t intend to kill them off, and I don’t make them suffer on purpose. We put our lives on the line, in exchange for theirs. When I hunt a whale, it’s either him or me. I don’t condone the commercial hunt, any more than you. It’s the commercial hunters who are driving the whales to extinction. You should be going after them, not us. Get it?”
Amundsen was a one-man army, with a truculent manner to match. Modern boats were so much faster than traditional ones, but Amundsen made a point of following the old ways. “At least, the whales that die by my hand die with dignity. They have a fighting chance, the chance to take my life.” Sometimes, before Little Sara was old enough to understand, he would explain, “People are a link in the food chain, and hunting in moderation won’t cause any species to disappear. Hunting whales made the old Scandinavian fishermen strong. This you must understand, my little Sara.”
To his friends, Amundsen was a typical Norwegian, tough and cold. Only Little Sara saw the weakness in him. He would often sit up at night in the cabin of his boat and pierce and yank at his skin with a fishhook. This process left twisting scars, which soon snaked all over his arms. People were always shocked by the sight when he rolled up his sleeves and set to work out at sea. One morning while they were eating breakfast, Little Sara surprised him by asking why he poked himself like that. He fell silent a minute, then replied, “To feel what the fish feel, my Little Sara.”
Many years later, Amundsen would say that his whaling career ended the year he turned fifty. That year he and his friends were chasing a pair of fin whales. They fought them all the way across the north Atlantic until they ended up killing the eighteen-meter-long bull and releasing the even more massive cow, because they had agreed never to kill females. But when the cow was leaving it took a swipe at the boat with her tail, not only ripping a hole in the hull but also destroying the propulsion system. Regretfully, they had to leave the male, letting its colossal body sink into the sea. Adrift, Amundsen and his friends sent out distress signals as they tried to fix the leak. They had even jumped into the whaleboat, ready to abandon ship, when a Canadian fishing vessel rescued them, lowering a transport net and hauling them off to Newfoundland.
It was already late autumn. Amundsen decided to winter in Canada, taking some time out for a trip down the Mississippi. Renting a boat and navigating this river had been a boyhood dream of his, ever since he had seen a cartoon called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom and Huck, Tom and Huck, Amundsen sang as he steered the boat, feeling himself fortunate to enjoy this kind of nostalgic interlude.
Amundsen returned to Newfoundland in early spring and met up with his whaling buddies to reclaim the repaired boat. A Canadian seaman named Kent invited him to hunt seals in Labrador, his homeland and a major breeding ground for harp seals. Amundsen had hunted seals in Europe, and it was actually not that hard. As an adventure lover, Amundsen was lukewarm about the idea, but could not really refuse Kent’s avid hospitality.
This was the season when pregnant seals congregated on the beach to give birth and nurse their pups. Amundsen and Kent and other hunters moored their boats along a floe and entered “the ice zone” on foot. The floe was dull and gray, making a fellow like Amundsen, who came from a land of ice and snow, feel right at home. The pod of seals was like a class of carefree kids on a field trip, looking around, enjoying the scenery.
On the way to the ice, Kent had filled Amundsen in on some basic seal lore. “Baby seals are called ‘whitecoats’ because they are covered in snow-white fur. Two weeks later when they start developing silver fur they’re ‘ragged-jackets.’ Another nineteen or so days after that, when they’ve entirely molted, they turn into silver-gray ‘beaters.’ Actually, when seal fur was fashionable in Europe, ‘whitecoat’ fur was the kind favored by the rich ladies, but now it’s against the law to hunt whitecoats. The government says we can only hunt the beaters. I just don’t get it! What difference does it make? Either way, it’s still killing a seal!”
“But I don’t have a hunting gun. You’d have to help me borrow one.”
“No problem.”
The weapon Kent handed him the next day wasn’t a gun. It was a special kind of club called a hakapik, about the length of a baseball bat but with a metal hammerhead and hook attachment on the one end.
“How do you use it?” Amundsen asked, doubtfully.
“You bludgeon the seal’s head with it. Bang, it’s dead. A good hunter can kill a seal with a single blow, then skin it,” Kent said. “Let the games begin.”
When the hunting party got close to the ice floe, the alert seals started to bark like crazy and flee en masse into the water. They could not move very fast on the ice, but once they made it into the water they were out of reach, out of range. But the seal pups ran very slowly, and some couldn’t swim too well, either. Some, too scared even to dive in, were soon caught by the hunters. Watching from off to one side, Amundsen discovered that killing a seal with one blow wasn’t easy, even for a big guy like him, mainly because the ice floe was swaying slightly and the seals would try to dodge. Most seals took quite a few hits, screaming and cowering, their heads all bloody, before they stopped resisting, by which time they were either badly injured or out cold. When a seal submitted, the hunter would turn the club the other way around, hook the animal’s neck and drag it over to the boat. The blood would drip down from the end of the club, as if the club itself had suffered a mortal wound.