- [Knute] The early 20th century has been called the heroic age of polar exploration.

By ship, dog team, aircraft, and on foot, explorers sought the ends of the earth.

And what's a little remembered now is the role Seattle and the Pacific Northwest played in the polar probing that dramatically changed our understanding of the planet.

One man in particular sought aid, rest and repair, money, and moral support here.

And he left clues about that legacy in artifacts that remained.

Like the snow shoes of the greatest polar explorer of all time.

Who was he, and why was he here?

(playful music) Today climate change is opening Arctic waters as ice melts.

(mellow music) But it wasn't always so.

Finding a water route through the far north was long a goal for explorers and colonizers.

Explorers like Captain James Cook of Britain came to the northwest seeking the legendary Northwest Passage.

A northern sea route rumored to link the Atlantic and Pacific.

Empires hungered for the trade such a passage would bring.

They sailed until they were stymied and sometimes crushed by the ice.

The loss of an expedition led by the British Navy, Sir John Franklin, who was seeking the Northwest Passage, spurred more exploration.

Franklin and his crew entered and then vanished into a forbidding icy realm in 1845.

Search parties for his ships and crew were unsuccessful, but they extended geographic knowledge.

Franklin's quest and fate inspired a 15 year old Norwegian boy to find answers.

His name, Roald Amundsen.

In the early 1900s, Amundsen was part of a new generation of explorers that was determined to conquer the ice.

(uplifting music) He dreamed of traversing the Northwest Passage by ship.

And eventually, he found a way.

Norway wanted to assert its rights to northern lands and shape a new national identity.

And these ambitions fueled Amundsen's drive.

From 1903 to 1906, Amundsen led an expedition going by boat, a converted herring boat called the "Gjöa".

From Greenland through northern Canada to Alaska.

It took patience, requiring this small craft to be locked in ice as it inched its way across.

When the ""Gjöa" emerged after two winters in ice, Amundsen became the first to have navigated the passage by boat.

Amundsen returned triumphant in Seattle, where he was feted by the large Scandinavian community.

The Seattle times compared his achievement to those of Sir John Franklin and Sir Francis Drake.

That success stoked Amundsen's ambitions.

He headed south, and became the first to reach the south pole in 1911, and attained global celebrity.

He then headed north again, this time in a vessel the "Maud", built to withstand the ice.

He hoped that the ice flows would take his ship to the North Pole, but instead, he successfully navigated the Northeast Passage across Siberia, only the third person to have done so.

The "Maud" became a kind of multi-year floating laboratory taking scientific readings.

(seagulls squawking) (boat horns honking) At one point, the "Maud" came to Seattle for repairs and refitting after its propellers were damaged by the ice.

Amundsen stayed in Seattle for six months.

(cars honking) He met a local Danish-American businessman Hakkon Hjalmar, who became his business manager.

Amundsen was a spender, and had to raise vast sums for his expeditions.

(uplifting music) When the "Maud" went back north to Alaska in 1922, Seattle gave Amundsen's crew a hero sendoff from a dock near what is now the Olympic Sculpture Park.

Amundsen had used his time in Seattle to outfit for a new era of Arctic exploration with modern technology.

Onboard the "Maud" were two new airplanes in crates.

Amundsen intended to pioneer the Arctic from the air.

He wanted to fly from Alaska to Spitsbergen in Norway.

The two planes, a Curtiss and a Junkers, had neither the range nor strength to survive the rigors of Arctic exploration.

So Amundsen raised funds and later returned with bigger, better airplanes, flying boats, to try another transpolar flight.

But that expedition had to be abandoned after crash landing on the ice.

And it turned out Hjalmar's business management had driven Amundsen into bankruptcy.

Undeterred Amundsen sought to fly north via even newer technology.

He teamed up with the Italian airship innovator, Umberto Nobile, to fly to the north pole in a dirigible.

With a Norwegian crew, American financing from explorer Lincoln Ellsworth, and a team of Italian mechanics.

In 1926, the airship left Spitsbergen and in just 17 hours traversed the Pole.

Given serious questions raised about the accuracy of Robert Peary and Frederick Cook's accounts of reaching the Pole on foot, and Richard Byrd's flight over it.

It now appears that Amundsen and company weren't just the first to float an air ship over the north pole.

But in fact, the first on record to have actually reached it.

The "Norge" fell short of its intended destination of Nome though and had a hard landing in Alaska.

(mellow music) Still, it was was a 20th century triumph.

When they returned to civilization, aka Seattle, they were given a huge welcome.

But the rather dour Amundsen took offense at Nobile and his crew.

In part, because he thought they were trying to hog the glory.

But also, because Amundsen was against fascism and Nobile's success was embraced by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Some years later, Nobile would try his own Arctic expedition in another airship, but it crashed.

Amundsen set out by plane to search for Nobile and his lost airmen.

Nobile was rescued, but Amundsen's search plane disappeared in the far north.

Like his hero Franklin, he's never been found.

But relics like these snow shoes at the National Nordic Museum in Ballard, help us remember that our region had a role in the adventures of polar explorations greatest hero.

(melancholy music) - [Announcer 1] Hear more about this episode on the Mossback podcast.

Just search Mossback wherever you listen.

- [Announcer 2] Mossback's Northwest is made possible by the generous support of Port of Seattle.