Gjøa

At this time Norway was still in a union with Sweden, and Amundsen hoped the nationalistic spirit which was sweeping the country would attract sponsors willing to underwrite the expedition's growing costs.

His crew were Godfred Hansen, a Danish naval lieutenant and Gjøa's first officer; Helmer Hanssen, second officer, an experienced ice pilot who later accompanied Amundsen on subsequent expeditions; Anton Lund, an experienced sealing captain; Peder Ristvedt, chief engineer; Gustav Juel Wiik, second engineer, a gunner in the Royal Norwegian Navy; and Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm, cook.

[5] There she remained for nearly two years, with her crew undertaking sledge journeys to make measurements to determine the location of the North Magnetic Pole and learning from the local Inuit.

The harbour, known as Uqsuqtuuq ("much fat") in Inuktitut, has become the only settlement on the island – Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, which now has a population of over a thousand people (1,349 at the 2021 census).

[6] Gjøa left Gjoa Haven on August 13, 1905, and motored through the treacherous straits south of Victoria Island, and from there west into the Beaufort Sea.

Amundsen left his men on board and spent much of the winter skiing 500 miles south to Eagle, Alaska to telegraph news of the expedition's success.

Rather than sail her round Cape Horn and back to Norway, the Norwegian American community in San Francisco prevailed on Amundsen to sell Gjøa to them.

Amundsen knew that because of the fame that his exploits aboard Gjøa had earned, he would be able to gain access to Nansen's ship Fram which had been custom-built for ice work and was owned by the Norwegian state.

Souvenir hunters and vandals necessitated a fence be erected and a caretaker hired — the gentleman lived in the ship and was enumerated there during the 1910 United States Census...The city installed a seal tank behind the stern of the ship and, according to the Call, the Alaskan fur seal that occupied it acted as an additional nighttime guardian of the boat...Occasionally, the city would be spurred to make repairs and give the Gjøa a paint job (a 1968 visit to the city by Norway’s King Olav provided motivation for one such spruce-up), but generally the vessel that survived the crushing ice of the Arctic seas was a helpless victim to neglect and vandalism.

Being displayed outdoors and having faced 66 years of high winds, ocean salt and sand, the boat once again suffered deterioration, and evidence of campfires,[15] until in 1972, with the help of Erik Krag, a Danish American shipping company owner (Inter-Ocean Steamship Corporation) of San Francisco, Gjøa was returned to Norway.