Roald Amundsen

Their life

The first man to reach the South Pole, on 14 December 1911, thirty-four days ahead of Scott — and the first to sail the Northwest Passage, in a fishing boat with a crew of six. His advantage was not courage but method: he learned from the Netsilik Inuit how to dress in furs rather than wool, how to drive dogs, how to build snow shelters, and he planned his depots and rations to a margin that assumed things would go wrong. He slept in the snow outside his childhood home with the windows open to harden himself, and read polar literature obsessively for the mistakes. He died in 1928 flying a rescue mission for a rival, Umberto Nobile, whose airship had gone down; Nobile survived and Amundsen was never found.

Known for

• First to the South Pole
• First to sail the Northwest Passage
• Wintering with the Netsilik Inuit
• Meticulous depots and polar planning
• Crossing the Arctic by airship Norge
• Voyage of the Maud

The road they walked

Roald Amundsen was born on 16 July 1872 in Borge, in southeastern Norway, into a family of shipowners and sea captains. Norway was then in union with Sweden, and its seafaring tradition was strong. As a boy he read the narratives of Sir John Franklin's lost expeditions and decided he would be an explorer. His mother wanted him to be a doctor, and he enrolled in medicine at the university in Christiania. When she died in 1893 he left his studies and went to sea.

His apprenticeship was served in the ice. In 1897 he joined the Belgian Antarctic Expedition under Adrien de Gerlache as first mate. The Belgica became trapped in the pack ice, and its crew was the first to endure an Antarctic winter. They suffered badly from cold, darkness and scurvy, and he took lessons from it that he never forgot. In 1903 he sailed in the small sloop Gjøa to find a route through the Northwest Passage. The ship wintered for nearly two years at King William Island, where he lived alongside the Netsilik Inuit and studied their furs, dogs and snow shelters. In 1906 he reached Nome, Alaska, having completed the passage that had defeated generations of British naval expeditions.

His great turning point came in 1909, when Frederick Cook and Robert Peary each claimed the North Pole, which removed the goal he had been preparing for. He quietly redirected his expedition south, borrowed Fridtjof Nansen's ship Fram, and informed Robert Falcon Scott only by telegram once he was under way. From a base on the Ross Ice Shelf, he and four companions, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel and Oscar Wisting, reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911. Scott's party arrived on 17 January 1912 and died on the return march. Amundsen later led the Maud expedition through the Northeast Passage and flew toward the pole in 1925. In 1926 he crossed the Arctic in the airship Norge with Umberto Nobile and Lincoln Ellsworth. Years of expensive ventures left him heavily in debt.

How their story ended

On 18 June 1928, Amundsen took off from Tromsø in a French Latham 47 flying boat to search for Umberto Nobile, whose airship Italia had crashed on the Arctic ice, though the two men had quarreled bitterly over the credit for the Norge flight. The aircraft vanished over the Barents Sea with Amundsen and a French crew. A float and a fuel tank were later found off the Norwegian coast, but his body was never recovered. Most accounts hold that the plane went down in fog, though the exact cause remains unknown. Nobile and other survivors were rescued by a Soviet icebreaker.

In their words

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