Amundsen, Roald

Amundsen, Roald (1872–1928), Polar explorer, born at Borgo, southern Norway. Inspired as a boy by the exploits of Sir John Franklin, he determined to explore the polar regions himself and abandoned a career in medicine in order to serve as a seaman in Arctic waters and to obtain his mate's certificate. In 1897 he secured the position of first mate on an expedition to the Antarctic and was one of the first to spend an involuntary winter in these regions when the ship became trapped in the ice. On his return in 1899 Amundsen obtained his master's certificate. Thus equipped with a first-hand knowledge of ice navigation and survival techniques he resolved to lead an expedition of his own to traverse the North-West Passage, which, in 1905–6, he managed to do in a 50-ton fishing smack, the first vessel to achieve this feat.

Two years later he planned to reach the North Pole by emulating Nansen's drift in the Fram. The Norwegian government gave him the Fram for this expedition, but the news of Peary's claim to have reached the Pole in the autumn of 1909 brought the scheme to a halt. Instead, Amundsen, emboldened by Shackleton's recent expedition there, switched his ambitions to be the first to reach the South Pole. Carefully avoiding Scott's planned route to the polar plateau up the Beardmore glacier, Amundsen and four companions achieved their goal by an untried route, reaching the pole on 14 December 1911. The return journey was equally successful.

After the First World War (1914–18), Amundsen used a considerable personal fortune to build a polar ship called the Maud with the idea of following a north-east passage to the Bering Strait, but in this he failed. This experience convinced him that the Arctic Ocean was best explored from the air. In 1925 he achieved a latitude of 87° 43′ N. in a Dornier flying boat and in 1926 he was the first to fly across the North Pole when he flew in an airship from Spitsbergen to Telfer, Alaska, a distance of 5,424 kilometres (3,390 mls.). He disappeared in June 1928 while flying to Spitsbergen to rescue those aboard a crashed airship.

Bibliography

Amundsen, A. , The South Pole (1912).
Huntford, R. , The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole (1999).
Mason, T. K. , Two Against the Ice: Amundsen and Ellsworth (1982).