Roald Amundsen, Robert F. Scott and a Race to The South Pole

Roald Amundsen was born in Borge, near to the Norwegian capital of Oslo in 1872. He was one of the greatest figures in polar exploration. He was the first mate on a Belgian expedition in 1897, that was the first to survive the winter in the Antarctic. In 1903 he was on board the sloop ‘Gioa,’ he guided this ship through the Northwest Passage and around the Canadian coast, becoming the first navigator to accomplish this journey.

Amundsen had planned to be the first man to reach the North Pole, he was about to embark on that expedition in 1909 when he learned that Robert Peary of the USA had achieved that. He continued with his preparations and instead turned his attention to the South Pole. In June 1910 he set sail for Antarctica at the same time as British explorer Robert F. Scott.

When arriving in the Bay of Whales, Amundsen set up his base camp 60 miles closer to the pole than Scott. Both explorers and their teams set off in October 1911, Amundsen using sleigh dogs and Scott being equipped with Siberian motor sledges, Siberian ponies and dogs. On the 14th of December, 1911, Amundsen and his team reached the South Pole, easily winning the race and began his journey back to his base camp. He arrived there in late January.

Scotts expedition did not go so well as Amundsen’s had. The motor sleds broke down, the ponies had to be shot. The dog teams were sent back to the base camp and Scott and four companions continued on foot. They arrived at the South Pole on January 18, 1912, only to find a Norwegian flag had been raised over a month previously. The weather on the return journey was worse than the difficult outward leg had been.

They eventually became trapped by a storm and froze to death just 11 miles from their base camp, when the bodies were discovered later that year, four were inside the tent. The fifth team member (Oates) had wandered off and Scott had written in his Diary that Oates had said ‘I am going outside, I may be a while’ he was not seen alive again.

After Amundsen’s success at the South Pole he established a successful shipping business, he also made attempts to be the first man to fly over the North Pole. In 1925 he flew within 125 miles of his goal before having to turn back. The next year he passed over the North pole in a dirigible (airship) just three days after American explorer Richard E. Byrd had reportedly done so in an aircraft. In 1996, a diary that Byrd had kept of his flight was found that seemed to suggest he turned back 150 miles short of the pole due to an oil leak. This revelation made Amundsen’s expedition in the dirigible the first to officially fly over the North Pole, sadly this news was many years after the Norwegian had himself perished. In 1928 while trying to rescue a fellow explorer whose dirigible had crashed at sea, Amundsen lost his own life near Spitzbergen, Norway.