Roald Amundsen
1872 – 1928 · Norway
Known for: First to reach the South Pole
“The first to stand at the South Pole, lost at last on a flight to save other men.”
Biography
Roald Amundsen came from a family of Norwegian shipowners and sea captains, and was born on 16 July 1872 in Borge, between the towns of Fredrikstad and Sarpsborg. He was the fourth son of Jens Amundsen and Hanna Sahlqvist, and his mother, hoping to keep him off the water, pressed him towards medicine. He kept that promise until she died when he was twenty one, then left the university within weeks for a life at sea. As a boy of fifteen he had read the narratives of Sir John Franklin's overland Arctic journeys, and he said later that they had shaped the whole course of his life. What he took from them was not romance but method: the conviction that the polar regions punished improvisation and rewarded preparation.
Amundsen learned that trade from the inside. In 1897 he joined Adrien de Gerlache's Belgian Antarctic Expedition as first mate aboard the Belgica, which became locked in the sea ice and so became the first expedition to overwinter in Antarctica, saved from scurvy largely by the fresh meat that the expedition doctor Frederick Cook insisted the crew eat. Between 1903 and 1906 he led an expedition of six men in the small fishing sloop Gjøa through the Northwest Passage, the first crossing ever made, wintering twice at King William Island, where the Netsilik Inuit taught him to drive sled dogs and to wear animal skins instead of wool that soaked and froze. Those lessons carried him south. He sailed from Norway aboard the Fram in June 1910, reached the Bay of Whales in January 1911, built the base he called Framheim, laid depots at 80, 81 and 82 degrees south, and on 14 December 1911 stood with four companions at the South Pole.
The pole did not end his ambition. After an attempt in 1918 to drift to the North Pole through the Northeast Passage in the ship Maud failed to reach it, he turned to the air, and on 12 May 1926 he and fifteen other men aboard the airship Norge became the first explorers verified to have reached the North Pole. In June 1928 he took off on a flight to search for the crew of the wrecked airship Italia and disappeared over the Arctic. The search for him was abandoned that September and his remains have never been found. What survived him was a body of hard practical knowledge, learned in large part from the people who already lived in the ice, and the example of a leader who brought his men home.