HE STOOD IN TRIUMPH AND TREPIDATION. IT WAS the evening of November 15, 1912. A proud, plain-speaking Norwegian adventurer, Roald Amundsen rose to address a packed house at London’s elite Royal Geographical Society after having bested better-equipped and better-funded British explorers in attaining a long-prized goal. He had reason to tremble. Some in the audience saw him as a jackal in a den of lions.
His talk would be modest, focused more on technical details of the journey than on the end accomplishment—but it could not be modest enough to please many of his British listeners. They, in turn, could not avoid insulting him even had they wanted to do so. For the second time in his life, he had achieved what Britain’s greatest heroes could not, but he had done it in a way that they disdained to attempt.
In 1912, when Amundsen made this second triumphal appearance before the society, London reigned over the most extensive empire in the history of the world. For three centuries, British explorers had led Europe in the discovery of other lands and seas. The Royal Geographical Society, or RGS, traced its origins to 1788, as the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, and had succeeded famously in its original goal through its support of David Livingston, Richard Burton, John Speke, Henry Stanley, and other renowned explorers. Under the patronage of Queen Victoria, it extended its reach to the ends of the earth. Antarctica, the last large blank space on world maps, had by 1900 become a focus of its ambitions. The South Pole took on aspects of a holy grail.
British geographers of the late Victorian and Edwardian era viewed themselves as scientists and their expeditions as grand enterprises of science. Simply reaching the head of the Nile, the high Himalayas, or the South Pole was not enough. An RGS explorer had to conduct research along the way. A series of RGS-endorsed expeditions had been opening the way to the pole for more than a decade when, late in 1911, Amundsen stole a march on a team already in the field to capture the prize by questionable means. Hailed for this achievement throughout most of the Western world, Amundsen was all but required to address the leaders of British geographical science and receive their validation of his effort. He did not want to come but could scarcely decline their summons. The Royal Geographical Society’s status as the arbiter of world geography was well earned.
The British boasted a long history of exploration and claimed a certain province over the far south, where early geographers thought a large landmass must exist to counterbalance the continents of the north. During the 1770s, the Admiralty launched a scientific expedition under the command of James Cook to look for this hypothesized southern land. “January 17th, 1773, was an epoch in the world’s history,” RGS Librarian Hugh Robert Mill declared in 1905, “for just before noon on that day the Antarctic circle was first crossed by human beings.” The intrepid Cook crossed the Antarctic Circle twice more on the same voyage but retreated each time before dense pack ice without sighting land. By circumnavigating the globe at roughly latitude 60° south, he established that, if an Antarctic continent existed, it must lie in the far south behind a daunting blockade of sea ice. “I will not say it was impossible any where to get farther to the South; but attempting it would have been a dangerous and rash enterprise,” Cook wrote in his journal. “It was, indeed, my opinion, as well as the opinion of most on board, that this ice extended quite to the pole, or perhaps joined to some land, to which it had been fixed from the earliest time.”1
Later British explorers thought otherwise. In 1839 the Admiralty commissioned a second expedition to Antarctic waters. James Clark Ross, already famous as the first European to reach the wandering North Magnetic Pole, was given two sturdy wooden ships, HMS Erebus and Terror, and a charge to make magnetic observations throughout the deep southern seas. By this time, sealers, whalers, and expeditions from various countries had probed the edges of the ice pack and returned with reports of isolated bits of land.
“Impressed with the feeling that England had ever led the way of discovery in the southern as well as in the northern regions,” Ross commented, “I considered it would have been inconsistent with the pre-eminence she has ever maintained, if we were to follow in the footsteps of the expedition of any other nation.” Instead he plowed through the ice pack south of New Zealand and found a vast open sea with a mountainous western coast that he named Victoria Land for his young queen. “It was an epoch in the history of discovery,” the RGS’s Mill later wrote, “the magic wall from before which every previous explorer had to turn back in despair, had fallen into fragments at the first determined effort to break through it.”2
Sailing south along the Victoria Land coast in the sea later named for him, Ross encountered at about latitude 78° south what he described as “a perpendicular cliff of ice between one hundred and fifty and two hundred feet above the level of the sea, perfectly flat and level on top, and without any fissures or promontories on its even seaward side.”3 The awestruck captain found that this “Great Ice Barrier” extended eastward from the Victoria Land coast for hundreds of miles. He realized it would prevent anyone from sailing farther south. Despite this obstacle in the way to the pole, Ross had found an exposed coastline with majestic mountains and, jutting from the Ice Barrier across the Ross Sea’s McMurdo Sound, a large island that was later named for him. He never set foot on the Antarctic mainland, but his namesake island became the base for many later efforts to probe the southern continent.
In 1901, after years of prodding by its president, Clements R. Markham, the RGS cosponsored the first British land expedition to the southern continent. Aboard the purpose-built wooden ship Discovery, which wintered over for two years at Ross Island’s Hut Point with a select team of scientists, officers, and sailors under Royal Navy commander Robert Falcon Scott, the British National Antarctic Expedition became the first to send parties south across the Ice Barrier and east over the Victoria Land mountains. A team consisting of Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and Edward Wilson set a new farthest south record on the last day of 1902 before turning back at the extreme end of their endurance, at just over latitude 82° south. They had covered almost five hundred miles on foot with heavy sledges. “Whilst one cannot help a deep sense of disappointment in reflecting on the ‘might have been’ had our team remained in good health,” Scott wrote in his published journal, “one cannot but remember that even as it is we have made a greater advance towards a pole of the earth than has ever yet been achieved by a sledge party.”4
Shackleton returned to Antarctica five years later leading a privately funded expedition aboard the forty-year-old converted sealer Nimrod. Accompanied by a small land party that included several scientists, he wintered at Cape Royds on Ross Island before heading south with three men across the Ice Barrier, up a glacial pass through the mountains of South Victoria Land, and onto the vast Polar Plateau. They man-hauled their sledge to within 120 miles of the pole before being forced to turn back or face certain death by starvation. “We have shot our bolt, and the tale is latitude 88° 23? South, longitude 162° East,” Shackleton wrote on January 9, 1909. “We hoisted her Majesty’s flag and the other Union Jack afterwards, and took possession of the plateau in the name of his Majesty,” King Edward VII.5
Scott, sailing from England aboard Terra Nova, with his sights locked on the South Pole, had his second Antarctic expedition under way before Amundsen’s ship, Fram, departed on September 9, 1909, with the same ultimate destination. Scott brought along more scientists than any prior Antarctic expedition; Amundsen took none. The two teams spent the Antarctic winter at Ross Sea harbors four hundred miles apart, with the British base at Ross Island’s Cape Evans and the Norwegian one at a cleft in the Ice Barrier known as the Bay of Whales. They set off with sledges for the pole within days of each other—Amundsen on October 20, 1911, and Scott on November 1. Many Britons viewed the entire Ross Sea basin as their domain by right of discovery and prior exploration. The Norwegians were virtual trespassers.
For all the attraction of the South Pole, the Arctic held greater fascination for the British during the nineteenth century—and here too Amundsen had come late to the game. British interests in the Arctic regions of North America began with the practical purpose of finding a Northwest Passage for sea trade with Asia. In 1497, soon after Christopher Columbus returned from his epic first voyage to the New World, King Henry VII of England sent John Cabot in search of a northern route around the Americas. He found none. A succession of expeditions over the next three centuries, while cementing British claims to the Hudson Bay region under Western concepts of acquisition by European discovery, established that if a Northwest Passage existed through Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, then it was likely blocked by ice most of the year. Still, hopes of finding open water at the top of the world persisted into the mid-1800s.
Idle years for the British navy following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 led Admiralty Second Secretary John Barrow to promote naval expeditions to the Canadian Arctic as a means to engage sailors and officers during peacetime, expand the empire, and make scientific and geographical discoveries. Surplus British warships were soon probing the far northern seas and coasts under the command of such veteran naval officers as John Ross, William Parry, and John Franklin—all of whom had served with distinction in the Napoleonic Wars. Ross’s nephew James Clark Ross, the future Antarctic hero, got his education in polar exploration by participating in six of these Arctic voyages from 1818 to 1833 under the tutelage of his uncle and Parry. Coinciding with the Romantic movement in the arts, these expeditions provided grist for countless books, paintings, and poems, including Mary Shelley’s groundbreaking 1818 science fiction tale, Frankenstein. Shelley’s tragic hero pursues his monstrous creation to the frozen north, where they encounter an icebound British Arctic expedition, which carries back their story of scientific hubris, death, and self-immolation on the polar ice. “I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft which brought me hither,” the monster tells the expedition’s leader, “and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame.”6 The North Pole already had become an ultimate destination.
Leaders of actual British Arctic expeditions returned with their own tales of life, death, and science in the far north, which they often related in popular articles and books. Franklin became famous as “the man who ate his boots” after surviving a harrowing overland expedition in which most of his men starved to death and the rest resorted to eating lichen, shoe leather, and (by some accounts) their fallen comrades. For successful officers—especially those who published gripping accounts of their exploits—Arctic service provided a means to attain promotion in a peacetime navy, as well as celebrity status and entry into elite social circles. Following their initial triumphs, Parry married into the aristocracy while Franklin wed the poet Eleanor Porden and, after her death, the wealthy world traveler Jane Griffin.
By 1845, parts of the Arctic Archipelago had been surveyed from either the Atlantic or Pacific end, but no one had completed a voyage through it. At age fifty-nine, after an interlude as a colonial governor, Franklin accepted command of Ross’s fabled Erebus and Terror to complete the passage in the course of taking magnetic readings around the North Magnetic Pole, but these ships became trapped in the ice and never returned. Assuming that the explorers would have abandoned their ships and proceeded on foot, the Admiralty dispatched a series of land and sea expeditions to find them. When these failed, Franklin’s wife sponsored four expeditions of her own and offered a reward that spurred on others before conclusive evidence showed that Franklin and his men had died either on board the icebound ships or during their attempted trek to safety. Inuit accounts of cannibalism among some starving crewmembers, at first discounted but later proven, darkened these reports.
To search for Franklin on the ice and land, the Royal Navy refined techniques of man-hauling heavy sledges. Although participants reportedly described this as “about the most severe work to which man has ever been put, at least in modern times,” it served as an appropriate means of winter transport in the far north for young sailors disciplined for teamwork and accustomed to handling ropes. The native people would have used dogsleds, but these required training that the searchers lacked. After a disastrous Arctic expedition during 1875–76, one former sledger wrote to the niece and companion of Franklin’s widow about continuing the brutal practice, “I would confine every one who proposed such a thing in a Lunatic Asylum, burn every sledge in existence and destroy the patterns.”7 He did not reckon with the force of navy tradition.
Through a dozen publicly or privately funded expeditions and over a hundred sledge trips, during which more sailors and ships were lost than on the original voyage, the Franklin searches greatly extended the survey of the Canadian Arctic. Yet no single ship traversed the entire Northwest Passage. That distinction was left to a small, shallow-draft fishing sloop, Gjoa, commanded by Amundsen with a crew of six. Inspired by Franklin’s 1824 book about searching for the Northwest Passage and by the outpouring of nationalistic euphoria after six Norwegians led by Fridtjof Nansen had skied across Greenland in 1888, Amundsen in his teens resolved to become a polar explorer. “Strangely enough,” he later wrote about Franklin’s book, “the thing in Sir John’s narrative that appealed to me most strongly was the sufferings he and his men endured. A strange ambition burned within me to endure those same sufferings.” Of Nansen, he added, “The 30th May, 1889, was a red-letter day in many a Scandinavian boy’s life. Certainly it was in mine. That was the day when Fridtjof Nansen returned from his Greenland Expedition.”8 Amundsen’s remote but revered seafaring father had died three years earlier; in Nansen, he found a hero and mentor.
After his mother’s death freed him from her demands that he become a land-bound physician, Amundsen openly pursued his polar dreams. Descended from a family of ship owners and captains, in 1897, the twenty-five-year-old threw in his lot with a barebones Belgian expedition to Antarctica that became the first to winter at the southern continent when its ship, Belgica, became trapped in the sea ice west of the Antarctic Peninsula. “For thirteen months, we lay caught in the vise of this ice field,” Amundsen recalled. “Two of the sailors went insane. Every member of the ship’s company was afflicted with scurvy, and all but three of us were prostrated by it.”9 In his memoirs, Amundsen credited himself and the expedition’s American doctor, Frederick Cook, with saving the expedition by directing the crew to eat fresh seal meat and to cut a channel in the ice from their ship to a nearby melted basin that eventually opened to the sea.
Having earned his spurs in polar exploration and gained Nansen’s backing, Amundsen organized his ambitious cruise through the Northwest Passage, which lasted from 1903 to 1906. Nansen was by this time a world-renowned professor of zoology and oceanography. To win his support, Amundsen cast this expedition as primarily a scientific effort to relocate and study the movement of the North Magnetic Pole. “He emphasized that this investigation of the magnetic pole was the expedition’s mission statement, the scientific core which gave it legitimacy,” Nansen later recalled, “and that, as they were already there, they might as well include the Northwest Passage.” To prepare, Amundsen briefly studied in Germany under Georg von Neumayer, a leading expert in terrestrial magnetism and proponent of polar exploration. He also secured the RGS’s endorsement for the effort. “My expedition must have a scientific purpose as well as the purpose of exploration,” he noted. “Otherwise I should not be taken seriously and would not get backing.”10 For Amundsen, however, the tail wagged the dog.
As the expedition proceeded, Amundsen increasingly turned over the scientific work to a young assistant, Gustav Wiik. “Wiik works continually on the magnetic north,” one crewman noted during the second winter. “The Governor [Amundsen] and the Lieutenant [Godfred Hansen] read novels and smoke and go for walks from time to time. It is unbelievable that a man can change like the Governor has in the course of one year. Last year he worked constantly with his observations. This year he has done nothing.”11 The crewman exaggerated. During two long winters frozen in place, Amundsen did learn valuable polar survival and dogsledding skills from the local Inuit people, with whom he freely bartered for food, animal-skin clothing, and women. Most important, with Amundsen in command, Gjoa made it through a passage that had blocked every earlier ship that attempted it.
Word of the successful transit of the Northwest Passage, telegraphed from Alaska after two years without communication, touched off revelry in Norway, which had secured its independence from Sweden during Amundsen’s absence. For many Norwegians at home and abroad, Amundsen became a second Nansen. “I attend one celebration after the other and have no time for much else,” Amundsen wrote of his return journey by train across the United States, which featured paid lectures at cities with large Norwegian populations. A European tour followed, which included an appearance before the RGS in London on February 11, 1907. Then came the obligatory book, The Northwest Passage, and book tour. “Don’t forget that from now on you must consider yourself a businessman,” Amundsen’s brother turned business manager, Leon, telegraphed to the explorer soon after his arrival in Alaska. “You might make a lot of money on a lecture tour of America, which is of course what you want.”12
Amundsen received honors wherever he went, including Norway’s highest decoration, but less so in England, where there was a sense of diminished achievement. He had taken a small motored sloop—some called it a yacht—on a route made known through decades of British sacrifice on tall ships and with heavy sledges. Nansen’s English agent, when asked about the prospects of Amundsen’s lecturing in Britain, advised him, “Your spectacular expedition attracted attention among the scientific public, but has not caught the imagination of the general public sufficiently to make the lecture tour a financial success.” The London press virtually ignored the Norwegian’s feat, and the British government, which once promised a monetary award to the first person who found a northern sea route to the Pacific, declined to pay him. The reward, he was told, had already had been disbursed among the Franklin searchers who, the British maintained, had virtually accomplished it. Some sentimentalists in Britain even credited Franklin’s much-romanticized lost expedition with achieving the feat. “However much these able men deserved remuneratory rewards for their hardships and achievements,” Amundsen complained about the distribution of credit and payments, “the voyage of the Gjoa stands as the first and only actual navigation of the Northwest Passage.”13
“There is no doubt that if you had returned home via Cape Horn with your ship,” RGS Secretary John Scott Keltie explained to Amundsen, “it would have made a big impression on the British public and thereby you could possibly have got more money from papers and publishers.”14 But Amundsen was too busy capitalizing on the past expedition and preparing for his next one to sail Gjoa home. It remained on display in San Francisco until 1972, before it finally returned to Norway.
The RGS was Amundsen’s toughest audience. Reviewing Amundsen’s book for the RGS Journal, the society’s immediate past president and longtime champion of polar exploration, Clements Markham, expounded on prior British expeditions to the region and noted Amundsen’s good fortune at finding the passage ice-free, which Markham depicted as a chance event. Scott Keltie even suggested that the revered Nansen, who was then serving as Norway’s ambassador in London, deliver Amundsen’s address so that it could be better understood. Amundsen gave his own talk, which the society heard at its clubhouse, having declined to book a grand hall such as the Royal Albert, where it had received Nansen and would receive Shackleton after their polar triumphs. In his formal introduction of Amundsen’s address, RGS President George T. Goldie, a former British administrator in Africa, underscored the expedition’s “very small” size and ended by noting its leader’s low-key reception in England. “I wonder what would have been the effect a century ago if it had been announced that some one was going to address a meeting describing his voyage through the North-West Passage?” he asked. “I do not think the Albert Hall would have sufficed if it had existed in those days. I now call upon Captain Amundsen to read his paper.”15
Amundsen tailored his address to his audience, which included aging veterans of the Franklin searches. “To Sir John Franklin must be given the honor of having discovered the North-West Passage,” he began. He attributed his success in being the first to sail through it to “the rich fund of experience gained by English navigators in those regions.” He then devoted virtually his entire address to the expedition’s magnetic research and his anthropological observations of native peoples. In short, he gave a science lecture. Amundsen said so little about the actual passage from known regions in the east to known ones in the west that, if anything, he made it sound too easy. Listeners could take his remarks as a backhanded rebuke of British failures.16
Nansen followed Amundsen to the dais. Ever the diplomat—he later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the League of Nations—Nansen noted how this “lucky man” had used the discoveries of prior British explorers to make his crossing of the Northwest Passage. “It shows us a good example of the way in which British and Norse sailors work together,” the ambassador noted. “I think we may say we belong to the same race.” Nansen also dwelt on Amundsen’s magnetic research. “He could have done the North-West Passage long before he did,” Nansen said, “instead of making scientific observations, which, I am afraid, very few of the public and of you appreciate as they ought to be appreciated.” Perhaps expressing his hopes rather than his beliefs, Nansen concluded that his protégé “knows what is of importance and what is not; he knows not to do sensational things when he has good work to do, but he can appreciate sensational things at the same time, as he has shown us. And we may see him start again on a new exploration, and I feel certain, next to his own country, he will have many well-wishers in this country.”17 By that expedition’s end, however, some in Britain would come to see him in a dark light in which a sensational dash to the pole eclipsed the important work of science.
According to his best biographer, Tor Bomann-Larsen, Amundsen never forgot the perceived slights he received from the British following the Gjoa expedition. Later in 1907, invited back to receive the RGS’s Patron’s Medal for “magnetic research in the region of the north magnetic pole,” rather than for transiting the Northwest Passage, Amundsen never even replied.18 A bold new adventure loomed ahead.
In 1907, a polar explorer with Amundsen’s ambition could savor two epic unclaimed destinations: the two poles. Science beckoned south, where the pole potentially sat on a high plateau of an unknown continent. Although scientists remained interested in the Arctic basin, the North Pole was merely a mathematical point on a vast expanse of sea ice. The science-minded British appeared intent on reaching the South Pole: Shackleton was preparing to leave on Nimrod, and Scott, not long back from his first try, was already negotiating with the RGS for another shot at it. Britain had all but abandoned the North Pole to the Americans, who seemed to care only about setting records. In a series of well-publicized efforts over the preceding two decades, the American Robert E. Peary and his assistant, Matthew Henson, had used Inuit dogsledders to push ever farther north. Although some openly doubted his claim—there was no way to confirm it—Peary reported having reached slightly over latitude 87° north in 1906 before being forced back. Calculating and obsessed, he would surely try again for the North Pole. Amundsen decided to contend for it.
A decade earlier, Nansen had set a prior “farthest north” by a means that incorporated science. Amundsen now prepared to emulate Nansen in order to reach his true goal: a pole.
Nansen had observed that the Arctic ice cap slowly circulates in response to underlying ocean currents. In an effort RGS leaders considered foolhardy, he secured Norwegian funding for a purpose-built ship, Fram, which he wedged into the sea ice north of Siberia with the intent of drifting across the pole in the circulating ice. The expedition could take years, during which time Nansen would study polar currents and climate as he drifted.
The plan worked, up to a point. The icebound Fram drifted north in a wide arc. When it became clear that the arc would fall short of the pole, Nansen and a colleague set off with skis, dogs, sleds, and kayaks for the pole. They established a new record of latitude 86° 14? north—nearly 2° north of Fram—before turning back for a horrific sixteen-month journey home. Drifting with the circulating ice, the ship and its crew eventually broke free on the ice pack’s far side, near Spitsbergen. This was the sort of adventure that inspired Amundsen.
While in London to deliver his RGS lecture on the Gjoa expedition, Amundsen apparently discussed his new scheme with Nansen. Nansen may have been alluding to it when he spoke of Amundsen’s linking the scientific and the sensational in “a new exploration.” By the end of 1907, Amundsen had Nansen’s backing and loan of Fram for a second drift across the Arctic ice cap beginning in 1910—it would be only the third major voyage by the pride of Norway’s fleet. In 1898, Otto Sverdrup had borrowed it for a scientific expedition to the Canadian Arctic.
To gain Nansen’s support and government funding, Amundsen sold the expedition as an oceanographic and meteorological study of the Arctic basin, with the North Pole an implied but unstated bonus. “From the moment the vessel becomes fast in the ice, a series of observations will be begun, with which I hope to solve some of the hitherto unsolved mysteries,” Amundsen told the RGS in January 1909, without mentioning the pole.19 The society responded with a small grant—“and that’s something,” Amundsen commented privately. About the RGS secretary, Amundsen added, “Keltie is completely changed. He is the nicest, friendliest person you can imagine.”20
To improve his chances of drifting near the pole, Amundsen decided to start much farther east than Nansen. “Our plan for the drift provided that we should enter the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait,” he wrote. “Our route from Norway to Bering Strait was by way of Cape Horn.”21 This route around South America was fortuitous because when Amundsen’s former Belgica colleague Frederick Cook claimed the North Pole in April 1908, and then Peary did so in April 1909, Amundsen was already scheduled to sail south. As the two Americans squabbled over who had reached the North Pole first and doubts arose over whether either actually did, Amundsen’s established itinerary provided cover for the most radical possible change of plans.
Amundsen had little interest in reaching anywhere second—or third. He wanted firsts. Publicly, however, he argued the scientific merit of the Arctic drift expedition, assuring backers that it would proceed with or without the pole. He needed to keep up the appearance of a proper scientific expedition to retain his funding, and he stood little chance of gaining support for a South Pole gambit while Scott was preparing a massive expedition to the region. Confiding at first only in his brother, Leon, and without telling Nansen or the Norwegian government, Amundsen packed Fram for a dash to the South Pole. Ninety-seven sled dogs from Greenland were loaded on board—which made no sense if he could gather huskies in Alaska after the long voyage around the Horn—along with a prefabricated hut for wintering on the Ice Barrier. The crew never became suspicious, and the watchful Nansen remained oblivious despite having asked Amundsen “why on earth he’d got so many dogs.”22 They were not alone: nobody guessed the truth.
Fram’s real destination was revealed only at its last port of call, the remote Portuguese island of Madeira. There, with Leon at his side, Amundsen informed members of his expedition and gave each of them a chance to disembark. No one did. Leon returned to Norway with letters to Nansen and the king, for simultaneous delivery, and a third for the Norwegian people. In them, Amundsen wrote that he still planned to complete the scientific drift across the Arctic but that finances forced him to detour south. “The masses” demand firsts, Amundsen explained in his letter to Nansen, and money follows. Because the Norwegian government had refused to provide added funds for the drift expedition once Cook and Peary had claimed the North Pole, he lamented disingenuously, only “this extra excursion” could save “the expedition I originally intended.”23 By this time, Nansen could not interfere and Scott had already set sail. At his brother’s direction, Leon wired a terse note to Scott in Australia: “Beg leave to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic.”24
“It was true that I had announced in my plan that the Fram’s third voyage would be in every way a scientific expedition, and would have nothing to do with record-breaking,” Amundsen wrote two years later to justify his change of direction, “but in view of the altered circumstances, and the small prospect I now had of obtaining funds for my original plan, I considered it neither mean nor unfair to my supporters to strike a blow that would at once put the whole enterprise on its feet. . . . Scott’s plan and equipment were so widely different from my own that I regarded the telegram that I sent him . . . rather as a mark of courtesy than a communication which might cause him to alter his programme in the slightest degree.” Amundsen stressed a key distinction: “The British expedition was designed entirely for scientific research. The Pole was only a side-issue, whereas in my extended plan it was the main object. On this little détour science would have to look after itself.”25
Following release of Amundsen’s letter to the public, the press began to trumpet a “great international polar race”—much like the international car races of the period. If this was a race, it was between unequal competitors. Scott’s Terra Nova carried sixty-six men, thirty-four of them in the shore party. They had various missions to perform, only one of which involved reaching the South Pole. Amundsen’s Fram carried nineteen men, of whom only nine wintered in the Antarctic. All of them focused solely on getting a small party to the pole, though after the five-person polar party departed, three of those remaining made an exploring excursion east to the Antarctic mainland. Scott set his base on Ross Island, nearly seven hundred miles in a straight line from the pole. But his route called for going around obstacles and up glaciers with heavy sledges. Knowing this in advance, Amundsen established his base, called Framheim, at the Bay of Whales, which was more than sixty miles closer to the goal and, as it turned out, offered a more direct path to it.
After laying depots along their planned routes during their first Antarctic autumn and wintering in their respective bases, the two expeditions set off for the pole late in 1911. Amundsen started twelve days before Scott and traveled faster. “The plan was to leave the station as early in the spring as possible,” the Norwegian explained. “If we had set out to capture this record, we must at any cost get there first.”26
The race became increasingly uneven as it progressed. The Norwegians used expertly trained dogs to pull their sledges rapidly across the Ice Barrier, up the mountain passes, and over the Polar Plateau. Those not driving sledges used skis. The British struggled with experimental motorized tractors, white Manchurian ponies, and heavy, man-hauled sledges. Of course, only Amundsen knew in advance there would even be a race, and unlike Scott, he felt no compulsion to do science along the way. The RGS’s self-anointed arbiters of Antarctic geography fumed. “What an imposter!” Markham exclaimed to Keltie in December 1910 about Amundsen on learning that the Norwegian was headed south. Although doubting that Amundsen could reach the pole, Markham conceded, “He is still a source of some anxiety.”27
“At three in the afternoon a simultaneous, ‘Halt!’ rang out from the drivers,” Amundsen wrote in his account for December 14, 1910. “They had carefully examined their sledge-meters, and they all showed the full distance—our Pole by reckoning. The goal was reached, our journey ended.” The Norwegians saw no sign of Scott. They camped for four days and used every available means to confirm their position. After repeated observations of the sun, which circled steadily around them for twenty-four hours each day, they determined that the camp was some six miles off the mark and moved their tent accordingly. “On December 17 at noon we had completed our observations, and it is certain that we had done all that could be done. In order if possible to come a few inches nearer to the actual Pole, Hanssen and Bjaaland went out four geographical miles (seven kilometers) in the direction of the newly found meridian,” Amundsen wrote. At dinner, they smoked cigars to celebrate.28
Scanning the horizon for Scott one last time, the Norwegians started home on December 17. They left a small tent with some excess provisions and a note for Scott, who they assumed would arrive shortly. “Welcome to 90°,” read a leather strip sewed to the tent.29 A Norwegian flag and a banner from Fram fluttered from a long pole extending from the tent’s peak. Amundsen also deposited a letter to the Norwegian king, which he asked Scott to bring back as proof that both parties made it to the pole. Presumably neither wanted to repeat the bitter dispute that still clouded the discovery of the North Pole and tarnished its claimants’ reputations.
“The going was splendid and all were in good spirits, so we went along at a great pace,” reads the first sentence of Amundsen’s chapter on the return trip to Framheim. The weather remained fair most of the way. Much of the route was downhill. “We always had the wind at our backs, with sunshine and warmth the whole time,” Amundsen noted. As they skied down the long slope from the Polar Plateau, “the surface was absolutely polished, and for long stretches at a time we could push ourselves along with our sticks.” Improvised sails were hoisted on the sledges. “The drivers stood so jauntily by the side of their sledges, letting themselves be carried over the plain at a phenomenal pace.” At times the skiers struggled to keep up. Rations steadily increased for men and dogs as they passed their evenly spaced supply depots. “We could not manage more,” Amundsen said of the food. Some was left behind. “The dogs were bursting with health, and tugged at their harness.” The polar party reached Framheim in good health and high spirits on January 25, 1912, after ninety-nine days out and back. Amundsen had gained weight. Fram had returned from winter quarters in South America. Six days later, the Norwegians sailed for Tasmania, where Amundsen telegraphed their success to the waiting world on March 8.30
Sketch of the Norwegian expedition’s route around the South Pole, December 15–17, 1911, with lettered polygons showing the field in which various observing stations must lie, from Roald Amundsen’s South Pole (New York, 1913).
The news made headlines throughout Europe, North America, and the British Empire, with the supposed race between Amundsen and Scott featuring prominently in the storyline. “The whole world has now been discovered,” the New York Times declared on March 8.31 Some outside Britain seemed to delight in a small band of Viking raiders tweaking mighty John Bull’s nose. The New York Times, France’s La Main, and the London Daily Chronicle paid Amundsen handsomely for exclusive rights to his first report. Other newspapers tried to scoop them or to run their own cobbled-together accounts, which led to a media frenzy. Celebrations erupted in Norway. At year’s end, the New York Times ranked Amundsen’s polar conquest as the number two news story of 1912, second only to the sinking of the Titanic.
Many in Britain could scarcely believe that a few Norwegians with dogsleds could beat their massive national expedition to the pole. When news of the Fram’s arrival in Tasmania leaked before Amundsen’s carefully crafted first report to the Daily Chronicle, word spread through London that the Norwegians would say that Scott had beaten them to the pole. “Rumours began to-day that you had got to the Pole and reporters began to flock and telephone,” Scott’s wife, Kathleen, wistfully wrote to her husband in her diary on March 6, “but apparently there is no sort of foundation.” After Amundsen squelched those rumors with his subsequent telegram, some Brits remained optimistic. “It still seems possible,” an essayist wrote in the nationalistic weekly the Spectator on March 16, “that Captain Scott may have reached the South Pole before Captain Amundsen, for although Captain Amundsen found no traces of his having done so it is to be remembered that the Pole is a vague point, and it would be possible in a region of mists and snowstorms for such fragile tokens as it is possible to leave behind them to be totally obscured.”32 Of course, Amundsen reported clear skies and fair weather at the pole.
Major British newspapers took a similar tack. “Even Sir Ernest Shackleton . . . declares that if Capt. Scott has reached the pole, it is probable that he would not hurry home,” the Evening Standard reassured readers on March 9. “It is to be remembered that, unlike the Amundsen, the Scott expedition had much scientific work to perform.” On the same day, an editorial in the Times of London commented, “We have still to hear the story of Captain Scott’s expedition during the Antarctic summer; and it is by no means unlikely that he also succeeded in his chief endeavor, and, indeed, possible that he reached the Pole before December 14.” Adding a gratuitous snub, the Times said of Amundsen’s efforts, “So far as has appeared these results from a scientific point of view are disappointing.” Even the Norwegian’s voice in London, the Daily Chronicle, wrote, “England will wait most anxiously for news of the Scott expedition. Through robbed of its crowning glory, geography and science will undoubtedly profit from it.”33
With no word from Scott, Amundsen set about cashing in on his triumph. While Fram sailed for Argentina, home of Pedro Christophersen, a wealthy Norwegian émigré who had helped provision the expedition, its leader lectured in Australia and New Zealand. Amundsen then followed Fram to South America, where he gave more lectures and completed his book about the expedition, The South Pole, for which he received a record advance in Norway. With his Arctic drift research on hold and Fram remaining in Buenos Aires, Amundsen embarked on a European lecture tour. “Mummy, is Amundsen a good man?” Kathleen Scott recorded her two-year-old son asking on March 11, 1912. “Amundsen and Daddy both got to the Pole. Daddy has stopped working now.”34 The boy was nearly right.
The British received a second blow on April 1, 1912, when further news dashed all hope that Scott had beaten Amundsen to the pole. Terra Nova had just returned to New Zealand after a second summer at the British base on Ross Island. The latest word from Scott, sent on January 3 to the main base with the final returning support team and conveyed by Terra Nova when it sailed north for the winter in early March, had the polar party 150 miles from the pole but otherwise in good shape. By this date, of course, the Norwegian party was partway back. “What, then, was our consternation when tidings were flashed over the world that Captain Roald Amundsen had been at the Pole?” the London literary magazine the Bookman asked. “Naturally enough, we resented in a way the wondrous good-fortune of one who . . . was a kind of interloper who had snatched the prize from the enclosing grasp of those who had more dearly won it.”35
Early reports carried back on Terra Nova spoke of motorized tractors and ponies failing but Scott and four others persevering in the finest British tradition, man-hauling their sledges across the Polar Plateau. “It is unfortunate that we were unable to remain a week or ten days longer,” a returning member of the Terra Nova expedition stated, “as we should almost certainly have back with us news that Capt. Scott had reached the Pole about Jan. 15. He and his companions probably returned to winter quarters before the end of March. No further news can be received from him until the Terra Nova again returns from the Far South about the end of next March.”36 Meanwhile, the expedition would endure a second winter in the Antarctic.
Science now became the only consolation for the British. “If less successful than Amundsen from the standpoint of adventure, Captain Scott and his colleagues promise much ampler scientific material,” the left-leaning English weekly the Nation offered in April. “They have spent their energies in elaborate researches into climate conditions, geological studies, and inquiries into marine biology.” The elite literary journal the Athenaeum added in Scott’s defense, “His expedition had serious scientific objects, so the ‘race for the South Pole,’ imagined by some newspapers, never took place.” Scott, the essayist suggested, was going to the pole in proper British fashion. Markham expressed the general view from the RGS: “There was no question of racing. The grand object was very far from that. It was valuable research in every branch of science. Capt. Amundsen’s plan was different. He conceived of a dash for the south pole without Capt. Scott’s knowledge.” Similar comments appeared in other British journals. “We offer to Captain Scott and the other members of the British Antarctic expedition the thanks of the scientific world for the attention being given to systematic observations, which are of far greater value than the attainment of the south pole,” the science journal Nature observed on April 4.37
Amundsen’s decision to begin a European lecture tour while Scott remained in the field put the RGS in an awkward position. Viewing him as a base record-chaser who had deceived their man, many RGS leaders did not want to honor Amundsen but not doing so might look petty. After all, the society had feted Peary for reaching the North Pole even though he too had done little science and his claim was shrouded in controversy. At least no one doubted that Amundsen reached a pole. RGS President Lord Curzon, an explorer of central Asia who once served as British viceroy of India, announced the invitation in May at an RGS anniversary dinner attended by Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. While praising Scott’s science and questioning Amundsen’s honor, Curzon noted that these concerns “should not deter them from recognizing brave and adventurous achievement wherever accomplished.” A more “hearty and enthusiastic welcome,” he suggested, would await Scott.38 To underscore the point, Amundsen’s lecture was scheduled for Queen’s Hall, a much smaller venue than the Royal Albert, where the RGS received Peary in 1910 and where it would surely receive Scott. Markham added to the insult at the 1912 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where he gave a keynote address on Antarctic discovery that did not even mention Amundsen. He would only cover “true Antarctic expeditions,” Markham said, not “mere dashes” to the pole. His lecture hailed Scott’s work.39
A proud man sensitive to such slights, Amundsen canceled all plans to lecture in England. Fearing the impact on bilateral relations, King Haakon VII of Norway prevailed on Amundsen to go. “Personally I would have preferred to abstain, but when the king wishes it what else can I do?” Amundsen acknowledged privately. The encounter with the RGS was set for November 15. As the date approached, Markham counseled Kathleen Scott not to attend the lecture and wondered aloud how those RGS leaders who did attend could speak to her “after shaking hands with Amundsen.” She returned her priority ticket for the event but slipped quietly into a top gallery. “Amundsen’s speech was plucky and modest but dull, and of a dullness!” she wrote in the diary she still kept for her husband. “He did not mention you except just to say you were at McMurdo Sound.” She noted with evident satisfaction that “there was scarcely anyone on the platform” with Amundsen except Curzon; Charles Darwin’s explorer-son, past RGS president Leonard Darwin; and Scott’s British rival, Shackleton. True to his word, Markham stayed away.40
As Kathleen observed, Amundsen gave a modest account that avoided contrasts with Scott. He offered due credit to his sled dogs. Curzon was not so discreet. In introducing Amundsen he spoke more warmly of Scott, “whose footsteps reached the same Pole, doubtless only a few weeks later than Amundsen, and who with unostentatious persistence, and in the true spirit of scientific devotion, is gathering in, during the absence of three years, a harvest of scientific spoils, which when he returns will be found to render his expedition the most notable of modern times.” In his closing remarks following the banquet, Curzon added, “I almost wish that in our tribute of admiration we could include those wonderful good-tempered, fascinating dogs, the true friends of man, without whom Captain Amundsen would never have got to the Pole.”41 Then, as Amundsen remembered it, Curzon concluded with the phrase, “I therefore propose three cheers for the dogs,” and turned toward the Norwegian.42
Amundsen never forgave Curzon’s closing comment, which he considered a “thinly veiled insult.” He lectured throughout Britain with mixed success for another month. When the gate at some of the lectures in England could not cover his fee, Amundsen insisted on full payment even from charities that had organized the lectures to raise funds. “I won’t let these damned English off one single penny,” Amundsen wrote to his brother. “I will not yield a single point to this ‘plum pudding nation.’ “43 Much larger audiences awaited him in continental Europe and the United States.
For their part, the British eagerly awaited a different explorer. “They must look forward to next spring,” Markham told a huge crowd in Dundee, “when the whole country would welcome the return of Captain Scott, the greatest of all Polar explorers, and hear of the geographical achievements of himself and his gallant companions with the deepest interest and with well-founded national pride.” A 1912 British children’s book on polar exploration agreed. “Our own Captain Scott is rapidly approaching the goal,” it assured readers, “and we sincerely trust that, though not first in the race—and, indeed, the obtaining of scientific results, not mere swiftness of march, was his aim—he too may win through.”44 Early in 1913, the prime minister assured Kathleen Scott that her husband would receive a peerage for his work in Antarctica. The honor only awaited his return. Then Scott, a gifted writer and speaker, would tell a story that would dwarf anything Amundsen could write or say. Drawing on more than a century of British experience in the Antarctic and a dozen years of focused research on Ross Island and Victoria Land, including his two grand expeditions there, he would spin them a tale of science, empire, and adventure at the world’s end.
Route of Edgeworth David, Douglas Mawson, and Forbes Mackay to the South Magnetic Pole (1908–9), from Ernest Shackleton’s Heart of the Antarctic (Philadelphia, 1909).
