Roald Amundsen

Roald Amundsen: The Professional Among Amateurs

The telegram reached Robert Falcon Scott in Melbourne on 10 October 1910, and it ran, in full: "Beg leave inform you proceeding Antarctic. Amundsen." Nine words, no explanation, and a race Scott had not known he was in. Fourteen months later one of the two men stood at the South Pole ten days ahead of his own schedule; the other reached it second and died on the way home. The difference was not luck. It was method.

A Ship-Owner's Son

Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was born on 16 July 1872 at Borge, in Østfold, into a family of Norwegian ship owners; his father moved the household to Oslo three months later. When his father died, Amundsen was fourteen, and his mother determined that her youngest son would study medicine at the university.

He read Sir John Franklin's accounts of the Arctic instead, and the medical career quietly died. What followed was eight years of deliberate physical preparation — skiing, sleeping in the cold, hardening himself against subzero temperatures — undertaken with the seriousness of an athlete in training rather than the enthusiasm of a young man with a dream. At twenty-two a ski expedition nearly killed him and very nearly ended the career before it started.

The Belgica

From 1897 to 1899 he served as first mate on the *Belgica* under Adrien de Gerlache. The ship was trapped in the ice of the Bellingshausen Sea for thirteen months and became, unintentionally, the first vessel to winter in the Antarctic. It was an unplanned ordeal, and Amundsen treated it as a field course: how men break down in permanent darkness, what food prevents disease, what an expedition looks like when its planning fails.

The Northwest Passage

In 1903 he took command of the *Gjøa*, a small vessel fitted with an auxiliary petrol motor, and set out after the passage that had defeated European navigators for centuries. Over three years he worked west from Greenland through the Canadian archipelago to Alaska, completing the Northwest Passage by sea for the first time.

The most consequential part of the voyage was the two winters spent on King William Island, where he took magnetic observations near the north magnetic pole and — decisively — lived among the Netsilik Inuit and studied how they survived. He learned their dog-driving, their sledge handling, their clothing. Almost every advantage he later held over the British in Antarctica came out of that apprenticeship. It is the single most important fact about Amundsen as an explorer: he assumed that people who lived in the ice knew more than he did, and he went and asked them.

The Telegram

His next plan was the North Pole. When word came that Robert Peary had claimed it, Amundsen turned his expedition around without telling his backers — or, initially, his own crew. He had the loan of the *Fram*, a ship built expressly for polar work, whose rounded hull was designed to be squeezed upward by pack ice rather than crushed by it, and he sailed from Norway in August 1910 with two years' provisions and some ninety-seven Greenland dogs. Only his ship's commander and two others knew the true destination. He told the rest of the crew at Madeira, and sent Scott the nine words.

Framheim to Polheim

He established the base he called Framheim at the Bay of Whales on 14 January 1911, closer to the pole than Scott's position, and spent the winter laying depots and reworking equipment obsessively. A first attempt on 8 September was aborted at −56°C with frostbitten men and dead dogs; in the recriminations that followed, Hjalmar Johansen criticised Amundsen's judgment publicly and was struck off the polar party altogether.

The real attempt left on 19 October 1911: five men — Amundsen, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel and Oscar Wisting — with four sledges and fifty-two dogs. Rather than follow Scott's known route up the Beardmore Glacier, Amundsen took the steeper, shorter Axel Heiberg Glacier, named for one of his financial backers. They reached the South Pole at three in the afternoon on 14 December 1911 and pitched a tent they called Polheim.

They were back at Framheim on 25 January 1912, after ninety-nine days, ten days ahead of schedule. Eleven of the fifty-two dogs came back. Scott's party arrived at the pole weeks later, having man-hauled their sledges, and died on the return.

The Air Years

Amundsen published *The South Pole* in 1912 and spent his later career trying to reach the North Pole from the air. An attempt with seaplanes in May 1925, alongside the American Lincoln Ellsworth, ended with a forced landing on the ice. He then bought an Italian airship, the *Norge*, flown by its designer Umberto Nobile, and in May 1926 crossed the Arctic by air — an achievement immediately soured by a bitter public argument with Nobile over who deserved the credit. He and Ellsworth wrote *First Crossing of the Polar Sea* in 1927.

Why Roald Is Called a Genius

Amundsen was not a scientist and made no discovery that changed a field. The word applies to him because of a different faculty: he was one of the great systems thinkers of the age, in a domain where a systems error kills everyone. His planning operated on margins: dogs and skis rather than ponies and man-hauling, provisions calculated rather than estimated, depots laid through a whole winter before they were needed, a route chosen for gradient rather than familiarity, clothing and technique copied from people who had solved the problem centuries earlier. Britannica calls him "one of the greatest figures in the field of polar exploration," and the ninety-nine-day round trip, finished ahead of schedule with the party intact, is the cleanest demonstration in exploration history that an extreme environment rewards engineering over courage.

The counter-case is substantial. He was deceptive: he misled his sponsors, concealed his destination from his own crew, and ambushed a rival with a telegram. He was autocratic, and he destroyed Johansen's standing for questioning him at a moment when Johansen may have been right. He deliberately subordinated science to speed, which is why Scott's doomed expedition produced more research than Amundsen's successful one. His decisive advantage was Netsilik knowledge, acquired from people who received none of the fame; his honesty in acknowledging the debt is to his credit, but the asymmetry remains. And the later career shows a man increasingly chasing records rather than solving problems, ending in a quarrel over an airship. The genius here is real but specific: it is the genius of logistics, of ruthless preparation, and of the humility to learn from those the rest of Europe was not listening to.

Legacy

On 18 June 1928 Amundsen boarded a French seaplane to search for Nobile, whose airship *Italia* had crashed in the Arctic. He and his crew were never heard from again; he was fifty-five, and his rival was rescued by others.

His work fed oceanography, climatology, geomagnetism and cartography, and he remains the only man to have both completed the first navigation of the Northwest Passage and led the first party to the South Pole. But the durable lesson is the unheroic one. Amundsen won because he prepared better, borrowed intelligently, and refused to confuse suffering with achievement. A century of polar operations has been run on his principles ever since.

Achievements

• Fridtjof Nansen Award of Excellence, Mathematics-Natural sciences class
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav‎
• Hubbard Medal
• Constantin Medal
• Recorded as explorer, writer and sailor