The story
On December 14, 1911, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and four companions, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel and Oscar Wisting, became the first people to reach the South Pole. They had left their base, Framheim, on the Ross Ice Shelf in October with four sledges pulled by 52 dogs, climbed onto the polar plateau by a new route up the Axel Heiberg Glacier and traveled on skis. They left a tent and letters at the Pole and returned safely to base in January 1912.
Amundsen was the most experienced polar traveler of his day. He had sailed the first ship through the Northwest Passage from 1903 to 1906 and learned from Netsilik Inuit how to use dogs and fur clothing. He had planned to drift across the Arctic toward the North Pole in Fridtjof Nansen's ship Fram, but after Frederick Cook and Robert Peary each claimed the North Pole in 1909, he secretly turned south. Antarctica itself was first sighted only in 1820, after James Cook's voyages of the 1770s suggested that any southern land lay hidden behind the ice.
His rival, the British naval officer Robert Falcon Scott, relied on ponies, motor sledges and man-hauling. Scott's party of five reached the Pole on January 17, 1912, and found Amundsen's tent. All five died on the return journey. Amundsen's careful planning, dogs and depots made the difference.
Why it mattered
- Amundsen's dog-based methods became a model for later polar expeditions.
- Scott's tragedy became a lasting British legend of heroic sacrifice, debated by historians ever since.
- The race marked the climax of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, which ended with Shackleton's expeditions.
- The US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, opened in 1956, carries both explorers' names.
Sources
- The third Fram expedition 1910-1914 Fram Museum
- The Race to the South Pole: To the Pole, Who Won? American Museum of Natural History
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