Monday, 18 December 1911

Scott

A 1965 map of the middle length of the Beardmore Glacier, from aerial photographs taken 1958-1963 by the USGS. [1]

"Scott set a hot pace," wrote Silas Wright. "May I never again be the only long-legged one in such a team. All did their best but I am damn sure I had to provide the extra speed." [2]

Their day's march of fourteen miles got them to 84° 34', 4500 ft. (1372 m) above the Barrier.

"After lunch got on some very rough stuff within a few hundred yards of pressure ridge," Scott wrote. "There seemed no alternative, and we went through with it. Later, the glacier opened out into a broad basin with irregular undulations, and we on to a better surface, but later on again this improvement nearly vanished, so that it has been hard going all day, but we have done a good mileage (over 14 stat.). We are less than five days behind S. now." [3]

"Still sweating horribly on the march and very thirsty at the halts."


Amundsen

In the evening -- switching to night travel, in order to have the sun behind them and avoid glare from the snow -- the Norwegians left the Pole for Framheim. Bjaaland was forerunner for the journey home. "We got away in the most wonderful weather conditions one could possibly desire," he wrote. "-19 deg. [C] must be said to be fine at the South Pole. The dogs, poor devils, have not been over fed at the Pole, yet they are quick and lively." [4] They backtracked to the first Pole camp to pick up their outward trail, and headed off. Fifteen miles out, Amundsen put up another black flag at about the 180th meridian, the approximate British route from the Beardmore.

Amundsen knew that he still had to be first back with the news. Scott, he said to Helmer Hanssen, "will arrive during the next day or two. If I know the British, they won't give up once they've started." [5]

"700 miles will be quite tough," Bjaaland had remarked in his diary the night before, "but I'll manage." [6] The job of forerunner was an unenviable one: he had to set the track and keep the course true, as well as keep ahead of the dogs in order to give them something to follow. He also preferred, as a ski-racer, to be at the back, where he could see the rest of the pack and judge the competition. But in Bjaaland, Amundsen wrote, "we have found a forerunner of class. He sees like nobody else, and he goes like nobody else. Thus he has kept our old spoors Northwards ... although they are very indistinct." [7]


Notes:

[1] United States Geological Survey, "The Cloudmaker" map.
[2] Charles Wright, diary, 18 December, 1911, quoted by David Crane in Scott of the Antarctic (New York : Knopf, c2005), p.473.
[3] R.F. Scott, diary, 18 December, 1911, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition, v.1.
[4] Olav Bjaaland, diary, 19 December, 1911, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.495.
[5] Helmer Hanssen, Gjennem Isbaksen, p.96, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.495. When Amundsen had arrived in Eagle, Alaska at the end of his Northwest Passage journey in 1906, his telegram conveying the news was leaked to the press, causing him considerable financial loss on a supposedly-exclusive story. The lesson that he took away from this experience, as well as from the Peary/Cook North Pole controversy, was that being first out with the news of an attainment such as this was essentially second only to the attainment itself.
[6] Olav Bjaaland, diary, 19 December, 1911, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.495.
[7] Roald Amundsen, diary, 19 December, 1911, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.496.

Saturday, 20 April 1907

Amundsen

Nansen persuaded the Norwegian government to grant Amundsen 40,000 kroner, at the time about £2,200, on condition that the ethnographical collection of Netsilik artifacts made on the Gjøa be given to the state. (Amundsen had in fact already offered to make such a gift.) The grant would clear most of Amundsen's debts from the Northwest Passage and allow funds collected on his forthcoming lecture tour in America to be used for a new expedition.

February 1907

Amundsen

Amundsen received an offer of further lectures in England, although attendance, it was noted, would not be great. "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." [1]

It had been known for some time that the Northwest Passage would not after all be the navigable trade route hoped for since the days of Cabot, and interest had dwindled even in Britain, source of numerous expeditions even before that of Amundsen's hero Sir John Franklin. Still, the Norwegian Consulate in London wrote to Amundsen that they were "more than surprised by the way in which you and your expedition have been ignored by the British press," and his British press agent ventured that "the expedition had lacked grandeur despite achieving great things." [2]

"There is no doubt," wrote Scott Keltie, "that if you had returned home via Cape Horn with your ship, and thus circumnavigated America, before sailing up the Atlantic and along the Thames to London, it would have made a big impression on the British public and thereby you could possibly have got more money from papers and publishers." [3]


Notes:

[1] Gerald Christy? quoted by Tor Bomann-Larsen in Roald Amundsen (Stroud, Gloucestershire : Sutton, c2006, c1995), p.56-57.
[2] Both quoted by Tor Bomann-Larsen in Roald Amundsen (Stroud, Gloucestershire : Sutton, c2006, c1995), p.57.
[3] Scott Keltie, letter to Roald Amundsen, [date not given], quoted by Tor Bomann-Larsen in Roald Amundsen (Stroud, Gloucestershire : Sutton, c2006, c1995), p.57.

Monday, 11 February 1907

Amundsen

Roald Amundsen and his crew aboard the Gjøa, upon arrival at Nome in 1906. In the back, from left, Godfred Hansen, Anton Lund, unknown, unknown; in front, Amundsen, Peder Ristvedt, Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm, Helmer Hanssen. Lindstrøm and Helmer Hanssen would later accompany Amundsen to the Antarctic. [1]

Amundsen lectured at the Royal Geographical Society in London, on his attainment of the Northwest Passage the year before. Admiral Sir Richard Vesey Hamilton said afterwards, "I do not think an Arctic expedition ever did so much with such small means.... I have had the experience of three Arctic winters and five Arctic summers, and I can say that nothing I have heard of surpasses the work of Captain Amundsen." [2]

Ernest Shackleton was also present at the lecture, having come to ask the support of the RGS for his planned expedition in the Nimrod to the Antarctic. [3]

At this time, and with a view towards achieving the North Pole, Amundsen asked Fridtjof Nansen if he could have the Fram, the ship that Nansen had commissioned for his exploration of the Arctic. Amundsen's plan was to repeat Nansen's 1893-1896 drift but to enter the Arctic ice pack further to the east, using wind and currents to reach a higher latitude than Nansen had, and thereby coming within range of a dash to the Pole with skis and dogs. Nansen, however, having long held a dream of being first at the South Pole, told Amundsen of his own plans for the Fram. [4]

The Fram was in fact State property, but such was Nansen's stature in Norway as not only an explorer but by now as a statesman and public figure that there was little question in Amundsen's mind who had the disposal of her.


Notes:

[1] Britannica.com. The two unidentified men are probably Ole Foss and an American called Beauvais, picked up late in the expedition as extra hands; see Amundsen's The North West Passage, v.2, ch.11.
[2] Geographical Journal, vol.XXIX, no.5, p.485, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.199.
[3] "Ernest H. Shackleton".
[4] In Roald Amundsen (Stroud, Gloucestershire : Sutton, c2006, c1995), Tor Bomann-Larsen says that in March of 1906, the men on the Gjøa, in the accumulation of newspapers they received in Alaska after the Northwest Passage, first read of Nansen's tentative plans for the South Pole.

Roald Amundsen

Roald Amundsen, the photograph used as the frontispiece to The Northwest Passage. [1]

Born 16 July 1872, Roald Amundsen came from a family of shipowners and captains in southeastern Norway. His mother pressured him to become a doctor, but upon her death when he was 21, Amundsen left university for a life at sea. Inspired since boyhood by the crossing of Greenland by Nansen in 1888 and by the doomed Franklin expedition, Amundsen decided to become an explorer.

By 1907, Amundsen had accompanied the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, the first to winter in the Antarctic, and led his own expedition, the first to navigate the Northwest Passage and reach the North Magnetic Pole. He had learned much, and now set his sights on the North Pole itself.

The French ambassador to Norway, Louis Delavaud, wrote in 1912 of Amundsen at this time, "[This] man, whose energy and modesty I had often the occasion to admire, had never given me such an impression of power .... [That] he had an authority and charm, nobody denies, who has approached him.... Without chasing people, he does not flee them. [He possesses] simplicity ... and a charm of conversation enlivened by sharp remarks, but without malice. Far from seizing the occasion to shine, as he could easily do, he listens more than he speaks, quite happily keeping in the background, smiling a little vaguely, and always he avoids speaking of himself." [2]

Hugh Robert Mill, geographer and meteorologist, and librarian of the Royal Geographical Society, found Amundsen "of a reserved and very sensitive nature. Although brave, daring and self-reliant above most men, he shrank from criticism, and withered under any suspicion of ridicule. He was, I think, the most successful and the most unhappy of all the Polar explorers whom I have met." [2]


Notes:

[1] Wikipedia.
[2] Louis Delavaud, L'Explorateur Roald Amundsen, pp.3-17, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.198.
[3] Hugh Robert Mill, An Autobiography, p.149, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.198.