Roald amundsen biography pdf

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In 1897, he first sighted Antarctica, which was still almost untouched by explorers, and the frozen continent retained a hold on his imagination for the rest of his life.

Amundsen Earns Recognition

In 1903, Amundsen won his first measure of renown as a seaman when he captained an expedition through the Northwest Passage in a fishing boat of just 70 feet in length.

The Shackleton voyage was unsuccessful, and Amundsen devoted large amounts of time to studying what had gone wrong with a view to avoiding such problems himself.

Amundsen Explores the Antarctic

Although widely commended for his planning and organizational abilities, Amundsen was said to be a rather taciturn and even a stern man.

In the following years Amundsen planed his mission to North Pole but when he found out that explorers Frederick Cook and Robert Peary have already reached it he turned his sights to the South Pole. Amundsen, who had been interested in exploration from an early age, is presumed to have died in 1928, when he disappeared while attempting to rescue comrades in the Arctic.

Early Life

Amundsen was born on July 16, 1872, in the small town of Borge.

He made two attempts to reach the South Pole. On December 13 1911, Roald Amundsen successfully reached the South Pole, naming that land as King Haakon VII’s Plateau. Only five weeks later English explorer Robert Falcon Scott would reach the Pole, just to tragically die from cold and starvation while returning to his base camp. Amundsen completed this voyage in 1906 by reaching the Pacific Ocean.

Second attempt was made with a crew of 6 people, 4 sleds and 52 dogs, travailing on a route that was previously explored by explorer Ernest Shackleton. Not even Norwegian officials were told of Amundsen’s change of heart, since the explorer worried that he would be told to avoid rivalry with Britain for political and diplomatic reasons.

Amundsen did not even tell his crew the full truth about where they were going until his ship, the Fram, had reached the waters off Morocco.

His other journeys included the first successful trip through the Northwest Passage beyond Canada.

After that successful feat, Amundsen went on a mission (1918-1925) to explore the waters of the Northwestern Passage. Because of doubts about whether Peary’s 1909 party had accurately reported their final position, Amundsen’s trip is now generally accepted as the first time that the North Pole was attained for certain.

Amundsen himself set up a Norwegian flag at the Pole before he and his party began the long return journey. Meanwhile, he had been engaged in the selection of sled dogs to pull his equipment once the party reached land.

His British rival, Robert Falcon Scott, instead relied heavily on Siberian ponies, a decision which was to prove fatally flawed.

After a unsuccessful two year Antarctic mission led by the Adrien de Gerlache, he returned to Europe where he prepared for his first solo discovery. On June 18, 1918, he was attempting to rescue fellow explorers in the Arctic Ocean from the air, but his plane was lost at sea.

When his expedition left port in August of that year, rumor had it that he was actually heading for the North Pole – but in fact, he had secretly ruled out that option after hearing that the U.S.

explorer Robert Peary had claimed to have reached 90 degrees north in 1909.

Two years later, however, while on another journey, he disappeared.

His body was never found.