Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
129
December 16: Roald Amundsen, Olav Olavson Bjaaland, Hilmer Hanssen, Sverre Has-
sel, and Oscar Whisting. Scott's men went through the motions, measured their position
with a sun compass, built a cairn, unfurled the “poor slighted Union Jack,” and shot a
photograph.
In his diary Scott despaired:
Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it
without the reward of priority. Well, it is something to have got here, and the wind
may be our friend to-morrow. We have had a fat Polar hoosh in spite of our chagrin,
and feel comfortable inside—added a small stick of chocolate and the queer taste of
a cigarette brought by Wilson. Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I
wonder if we can make it.
As history tells us, the party was doomed. With seven hundred miles of the inward
march completed, they ground to an agonizing halt eleven miles short of a depot with
more than a ton of food, while a howling blizzard held them in their tent for their final
days. The party's labor, their triumph and defeat, their ultimate sacrifice, the grace and
eloquence of their diaries, the fossil-bearing rocks they carried to the end, and the irony
of the final blizzard are the stuV of fame and legend.
Amundsen: Taking the Mountains in Stride
Roald Amundsen is legendary not only for reaching the South Pole first but also for the
apparent ease with which he accomplished the feat. When the Norwegians encountered
the mountains 250 miles beyond Beardmore Glacier and 100 miles closer to the South
Pole, they took them simply as a challenge to be surpassed, not as new lands to be charted
with the same care as the British surveyors (Fig. 5.1). Their passage through the moun-
tains was short, but fiendishly steep, and the crevasses on the plateau side were every bit
as dangerous as those encountered on Beardmore Glacier by the British. Amundsen's
matter-of-fact writing style was the antithesis of Scott's eloquence, belying the rigor and
proficiency of his accomplishment, and upon his return some in Britain seized on this
nonchalance to denigrate his fame.
The third son of a Norwegian ship owner, Amundsen consciously pursued a career
Figure 5.1. (overleaf) Sweeping for seventy-five miles to the northwest of Mount Griffith, the heart
of the Queen Maud Mountains culminates in Mount Fridtjof Nansen, the blocky summit at the cen-
ter skyline. In 1911 at the foot of that massif, Roald Amundsen's party found passage through the
Transantarctic Mountains on its quest for the South Pole. One hundred seventy miles southwest of
Shackleton's route on Beardmore Glacier, none could have predicted that the men would discover
one of the narrowest connections in all of the Transantarctic Mountains linking the Ross Ice Shelf
(at the right skyline) and the polar plateau (at the left). Amundsen Glacier flows from left to right in
the middle foreground of the image. This glacier and the surrounding mountains were first seen and
mapped from the ice shelf in 1929 by a ground party of Byrd's First Antarctic Expedition (BAE I), led
by geologist Laurence Gould.
