Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
seem as arduous as a day at the seaside. The food depots were so plentiful that he describes the
plateau as 'the fleshpots of Egypt'.
Commentators have found Amundsen cold, but the author of
The South Pole
, published in Eng-
lish in two fat volumes in 1912, emerges as a warm and humorous figure. He was capable of great
admiration; he said that Shackleton's sledge journey to within 97 nautical miles of the Pole was
'the most brilliant incident in the history of Antarctic exploration', and that 'Sir Ernest's name
will always be written in the annals of Antarctic exploration in letters of fire.' The night before he
reached ninety south he said that he felt as he did as a little boy the night before Christmas Eve.
There is more than a touch of romance about his perception of the continent. He refers to it as 'the
fair one': 'Yes, we hear you calling, and we shall come. You shall have your kiss, if we pay for it
with our lives.'
Many pages of the topic concern the dogs, some of which have more distinct personalities than
the men. 'If we had a watchword', Amundsen wrote, 'it was dogs first, dogs all the time.' When
the dogs were killed for manfood, Amundsen records that he turned the primus up full blast so he
couldn't hear the shots. And oh, the innocent, ingenuous times! A photograph, taken by a member
of the crew and depicting a man dancing with a dog, is captioned, 'In the absence of lady partners,
Ronne takes a turn with the dogs.'
He tried hard to be egalitarian, insisting that all five plant the flag at the Pole, and when they
arrived back at Framheim they mustered outside the hut so that they could go in together. He cher-
ished those days. 'When everyday life comes back with its cares and worries, it might well happen
that we should look back with regret to our peaceful and untroubled existence at Framheim.'
Yet there was a doubt, lurking somewhere in the shadowy recesses of his mind. He left a letter
for King Haakon in the tent at the Pole, for Scott to deliver should the Norwegian party fail to re-
turn. They talked of Scott daily. Amundsen must have known that he himself had made a terrible
mistake by setting off too early in the season and almost killing his men and himself.
Amundsen also used a camera, and the images in his surviving lantern slides are artless, imme-
diate and authentic, revealing, in the self-portraits, a long face, enormous nose and the gleaming,
lugubrious eyes of a basset hound. He was lonely and unhappy at the end. He knew that the Eng-
lish had all but expunged his achievements from the records. His autobiography tells of the son of
a prominent Norwegian living in London who reported that English schoolboys were taught that
Scott discovered the South Pole. As Roland Huntford commented in his introduction to a 1987
edition of the lantern slides, 'It was as if he had been called upon to pay the price of achieving all
his goals; beware, as Teresa of Avila said, of having your prayers answered.'
∗
I entered the dome through the wide tunnel. Underneath, it was a couple of degrees warmer than
outside. Following the sound of laughter, I crunched over the same knuckle-hard snow and stopped
in front of a construction like a large mobile home with a freezer door. At that moment a woman
appeared behind me dragging a banana sledge loaded with cardboard boxes. She was wearing a
white apron underneath her parka, and on her head she had a purple hat with enormous earflaps.
