50 Fun Facts About Roald Amundsen

Who planted the Norwegian flag when Amundsen's party reached the South Pole in December 1911?

The five men together gripped the flagpole: Amundsen wrote that the honour was not for one man but for everyone who had staked his life in the struggle.

Which ship carried Amundsen's expedition to Antarctica in 1910?

Fram left Norway with a crew who believed they were bound for the Arctic; Amundsen revealed the real goal only weeks into the voyage.

Amundsen's father and uncles built up a family business in which trade?

Shipping: his father's family were sea captains and shipowners, and with her three older sons already in the trade, his widowed mother wanted her youngest to stay ashore.

What career did Amundsen's mother want for him, a promise he kept only until she died?

Doctor: he studied medicine without enthusiasm, and when his mother died in 1893 he sold his medical books and signed on to an Arctic sealing ship.

Whose narratives of overland Arctic expeditions enthralled the 15-year-old Amundsen?

John Franklin's accounts decided him at fifteen: he devoured every polar book he could find and spent years toughening his body for the ice instead of studying.

On which 1897-99 venture, the first to winter in the Antarctic pack ice, did Amundsen serve as first mate?

The Belgian Antarctic Expedition was trapped in pack ice for about a year; Amundsen made the ordeal his schooling, trying out sleeping bags, tents and sledges he would rely on later.

Which American physician did Amundsen credit with saving his first Antarctic expedition's crew from scurvy?

Frederick Cook hunted seals and penguins and got the ailing crew to eat the fresh meat; a grateful Amundsen later visited him in prison when Cook was jailed for fraud.

Amundsen led the first traverse of which sea route in 1903-06?

The Northwest Passage had beaten far bigger ships; Amundsen's small, shallow boat, with only seven men aboard, could creep along the coast over shoals that had stopped them.

What was the name of the small sloop Amundsen sailed on his 1903-06 Arctic voyage?

Gjøa slipped out of Oslo around midnight in June 1903: by Amundsen's own account, he was dodging a creditor who threatened to seize the boat.

What scientific goal kept Amundsen's sloop at King William Island for two winters in 1903-05?

Locating the north magnetic pole: Amundsen spent months in Hamburg learning the measurements, and two of his men lived beside their observatory for nearly two years to record it.

Which people taught Amundsen Arctic survival skills during his two winters on King William Island?

The Netsilik taught his crew to drive sled dogs; Amundsen studied their way of life in return and brought a collection of their tools home to a museum in Oslo.

Why did Amundsen trek hundreds of miles overland to the Yukon River town of Eagle in winter 1905?

To telegraph his success: the army post at the gold-rush town of Eagle had the nearest telegraph line, so he left his icebound crew for most of the winter to send the news.

What news about his own country reached Amundsen in the far north in 1905?

Norway had a new king because it had left its union with Sweden while he was in the ice: he sailed in 1903 and came home in 1906 as a hero of a newly independent country.

In which US city was Amundsen's Arctic sloop displayed for decades before her return to Norway in 1972?

San Francisco kept her on show in Golden Gate Park, where decades in the open left her badly decayed; she was shipped home to Norway for the centenary of Amundsen's birth.

What made Amundsen switch his 1910 expedition from the Arctic to Antarctica?

Cook and Peary claimed the North Pole in 1909, and with that prize apparently gone the money for Amundsen's Arctic voyage dried up, so he turned to the one pole still unclaimed.

At which island did Amundsen tell his crew they were sailing for Antarctica, not the Arctic?

Madeira was the ship's only port of call; there he asked each man in turn whether he would still go on, and every one said yes.

The rounded hull of Amundsen's borrowed polar ship made pack ice do what?

Lift her up: Colin Archer built the hull so round that squeezing ice would pop the ship upward, like a nut pressed between two fingers, instead of grinding her to pieces.

Where on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf did Amundsen set up his base camp?

The Bay of Whales lay nearer the pole than Scott's base, but it was a gamble: nobody had travelled the ground to the south, so Amundsen had to find his own way through the mountains.

Where was Amundsen's Antarctic base hut first put up, before being dismantled and shipped south?

In his garden in Norway: every plank was numbered before the hut came down, and the solid, double-walled building was described in public as a mere 'observation house' for the Arctic.

How did Amundsen make sure his men could find their supply depots on the featureless Barrier?

Flags set out east and west: a line of numbered markers ran for miles across the route at each depot, so a party off course in fog would still hit it and know which way to turn.

Why was Amundsen's first start for the pole, on 8 September 1911, abandoned?

Extreme cold froze the dogs' paws and nearly killed men and animals; Amundsen had set out weeks too early, driven by the fear that Scott would reach the pole first.

Hjalmar Johansen, dropped from Amundsen's polar party, once trekked Arctic ice with whom?

Fridtjof Nansen and Johansen had tried for the North Pole on skis in 1895; Nansen later persuaded Amundsen to take his old companion south, a favour that ended in an open quarrel in front of the men.

Which unmapped glacier, which Amundsen named after a financial backer, did his party climb to the polar plateau?

Axel Heiberg Glacier forced long detours round crevasses, yet the dogs hauled loaded sledges to the top in a few days, which Amundsen held up as proof of what trained dogs could do.

What grim name did Amundsen's party give the glacier-top camp where most of their dogs were killed for food?

The Butchers' Shop: as the shooting began, Amundsen pumped the Primus stove to a roar so that he would not hear it, and he wrote of 'depression and sadness in the air'.

Why did three of Amundsen's men ski out for miles in different directions at the South Pole?

To bracket the exact spot: their instruments could not fix the spot to the mile, so the skiers set markers far out on three sides, leaving no room for doubt that they had been there.

What did Amundsen name the tent his party left behind for Scott to find?

Polheim held a letter for Scott to carry home, Amundsen's insurance: proof that the Norwegians had reached their goal would get out even if they died on the way back.

What name did Amundsen give the high ground around the South Pole?

King Haakon VII's Plateau was his name for the plain around the pole, yet he found the triumph 'topsy-turvy': since childhood he had dreamed of the North Pole, and here he stood at the South.

In December 1911 Amundsen's party passed whose 'farthest south' record?

Ernest Shackleton had turned back short of the pole in 1909; when the Norwegian flag passed his mark, Amundsen wrote, tears forced their way to his eyes as at no other moment of the journey.

Olav Bjaaland, the champion skier in Amundsen's polar party, came from which Norwegian region?

Telemark, the home of modern skiing, also made Bjaaland a craftsman: he built skis for a living, and in the Antarctic winter he planed the heavy sledges down to make them far lighter.

In which city did Amundsen publicly announce his South Pole success on 7 March 1912?

Hobart, in Tasmania, was five weeks' sailing from the ice: until Amundsen stepped ashore there and cabled home, nobody outside Antarctica knew who had won the race.

Returning from the South Pole, Amundsen's party marched at 'night' to avoid what?

Snow-blindness: in the 24-hour daylight, heading north in the 'night' hours kept the sun behind them; marching into its glare off the snow strained the eyes even behind goggles.

Which ship did Amundsen have built for his 1918-25 attempt on the Northeast Passage and Arctic drift?

Maud was christened not with champagne but with a block of ice smashed against her bow, as Amundsen told her that she was built for the ice and would spend her best years in it.

The scientist on Amundsen's 1918 Arctic voyage spent months living among which reindeer-herding people of north-east Siberia?

The Chukchi took in Harald Sverdrup while the ship lay frozen in; he learned their language and wrote about their way of life, and his measurements turned a failed drift into a scientific success.

What two misfortunes befell Amundsen while his ship was frozen in off Siberia?

A broken arm and a polar bear attack were followed by a third blow, carbon monoxide poisoning in the observatory hut; his heart was weak for years and he sat out the sledge journeys.

What became of Amundsen's last polar ship after his creditors seized her in 1925?

A Hudson's Bay Company supply ship: she sank at her moorings in Arctic Canada in 1930 and lay half-submerged for decades, until she was raised in 2016 and towed home to Norway.

Whom did Amundsen take into his care and bring to Norway from Siberia in 1921?

Two young Indigenous girls, Kakonita and Camilla, were to get a better start in life with schooling in Norway, but within a few years both were sent back to live with Camilla's family.

Which American financed and flew with Amundsen on his 1925 and 1926 Arctic flights?

Lincoln Ellsworth, a millionaire's son, turned up when Amundsen was bankrupt and reckoning that lecture fees would take decades to clear his debts; Ellsworth's money put him back in the air.

After one flying boat was wrecked on the ice in 1925, how did Amundsen's party get home?

They built a runway on the drifting ice: for more than three weeks, on minimal rations and with makeshift tools, the six men levelled it, then crammed into the one sound plane, which barely got airborne.

What did the crew of Amundsen's airship drop onto the ice as they passed over the North Pole in 1926?

Three national flags fell to the ice, Norway's first, one for the homeland of each of the flight's three leaders; with that pass, Amundsen had looked down on both poles.

After crossing the North Pole from Spitsbergen in 1926, where did Amundsen's airship land?

Alaska: with the weather worsening after three days in the air, the Norge was set down beside the tiny settlement of Teller, short of its goal of Nome, and was taken apart there and shipped away.

Which American aviator claimed to have flown to the North Pole days before the Norge?

Richard E. Byrd was hailed as the first to fly to the pole, but his own flight diary, released in 1996, holds navigation figures that suggest he turned back short of it.

Which airship's crash prompted the 1928 rescue flight on which Amundsen vanished?

Italia was commanded by Umberto Nobile, with whom Amundsen had quarrelled bitterly; he volunteered for the search all the same. Nobile was rescued, and Amundsen never came back.

From which Arctic Norwegian town did Amundsen's flying boat take off on its last flight in June 1928?

Tromsø watched the French flying boat lift off on 18 June 1928; a last radio message came about three hours later, and only a float and a fuel tank were ever found.

Which country, neither Norway nor Britain, runs the Amundsen–Scott base at the South Pole?

The United States opened it in 1956, flying in Navy builders for the International Geophysical Year, and chose a name that honours the loser of the race alongside the winner.

Which actor played Amundsen in the 1969 film The Red Tent about the 1928 airship disaster?

Sean Connery plays Amundsen as a stern ghost: in the film an ageing Nobile imagines himself put on trial, years later, by people caught up in the disaster and the rescue.

Roland Huntford's book Scott and Amundsen was adapted into which 1985 TV serial?

The Last Place on Earth cast Martin Shaw as Scott and Sverre Anker Ousdal as Amundsen over seven episodes, and Huntford's book has since been reissued under the serial's title.

Carsten Borchgrevink, whose reports helped Amundsen, led the first expedition to winter where?

Antarctic mainland: in 1899 Borchgrevink's party proved that men could survive a winter ashore there, and his reports on the ice and its landing places helped Amundsen plan his own base.

Which of these describes Amundsen's marital history?

He remained unmarried; the woman who kept house for him until her death was Betty, his childhood nanny, and he named an Antarctic mountain after her.

In 2012 which country put a research icebreaker named after Amundsen on its new $50 banknote?

Canada chose the ship to stand for its Arctic frontier and the research done there: an ageing Coast Guard icebreaker, she had been overhauled by universities and government agencies and relaunched as the Amundsen in 2003.

What did Amundsen wear on the polar journey instead of the heavy wool of earlier expeditions?

Inuit-style furred skins, worn loose, let air move between the layers so that sweat did not soak in and freeze, a way of dressing Amundsen had learned during his winters in the Arctic.