Who is Amundsen, Roald E. G.

He was making plans in 1909, when he was 37 years old, to reach the North Pole. Then he learned that Robert Peary, the American admiral and explorer, had arrived there before him. Amundsen then decided that he would be the first man to reach the South Pole on the opposite end of the world.

The South Pole is in the centre of the vast, frozen continent of Antarctica. Amundsen arrived at the edge of the Antarctic continent in 1911, and set up a camp at a place called the Bay of Whales. From here he and his party travelled overland, using sled pulled by dogs. On December 14, 1911, they reached the spot on the southern end of the world known as the South Pole. In 1926 Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth, an American explorer, bought an airship called the Noige and flew from the islands of Spitsbergen across the Arctic Ocean to Alaska.

That made Amundsen the first explorer to reach both the North and the South Poles. Hewas also the first man ever to take a ship through both the Northwest Passage and the North-east Passage. (The North-east Passage is the water route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic Ocean among the islands north of Canada. There is an article in a later volume about the north-west passage.) He made this trip in a ship named the Gjott. It took more than three years, from 1903 to 1906, because he spent three winters in the Arctic with his ship frozen in the ice.

In 1918 he sailed in a ship called the Miiud, and after two winters during which his ship was frozen in the ice he completed the North-east Passage through the Arctic Ocean along the northern coasts of Europe and the Soviet Union. Amundsen lost his life heroically in 1928, attempting to rescue another explorer, Umberto Nobile of Italy, whose airship, the Italia, had crashed in the Arctic.