The Last Viking
His gift was a willingness to learn
When the end finally came, few believed it. The year was 1928, and famed polar explorer Roald Amundsen had left for the North Pole on a rescue mission, 25 years to the day after his first polar journey. But three hours later, a fisherman reported seeing his plane plunge into the ocean and disappear. Norwegians whispered that it was surely the stuff of the next national legend, another occasion when their native son would emerge from the ends of the Earth unfazed and victorious.
It was a fitting coda for a man of his accomplishments. Amundsen was the first person to navigate the Northwest Passage between the Canadian mainland and its Arctic islands, the first to reach the South Pole, and the first to touch the two poles in a lifetime. Moreover, he shunned the everyday life, often writing to friends that he longed to die on a quest.
Amundsen was born in 1872 in an island community off Norway, where his mother inspired chuckles by calling her blue-eyed, unusually tall son, who slept with the windows open, "the last of the Vikings." By 22, he had abandoned medical school to train for polar exploration, going to work on a sealing vessel and later almost losing his life on Hardangervidda, a Norwegian mountain whose dizzying crevasses and formidable winds were said to resemble those of the poles.
His great gift was a willingness to learn from those around him. For instance, when he led the charge through the Northwest Passage in 1903, Amundsen became fascinated with the Netsilik, an isolated group of Eskimos. He "lived as they lived," says Susan Solomon, an atmospheric scientist who chronicled Amundsen's South Pole journey in the book The Coldest March. He careened down hills in their dog sleds, slept in their igloos, and adopted their reindeer-fur dress.
Hardy pups. All this laid the groundwork for his most difficult journey. In 1911, Amundsen decided to try to beat Britain's Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole. Scott's team spent the Antarctic winter watching the ponies they had shipped from Siberia to haul their sleds slowly perish. Meanwhile, the Norwegians busied themselves sewing reindeer-skin boots and hewing the runners on their sleds to the slender shape advocated by the Netsilik. Months later, as Scott and his men trudged toward the pole--nearly 1,800 miles away--on foot, Amundsen's dog sleds glided the distance, arriving at the pole in 57 days. Amundsen beat the Brits by five weeks.
Amundsen's final years were marked by bitterness and disappointment. Scott and his men died on their return trip, and although Amundsen wasn't blamed for their deaths, his accomplishment was eclipsed by tales of their martyrdom. Amundsen also seemed a poor fit for newer modes of exploration: He joined a team that became the first to fly across the Arctic Circle in 1926, but he couldn't pilot the craft and was shunned by the team for taking too much credit. "I wish only that death will . . . overtake me in the fulfillment of a high mission, quickly, without suffering," he told an Italian journalist in 1927. Even in death, he realized a conquest.
This story appears in the February 23, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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