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Biography : Roald Amundsen
Roald Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer who led the first expedition to the South Pole in Dec. 14, 1911.He reached 5 weeks earlier than Robert Scott'sTeam . The achievement was to bring fame to Amundsen and his men. But in a letter, describing his reactions at that time, Amundsen openly confessed that "no man has ever stood at the spot so diametrically opposed to the object of his real desires", which for the ambitious Norwegian was the North Pole. For Amundsen a new goal always beckoned. He himself described his life as a constant journey towards the final destination.
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Early Life
Amundsen was born in 1872 at Borge, near the town of Sarpsborg, in southeast Norway. From boyhood days his life was singularly purposeful. No nagging doubts troubled his firm resolution. He wished to be a polar explorer. He devoured all the literature he could acquire on polar exploration, particularly the ill-fated journey of the British explorer, Sir John Franklin, who with the "Erebus" and the "Terror" set out to find the Northwest Passage in 1845, and never returned. Like Nansen he devoted a great deal of time to training and strengthening his physique to make his body a perfect instrument for the hazardous adventures he was determined to undertake. However, he was a dutiful son, and bowed to his mother's wish that he study medicine. But at the age of 21, when both his parents had died, Roald Amundsen sold his medical textbooks, packed away the cranium he had studied and announced his intention of becoming a polar explorer.
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| In 1897 he sailed as first mate on the Belgica in a Belgian expedition that was the first to winter in the Antarctic. In 1903, with a crew of six on his 47-ton sloop Gjöa, Amundsen became the first man to sail through the Northwest Passage and around the northern Canadian coast; his east-west journey ended at Herschel Island in the Yukon in 1905. This achievement whetted his appetite for the spectacular in polar exploration.
Continue................His Voyages
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