December 14, 1911: Roald Amundsen and his expedition party reach the South Pole.
In September of 1910 Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen set off on an expedition to Antarctica. Two rival American explorers, Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, both claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1908 and 1909, respectively, but their conflicting claims could not be completely verified and the subsequent controversy prompted Amundsen to take extreme caution in ensuring that his reaching the South Pole could not be disputed. After leaving Norway aboard Fridtjof Nansen’s ship Fram, Amundsen made it known to the world and to his own countrymen that he intended to sail to south, not north, as he had led them to believe. Robert Falcon Scott led his own Antarctic expedition (the Terra Nova expedition) concurrently with Amundsen’s, although he too had left for the pole believing Amundsen was sailing north.
After a false start, Amundsen and four other men departed with four sledges and fifty-two sled dogs (Scott’s party, on the other hand, traveled using both dogs and ponies). Amundsen and his team discovered and ascended the Axel Heiberg Glacier, a trip that only forty-five of the dogs survived; atop the summit, twenty-seven of the remaining dogs were killed and skinned for food. On December 8, the group passed Ernest Shackleton’s Farthest South record. On December 14, they became the first humans to reach the South Pole and pitched camp at Polheim (“Home at the Pole”) atop a plain they named after the Norwegian King Haakon VII.
For Robert Falcon Scott, whose team arrived at the pole thirty-three days later, Amundsen left a Norwegian flag and a tent containing a letter addressed to his British rival:
Dear Captain Scott — As you probably are the first to reach this area after us, I will ask you to kindly forward this letter to [Norwegian] King Haakon VII. If you can use any of the articles left in the tent please do not hesitate to do so. The sledge left outside may be of use to you. With kind regards I wish you a safe return. Yours truly, Roald Amundsen.
Amundsen later reflected on the irony of his achievement: “Never has a man achieved a goal so diametrically opposed to his wishes. The area around the North Pole—devil take it—had fascinated me since childhood, and now here I was at the South Pole. Could anything be more crazy?” In 1926, however, he became the first explorer to indisputably reach the North Pole.