Roald Amundsen

 Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) was born to a shipowning family near Fredrikstad, Norway on July 16, 1872.  From an early age, he was fascinated with polar exploration.  He joined the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897, serving as first mate on the ship Belgica.  When the ship was beset in the ice off the Antarctic Peninsula, its crew became the first to spend a winter in the Antarctic.  In 1903, he led a seven-man crew on the small steel-hull sealing vessel Gjoa in an attempt to traverse the fabled Northwest Passage.  They entered Baffin Bay and headed west.  The vessel spent two winters off King William Island (at a location now called Gjoa Haven) before arriving in Nome, Alaska in 1906.  The achievement made him a national hero of newly independent Norway.  In June, 1910, he departed Oslo in the ship Fram headed for Antarctica.  His goal was to reach Antarctica, and to do so before his rival Robert F. Scott from the United Kingdom.  Having learned many lessons from his time with the Inuit of northern Canada, he and his team dressed in fur-lined clothes and used skis and dog sleds for transportation.  The team of five persons and 16 dogs reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911 (over a month before Scott).  They left a small tent and a letter commemorating the event and headed back, arriving on January 25, 1912.  During the years 1918-1921, he led an unsuccessful attempt to transit the Northeast Passage from west to east.  In 1926, Amundsen participated in the first crossing of the Arctic in an airship.  The airship Norge, designed and piloted by the aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile, flew from Spitsbergen to Alaska on May 11-13, 1926.  In 1928 Nobile attempted another polar flight in his new airship Italia.  When the airship encountered difficulties and crashed on the ice, Amundsen and others departed in a flying boat from Tromsø on a rescue mission.  The airplane crashed and Amundsen’s body was never found.  His influence on polar exploration remains indelible.