Wednesday, May 26 9:41 am
In June, 1910, Roald Amundsen left Norway on a ship called the Fram. His stated plan: sail north to the Arctic. In October, Royal Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott, leader of the highly publicized British expedition to the Antarctic, whose ship Terra Nova was then docked in Melbourne, received a terse telegram indicating the Fram had turned south to the Antarctic. Curator Ross D. E. MacPhee describes the fallout in his book Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott, and the Attainment of the South Pole.
It was vitally important for Scott to have his expedition seen as scientifically significant. To that end, he took along 12 researchers or scientists, including a bespectacled young Oxford graduate, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who paid £1,000 pounds (equivalent in buying power to $120,000 to $150,000 today) to join the team as assistant zoologist. These are his snow goggles, fitted with prescription lenses, atop a copy of his book The Worst Journey in the World, which includes a harrowing account of a side trip in search of emperor penguin eggs. It became an instant classic. © Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
After reading the telegram Scott summoned Tryggve Gran, the young Norwegian ski expert appointed to the expedition on the recommendation of Fridtjof Nansen. Scott had hoped that Gran, as Amundsen’s fellow countryman, could help him make sense of the message. But little could be gleaned from the deliberately curt wording, sent according to plan by Leon Amundsen [the explorer’s brother] after Fram was well away from Madeira.
For a man like Amundsen, whose exploration career was built on a continuing cascade of firsts, there could be only one goal in Antarctica. As Scott told Gran, “Amundsen is acting suspiciously…In Norway he avoided me in every conceivable manner…Let me say it right out. Amundsen was too honorable to tell me lies to my face. It’s the pole he is after, all right.”
…As [Apsley Cherry-Garrard] later recollected,“The last we had heard of [Amundsen] was that he had equipped Nansen’s old ship, the Fram, for further exploration of the Arctic. This was only a feint. Once at sea, he had told his men that he was going south instead of north; and when he reached Madeira he sent this brief telegram, ‘I shall be at the South Pole before you.’ It also meant, though we did not appreciate it at the time, that we were up against a very big man.”
…The fact is that, whatever Scott may have said to influential backers about the vulgarity of racing for the pole, to the public he plainly and unequivocally stated that “the Pole was the main objective.” Of course, it only became an actual race when Amundsen and his men showed up; but others had been sending out trial balloons well before the Terra Nova expedition left for the south, and no one could have been in any doubt that, if there was to be any kind of competition for the pole on the Antarctic ice, Britain intended to get there first.
Newspapers had begun to trumpet Amundsen’s change of plans even before the Terra Nova had docked in Melbourne. Challenge had been served, and the competition for the South Pole was now very much on.
Reprinted with permission from Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott, and the Attainment of the South Pole © Ross D. E. MacPhee 2010, Sterling Innovation.
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