A temporary exhibition creates an excellent opportunity to showcase materials from the Museum’s vast collections — and Race to the End of the Earth, which opens May 29,is no exception.
The exhibition recounts one of the most stirring tales of Antarctic exploration: the contest between Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and British Royal Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott to reach the South Pole in 1911-1912. Through a special relationship between Amundsen and U.S. explorer and Museum Trustee Lincoln Ellsworth (1880-1951), the Museum Library’s Memorabilia Collection boasts a number of personal effects the Norwegian explorer carried with him in his quest. Displayed in the exhibition are a sledge, chronometer, binoculars, and shotgun, as well as an enameled tin cup inscribed with the name of Amundsen’s ship, Fram, the Norwegian word for “forward.”
Race to the End of the Earth recounts one of the most stirring tales of Antarctic exploration: the contest to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1911-1912. The exhibition focuses on the challenges that two competing explorers — Norwegian Roald Amundsen and Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the British Royal Navy — faced as they undertook their 1,800-mile journeys from the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf to the Pole and back.
Each team faced not only Antarctica’s extreme weather conditions — some of the harshest in the world — but also the risk of starvation, the hazards of losing their way, and the limits of human endurance. Amundsen had only one goal inAntarctica: to be the first to stand at the South Pole. Scott wanted victory as well, but he was also committed to the scientific exploration of the last unknown continent.
Race to the End of the Earth is on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History from May 29 to January 2, 2011.
The story has been likened to Indiana Jones with snow. Thrilling and action-packed, yes, but it was no film fantasy when two men — Roald Amundsen of Norway and Britain’s Robert Falcon Scott — set out in 1910 on a quest to plant their county’s flag on the last great geographical prize: the South Pole. Only one could be first. Only one would return home.
This high-stakes drama is played out in all its chilling detail in the Museum’s new exhibition Race to the End of the Earth, which opens May 29 and runs through January 2, 2011. The exhibition is curated by Ross D. E. MacPhee, a curator in the Museum’s Division of Vertebrate Zoology and author of Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott, and the Attainment of the South Pole, which is being published this month by Sterling Innovation in conjunction with the exhibition.
To heighten the experience of Race to the End of the Earth, each visitor, on entering the exhibition, will be offered a card featuring information about one of the members of either Amundsen’s or Scott’s team. Moving through the exhibition, visitors will find clues about their characters’ experiences, see actual items of clothing and tools they used, and look in on life-sized models of rooms in the respective base camps—all set against a spectacular backdrop of Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights, and field recordings of cracking ice, gusting snow, and howling winds. Compelling interactive exhibits will help visitors understand the challenges of exploration a century ago, along with paintings, astonishingly beautiful photographs reminiscent of images that captivated the public’s imagination in the Museum’s exhibition The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition a decade ago, and rare historical artifacts, including personal effects of Amundsen’s and a copy of one of Scott’s last letters home. Read more »
