Roald Amundsen

Amundsen, Roald 

Born July 16, 1872; died 1928. Norwegian polar explorer. Born in the city of Borge into the family of a captain, the owner of a shipyard. A student of the medical faculty of Kristiania University from 1890 to 1892.

Amundsen was a sailor and navigator on various ships from 1894 to 1899. Beginning in 1903 he made several expeditions for which he became famous. He made the first crossing of the Northwest Passage in 1903–06 on a small commercial vessel, the Gjöa, sailing westward from Greenland to Alaska. He set off for the antarctic on the Fram, disembarked at the Bay of Whales, and reached the south pole by dogsled on Dec. 14–16, 1911, a month ahead of R. Scott’s British expedition.

On his return from the antarctic, Amundsen wanted to follow F. Nansen’s drift across the Arctic Ocean by first crossing the Northeast Passage along the northern coast of Eurasia. In the summer of 1918 his expedition left Norway on the Maud and reached the Bering Straits in 1920. Amundsen spent several years collecting funds and equipment for a flight to the north pole. In 1926 he headed the first transarctic flight on the dirigible Norway, traveling from Spitsbergen to Alaska via the North Pole. In an attempt to locate and rescue the expedition of U. Nobile, whose dirigible Italy had been lost over the Arctic Ocean, Amundsen set off in the seaplane Latam on June 18 and, together with his crew, perished in the Barents Sea.

A sea, a mountain, and the American Amundsen-Scott scientific research station have been named after Amundsen, as have a gulf and a trench in the Arctic Ocean.

WORKS

In Russian translation: Sobr. soch., vols. 1–5. Leningrad, 1936–39.
Perelet cherez Ledovityi okean. Moscow, 1927. (Jointly with [L.] Ellsworth.)
Na korable “Mod”: Ekspeditsiia vdol’ severnogo poberezh’ia Azii. Moscow-Leningrad, 1929.
luzhnyi polius. Moscow-Leningrad, 1937.
Moia zhizn’. Moscow, 1959.

REFERENCES

D’iakonov, M. Amundsen. Moscow, 1937.
Iakovlev, A. Rual Amundsen. Moscow, 1948.