South Pole Race: “Mummy, is Amundsen a good man?”
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 July 2022
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Roald Amundsen beat Captain Scott to the South Pole. The Norwegian - using dog sleds and skis - made it look easy... fun, even. He was heading home to safety, while the British party - hauling sleds by hand - were struggling to survive out on the ice.
In this case, to the victor went a spoiled reputation. The British grumbled that Amundsen had somehow cheated, or had at least behaved in an underhand manner. These stinging accusations would haunt the adventurer until the day he died in the polar wastes.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The headquarter of the Royal Geographical Society is a grand building in the heart of |
| 0:16.4 | Victorian London amidst palaces in the Royal Albert Hall. The society was founded in 1830 |
| 0:23.6 | and became an icon of Britain's scientific and imperial ambitions. And to roll Amundsen, |
| 0:31.2 | the invitation to visit the Royal Geographical Society for a lecture and banquet late in 1912, |
| 0:38.4 | well, it must have felt like an invitation from Sauron to come and have a picnic in Mordor. |
| 0:44.6 | This cautionary tale is part 2 of a three-part story. If you've listened to part 1, |
| 0:53.6 | you'll know that the Norwegian Amundsen was a brilliant adventurer. He'd astonished the world |
| 0:59.9 | by announcing that there'd be a slight detour in his plans to explore the Arctic. He would first |
| 1:05.9 | dash to the Antarctic with one simple aim, being the first man to set foot on the South Pole. |
| 1:15.2 | His British rival, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, had also headed south with the same mission, |
| 1:21.2 | but with other missions too. Scott was going to make maps in Antarctica and do serious |
| 1:26.8 | science with funding from the Royal Geographical Society. He was testing out an innovation, |
| 1:32.8 | a new kind of motorised snow-sledge. He would plant the British flag symbolically at the South |
| 1:38.6 | Pole, but not only that, he would show off British grit and courage by getting there the hard way, |
| 1:45.3 | on foot. Amundsen had no such distractions. He wasn't going to do science or pioneer technology, |
| 1:53.6 | although his navigation was precise, he had no interest in making maps. That was a chore for |
| 1:59.0 | those who would come later. Nor did he want to prove a point about endurance. Amundsen knew that |
| 2:05.7 | a place in the history books awaited the first man to the Pole, and he knew the most sensible way |
| 2:11.3 | of getting there, on sledges, pulled by teams of dogs. In this unexpected race, Amundsen had |
| 2:20.0 | comprehensively defeated Captain Scott and his patrons at the Royal Geographical Society. |
| 2:25.6 | He returned triumphant in March 1912, leaving behind him an Antarctica cut off by the southern winter. |
| 2:34.4 | Nobody even knew if Scott or any of his companions were alive or dead. |
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