The South Pole

 Published in 1913, The South Pole, Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the ‘Fram,’ 1910-1912 was written by the most successful of the Arctic and Antarctic explorers, Roald Amundsen. It was Amundsen who first reached both the north and south poles and he apparently was never unsuccessful with any goal that he created. He planned meticulously. However, there were deaths that occurred in the course of his journey which seemed to be a more common experience of those who chose to take on the horrors of Antarctic exploration. His writing was somewhat more simple, direct, mater-of-fact than those words of his rival Shakleton, leaving out much of the human hardship and trauma that one could see in Shakleton’s writing. The prose was more like the words of the old tv show Dragnet when Joe Friday would say to a woman he was interviewing, “The facts, just the facts maam.” Still, the difference between the styles of Amundsen and Shakleton gives an important picture of the race to the South Pole and the difficulty of exploring such a remote and difficult terrain as Antarctica.