ROALD AMUNDSEN

Taranaki Daily News, 9 October 1928, Page 12

ROALD AMUNDSEN

A GREAT MAN. I A LIFE OF STRUGGLE. Roald Amundsen was a great man. lie w'as a great man not merely because of his achievements in Arctic exploration, because he conquered the North-west Passage, reached the South Pole, and flew across tho North Pole in a dirigible, but because he spent a lifetime in overcoming difficulties, and went straight on in a path he had marked out years before. _ “How did I happen to become an explorer?” Amundsen says in the first line of his latest book. ‘My Life as an Explorer,’ published last year. Then he relates how his career was a steady progress towards an end he designed when he was fifteen years old. It was a life of constant planning to outwit a destiny which seemed to find a malignant pleasure in tangling circumstances almost inextricate about his feet. He was born a few miles south of Oslo, in Norway, on July IG, 1872, fifty-six years ago. When he was fourteen his father died and his mother determined to make a doctor of him. Perhaps he would have been a doctor, despite his inability to respond satisfactorily to I his mother's ambitions if a year later he had not stumbled upon the works of Sir John Franklin, the great British explorer. They undoubtedly shaped the whole course of his extraordinary life. Anyway, they sowed in his mind a passionate determination to solve that titanic and fatal riddle, the North-west Passage. He trained his body to bo hard, abnormally strong; he made himself bear hardship which in his station was unnecessary; he wilfully submitted to suffering. . His enthusiasm to prepare for hardships at the Poles often led him ini > the most preposterous extravagances. Through the annihilating winter of Norway, when people lived round fires and opened doors only if there seemed no other way of letting visitors in, and unlocked windows never,' he slept with the bitter, ice-sharpened winds blowing upon his almost naked body. His unhappy mother tore her hair and expostulated, and wept for a son gone off his head; but lie explained that lie liked fresh air. It was a conscientious hardening process. He went to the university, and entered the medical school, and liia mother fondly thought of Roald working to become a surgeon. Nothing was further from his mind. He had less interest in medicine than in entomology. Day and night he dreamed of cold and hunger, frostbile and a diet of shoe leather, sufferings and triumph at the Poles. Then his mother died. That released him from the obligation of appearing to study medicine, and he settled himself to prepare seriously and exclusively for the great adventures. But it was time for military service. At the barracks the physician was astonished when he stripped to see so perfect a body. Twenty-eight years cf exercise had developed a trunk and limbs which so amazed the officers that they overlooked his defect of shortsightedness. NEARLY KILLED. Having at his own disposition all but | the few weeks of the year demanded] by the army, he set about testing himself with a few preliminary expeditions. They were only skirmishes, as it were, with danger, but they nearly ended the life and ambitions of a too impetuous young man. He set out to cross a wide plateau which no one had ever crossed in winter, and, sleeping one night in a cave of snow, found himself frozen to the ground. He knew that unless there was a thaw, he would die as miserable as a man locked in a coffin. But just as he lost consciousness his companion whom he believed to have been entrapped in the same way, appeared stamping overhead, and dug him out. They pushed on, exhausted, frightened sick, and nearly drove the life out of a peasant who lived on the edge of the plateau by appearing at his door on a dead winter day. He would have 1 thought it more plausible that the snow should turn to'diamonds than that anyone could be so mad as to amuse themselves by wandering over it in winter. Amundsen realised that if he was to be a sort of explorer he dreamed of being he must master several arts, but principally the art of navigation and seamanship. The years of apprenticeship and experience he faced as though ] they were the merest novitiate. In this ] way he overcame all difficulties; Ho did not . stop to think how ho could I crawl round a deficiency, or patch it ! up; he climbed straight over the top, < laboriously, conscientiously. He engaged himself now as a sailor'on a ship I

bound for the Arctic. That was his first satisfying adventure. It tried him out, and proved him, but more important, it tried out his ambitions, and they survived the test. He mastered navigation and seamanship, and turned to the next stage of his education by studying magnetic science and the methods of taking magnetic observations. The slow, inexhaustible patience of the man!

At last, in 1903, he cast off the hawsers and steered out in a black, unfriendly North Sea on a devil of a night bound for the long, imagined, planned, breathlessly anticipated assault upon the North-west Passage. No vessel had ever before troubled these waters. Long winters, times of desperate expedient fight, suffering weariness—when they were in the passage. Day after day, for three weeks, the longest, three weeks in his life, he says, he crept on, feeling blindly for a path, for a channel that would carry h'm clear to the known waters on the west. Once, in Simpson Straight, the boat had just an inch of water to spare under the keel. Food struck in hie throat when lie tried to swallow. Nerves stretched agonisingly to the point of snapping. Suddenly he was out ic the safe, charted waters. His first great triumph! But it had occupied three years.

Then came the South Pole, a story already well-known, since it closely involves one of the greatest heroes of all Englishmen. It is interesting, how ever, to see what he says of Scctt: “They died on their return from the Pole, not from broken hearts over our earlier arrival, but from actual starvation because of their inability to provide food for the return trip.” He iiad put his faith in dogs, and had worked out to the day when he would kill and eat them. Scott’s adventure he acknowledges with enthusiastic praise in his books.

I He tackled the Arctic again after the war, but the most spectacular adventures of his latter days were the flight across the Polar Sea with the rich American. Ellsworth, in aeroplanes, and finally with Ellsworth and Nobile in the Norge. Those who have read hie story of this last trip, in the dirigible, a bitter, angry story, must be profoundly touched to realise that he died endeavouring to rescue a man he warned never to attempt Arctic exploration on his own account.