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10 unusual facts about Roald Amundsen


Amundsen High School

It was named after Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer who led the first expedition to reach the South Pole.

Audruicq

A pilot, he disappeared, flying a "Latham47" in the Arctic in 1928 with Roald Amundsen.1

British Polar Engines

The engine and company take their name from the engine supplied to Amundsen's Fram, from which he conquered the South Pole.

James Ellsworth

James Ellsworth was vitally interested in polar exploration and donated vast sums of money to Roald Amundsen's expedition to the North Pole in 1925, in which Lincoln was a pilot.

Latham

The flyingboat "Latham", used by arctic explorer Roald Amundsen when he disappeared during the search for Umberto Nobile in 1928.

René Guilbaud

Guilbaud disappeared in the Barents Sea in June 1928, while piloting a Latham 47 flying boat in which Roald Amundsen was travelling to join the search the survivors of the crash of the airship Italia.

Russell Owen

That year he covered the air race to the North Pole, flying with Roald Amundsen (airship Norge) as far as Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard and meeting Richard Evelyn Byrd there.

Uboynaya River

They belonged to Roald Amundsen's 1919 Arctic expedition's ill-fated crew members Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen.

Vince Barnett

Among the many victims of his pranks were such luminaries as Winston Churchill, Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford and the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen.

Zeledeyeva River

He and his party found there the lost mail of Roald Amundsen's 1919 Arctic expedition trusted to crew members Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen.


Bjørn Helland-Hansen

Helland-Hansen trained Alexander Kuchin, the Russian oceanographer who went to Antarctica with Roald Amundsen.

Chlorocardium rodiei

The Fram and the Endurance, made famous in the polar expeditions of Amundsen and Shackleton, were the two strongest wooden ships ever constructed and were sheathed in greenheart to prevent them from being crushed by ice.

Coppermine Expedition of 1819–22

The story of the Coppermine Expedition was to serve as an influence on Roald Amundsen, who would eventually become the first man to navigate the entire Northwest Passage, as well as the first to reach the South Pole.

Framheim

Framheim was the name of explorer Roald Amundsen's base at the Bay of Whales on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica during his quest for the South Pole.

Gabardine

Burberry clothing of gabardine was worn by polar explorers, including Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, in 1911, and Ernest Shackleton, who led a 1914 expedition to cross Antarctica.

John Balleny

The Balleny corridor through the Southern Ocean would be used by future explorers such as Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and Richard Byrd, and is used today by surface vessels resupplying McMurdo and other scientific bases located in and around the Ross Sea sector of Antarctica.

Kathleen Scott

A biographer of the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen has suggested that, in her husband's absence, she began a brief affair with Nansen, the mentor of Scott's rival Amundsen.

Mikhailov Peninsula

In 1921, a Soviet-Norwegian expedition led by Nikifor Begichev looking for Roald Amundsen's men Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen, found the remains of a campfire with charred bones near the Mikhailov Peninsula.

Mount Balchen

Named by the Southern Party of the New Zealand Geological Survey Antarctic Expedition (NZGSAE) (1961–62) for Bernt Balchen, pilot with Roald Amundsen on Arctic flights, and with Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd on his South Pole flight of 1929.

Nanoq

The museum hosts an exhibition about famous polar expeditions and displays many items, e.g. the balloon gondola from S.A. Andrée's fateful expedition and material from the John Phipps expedition to Svalbard around 1770, as well as several documents that refer to the Norwegian explorers Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen.

Nikolay Urvantsev

In 1922, while leading a geological expedition, Urvantsev found evidence of the mysteriously disappeared Amundsen's 1918 Arctic expedition crew members Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen.

Queen Maud Mountains

Captain Roald Amundsen and his South Pole party ascended Axel Heiberg Glacier near the central part of this group in November 1911, naming these mountains for the Norwegian queen Maud of Wales.

Raymond Priestley

Unable to find a suitable landing site, they decided to return West with the intention of landing at the Bay of Whales but arriving on 3 February 1911 they encountered Roald Amundsen's ship Fram and his expedition already camped there.

Will Steger

Will Steger joins Amelia Earhart, Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen and Jacques-Yves Cousteau in receiving the National Geographic Society's John Oliver La Gorce Medal for "accomplishments in geographic exploration, in the sciences, and for public service to advance international understanding" in 1995.