EUROPE and the US are currently awash with exhibitions, books and movies
celebrating early polar explorers. History hasn’t done them all justice, but an
exhibition and a new book are helping to restore the Norwegian Roald Amundsen
and Russia’s Valerian Ivanovitch Albanov to their rightful places in the cast of
leading ice men.
At the National Maritime Museum in London, the new exhibition South: The
Race to the Pole compares artefacts from Captain Robert Scott’s doomed
expedition to the South Pole with items used by Amundsen, his successful
arch-rival. It dispels once and for all the image—perpetuated most of all…
