EUROPE and the US are currently awash with exhibitions, books and movies
celebrating early polar explorers. History hasn鈥檛 done them all justice, but an
exhibition and a new book are helping to restore the Norwegian Roald Amundsen
and Russia鈥檚 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鈥檚 doomed
expedition to the South Pole with items used by Amundsen, his successful
arch-rival. It dispels once and for all the image鈥攑erpetuated most of all
in Britain鈥攐f Scott as romantic hero and Amundsen as efficient but
impassive automaton.
True, Scott鈥檚 moving final journal entry gets pride of place in the display.
But the Amundsen objects paint a vivid personal picture of the explorer and his
team. One of these is the rudimentary dental equipment with which Amundsen
removed a tooth from one of his companions (ironically, the team鈥檚 dentist).
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The other long-deserved reassessment can be found by reading Albanov鈥檚 own
marvellous book, In the Land of White Death (Modern Library,
拢15.29), which was published in Russian in 1917 but has only now been
translated into English. Albanov鈥檚 storytelling skills more than survive
translation. Recounting his escape from a ship trapped in Arctic pack ice, he
describes how a fierce storm flings him and his tent companion into the ocean
鈥渓ike two unwanted kittens thrown together into a sack to be drowned鈥�.
Refreshingly, he sees no need to glorify his 10 companions. Instead he is
constantly exasperated by their laziness, grumbling and incompetence. Albanov is
another human explorer, now deservedly feted for his superhuman feats.