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The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen

by Stephen Bown

The Arctic was the final frontier of the age of terrestrial exploration, and Roald Amundsen, arguably the greatest of all polar explorers, knew it. At the start of the 20th century, aware that the window was closing quickly, he set out to chart the region with single-minded determination, and his accomplishments speak for themselves: first to traverse the Northwest Passage, first to reach the South Pole, and almost certainly first to reach the North Pole.

Being first matters for explorers. There are no medals, or distinctions of any kind, for second place. “Why should anybody want to go to a place where somebody else had already been?” Amundsen once asked. He claimed to be glad he had not been born later, because the only place left for him to go would have been the moon.

Stephen Bown, author of a number of popular histories, has drawn a portrait of the Norwegian explorer as a public man, “a large-canvas story of Amundsen’s life and times rather than a meditation on his character.” Such an approach makes sense given how sketchy information is about Amundsen’s personal life (he carried on a number of affairs with married women that he kept quiet) and his physical and mental health (he died as part of a search-and-rescue operation and his body was never recovered). Bown relies heavily on Amundsen’s own published accounts of his adventures, supplemented by contemporary newspaper reports. Less emphasis than usual is placed on the “race” to the South Pole with British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, and more on Amundsen’s later years, but there are no new revelations and nothing much in the way of fresh insight or original interpretation.

That said, it is a wonderful story, especially for armchair explorers. In addition to elements of high adventure (plane crashes, maulings by polar bears, and the like), Amundsen’s story has a heroic, larger-than-life scale. The identification of Amundsen as, variously, the Flying Dutchman, the Napoleon of the Poles, and the last of the Vikings highlight the outsized nature of his persona.

While his motivations were murky and conflicted, his achievements remain impressive. Bown shows that in the end, with no new worlds to conquer and nothing left to live for, Amundsen’s life wound down to a resigned finale complete with a fitting, fatalistic tinge.

 

Reviewer: Alex Good

Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

DETAILS

Price: $32.95

Page Count: 400 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-1-55365-937-2

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2012-10

Categories: History