Roald Amundsen

Roald Amundsen was a Norwegian polar explorer who led the first expedition confirmed to reach the geographic South Pole, arriving on 14 December 1911, five weeks ahead of a rival British expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott, whose party died on the return journey. Before that achievement he had already led the first expedition to successfully navigate the Northwest Passage by ship, between 1903 and 1906, a route through the Arctic archipelago north of Canada that had defeated numerous earlier attempts since the sixteenth century. He continued exploring the polar regions in later years, taking part in early Arctic aviation, including a 1926 transpolar airship flight, the "Norge," which he and his crew flew over the North Pole, making Amundsen among the first people verified to have reached both poles. In 1928 he disappeared over the Arctic while flying a rescue mission to search for the crew of the airship "Italia," which had crashed on a separate polar expedition, and neither his body nor his aircraft were ever recovered. Amundsen remains one of the most celebrated figures in the history of polar exploration, credited with a series of meticulously planned and executed expeditions that succeeded where several earlier, better-funded efforts had failed.