Quotes from Roland Huntford

Men, as Amundsen liked to say, are the unknown factor in the Antarctic.

Our plan is one, one and again one alone—to reach the pole. For that goal, I have decided to throw everything else aside.

Nansen had moreover introduced a startling new concept into Polar exploration. He had deliberately cut off his lines of retreat. His route was from the desolate east coast to the inhabited west. This was not bravado, but calculated exploitation of the instinct of self-preservation. It drove him on; there was no incentive to look back.

In the snows Amundsen grasped that it was usually best to lead from behind. He could see his men and survey the situation, the foundation of command. And the last man has the responsibility of retrieving what falls off the sledges. However careful the stowing, somehow something vital usually drops by the wayside.

It was the final division of skiing into two branches. In one way, it was merely codifying a fundamental distinction with psychological consequences. The Nordic events implied fighting the force of gravity. Alpine skiing exploits it. Ski-jumping is a hybrid: on the approach run you use gravity for the take-off but once in the air you fight it to keep aloft as long as possible. The

Curiously, the Swedes looked for untouched snow, while the Norwegians wanted marked and prepared tracks so that they could race along the valleys and over the plateau. Another difference: Swedes carried equipment to face the elements; the Norwegians put their trust in mobility and light equipment, sometimes with dire consequences.

Perhaps Nansen, or at least the name of his ship, owed something to Verne as well. Jules Verne, the great French pioneer of science fiction, had also shown interest in the Arctic. Some thirty years earlier, he had published The English at the North Pole, in which there figured an expedition ship called Forward – of which Fram, naturally, was the Norwegian equivalent.

All his life he had waited for 'the great idea that … would hit me like a bolt of lightning'. Youth was when 'the bolts of lightning come, if they are ever to strike … But now … I am hardly really young any longer … and the future is unlikely to bring any.

One fragment from Vis consists of a ski tip, under which there is a wedge-like protuberance. It is carved in the shape of an elk's head facing towards the rear.3 It was evidently designed as a brake to prevent slipping backwards – a forerunner of modern waxless cross-country skis.

when 'one leads a nomadic life, as I do at the moment, it is not easy to do everything at the right time'.

The other side of that coin, which Nansen found hard to fathom, was that someone like Shackleton was only true to himself when improvising; fighting against the odds. He would wither in the face of systematic preparation, and only in a crisis did he come into his own.

Nansen introduced what has come to be known as the layer principle. Still faithful to Dr Jaeger's precepts, he stuck to pure wool. There were to be four layers: underwear, shirt, sweater and, finally, jacket, knee breeches and leggings made of a tough, thick Norwegian woollen material called vadmel.

It was the inward, not the outer world that engrossed Shackleton. He did not share the semi-pagan nature worship in which Nansen and Nordenskjöld were steeped.

Until the advent of fast railway trains, in the late nineteenth century, a skier was the fastest human being on earth.

Nesseby broke new ground in other ways as well. The fixture consisted of a ski-jump, followed by a separate sprint-like cross-country race. This was the first known Nordic combination in the modern sense.

Only in February 1860, more than a decade after Trondheim, did Morgenbladet, a leading Christiania newspaper and therefore part of the national press, carry the first advertisement for a ski tour.9 It was probably the start of organized skiing in Christiania. The tour was to Maridalen, on the northern outskirts of the city.

and perhaps tomorrow may see the end of these difficulties. Difficulties are just things to overcome after all."44

Antarctica is a desert, and fresh snowflakes falling are as rare as raindrops in the Sahara. Most blizzards simply sweep old, needle-like crystals of drift from one place to another. They are really dust storms in the cold. Shackleton