Introduction

When the explorer comes home victorious, everyone goes out to cheer
him. We are all proud of his achievement -- proud on behalf of the
nation and of humanity. We think it is a new feather in our cap,
and one we have come by cheaply.

How many of those who join in the cheering were there when the
expedition was fitting out, when it was short of bare necessities,
when support and assistance were most urgently wanted? Was there
then any race to be first? At such a time the leader has usually
found himself almost alone; too often he has had to confess that his
greatest difficulties were those he had to overcome at home before
he could set sail. So it was with Columbus, and so it has been with
many since his time.

So it was, too, with Roald Amundsen -- not only the first time, when he
sailed in the Gjoa with the double object of discovering the Magnetic
North Pole and of making the North-West Passage, but this time again,
when in 1910 he left the fjord on his great expedition in the Fram,
to drift right across the North Polar Sea. What anxieties that man has
gone through, which might have been spared him if there had been more
appreciation on the part of those who had it in their power to make
things easier! And Amundsen had then shown what stuff he was made of:
both the great objects of the Gjoa's expedition were achieved. He
has always reached the goal he has aimed at, this man who sailed his
little yacht over the whole Arctic Ocean, round the north of America,