Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2009
In victory, there are no questions asked. After Roald Amundsen won the race for the South Pole on 14 December 1911 very few cared how he did it, least of all himself. As Fridtjof Nansen put it in his preface to Amundsen's book, The South Pole, ‘When the discoverer comes home in triumph, everybody cheers him. We are all proud of the accomplished deed…. We feel we have got a new feather in our cap, and got it cheaply’. Only the cognoscenti brood over the whys and wherefores, and the little question—how?