Roald Amundsen: First at the Pole, by Both Leaders' Records

Who reached the South Pole first?

Roald Amundsen's party reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911; Robert Falcon Scott's arrived 34 days later. Each date comes from the leader's own record, and the two records were kept separately, one by each party. Amundsen's book, The South Pole, puts his halt at three in the afternoon, when the drivers checked their sledge-meters and found that all of them showed the full distance: “our Pole by reckoning.” Scott's journal entry for Wednesday, January 17, 1912, opens, after the camp number and temperatures, with two words: “The Pole.”

Fix: the Norwegians were at the Pole before Scott's party, a point on which Amundsen's book and Scott's journal agree from opposite sides. On January 16, Scott writes, Henry Bowers spotted a black speck ahead that proved to be a black flag tied to a sledge bearer, close to sledge tracks, ski tracks and “the clear trace of dogs' paws.” Two days later Scott's party reached a small tent holding a record of five Norwegians, dated 16 Dec. 1911. Amundsen's book calls that tent Polheim.

Fix: what the Norwegians left inside the tent, where the two accounts largely match. Amundsen writes that he left a letter to the King of Norway, “a short epistle to Captain Scott,” a sextant with a glass horizon, a hypsometer case and reindeer-skin foot-bags. Scott lists a note from Amundsen asking him to forward a letter to King Haakon, three half bags of reindeer skin holding mitts and sleeping socks, a sextant, a Norwegian artificial horizon and “a hypsometer without boiling-point thermometers.” Scott also lists a second sextant and hypsometer “of English make,” which Amundsen's list does not mention.

The sources disagree on one detail. Scott, writing later on January 18, guessed that the Norwegians “arrived at the Pole on the 15th Dec. and left on the 17th.” Amundsen's book gives the 14th for the arrival and the 17th for the start home.

Scott also thought, from the Norwegian sledge tracks he followed on January 17, that there were “only two men.” The record in the tent, as he copied it, named five. Scott left a note of his own in the tent to say he had visited it; a far older polar record, found in a cairn in 1859, is the subject of the Franklin Expedition entry.

Day by day: two latitude records

Both books give dated latitudes on the way south, though not for every day. A latitude is a position measured north or south of the equator, and the South Pole lies at 90° S. Some figures in the books come from sun sights, some from reckoning, and some are stated without saying which.

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Table: a selection; Amundsen's rows follow his full narrative, and the CSV adds more dated latitudes from both books, including the First Account's, each with its chapter or journal date.

Download the table (CSV, race-to-the-south-pole-latitudes.csv) (file notes: sources and license) Data: Roald Amundsen, The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the “Fram,” 1910–1912, trans. A. G. Chater, vol. 1 (1912), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; Roald Amundsen, The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the “Fram,” 1910–1912, trans. A. G. Chater, vol. 2 (1912), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; Robert F. Scott, Scott's Last Expedition, vol. 1, arranged by Leonard Huxley (New York, 1913), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain

Each party wrote down the moment it left known ground. At 82° S on November 6, Amundsen wrote: “Now the unknown lay before us.” Scott passed the farthest south of Ernest Shackleton's earlier walk on January 9, 1912, by his own reckoning, and wrote: “All is new ahead.” By then Amundsen's party had been heading home for more than three weeks.

The pace on the high plateau can be read from the latitudes alone. By the full narrative's dates, Amundsen's party gained about 104 nautical miles of latitude in the 7 days from its sight of 88° 16′ S on December 7 to its Pole by reckoning, close to 15 a day; the First Account puts that sight on December 8, which leaves 6 days. Scott's party gained about 95 in the 10 days from 88° 18′ 40″ S on January 7 to its sight of January 17, close to 9.5 a day. These are changes in latitude, not miles walked, and each is worked out twice, at 60 nautical miles to a degree and along the Earth's curved meridian; the two methods agree to within 1 percent.

Two routes, two glaciers

The two parties set out from different bases and climbed to the plateau by different glaciers. By his own book, Amundsen started from Framheim, his winter hut, at 78° 38′ S, and steered due south across the Barrier, as both books call the great ice shelf. Scott started from Cape Evans, and his journal shows a party that changed its way of hauling as it went.

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Download the table (CSV, race-to-the-south-pole-compare.csv) (file notes: sources and license) Data: Roald Amundsen, The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the “Fram,” 1910–1912, trans. A. G. Chater, vol. 1 (1912), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; Roald Amundsen, The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the “Fram,” 1910–1912, trans. A. G. Chater, vol. 2 (1912), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; Robert F. Scott, Scott's Last Expedition, vol. 1, arranged by Leonard Huxley (New York, 1913), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain

Amundsen's plan for the dogs was written down before the climb. According to his narrative, the plan was to take all 42 dogs up to the plateau, kill 24 there and go on with 18; his First Account records that 24 were killed there and 18 kept. Scott's journal records that the ponies were shot on December 9, the day before the climb up the Beardmore began, and that the dog teams turned back on December 11. From then on, men pulled the sledges.

Scott's journal records that on January 3, 1912, he told his last supporting party to turn back, and that from the next day he went on with five: himself, Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers, Lawrence Oates and Edgar Evans. His journal ends with an entry dated March 29, 1912, and none of the five came back.

By dead reckoning, the start dates alone do not explain the 34 days. Amundsen left 13 days earlier by his full narrative, but he also took fewer days from base to Pole, 56 against 77, and moved faster on the plateau by the latitudes above. Dogs, route, weather and loads all differ between the two books, and neither book tests one choice against another, so this page does not name a single reason.

How close to the Pole did each party get?

Neither party could be sure of standing on the exact spot, and both books say so. Amundsen's halt on December 14 was by dead reckoning, a position worked out from the course steered and the distance covered, which on this march was measured by the sledge-meters. He wrote that “every one of us knew that we were not standing on the absolute spot.”

So the Norwegians kept measuring. Sun sights that night gave 89° 56′ S, by the full narrative, while the First Account gives 89° 55′ for the next day's work, and three men went out in three directions to mark a circle with a radius of about twelve and a half miles around the camp. The party then went on about five and a half geographical miles and set up the Polheim camp. In an appendix to the book, Anton Alexander later worked through the hourly sights taken there on December 16 and 17 and put Polheim at roughly 89° 58.5′ S, “barely three kilometres” from the Pole.

Scott's party used sun sights too, worked out by Bowers in the tent. On the morning of January 18, Scott “decided after summing up all observations that we were 3.5 miles away from the Pole.” By lunch, after a further march, the sights put them “1/2 to 3/4 of a mile from the Pole,” and they built a cairn there and raised the Union flag.

Where Amundsen's book disagrees with itself

The South Pole tells the march twice, and the two versions do not always give the same day. Volume 1 includes a short report called “The First Account,” and volume 2 carries the full narrative. Between October and early December, the First Account's dates run one or two days later than the narrative's for the same events.

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The start is the clearest case. The narrative says, “At last we got away, on October 19.” The First Account gives October 20, and so does Lieutenant K. Prestrud, who saw the party off and wrote his own chapter of the book. From December 11 on, the two versions agree day by day, and both give December 14 for the Pole.

The two versions also measure distance over different spans. The First Account puts the distance from winter quarters to the Pole at about 870 English miles, while the narrative sums up the whole trip, there and back, as “Ninety-nine days” and “about 1,860 miles.” Counted as elapsed days, October 19 to January 25 is 98; the book's 99 matches a count that takes in both the first day and the last.

By dead reckoning, the arrival date is the firmest of Amundsen's dates on this page, because both versions of his book give it, and the start date is the weakest. Each day count here is computed twice, from calendar dates and from day numbers, and the two methods agree.