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Radiotelegrams from Alaska announce that the famous explorer Roald Amundsen is completing his final preparations for his daring attempt to fly over the North Pole in an airplane; starting from Wainwright, at the point of Barrow, he intends to land in Spitsbergen. Having conquered the South Pole, having accomplished the marvelous feat which earned him an imperishable reputation and universal glory, he could, well past his fifties, follow the example given to him long ago by his compatriot Nansen, who, having returned from his famous expedition , never left Norway. But Amundsen, similar to Shackleton, his emulator, does not want to know rest, and perhaps in the secret of his soul, he aspires to end up, too, in the wild and icy lands of which he has made his domain.
" It's a man! wrote Jean Charcot, trying to define Amundsen, when he came to Paris in December 1912, on his return from the South Pole, and Charcot admitted that he could find another word. . He is a man, in fact, of whom Jean Charcot was able to draw an expressive portrait in a few lines: "Tall, muscular without exaggeration, but without a fault, he is a perfect animal, a marvelous tool of the
nature, but a tool endowed with a brain as balanced as its physical machine and all the perfect cogs of this complete organization working together, without a hitch, without a misfire. »
It was necessary to realize the bold project and reach the goal sought before him, for centuries, by so many explorers. We can say that Amundsen lived the most beautiful dream that an energetic, stubborn, ambitious and bold person could have conceived. He will remain famous on a par with legendary heroes, for having been the first man to tread on the precise point of the South Pole where the axis of the world passes. It is necessary to read the work in which Roald Amudsen recorded, from day to day, the adventures of his terrible and magnificent journey. — Au Püle Sud, published by Hachette in 1912 — to get an idea of the suffering suffered, the perils braved, the anguish experienced by this prodigious man.
But Amundsen disdains to dwell on them, they point them out without insisting; sometimes he even lets them guess more than he mentions them. As Nansen makes a point of pointing out, in the introduction written for the book of his worthy and valiant disciple: “It relates the results, without mentioning the difficulties which they have cost; the phrase still retains the accent of virility: virile, indeed, must have been the victor. »
Our Charcot, who knows these hostile and murderous regions of the Antarctic well, since he lived there for years of struggles and privations — the memory of which, moreover, fills him with regret and melancholy — Charcot is amazed at the means employed by Amundsen to achieve his goal: “A few pieces of wood bound together to make sleds, others forming skis, dogs, and that's all. »
Nansen, in his preface, does not fail to underline this with legitimate pride for his emulator and for his country: "It is the triumph of the will of a man with an immutable purpose who pursued his goal, through the ice, snowstorms and death. And this victory was obtained, not thanks to the competition of the great modern inventions, but with the help of means borrowed from the primitive nomads, who, thousands of years ago, furrowed the snows of Siberia and northern Europe, and which were adapted by a superior intelligence; the genius of man was the architect of this conquest. »
It is understandable that Norway is proud of an Amundsen, as England is, justly, of a Shackleton, and France “of a Jean Charcot.
Paul Mathiex.
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