Antarctic Science, edited by D.W.H. Walton

In the spring of 1986 an exhibition was mounted in Vadsa, northern Norway, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Roald Amundsen’s flight in the airship Norge from Vadsa, via Kongsfjorden in Svalbard across the Pole to Teller, Alaska, the first flight across the Arctic Ocean. In their search for Amundsen memorabilia the organizers of the exhibition approached Mrs. Alda Amundsen, widow f Roald Amundsen’s nephew Gustav. Searching the attic of her apartment in Oslo, Mrs. Amundsen produced a wooden box labelled “Horlick’s Malted Milk” and assumed that it contained supplies left over fromone o A u dsen’s polar expeditions. But when it was opened in Vadsa it was found to contain over 200 of Amundsen’s original glass-mounted lantern slides. It was known that Amundsen had had several sets of lantern slides that he used on the lecture circuit, but when his aircraft disappeared while heading north to help in the search for Umberto Nobile and the other survivors of the crash of the airship Italia in 1928, his affairs and his belongings were left in a state of confusion, and the various sets of lantern slides were assumed to have somehow gone missing. The set in the box found in 1986 was thus the first more-or-less complete set ever found. Roland Huntford, who recently published a dual biography of Scott and Amundsen (Huntford, 1979), has made a selection of over 150 of the slides discovered in Vads0. They pertain to three of Amundsen’s major expeditions: his voyage through the Northwest Passage in Gj@ain 1903-07; his journey to the South Pole in 1910-12; and his voyage through the Northwest Passage inMaudin 1918-20. Many of the slides have been hand tinted with greater or less success; in some cases the results are quite crude and garish. Not a few show signs of the wear and tear resulting from hundreds or even thousands of projections during Amundsen’s lecture tours; for example, the famous view of the South Pole party saluting the Norwegian flag flying atop the tent pitched at the South Pole is badly cracked. Others appear badly faded as compared to the illustrations printed from the same photographs used in Amundsen’s own accounts of his expeditions. Since the pictures taken on the South Pole trip were taken by Olav Bjaaland using a folding Kodak camera (Amundsen’s own, more sophisticated camera having malfunctioned), many of them leave much to be desired in terms of exposure, focus and composition. As Huntford remarks, however, “The outcome is a poignant blend of immediacy, artlessness and authority.” The best of the photos, on the other hand, are first-class. Huntford’s general introduction, which includes a condensed biography of Amundsen, placing the three major expeditions and hence the photographs into perspective, and his introduction to each of the expeditions in tum are informative and more than adequate. The same holds true for most f he extended captions to each of the photographs. One specific criticism, however, is that on three separate occasions Huntford commits a gaffe that casts serious doubt n the breadth of his scholarship, namely, his statement thatMaud was only the second ship, after Nordenskiold’s Vega, to complete the Northeast Passage; in fact she was the fourth such ship. In 1914-15 the Russian Imperial Navy icebreakers Taymyr and Vaygach (Captains B.A. Vil’kitskiy and P.A. Novopashennyy respectively) travelled from Pacific to Atlantic via the Northeast Passage, wintering en route off the west coast of Poluostrov Taymyr (Starokadomskiy, 1976). Such a mistake would also suggest that the text was not submitted to any rigorous review process by the publisher. While this reviewer is prepared to believe that this is an innocent mistake, in view of the fact that it is repeated three times a Russian reader could be forgiven for interpreting this as a deliberate attempt at belittling Russian arctic achievements. The other major failing may perhaps also be the fault of the publisher rather than the author, namely, the total lack of references, a bibliography, or even an abbreviated reading list. For example, only by comparing Huntford’s quotations from Amundsen’s diary on the South Pole trip with the text of Amundsen’s book (Amundsen, 1912) can one establish that Huntford did indeed consult the original diaries and did REVIEWS i 145