Southbound and Down
Roald Amundsen’s Race to the Pole
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Voyages & Ventures brings the world’s greatest journeys to life with irresistible storytelling, vivid historical insight, and the sheer joy of plunging into the unknown. Each volume shines a warm light on the daring choices, flawed personalities, and unrepeatable moments that shaped humanity’s most extraordinary explorations.
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Southbound and Down: Roald Amundsen’s Race to the Pole tells the gripping, clear-eyed story of how a meticulous Norwegian navigator outmanoeuvred nature, rivals, and even his own doubts to reach the last great prize on Earth. In a narrative that blends humanity with high-latitude suspense, this book plunges readers into the heart of Amundsen’s polar world – from the shifting pack ice that tested his early ambitions to the vast Antarctic plateau where silence presses against the mind like a physical force.
Here, the continent is both adversary and teacher. We follow Amundsen as he abandons his original Arctic plan, quietly pivots south, and launches one of the most skilfully executed expeditions in the history of exploration. The story unfolds with pace and wit: the rattle of dog traces on the Fram’s deck, the tense unveiling of Amundsen’s secret plans, the construction of Framheim on the trembling edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, and the brutal September false start that nearly ended the campaign before it began. And then comes the march itself – dogs lunging into harness, skis hissing over snow, crevasses gaping under thin crusts of ice, the Axel Heiberg Glacier looming like an icy staircase to the sky.
But this book also gives space to the inner landscape: the anxieties Amundsen refuses to name, the camaraderie that forms around pemmican pots and flickering Primus stoves, the dizzying mental quiet of the plateau, and the strange, humbling realisation that triumph leaves no mark upon the ice.
When Amundsen finally stands at 90° South, he confronts a place so monumentally empty it challenges the very idea of victory. And when he returns to learn of Scott’s fate, the meaning of the race shifts once more – becoming not a tale of winners and losers, but a study in how preparation, timing, and the continent’s merciless logic write their own verdicts.
Fast-paced, atmospheric, and sharply human, Southbound and Down invites readers into a world where success depends not on heroics but on respect: for the dogs, the ice, the weather, and the limits of the human spirit.