Smarter Together: The First Dispatch

Issue 173: Early Glimpses into Our Next Book

Over the next few months, we’ll be workshopping parts of our next book. These posts—mostly for paid subscribers—will offer early glimpses of our ideas and a chance for you to shape them with your feedback. We are genuinely eager to hear what you think. Consider this your backstage pass! Welcome to the first such dispatch.

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The Final Polar Race

The early twentieth century was the culminating age of polar exploration. Teams from Britain, America, Germany, Japan, Norway, and beyond competed to be the first to chart never seen before—by industrialized eyes, anyway—coastlines, islands, glaciers, and ice sheets. But the real race was for the poles.

On April 6, 1908, American Robert Peary’s team reached the North Pole. With that triumph, all eyes turned to the Antarctic and the South Pole. To be the first to reach the globe’s axis at the bottom of the world was the next grail.

When Peary attained the North Pole, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was almost two years into planning an attempt at the same prize. He immediately cast his sights southward, but dared not tell anyone. All his financial backing, grounded in scientific questions about the Arctic, was based on his going north. He was also loath to alert his rivals as to his change of plans, chief among them the British naval officer and polar explorer Robert Scott. So, except for a few close and trusted confidants, he kept his new southern ambitions a secret, including from the crew of men and fellow explorers he was taking with him aboard his ship, the Fram.

Amundsen (middle) and some of his unsuspecting crew aboard the Fram