Roland Huntford

Iconoclastic historian who recast Scott of the Antarctic as a tragic failure in the race to the South Pole

- Patrick Kidd

Antarctica is the one environment on Earth where a man has reasonable control over his own fate,” said the polar historian Roland Huntford. “There are no hostile men; no hostile bacteria. It’s all down to you.”

That belief underpinned Scott and Amundsen: The Last Place on Earth, Huntford’s account of the 1911 race to the South Pole, in which he argued that the true hero was the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who got there first and brought his team home alive, while the doomed British explorer Robert Falcon Scott was incompetent and reckless.

Huntford’s book, published in 1979, challenged 70 years of hero-worship for Scott, who froze to death with his men on their return journey after reaching the pole 34 days behind Amundsen. The British, he said, love a glorious failure, especially if they die.

He insisted his aim was not to destroy Scott but to elevate Amundsen, whose achievements he felt had been wilfully diminished in Britain. No previous English-language biographer had used the Norwegian sources extensively.

In an age of amateur sportsmen, meticulous preparation and a desire to win were considered by the British to be somehow cheating. At a Royal Geographical Society dinner in 1912, the president, Lord Curzon, raised a toast not to Amundsen but to his dogs. Scott’s men had pulled their equipment themselves after their motor sleds failed.