December 14 marks the 95th anniversary of Roald Amundsen's arrival at the South Pole in 1911.
Roald Amundsen, of course, was the famous Norwegian explorer. He participated in attempts to reach both poles, and in 1910 he found himself with a fully-equipped Arctic expedition when word came of Peary's successful trip to the North Pole. Amundsen immediately changed directions and headed for Antarctica (without informing his crew until they reached Madeira).
The Amundsen expedition reached Antarctica in January of 1911 and spent the Antarctic autumn and winter constructing a base camp and preparing for the big push once the weather warmed. He made a false start in September, then set out in earnest in October, using dogsleds and skis. In what strikes modern sensibilities as a bit of brutal pragmatism, as the sledges for the party became empty and useless, they were abandoned and the extra dogs were used as food for the others.
Amundsen and four other men reached the Pole on December 14, and returned to base January 25. The whole overland journey took 99 days. Amundsen's account of the whole mission is available online.
Amundsen wasn't the only one trying to reach the South Pole in 1911-1912. Robert Falcon Scott was leading a much larger British expedition at the same time. A combination of poor planning and really rotten luck led to Scott reaching the Pole a month after Amundsen, and dying with his whole team on the trek back. Since Edwardian England loved dead heroes as much as live ones (if not more), Scott was subjected to a process of posthumous canonization which tended to downplay his bullheadedness and unwise decisions. The British attitude was that it was rather unsporting of Amundsen to come back alive.
The conquest of the Poles marked the end of the "heroic age" of exploration on Earth. A century later, the South Pole has a permanent station. What makes those expeditions so amazing by modern standards is how small-scale they were. Amundsen and Scott both were privately funded. They scraped together the bare minimum for their expeditions, with funding from newspapers and private donors. Your average "adventure tourist" trip has more elaborate preparation. Even Lewis and Clark, a century earlier, had better support for their mission to cross North America.
Now that exploration has moved beyond Earth, the day of the bare-bones amateur expedition may be over forever. Certainly the scale of the operation required to put Gagarin in orbit or Armstrong on the Moon dwarfs anything Amundsen could have imagined. Unfortunately, the effort and expense of space exploration makes it a much more conservative endeavor, with a strong emphasis on safety. This is a good thing -- nobody likes to see dead astronauts -- but it does mean the pace of space exploration is frustratingly slow. Perhaps the rise of private space launch operations will restore some of the risky romance.
When it was founded back in 1626, it was called the Jardin du Roi (the King's Garden), and was basically the private plot where the King's physician grew medicinal herbs. By 1650 it was open to the public as a park.
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