Oddlet: Roald Amundsen · 1 min read
Jun 11, 2026
The Last Flight of Roald Amundsen
Why did the most meticulous explorer who ever lived climb into a prototype flying boat to rescue a man he openly despised?
Roald Amundsen was the most prepared man in the history of preparation. For the South Pole he wrote out the precise day each of his dogs would be shot and eaten, executed twenty-four of them in a single afternoon at a place his men named The Butcher's Shop, and reached the Pole roughly ten days ahead of schedule. "Victory awaits him who has everything in order," he wrote. "Luck, people call it."
Sixteen years later he walked away from every word of it.
He had spent two years feuding with the Italian airship designer Umberto Nobile, calling Nobile's craft "a circus wagon of the skies." When Nobile's airship Italia crashed on the Arctic ice in May 1928, Amundsen was bankrupt and hounded by creditors. He refused to wait for the Swedish and Finnish search planes. He climbed instead into a French prototype flying boat called the Latham 47. It was the second of its kind. The first had burned.
What he was thinking has been argued about ever since.
At Tromsø, before boarding, he handed his friend Fritz Zapffe his lighter and said, "I will have no more use of it."
Then he flew north to save the man he hated, and vanished.
A port float washed up in August. A fuel tank in October. Nobile, plucked off the ice by a Swedish pilot, lived another fifty years.
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- Wikipedia: Roald Amundsen — Comprehensive biography with dates, crew lists, equipment counts, expedition routes, family details, the Netsilik relationship, the Norge flight, the Nobile dispute, and the Latham 47 disappearance including debris recovery.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Roald Amundsen — Authoritative summary of birth/death, Gjøa Northwest Passage voyage, Fram South Pole expedition timing, base location at Bay of Whales, methods (dogs vs Scott's ponies), and the 1926 Norge dirigible crossing.
- Wikipedia: Latham 47 — Specifics on the French prototype flying boat, the 18 June 1928 departure from Tromsø, crew identities and nationalities, mission purpose (Italia rescue), and the port float and gasoline tank debris finds.
- Norway Historical Museum: The Netsilik Meet Amundsen — Museum source on Amundsen's 1903–1905 stay at Gjoa Haven, his interactions with the Netsilik Inuit, acquisition of reindeer-skin clothing, and his statements that Netsilik knowledge was essential to his polar success.
- Wikipedia: Norge (airship) — Details of the 11–13 May 1926 Spitsbergen-North Pole-Alaska flight, crew composition, and the post-flight credit dispute between Amundsen and Nobile.
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