Conquest
On 9 May 1926, Richard Evelyn Byrd attempted to fly over the North Pole in an airplane. He was widely credited with achieving this, but his claim subsequently became subject to doubt. Finally, on 12 May 1926, the airship Norge carried Roald Amundsen and fifteen other men (including the craft's designer and pilot Umberto Nobile, helmsman Oscar Wisting, navigator Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, and the expedition's sponsor Lincoln Ellsworth) over the North Pole, en route from Spitsbergen to Alaska, the first achievement of the Pole about which there is no controversy. The first man definitely to set foot on the Pole was the Russian Alexander Kuznetsov, who landed an aircraft there in 1948. On 3 August 1958 the United States submarine USS Nautilus (SSN-571) was the first to sail under the ice pack to reach the North Pole. In 1968–69 the British explorer Wally Herbert became the first person indubitably to reach the Pole on foot, having sledged from Alaska. His expedition was supported by air drops.
Read more about this topic: Farthest North
Famous quotes containing the word conquest:
“The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The only fruit which even much living yields seems to be often only some trivial success,—the ability to do some slight thing better. We make conquest only of husks and shells for the most part,—at least apparently,—but sometimes these are cinnamon and spices, you know.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)