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:
“While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue, I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Have I in conquest stretched mine arm so far
To be afeared to tell greybeards the truth?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“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)