Roald Amundsen Trivia
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50 free Roald Amundsen trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Roald Amundsen trivia quiz covers the Norwegian who was first through the Northwest Passage, first to the South Pole and, in all likelihood, first over the North Pole too. The easy questions are the ones every schoolchild learns: the date he stood at the bottom of the world, the British rival he beat there by a month, the ship he borrowed from Nansen and the way he vanished. From there it moves through his medical studies abandoned for the sea, the Belgica's terrible winter, the tiny herring boat Gjøa, the Inuit lessons in furs and dogs, the telegram from Madeira and the depots laid along the Barrier. The harder end is for polar historians: the glacier route to the plateau, the Butchers' Shop, the black dot that turned out to be dog droppings, the letter left in the tent for King Haakon, the ship frozen in for three winters off Siberia, the six men who dug 600 tons of ice to fly home, the Alaskan village where the Norge landed and the French flying boat that never returned. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for Amundsen, his expeditions and his ships before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Ernest Shackleton, Antarctica and famous explorers quizzes next.
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Q 01Who planted the Norwegian flag when Amundsen's party reached the South Pole in December 1911?
The five men together
The five men together gripped the flagpole: Amundsen wrote that the honour was not for one man but for everyone who had staked his life in the struggle.
Q 02Which ship carried Amundsen's expedition to Antarctica in 1910?
Fram
Fram left Norway with a crew who believed they were bound for the Arctic; Amundsen revealed the real goal only weeks into the voyage.
Q 03Amundsen's father and uncles built up a family business in which trade?
Shipping
Shipping: his father's family were sea captains and shipowners, and with her three older sons already in the trade, his widowed mother wanted her youngest to stay ashore.
Q 04What career did Amundsen's mother want for him, a promise he kept only until she died?
Doctor
Doctor: he studied medicine without enthusiasm, and when his mother died in 1893 he sold his medical books and signed on to an Arctic sealing ship.
Q 05Whose narratives of overland Arctic expeditions enthralled the 15-year-old Amundsen?
John Franklin
John Franklin's accounts decided him at fifteen: he devoured every polar book he could find and spent years toughening his body for the ice instead of studying.
Q 06On which 1897-99 venture, the first to winter in the Antarctic pack ice, did Amundsen serve as first mate?
The Belgian Antarctic Expedition
The Belgian Antarctic Expedition was trapped in pack ice for about a year; Amundsen made the ordeal his schooling, trying out sleeping bags, tents and sledges he would rely on later.
Q 07Which American physician did Amundsen credit with saving his first Antarctic expedition's crew from scurvy?
Frederick Cook
Frederick Cook hunted seals and penguins and got the ailing crew to eat the fresh meat; a grateful Amundsen later visited him in prison when Cook was jailed for fraud.
Q 08Amundsen led the first traverse of which sea route in 1903-06?
The Northwest Passage
The Northwest Passage had beaten far bigger ships; Amundsen's small, shallow boat, with only seven men aboard, could creep along the coast over shoals that had stopped them.
Q 09What was the name of the small sloop Amundsen sailed on his 1903-06 Arctic voyage?
Gjøa
Gjøa slipped out of Oslo around midnight in June 1903: by Amundsen's own account, he was dodging a creditor who threatened to seize the boat.
Q 10What scientific goal kept Amundsen's sloop at King William Island for two winters in 1903-05?
Locating the north magnetic pole
Locating the north magnetic pole: Amundsen spent months in Hamburg learning the measurements, and two of his men lived beside their observatory for nearly two years to record it.
Q 11Which people taught Amundsen Arctic survival skills during his two winters on King William Island?
The Netsilik
The Netsilik taught his crew to drive sled dogs; Amundsen studied their way of life in return and brought a collection of their tools home to a museum in Oslo.
Q 12Why did Amundsen trek hundreds of miles overland to the Yukon River town of Eagle in winter 1905?
To telegraph his success
To telegraph his success: the army post at the gold-rush town of Eagle had the nearest telegraph line, so he left his icebound crew for most of the winter to send the news.
Q 13What news about his own country reached Amundsen in the far north in 1905?
Norway had a new king
Q 21Why was Amundsen's first start for the pole, on 8 September 1911, abandoned?
Extreme cold
Extreme cold froze the dogs' paws and nearly killed men and animals; Amundsen had set out weeks too early, driven by the fear that Scott would reach the pole first.
Q 22Hjalmar Johansen, dropped from Amundsen's polar party, once trekked Arctic ice with whom?
Fridtjof Nansen
Fridtjof Nansen and Johansen had tried for the North Pole on skis in 1895; Nansen later persuaded Amundsen to take his old companion south, a favour that ended in an open quarrel in front of the men.
Q 23Which unmapped glacier, which Amundsen named after a financial backer, did his party climb to the polar plateau?
Axel Heiberg Glacier
Norway had a new king because it had left its union with Sweden while he was in the ice: he sailed in 1903 and came home in 1906 as a hero of a newly independent country.
Q 14In which US city was Amundsen's Arctic sloop displayed for decades before her return to Norway in 1972?
San Francisco
San Francisco kept her on show in Golden Gate Park, where decades in the open left her badly decayed; she was shipped home to Norway for the centenary of Amundsen's birth.
Q 15What made Amundsen switch his 1910 expedition from the Arctic to Antarctica?
Cook and Peary claimed the North Pole
Cook and Peary claimed the North Pole in 1909, and with that prize apparently gone the money for Amundsen's Arctic voyage dried up, so he turned to the one pole still unclaimed.
Q 16At which island did Amundsen tell his crew they were sailing for Antarctica, not the Arctic?
Madeira
Madeira was the ship's only port of call; there he asked each man in turn whether he would still go on, and every one said yes.
Q 17The rounded hull of Amundsen's borrowed polar ship made pack ice do what?
Lift her up
Lift her up: Colin Archer built the hull so round that squeezing ice would pop the ship upward, like a nut pressed between two fingers, instead of grinding her to pieces.
Q 18Where on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf did Amundsen set up his base camp?
The Bay of Whales
The Bay of Whales lay nearer the pole than Scott's base, but it was a gamble: nobody had travelled the ground to the south, so Amundsen had to find his own way through the mountains.
Q 19Where was Amundsen's Antarctic base hut first put up, before being dismantled and shipped south?
In his garden in Norway
In his garden in Norway: every plank was numbered before the hut came down, and the solid, double-walled building was described in public as a mere 'observation house' for the Arctic.
Q 20How did Amundsen make sure his men could find their supply depots on the featureless Barrier?
Flags set out east and west
Flags set out east and west: a line of numbered markers ran for miles across the route at each depot, so a party off course in fog would still hit it and know which way to turn.
Axel Heiberg Glacier forced long detours round crevasses, yet the dogs hauled loaded sledges to the top in a few days, which Amundsen held up as proof of what trained dogs could do.
Q 24What grim name did Amundsen's party give the glacier-top camp where most of their dogs were killed for food?
The Butchers' Shop
The Butchers' Shop: as the shooting began, Amundsen pumped the Primus stove to a roar so that he would not hear it, and he wrote of 'depression and sadness in the air'.
Q 25Why did three of Amundsen's men ski out for miles in different directions at the South Pole?
To bracket the exact spot
To bracket the exact spot: their instruments could not fix the spot to the mile, so the skiers set markers far out on three sides, leaving no room for doubt that they had been there.
Q 26What did Amundsen name the tent his party left behind for Scott to find?
Polheim
Polheim held a letter for Scott to carry home, Amundsen's insurance: proof that the Norwegians had reached their goal would get out even if they died on the way back.
Q 27What name did Amundsen give the high ground around the South Pole?
King Haakon VII's Plateau
King Haakon VII's Plateau was his name for the plain around the pole, yet he found the triumph 'topsy-turvy': since childhood he had dreamed of the North Pole, and here he stood at the South.
Q 28In December 1911 Amundsen's party passed whose 'farthest south' record?
Ernest Shackleton
Ernest Shackleton had turned back short of the pole in 1909; when the Norwegian flag passed his mark, Amundsen wrote, tears forced their way to his eyes as at no other moment of the journey.
Q 29Olav Bjaaland, the champion skier in Amundsen's polar party, came from which Norwegian region?
Telemark
Telemark, the home of modern skiing, also made Bjaaland a craftsman: he built skis for a living, and in the Antarctic winter he planed the heavy sledges down to make them far lighter.
Q 30In which city did Amundsen publicly announce his South Pole success on 7 March 1912?
Hobart
Hobart, in Tasmania, was five weeks' sailing from the ice: until Amundsen stepped ashore there and cabled home, nobody outside Antarctica knew who had won the race.