Roland Huntford > Quotes

“Where imaginary mole hills turn into hallucinatory mountains”
― Roland Huntford, The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole

“Men, as Amundsen liked to say, are the unknown factor in the Antarctic.”
― Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen: The Last Place on Earth

“In the snows Amundsen grasped that it was usually best to lead from behind. He could see his men and survey the situation, the foundation of command. And the last man has the responsibility of retrieving what falls off the sledges. However careful the stowing, somehow something vital usually drops by the wayside.”
― Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen: The Last Place on Earth

“The English too, were turning their eyes to the South. In 1769, there was to be a transit of the planet Venus across the disc of the sun, a rare event which astronomers wanted to observe. The newly discovered island of Tahiti was judged the perfect site. The Royal Society in London asked the Royal Navy to organize the expedition. The Navy obliged. This was to have profound and unlooked-for consequences. It led to the virtual monopolization by naval officers of British Polar exploration until the first decade of this century. The voyage inspired by the transit of Venus was commanded by a man of quiet genius, James Cook, one of the greatest of discoverers.”
― Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen: The Last Place on Earth

“Our plan is one, one and again one alone—to reach the pole. For that goal, I have decided to throw everything else aside.”
― Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen: The Last Place on Earth

“Nansen had moreover introduced a startling new concept into Polar exploration. He had deliberately cut off his lines of retreat. His route was from the desolate east coast to the inhabited west. This was not bravado, but calculated exploitation of the instinct of self-preservation. It drove him on; there was no incentive to look back.”
― Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen: The Last Place on Earth

“It was the inward, not the outer world that engrossed Shackleton. He did not share the semi-pagan nature worship in which Nansen and Nordenskjöld were steeped.”
― Roland Huntford, Shackleton

“One fragment from Vis consists of a ski tip, under which there is a wedge-like protuberance. It is carved in the shape of an elk’s head facing towards the rear.3 It was evidently designed as a brake to prevent slipping backwards – a forerunner of modern waxless cross-country skis.”
― Roland Huntford, Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing

“The other side of that coin, which Nansen found hard to fathom, was that someone like Shackleton was only true to himself when improvising; fighting against the odds. He would wither in the face of systematic preparation, and only in a crisis did he come into his own.”
― Roland Huntford, Shackleton

“Perhaps Nansen, or at least the name of his ship, owed something to Verne as well. Jules Verne, the great French pioneer of science fiction, had also shown interest in the Arctic. Some thirty years earlier, he had published The English at the North Pole, in which there figured an expedition ship called Forward – of which Fram, naturally, was the Norwegian equivalent.”
― Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero

“It was the final division of skiing into two branches. In one way, it was merely codifying a fundamental distinction with psychological consequences. The Nordic events implied fighting the force of gravity. Alpine skiing exploits it. Ski-jumping is a hybrid: on the approach run you use gravity for the take-off but once in the air you fight it to keep aloft as long as possible. The”
― Roland Huntford, Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing

“Curiously, the Swedes looked for untouched snow, while the Norwegians wanted marked and prepared tracks so that they could race along the valleys and over the plateau. Another difference: Swedes carried equipment to face the elements; the Norwegians put their trust in mobility and light equipment, sometimes with dire consequences.”
― Roland Huntford, Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing

“He was not only concerned with the act of travel. He feared the effect of waiting on morale. Shackleton and his companions were, in a sense, too civilised. They were dependent on activity, almost like a drug. They had lost the understanding that nature sometimes requires nothing but the patience to wait. In these circumstances, the Eskimo would have been the wiser man. However, Shackleton had to avert the slow insidious panic that could grow when waiting generated apathy and helplessness. He also had to cope with his own temperament which, if left unchecked, would trap him into activity for its own sake.”
― Roland Huntford, Shackleton

“Antarctica is a desert, and fresh snowflakes falling are as rare as raindrops in the Sahara. Most blizzards simply sweep old, needle-like crystals of drift from one place to another. They are really dust storms in the cold. Shackleton”
― Roland Huntford, Shackleton

“All his life he had waited for ‘the great idea that … would hit me like a bolt of lightning’. Youth was when ‘the bolts of lightning come, if they are ever to strike … But now … I am hardly really young any longer … and the future is unlikely to bring any.”
― Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero

“Nesseby broke new ground in other ways as well. The fixture consisted of a ski-jump, followed by a separate sprint-like cross-country race. This was the first known Nordic combination in the modern sense.”
― Roland Huntford, Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing

“More soberly, he gave an explanation of Telemark skiing terminology. This arose from the local dialect, a world away from the Danish-Norwegian spoken by the educated classes in the towns. The terms were not known elsewhere: The track of … skis in the snow … is called … a ‘laam’ (plural ‘laamir’). A clear distinction is drawn between a race with a jump, and one without. The former is called ‘hoppelaam’ [literally ‘jumping track’] … The other kind of race [is a] ‘slalaam’.”
― Roland Huntford, Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing

“Until the advent of fast railway trains, in the late nineteenth century, a skier was the fastest human being on earth.”
― Roland Huntford, Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing

“Only in February 1860, more than a decade after Trondheim, did Morgenbladet, a leading Christiania newspaper and therefore part of the national press, carry the first advertisement for a ski tour.9 It was probably the start of organized skiing in Christiania. The tour was to Maridalen, on the northern outskirts of the city.”
― Roland Huntford, Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing

“Nansen introduced what has come to be known as the layer principle. Still faithful to Dr Jaeger’s precepts, he stuck to pure wool. There were to be four layers: underwear, shirt, sweater and, finally, jacket, knee breeches and leggings made of a tough, thick Norwegian woollen material called vadmel.”
― Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero

“Such is the control, and such the public mentality, enjoyed by the Swedish planners. The rulers of the Soviet Union, although favoured by despotic power, are not so fortunate. Obstructively resentful of officialdom, the Russian, in the words of the Spanish saying, has always known how orders are 'to be obeyed but not carried out'. To the Swede, that sort of compromise is downright immoral. His elected leaders have received those political blessings denied the autocrats in the Kremlin: compliant citizens and an unopposed bureaucracy.”
― Roland Huntford, The New Totalitarians

“when ‘one leads a nomadic life, as I do at the moment, it is not easy to do everything at the right time’.”
― Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero

“and perhaps tomorrow may see the end of these difficulties. Difficulties are just things to overcome after all.”44”
― Roland Huntford, Shackleton

“I do so wish sometimes, that I could just pop home for an hour or two as easily in the flesh as in the spirit. No doubt the explorers of 2015, if there is anything left to explore, will not only carry their pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes but will also receive their nourishment & warmth by wireless … and also their power to drive their motor sledges, but, of course, there will be an aerial daily excursion to both poles then, & it will be the bottom of the Atlantic, if not the centre of the earth that will form the goal in those days.27”
― Roland Huntford, Shackleton