Amundsen: Unique films

What is amazing is that the men seem just as completely happy on arriving back at Fram in the Ross Sea [Rosshavet] as leaving.

Med glad hilsen, George Fredrik

Thanks George. I love reading about your Norwegian heritage.

More silent film of Amundsen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CporetQe7bA

This time approaching the North Pole in 1925 in a German Dornier [kit-aeroplane!] fitted with Rolls Royce engines ...

Best wishes from George

Thanks for the links George. Another Norwegian worth knowing a little more about is Herman Smith "Jack Rabbit" Johansen, who introduced cross-country skiing to Canada :

https://www.nfb.ca/film/jack_rabbit

Jan

Dear Jan,

What a heart warming film this is. Something I would never have found for myself either. 

Tusen takk!

Fascinating to see his nearly going with Svedrupp on the second North Polar Voyage of the Fram. Otto Svedrupp was a distant cousin of mine. You have to go back to my great great grandfather Carl Oskar Rasmussen to get the link, and he died in 1928 well into his nineties. Like Jack he smoked a pipe and prodigious sized cigars! Also a business man who lost everything twice and at death still in harness at the head of his third successful wool cloth making business!

Interesting to those interested in renewable energy, his cloth factory was entirely powered by hydro. Hydro-mechanical for the machinery and Hydro-electric for the lighting. He built his factory near a fast flowing river ... It became disused only in 1963 ...

I find the tough, no-nonsense Norwegian approach fascinating. Ferociously independent and self-reliant, but warm to those nearest and dearest. Not people to hold shades of opinion, they know their mind, and it is unwise to try to argue them into a different view-point. My Norwegian grandfather was also called Johansen, and he was in the Home Army [often called the Resistance] during the Nazi occupation. His nom de guerre was “Tito” and he was an outlaw of the occupation forces by 1945. He had to “disappear for eighteen months ...

He was also a leading textile businessman in his day.

ATB from George