When I set out to compile this web site my motivation was simple; I am interested in the events of the period and realised that the 100th anniversary of these events was coming up. A lot of data that this site uses is now in the public domain and it is available in journal (diary) format making it ideal for a blog. I'm not sure when you might be reading this, i.e. I'm not sure when the site may go live (and I'm writing this more than a year before the first journal entries achieve their 100th year anniversary), but by referring to the data in the journals daily entries will be published, in a blog style, 100 years to the day they were originally written. I am really excited by this, a day by day snippet as the whole drama unfolds!

One of the things that is clear, even before I write the site, is that the amount of information I've been able to compile for the Norwegian expedition versus that for the British expedition varies significantly. That is only because of the amount of data that is available (to me). There is a lot of information for the British expedition, available to Joe Blogs,  but comparatively little relating to the Norwegian expedition. That could be simply because I am English and the only works available to me are written in english and that there may be a lot more available if I were able to read Norwegian. That said I have asked Norwegian friends if they could trawl Norwegian book shops, etc., for texts (in English) that I could use for reference to add to the Norwegian material I have drawn upon but they drew a blank, unfortunately.

One of the things that I'd like to make clear is that this difference is because of circumstance and not because of bias on my part.

My gut feeling for the lack of published material relating to the Norwegian expedition that has been translated into English is because there is a lack of basic material in the first instance. Amundsen's expedition was not planned, at least publicly, to go to the south pole and as such the sponsors of the expedition could not have required a contracted expedition account relating to the expedition to the south pole.

There may also be a cultural difference; the primary members of the British expedition were contracted to keep a journal and to write up and publish this on the completion of the expedition. There was, as far as I'm aware, no such requirement of the Norwegian expdition members, save for Amundsen himself. In any event Amundsen, according to his biographer Tor Bomann-Larsen (Roald Amundsen, Sutton Publishing 1995) compiled his content for his expedition's book after the event and from memory. His book also contains content written by third parties, again compiled after the events they describe and from memory rather than contemporary journal entries.

None of this is intended as a complaint or criticism by me, I'm simply mentioning these differences to show why it might seem there's a difference