First Crossing of the Polar Sea

On May 12th, 1926, at 1:30 in the morning Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth looked down from the cabin of the airship Norge and knew that they were over the North Pole.

It was a busy moment. They dropped flags - the American, the Norwegian, and the Italian. Two of them, Amundsen and Oscar Wisting had seen the South Pole - from dog sleds. The third, Lincoln Ellsworth, saw the culmination of years of planning the conquest of the Arctic by air.

Radio messages were dispatched, observations made and the pole circled. Then the Norge swung back into her course - a course whose thin tracing over the uncharted wastes was followed by millions - and pointed for Alaska.

Thus briefly the story of the flight. Yet into the forty-eight hours in the air were packed all the excitement, the hopes and fears and thrills and mishaps and prayers of a season of polar exploration on the ground. This is the history, written by the leaders themselves, of one of the most remarkable exhibitions of daring and skill ever recorded.