Which explorer first reached the South Pole?

Roald Amundsen, on 14 December 1911, thirty-four days before Scott. The two expeditions are the standard comparison in planning and it is not close: Amundsen used dogs, skis and Inuit-derived clothing learned from the Netsilik people, laid supply depots generously, and had a team who could all ski and drive dogs. Scott used ponies, motor sledges that failed, and man-hauling.

Amundsen also lied about where he was going. He had prepared to attempt the North Pole, learned it had been claimed, and turned south without telling his crew or his backers until they were at sea - sending Scott a telegram from Madeira reading only that he was proceeding south.

Scott's party reached the pole to find a Norwegian flag and died on the return, and their reputation went through a long cycle: heroic failure for fifty years, then a harsh reassessment in the 1970s that treated Scott as an incompetent amateur, then a partial rehabilitation arguing that he met exceptionally bad weather. The two versions have been fought over for a century. Amundsen, having been first to the South Pole and first through the Northwest Passage, died in 1928 in a flying boat searching the Arctic for a rival explorer whose airship had crashed.