On 14 December 1911, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (who had already led the first expedition to traverse the North West Passage, and would go on to lead the first successful attempt to cross the Arctic by air) and his team became the first human beings to reach the South Pole, just over a month before Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition.

Roald Amundsen’s South Pole Diaries are now available to the public for the first time, more than a hundred years after they were written. The diaries give readers the opportunity to travel back in time to one of the highlights of international polar exploration.