Dr.Fred Goldberg - Roald Amundsen & Svalbard Postal History
Fred Goldberg is Doctor of Engineering at the Royal Insitute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and is an authority on polar philately and polar history and exploration. He is the secretary of the Swedish Polar Society and is a member of several other polar and polar-philatelic societies. He has led and participated in many expeditions to Svalbard, Antarctica, Canada, and Siberia. In 1997 he published a booklet on Svalbard Postal History and more recently a booklet on Roald Amundsen Postal History to coincide with his Roald Amundsen Postal History Exhibition at the Fram Museum in Norway.
Roald Amundsen, without doubt the greatest polar explorer of all times, is probably most famous for being the first man to have reached the South Pole. But Amundsen led more polar expeditions and achieved more, lesser known but not less admirable firsts in the history of polar exploration. Amundsen was with the men of the Belgica expedition (1897-1899), the first group of men to winter in the Antarctic. On his Gjøa expedition (1903-1906), he became the first to navigate the long sought after Northwest Passage. During part of the Maud expedition (1918-1925) he pioneered in using aeroplanes for the exploration of the Arctic. In 1925 he reached a record 87º 44'N with the hydro-planes N-24 and N-25. And in 1926, with the airship Norge, he became the first to make a trans-polar flight over the North Pole.
Today, Amundsen's expeditions can be studied and documented by collectors in a unique way with a variety of interesting philatelic and postal historic material. Fred Goldberg's collection, exhibition and booklet wonderfully illustrate this.
In the history of polar exploration the polar vessel Fram has played an important role. Fridtjof Nansen used her for his Fram expedition (1893-1896), during which the vessel was locked in and drifted with the ice of the Arctic Ocean for almost three years. Otto Sverdrup used her on his 1898-1902 expedition and charted 200,000 square kilometres of unknown territory around the northwest coast of Greenland. Amundsen, eventually, used the vessel to sail to the Antarctic for his succesful aim at the South Pole in 1911.
The Fram survived the extreme polar conditions and the test of time, and today she's on display in the Fram Museum in Oslo, Norway.
The Roald Amundsen Postal History Exhibition
Being the leading expert in the field, Dr.Fred Goldberg from Sweden was asked by the Fram Museum to prepare a Roald Amundsen Postal History exhibition to be shown at the museum and to be opened in 2000, the year that celebrates the 75th anniversary of Roald Amundsen's flight attempts towards the North Pole with the N-24 and N-25 as well as the return of Amundsen's ship Maud from its three last years in the ice of the Arctic.
Attended by 150 invited guests, the exhibition was opened on May 4th, 2000. The opening program started with Kåre Berg, Director of the Fram Museum and was followed by a lecture by Fred Goldberg. In the audience there were 20 relatives of Roald Amundsen and 6 relatives of other expedition members who accompanied Amundsen to the Poles. After the lecture, the director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, Olav Orheim, officially opened the exhibition. After viewing the exhibit a reception was held on the deck of the Fram.
The exhibition consists of 48 A3 frames showing letters, contracts, cachets, cancellations, stamps, and postcards from all of Amundsen's expeditions. The exhibit is shown along the inside wall next to the Fram. The exhibition will be shown for approximately 2 years.
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The original of the article is arranged on a site
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