Journalist and historian Roland Huntford, "who wrote about the world's polar extremities and the men who explored them, including a book that challenged the previously undisputed heroic status of Robert Falcon Scott for his doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1912," died January 23, the New York Times reported. He was 98.
Born in South Africa, Huntford spent 15 years as the Scandinavian correspondent for the British newspaper the Observer, "a job that allowed him to indulge his love for Nordic skiing and winter hiking," the Times wrote. His familiarity with Nordic culture and ability to speak Norwegian added to his fascination with the race to the South Pole between British explorer Captain Scott and Norwegian Roald Amundsen.
Huntford's book Scott and Amundsen, later retitled The Last Place on Earth (1979), "sent shock waves through Britain by poking holes in Captain Scott's previously incontestable heroic narrative," the Times noted. Although critics praised the book, Scott's fans were not impressed.
The Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University barred Huntford from accessing its archives after the book's publication, and Peter Scott, the explorer's son, sued for libel because of a sentence in the acknowledgments thanking him for access to his father's papers. He claimed it implied that he approved of the book as a whole. A settlement was reached with a disclaimer in subsequent editions indicating that Peter Scott disapproved of the book.
For his part, Huntford told the Guardian in 2008: "In as much as I had an agenda, it wasn't to run down Scott. Rather, it was to rehabilitate Amundsen, who I felt had never been given the credit he deserved outside Norway."
Huntford's other books include The New Totalitarians (1971), Shackleton (1985), Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing (2008), and Nansen (2012). In 1974, he worked on Scott and Amundsen, a British TV mini-series based on the book that aired on PBS's Masterpiece Theater in 1985, starring Martin Shaw as Captain Scott and Sverre Anker Ousdal as Amundsen.