Recorded to history as :
“Beg leave to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic. Amundsen.”
Did Amundsen speak English, and was the cable in English. Seems an odd choice of words for a native speaker. Amundsen himself may or may not have personally sent the cable. I don’t know that that detail is known to history.
Amundsen spoke English well, but apparently with a heavy Norwegian accent. After his conquest of the South Pole, he went on a lecture tour to England in 1912.
Here is a link to a blog entry which features a photo of a museum display in which the Norwegian telegraph company’s copy of that telegram is showcased. It seems that the original wording of the telegram is, in fact, in English - which is not surprising considering that Amundsen had already been involved in internationally staffed expeditions before, travelling, inter alia, extensively in Canada and Alaska.
The odd wording is most likely a result of the “telegram style” in which such cable messages were usually phrased: The messages were charged by the number of words they contained, so people tended to omit any word which was not indispensable for the understanding of the intended meaning.
Thanks
Thislooks like a photo of the telegram in question. Written in English, and I presume from the fact that it’s on a Norwegian message blank that it’s the sender’s copy rather than the recipient’s.
As I recall, “I beg leave to inform you” (or “I beg to inform you” or “I beg to report”) was an old formal way of breaking bad news to someone. There are plenty of older English-language examples when you google those phrases. So I don’t think the language sounds stilted because Amundsen wasn’t a native speaker of English but because a then-common English phrase is now considered a bit archaic or over-formal even by English native speakers.
Which makes it all the more historically interesting that “beg leave to inform you” was considered so vital that it was allowed to take up half the message.
It’s even less surprising when we consider that, had the telegram been in Norwegian, Scott would have had no clue what it meant.
Scott and his crew spent some time training in Norway prior to travelling south, so he or one of his men may have understood Norwegian. A long shot I know but verging on possible.
It’s an interesting phrase that appears in Australasian newspaper ads in the mid-late 19th century a lot; “Messrs Lewis & Gunn beg leave to inform the public that a new shipment of widgets has just arrived, viz: [list of random stuff they now have for sale]”
The idea of acronyms and the like really didn’t come about until WWI - “Anzac” (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) is the first such one I’ve been able to identify in widespread use - so while there were abbreviated phrases, it’s not like Amundsen’s message would have read “Rob - heading 2 S Pole. C U There. - RA”
Although, in a way, it might. The thing is, the abbreviations etc were for the telegraph operators, not the recipients - so while the operators would be sending the Victorian/Edwardian equivalent of TXT speak at each other, the version the recipient saw (and the sender was charged for) used full words.
Interestingly, there were codes and ciphers for conveying longer concepts, as well as stuff one didn’t necessarily want random telegraph operators seeing too.
Well, this is pre-WWI, a time when French was still (though it was already in decline relative to English) an international lingua franca, especially in academia. The use of a lingua franca as a means to facilitate communication between people of different native languages is not a recent phenomenon; every era in history has had one in which educated and sophisticated people would have been expected to be fluent. It’s just that the specific language which fulfils that function varies. The later 19th and early 20th century was a time when that function was shifting from French to English.
From all I’ve read, “* beg leave to inform you” was simply a polite, formal written preface to whatever someone might write back then - it did not necessarily mean that bad news would follow.
The 1901 Western Union Telegraphic Code unaccountably seems to lack “Beg leave to inform you”. Amundsen would have had to choose between
Envoy - Glad to inform you
Enxombrar - Regret to inform you
