Amundsen, Shackleton, and Peary. Portrait of (from left to right) Roald Amundsen (1872-1928), Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922) and Robert Edwin Peary (1856-1920), the three leading polar explorers of their time. Amundsen was the first man to reach the South Pole on December 14 1911 and the first man to fly over the North Pole in 1926. In 1909 Shackleton lead the first-ever attempt to reach the South Pole and was the first man to climb Mount Erebus, the world's most southerly volcano. Peary was the first person to reach the most northerly piece of land in the world at the northern tip of Greenland in 1900 and was the first to reach the North Pole on 6 April 1909.