Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  On that late winter day in 1895, Nansen and his partner, Frederik Johansen, strapped on skis, harnessed dogs to sledges, and set out. All the hopes and prayers of the mission launched in the Fram nearly two years earlier rested on their shoulders. The world the thirteen Norwegians had left behind—their friends and loved ones, the joys of civilized life, the meaning that their deed might acquire—lay far to the south.

  Nansen and Johansen headed north.

  Thirty-one years old at the outset of the expedition, Fridtjof Nansen had been a champion skier and speed skater trained on the hills and lakes surrounding his birthplace, on the outskirts of Christiania (today’s Oslo). In school he specialized in zoology, and his study of the nervous systems of such lowly marine creatures as sea squirts and hagfish eventually led to breakthroughs in the nascent science of neuroanatomy.

  Nansen’s real passion, however, was for adventure—skiing, hunting, and above all exploring. In the summer of 1888 he led a skiing expedition that accomplished the first traverse of Greenland, a challenge that had turned back more experienced veterans such as Robert E. Peary and Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld. Rejecting the conventional wisdom of a west-to-east journey—from the safety of inhabited villages on the west coast, and traveling for the most part downwind—Nansen had a ship drop his team off on the barren, iceberg-thronged east coast. The party’s only half-ironic motto was “Death or the west coast of Greenland.”

  By the 1890s, Norwegians were nowhere near the forefront of Arctic exploration. Starting in the Renaissance, the boldest thrusts into the unknown North had been carried out by British, Dutch, Russian, American, and even Austrian expeditions. Between 1878 and 1880 the Finnish-born Swede Nordenskiöld seized the prize of the Northeast Passage (the Old World’s equivalent of the Northwest Passage, which would not be navigated until 1903–06), by steering the Vega along a tortuous path north of Siberia and through the Bering Strait.

  As early as 1550, the fantasy of a northern shortcut to the riches of Cathay had set European minds afire. When all attempts at the Northwest and Northeast Passages were defeated by impenetrable wastes of pack ice, the even more fanciful dream of a journey straight across the top of the world kindled the brains of monarchs and explorers. In the absence of any knowledge of the globe north of the coasts of Greenland, Ellesmere Island, and Russia, the theory of an Open Polar Sea gained a persistent vogue. Beyond the ice that thwarted mariners, pundits declared, must lie a temperate ocean and undiscovered lands, peopled perhaps by savages unknown to the rest of the world. Break through the frozen barrier into the open sea, and an easy voyage to the Orient would ensue.

  Even before Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492, geographers recognized that a spherical earth (first demonstrated by the ancient Greeks) meant that there was a pole at 90 degrees north, a point on the surface of the globe where all lines of longitude converged and from which every direction pointed south. In the fifteenth century the notion of sailing toward that pole was a utilitarian dream among northern European visionaries, a scheme by which traders might reach the riches of half-mythic Cathay without running afoul of Spanish and Portuguese warships.

  According to Arctic historian Jeannette Mirsky, the first explorer explicitly to propose a quest to reach the North Pole was the merchant Robert Thorne, who petitioned King Henry VIII in 1527. The proposal sparked a feckless thrust toward the New World that reached the coast of Labrador after being thwarted by the eternal ice farther north. Thorne remains a footnote to history but for his bold vow, repeated again and again over the centuries: “There is no land unhabitable nor sea innavigable.”

  The voyages of such doughty explorers as Sir Hugh Willoughby, Willem Barents, and Henry Hudson likewise sought to reach Cathay via the North Pole, but ice wrote its stern finis to their hopes. On his three voyages in search of the Northwest Passage, Martin Frobisher claimed the European discovery of Baffin Island (though a Viking settlement long preceded him, and Inuit had thrived on the island for almost a millennium), but on his return to England Frobisher’s journeys were greeted as utter failures. The chronicler on Frobisher’s second voyage vividly evoked the hardships of Arctic navigation: “Whoso maketh navigations to those Countreys, hath not onely extreme winds, and furious seas to encounter withall, but also many monstrous and great Islands of yce: a thing both rare, wonderfull, and greatly to be regarded.”

  The toll of Arctic exploration during the Renaissance, not only in thwarted ambitions but in lost ships and lives, led to a hiatus of nearly two centuries in European probes toward the North Pole. Only at the end of the eighteenth century did mariners again take up the gauntlet. And by the early nineteenth century, the quest had taken on a life of its own. No matter that not a single ship had been able to defeat the ice or find the remotest hint of an Open Polar Sea. The rivalry acquired a new yardstick: the claiming of a “farthest north.”

  William Edward Parry, the same explorer whose ships had been the first to endure a frozen winter in 1819–20, won the support of the Admiralty for an expedition with the avowed goal of reaching the North Pole. Parry’s plan seems in retrospect a bizarre one. He would sail to the northern edge of Svalbard (Spitsbergen), then set out across the ice with boats equipped with sledge runners, to be pulled by reindeer. When the reindeer failed to do their job, the men hauled the boat-sledges. Man-hauling became de rigueur on British expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic during the next ninety years, to the disdain of Norwegians, who would perfect the use of dogs for the task. (Wrote Nansen, tongue in cheek, in 1897: “It would appear, indeed, as if dogs were not held in great estimation by the English.”)

  Nonetheless, on July 27, 1827, Parry’s team reached 82˚ 45' N. It was a record that would stand for the next forty-nine years.

  By the time Nansen got caught up in the quest, in the early 1890s, the record had advanced by only 38 minutes of latitude—a mere 49 miles. Ice had defeated the bravest thrusts of all the polar aspirants. A daunting 457 miles of terra incognita—more likely glacies incognita—stretched between the discovered pack and 90˚ N. The new mark had been set in 1882 by two members of an expedition led by the American army officer Adolphus Greely, whose 83˚ 23' N came at a terrible cost. Thanks to resupply ships that never arrived and to Greely’s woeful leadership, nineteen of the twenty-five men died during their three-year ordeal, including a private who was executed for stealing food.

  Rather than batter his boats and sledges against the unrelenting ice, Nansen came up with a plan that was breathtaking in its audacity. It was based on the fate of another American polar voyage that had spiraled into disaster—that of the Jeannette under Lieutenant George W. De Long of the U.S. Navy between 1879 and 1881.

  De Long’s plan was to strike north not from the conventional bases of Greenland or Svalbard but by sailing through the Bering Strait into the Chukchi Sea. The theory underpinning the expedition comprised another pair of a priori geographical assumptions: that Wrangel Island north of eastern Siberia (“discovered” in 1764, though humans inhabited it as early as 1700 BC) was actually a vast landmass whose coast the Jeannette could follow into the high latitudes, and that the warm Japanese Current flowing north through the Bering Strait would assure an ice-free path most of the way to the pole.

  With thirty-three men aboard, the Jeannette set sail from San Francisco in July 1879. By September she was stuck fast in ice, still short of Wrangel Island. During the next twenty-one months, the ship drifted aimlessly in its frozen prison, as the thaws of two summers failed to release her. As one expedition after another learned throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, if a ship failed to break free of the ice, the crushing pressure would eventually destroy and sink her. The end for the Jeannette, which struck with dramatic suddenness, came on June 12, 1881.

  The ship’s final position was 77˚ 15' N, well short of Parry’s farthest north from sixty-one years before. The failure of De Long’s voyage would pound one of the final nails into the coffin of the hypothesis of the Open Polar Sea
.

  The crew set out on a grim trek toward the south, hauling heavy boats across slushy ice, hoping to reach the Lena delta on the Russian mainland. In the end, twenty of the thirty-three men died, including De Long.

  So much for yet another ill-fated attempt to bash through the ice in quest of the elusive North Pole. But three years after the men bid farewell to the Jeannette, electrifying news emerged from Greenland. Near Julianehaab on the southwest coast, some Inuit discovered curious relics embedded in the drift ice on shore. Danish authorities soon identified them as fragments from the lost ship. Among the relics was a list of provisions signed by De Long and several pieces of clothing with the names of known expedition members sewn or written on them. The conclusion was unmistakable: these pieces of debris had been carried by the ice across the top of the world. The only possible force was a prevailing current that pushed the ice itself hundreds of miles from north of Siberia to Greenland.

  The discovery was so outlandish that many observers, including several supposed experts, discounted it as a hoax or a case of mistaken identification. Yet further corroboration of the transpolar drift came in another discovery on the Greenland shore: that of an Inuit throwing-stick of a style unknown to Greenlanders but matching that of Alaskan natives, down to its decoration with Chinese glass beads of the kind regularly traded near the Bering Strait.

  As the longitude of the Jeannette when it sank was nearly opposite that of the west coast of Greenland, it seemed unarguable that the drift must have carried the relics within several degrees of the pole.

  Nansen’s bold idea came to him in a eureka moment. Instead of fighting the Arctic ice, why not embrace it? What if a team deliberately let its ship get frozen in, so as to ride the newly discovered drift far closer to the pole than men with dogs and sledges and boats had yet been able to go? And if so, how could such a ship escape the usual fate of being crushed and sunk by the relentless pressure of the floes?

  Most of the nautical attacks on the high Arctic had been launched in refurbished ships originally designed for other types of service. The truly radical notion Nansen brought to his quest for the pole was to build from scratch a ship that could withstand the worst the ice could do. The structure of the hull would call for a lattice of unusually stout timbers reinforced with iron. But its shape would be the critical factor. Design a hull that was far shallower and rounder than that of most ships, Nansen argued: instead of crushing it, the floes would force the ship upward, so that it would “be able to slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice.”

  Nansen announced his plan in 1890 at a meeting of the Christiania Geographical Society. When his speech was published, experts from several countries weighed in. Most of them thought Nansen’s idea was crazy. Among his harshest critics was Adolphus Greely, who, given the disastrous outcome of his own expedition in search of the pole, might have been wiser to bite his tongue. The whole conception, Greely judged, was an “illogical scheme of self-destruction.” Not content to denigrate the plan, Greely sneered at the man himself. “As far as I know,” he proclaimed, “[Nansen] has had no Arctic service.” Apparently the crossing of Greenland didn’t count.

  Nansen blithely ignored the skeptics, and construction of the Fram (Norwegian for “forward”) began at a shipyard in Larvik. Thanks to his fame from the Greenland expedition, Nansen’s call for crew members elicited a deluge of applications. The hand-picked roster of twelve included Nansen’s close friend and partner on the Greenland ice, Otto Sverdrup, who would be the captain of the ship.

  On June 24, 1893, the Fram weighed anchor and began her long voyage. As the ship glided slowly northeast along the Norway coast, throngs gathered in ports and on hills to cheer her passage. The storage chests below decks were loaded with provisions for thirteen men for five years. Nansen was fully confident that after the Fram had completed an epic traverse of the polar regions, she would be delivered into ice-free waters somewhere in the North Atlantic, where the long-dormant engine could be fired up and the vessel could steam back to Norway. He had calculated the rate at which the Jeannette relics had floated in the ice as two miles per day. At a comparable rate, the Fram might complete her ice-bound drift in two years, so the ample provisioning built in a generous margin of safety.

  The critical first leg of the journey would require a journey across the perilous seas north of Europe and Asia to reach the New Siberian Islands, near which the Jeannette had sunk twelve years earlier. In itself that was a formidable challenge, for many a mariner had been turned back by ice long before reaching that archipelago. In effect, Nansen’s team would be retracing two-thirds of the Northeast Passage, still unrepeated after Nordenskiöld’s landmark journey from 1878 to 1880. Should the Fram arrive at her goal without mishap, Sverdrup would then steer the ship straight north into the ice, whose grasp would transport her along the course of the hypothesized drift.

  At age thirty-one, Nansen was in the prime of life, an athlete famed for his strength and stamina. Tall and solidly built—in the expedition photos, he looks almost portly—he exuded a brimming confidence that camouflaged deep doubts about his worth and achievements that would haunt him all his life. Handsome, with a penetrating gaze and an almost regal air, he dressed habitually in the “Sanitary Woolen Clothing” of the German health nut Dr. Gustav Jaeger, who trumpeted the virtues of garb that would allow “evaporation of the ‘noxious’ emanations” given off by the body.

  Nansen was known as something of a ladies’ man, who had formed a number of passionate if short-lived liaisons with Norwegian beauties. His biographer Roland Huntford rather harshly concludes, “He could only make friends with women, and never with a man.” Yet in 1889, after an engagement lasting less than a month, he married Eva Sars, a professional singer and a first-rate skier. Only five months before setting out in the Fram, Eva gave birth to a daughter the couple named Liv. Being separated from his wife and daughter after June 1893 would prove a lingering grievance for the ambitious explorer.

  With the radical design of her hull, as yet untried in any ocean, the Fram remained an enigma. Would she prove seaworthy in stormy conditions? A partial and discouraging answer came on only the fourth day of the expedition. Still skirting the coast of Norway, the ship was battered in the middle of the night by a sudden tempest. Seas flooded across the deck, all kinds of equipment was swept overboard, and several men came close to following the debris. The crew salvaged other cargo, but the scene was pandemonium. As Nansen drily recorded, “I am afraid the shares in the expedition stood rather low at this moment.”

  Nonetheless, as the ship plowed steadily eastward during the following weeks, the men adjusted to her quirks, and Sverdrup navigated skillfully through a chaos of free-ranging floes and foggy whiteouts. By mid-September, three months into the voyage, the Fram stood off the westernmost coast of the New Siberian Islands. Nansen ordered a course due north.

  On September 25, the floes closed around the ship and froze her in their grip for good. The theodolite gave a latitude reading of 78˚ 50’ N—about 770 miles as the crow flies from the North Pole. And now the great trial began.

  Just how daring Nansen’s scheme was can be gleaned via an anachronistic analogy. To submit to an icy prison in a ship whose design had never been tested, and to trust to an invisible current whose existence had been only indirectly deduced, might have been akin to setting out on the first manned mission to the moon if the type of spaceship the astronauts rode, unlike Apollo 11, had gone through no trial runs whatsoever, with the route across 230,000 miles of empty space only guessed at.

  That the North Pole, like the moon seven decades later, should have loomed as a profoundly worthwhile goal for a mission of discovery seemed self-evident to the crowds that lined the seacoast to hail the Fram’s departure. And no doubts about the value of their quest troubled the sleep of the twelve men who had so eagerly sought places in the ship’s crew. In the opening pages of Farthest North, the book Nansen would write about the expedition—one of the truly magi
sterial accounts of terrestrial exploration of his or any other age—Nansen nonetheless laid out the rationale for the voyage.

  As did the moon, the Far North posed certain scientific questions. But a more fundamental motivation lay closer to the heart: “the limits of the unknown,” Nansen wrote, “had to recede step by step before the ever-increasing yearning after light and knowledge of the human mind, till they made a stand in the north at the threshold of Nature’s great Ice Temple of the polar regions with their endless silence.”

  That same yearning, Nansen was sure, gave voice to the cheers of the crowds who watched the Fram sail past: “the same thirst for achievement, the same craving to get beyond the limits of the known . . .”

  Even as early as the 1890s, some skeptics voiced their doubts as to whether the arbitrary goal of 90˚ N—an abstract point on the surface of the globe, defined only by latitude—was worth the titanic struggle. In Farthest North, Nansen disavowed the North Pole itself as a paramount objective:

  it is not to seek for the exact mathematical point that forms the northern extremity of the earth’s axis that we set out, for to reach this point is intrinsically of small moment. Our object is to investigate the great unknown region that surrounds the Pole . . .

  Yet as the Fram drifted in her zigzag course, Nansen’s veering moods betrayed that disavowal. Every second of latitude gained was a triumph, every second lost a setback. Breaking Greely’s record farthest north became an all-consuming passion, and the only truly satisfying result of the expedition would be to stand at the “exact mathematical point” of the pole. For Nansen, the pull of 90˚ N outweighed even the pull of home, of the infant daughter and the wife who longed for his safe return.