Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  Beneath the raillery, I nurse the memory of the blissful state that disconnectedness imbued. How could I convey to my younger friends what they missed? For the first few days in the mountains I would be jittery with the change, as half-formed fears and guilt about duties left undone jangled my nerves. Then contentment seeped in. The absolute distinction between “out” (the world I left behind) and “in” conferred its benediction. The petty aggravations of normal life fell away. The knowledge that if we got into trouble, we could count only on ourselves for rescue delivered a paradoxical boon in self-reliance. At the end of the trip, it was always wrenching to return to “out.”

  In the midst of such exchanges with today’s alpinists, the phrase from Marvell seizes my brain: “But at my back I always hear . . .” Not time’s wingèd chariot, but rather the stern put-down of my vanity that Nansen and Amundsen and their kin embody. The longest I ever spent disconnected in the mountains was fifty-two days. That seemed plenty. Yet Nansen and his teammates submitted without an apparent qualm to the prospect of five years with no word to or from the “real” world left behind.

  Between 1819 and 1917, scores of expeditions wintered over in the Arctic and Antarctic. More than a few spent two or even three years disconnected from the world back home. The record may have been held by the men aboard the Victory under Sir John Ross, who endured four winters between 1829 and 1833 in the Canadian Arctic before returning to England with the loss of only three crew members.

  In all the rich literature of these polar campaigns, there is scant discussion of the sacrifice those sailors and sledgers made in going so long without outside contact, though the principals in several of the more ill-starred expeditions (the Belgica off the Antarctic coast in 1897–99, among others) went insane from the stress, and “polar madness” was a semi-official diagnosis of mental derangement inflicted by such ordeals.

  In the twenty-first century, the number of explorers willing to sign on for a three- or four-year exile from the civilized world has dwindled to absolute zero. It is hard to think of any adventurer in recent years who has gone thus disconnected for even twelve consecutive calendar months. Yet when Nansen had announced the journey, hundreds of applicants clamored to join.

  The polar explorers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries put us all to shame. We have grown addicted to contact. (American teenagers in recent experiments have gone bonkers trying to survive without social media for twenty-four hours at a stretch.) Not many of my younger climbing friends today would be psychologically equipped to handle fifty-two days in the wilderness without a radio or sat phone. But, in turn, in the 1960s I could not have countenanced the threat of two years of isolation aboard an ice-locked ship in the Arctic.

  Nansen’s account of his landmark voyage verges at regular intervals into personal confession. Leaving behind his wife and infant daughter amounted for him to an almost unbearable tribulation. In Farthest North, he calls June 24, 1893, when he waved goodbye to them from the ship, “the darkest hour of the whole journey.” Yet throughout the epic voyage, he never wavered from his goals, never succumbed to the lure of the south by cutting short the audacious program he had devised to seek the North Pole.

  Perhaps we modern adventurers have lost for good the character traits that would tolerate all-out commitment to the prolonged separation from the cherished world a polar voyage once demanded. Perhaps we have lost the art of disconnectedness. In terms of psychological endurance, perhaps we have all gone soft. Neither in 1963 nor in 2016 would I have signed on for an expedition like the Fram’s. But the loss, I know, is mine.

  With my diagnosis of throat cancer in July 2015, the awareness of ever-fleeting time took on a new acuity. I no longer worried about what I might be doing a year from now: what I might be capable of in three months seemed a more urgent concern. At the age of seventy-two, I had long since renounced any ambitions to set off into the Alaska ranges and forge first ascents. But now the question of whether I should ever again hike a favorite canyon in Utah loomed uncertain.

  In my twenties and thirties, each time I headed into the mountains, I pondered the possibility that I might not come back alive. Climbing is dangerous, expeditionary mountaineering especially so. By the age of twenty-two I had lost friends in fatal accidents. After 1965, parting with Sharon, my wife, each time I stepped on board the bush plane seared my soul with ambivalence. And during storm days in the tent, I whispered a plea to her not to worry, or wrote to her in my diary.

  Nansen’s men were in their twenties and thirties when they sailed north from Norway in 1893. And though their anguish goes unarticulated in Farthest North, we can be sure they spent many a sleepless night aboard the Fram, wondering anew whether the bargain with fate they had sealed was worth all the privation and sacrifice, and wondering whether they would return alive. Seven of the twelve men were married with children.

  Nansen speaks for all of them in his dark nights of the soul. Setting off on that serene June morning, he tells himself, “Behind me lay all I held dear in life. And what before me? How many years would pass ere I should see it all again?”

  Four months later, drifting in zigzags aboard the frozen ship, on the eve of his thirty-third birthday, Nansen pondered primal matters: “in these nights such longing can come over one for all beauty, for all which is contained in a single word, and the soul flees from this interminable and rigid world of ice. When one thinks how short life is, and that one came away from it all of one’s own free will. . . . We are but as flakes of foam, helplessly driven over the tossing sea.”

  Nansen and Johansen’s southward retreat, an expedition unto itself, is the stuff of legend. Seizing the reprieve of turning back from their hopeless quest, at first they flew across the ice, sledging for thirty-six hours without stopping to camp. In the process, they made a tiny mistake, one that might well have proved fatal. They forgot to wind their watches.

  Without an accurate timepiece, the men had no way of determining their longitude. And without longitude, they might veer so far to the east or west that they could miss Franz Josef Land altogether. Without longitude, they were effectively lost.

  Minimizing the setback in his diary, Nansen tried to guess the time by watching the sun as it neared its noon zenith and by recording sunrise and sunset—at least during the days when clouds and snowfall held off. He noted down his educated guesses as to the men’s longitude. (So canny was Nansen’s dead reckoning that he was later able to ascertain that his estimates were off by only 26 minutes, or less than half a degree!)

  One by one the dogs, famished and played out, had to be killed. To save ammunition, the men resorted to means of execution other than shooting. “The killing of the animals, especially the actual slaughtering, is a horrible affair,” Nansen wrote on April 19. When several of the huskies failed to succumb to strangulation by rope, Johansen had to finish them off with a knife. Still confident that their rations would hold out for many weeks, the men fed the slain dogs only to the others. By June 5, only six of the original twenty-eight were alive.

  That day Nansen got a latitude reading of 82˚ 18' N. From their farthest north on April 8, in two months the men had gained almost four degrees in their southward dash, or some 270 miles. Yet Nansen complained to his diary, “I cannot understand why we do not see land. The only possible explanation is that we must be farther east than we think . . .”

  It was not Franz Josef Land that the men expected to sight, but Petermann Land. The Franz Josef archipelago had been discovered by an Austro-Hungarian expedition only in 1873, and then quite by accident. The expedition ship, the Tegetthoff, frozen into the pack the previous November, had drifted aimlessly north of the Russian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya for a year until its men touched the shores of the southernmost island of a previously unknown landmass. The team named this new discovery (191 islands all told, stretching across some 6,200 square miles) after their emperor, Franz Joseph. Despite their dire predicament, the men explored the archipelago, reaching its n
orthern tip at Cape Fligely, from which its co-leader, Julius von Payer, stared across the frozen sea and spotted another sizeable land mass dead north, which he named after Augustus Petermann, a German geographer who had divined a temperate branch of the Gulf Stream that ought to promise easy passage north of Novaya Zemlya (one more last gasp of the Open Polar Sea). The official expedition map sketches in the southwestern shore of that presumably massive tract, centered at 83˚ N, even naming a western promontory Cape Vienna.

  From wondering whether the two men had missed Petermann Land by veering eastward, Nansen became convinced during the following days that a prevailing wind was driving them west. If so, they might stand a better chance of reaching Svalbard than Franz Josef Land, though the prospect seemed almost hopeless. “We do not know where we are, and we do not know when this will end,” Nansen lamented on June 11.

  It would take Nansen and Johansen’s retreat, as well as the probings of subsequent expeditions, to prove that Payer’s Petermann Land did not exist. It was one more illusion, born of the hunger for discovery, by which explorers in the Arctic and Antarctic again and again turned mirages into previously unknown lands.

  With the southern push and the approach of summer, the two men saw the icescape in which they lived transformed. The temperatures rose steadily, until the norm hovered just below freezing rather than forty below. With the thaw, the once solid ice disintegrated, until vast stretches were reduced to “brash,” a slushy melange of chunks and water. Even as they crossed seemingly solid snowdrifts, the men regularly sank to their knees, soaking their legs.

  They realized that in order to complete their quest for terra firma, they would have to repair the kayaks, carried so far as dead weight aboard the sledges. Sewing and patching the torn kayak skins inside the tent each night, they tackled this renovation.

  By now the men were almost out of food, nearly 800 pounds of which they had hauled away from the Fram in March. Fortunately seals began to appear in the open leads, some of which they were able to kill and haul onto the ice before they sank. Butchering these beasts was a nasty and onerous business, but the taste of fresh meat sent the men into transports of delight. Eventually they were able to supplement their larder with walrus and polar bear.

  On July 24, as they began to give up hope, they sighted land—the first they had seen in two years. “It has long haunted our dreams, this land, and now it comes like a vision,” Nansen wrote. But so treacherous were the channels full of brash ice, and so fickle the winds, that it took them thirteen days to close the short distance to the shore.

  It was in the midst of this arduous toil, on August 5, that Nansen and Johansen suffered their closest call of the expedition thus far. Without their noticing it, a polar bear had stalked the men as they struggled to ferry their loads by kayak across a slushy lead. Johansen turned to pull up his sledge just as the bear, towering over him, made a lunge, cuffing him on the head and knocking him onto his back. In the best tradition of explorers’ understatement, he quietly urged his partner, “You must look sharp if you want to be in time.”

  Fumbling to retrieve the rifle from the kayak, Nansen almost let it slip into the sea. The bear was momentarily distracted by one of the two remaining dogs, which was barking fiercely. One shot behind the ear from the marksman who had trained among the Norway hills felled the great mammal.

  At last, on August 6, the men set foot on land. Undercutting their joy was the necessity of finishing off the last two dogs, Suggen and Kaifas, for there was no way they could be carried on sledge or kayak, and they were too weak to walk. “Faithful and enduring, they had followed us the whole journey through,” wrote Nansen, “and now that better times had come, they must say farewell to life.” Out of pity the men squandered cartridges on the executions. “I shot Johansen’s, and he shot mine.”

  They could only guess what land they had discovered. “I am more than ever at a loss to know where we are,” confessed Nansen. So true had been his dead reckoning, however, that the small island on which the men first set foot, which Nansen named after Eva, his wife, was in actuality part of Franz Josef Land, an outlying isle only 40 miles southeast of Cape Fligely.

  During the next month, the men made their way south and west, traveling more by kayak than by sledge. Coasting the shores of much larger land masses than Eva Island, they began to believe they must after all have stumbled upon Franz Josef Land. But Payer’s sketchy map was impossible to fit to the terrain they came across. With the waning of summer, they reconciled themselves to wintering over, as they searched for the ideal location to build a rude hut.

  Construction took a week. They quarried stone for the walls, and dug into the turf to hollow out a space in which eventually they could just barely stand erect. A walrus shoulder blade tied to a broken snowshoe piece served as their shovel. They chinked the stones with moss and dirt. For a roof, they rigged a ridgepole out of a driftwood log, over which they stretched walrus skins.

  Almost out of food, the men dug a hole in the turf and buried a cache containing the last of the provisions they had hauled all the way from the Fram—a treat to be saved for the spring of 1896. They counted on surviving off the land, principally the walruses they were able to kill just offshore from their hut. For light, the men fashioned stone lamps in which they burned smoky oil from the walruses, scavenging bits of cloth from their medical kit for wicks. They had hoped the lamps would give off heat as well, but after the sun disappeared for good on October 15, the men shivered in perpetual cold.

  Nansen and Johansen spent the next eight months confined to their domicile. For the first time during the expedition, Nansen stopped writing in his diary. If depression seized the men’s spirits, Farthest North gives no hint of it. Instead, Nansen claimed, “our life was so monotonous that there was nothing to write about.”

  The men tried to sleep as much as they could, sometimes managing twenty hours out of twenty-four. They tried to take interest in the winter sky, attending to Northern Lights, meteors, and the wandering of the planets. On Christmas Eve, Nansen “washed myself . . . in a quarter cup of warm water.” Their dreams dwelt on banquets back in Norway, packed with friends and family. By day they endlessly discussed a myriad of topics, skirting the gut-level questions of survival and rescue. They speculated for hours about what had happened to the Fram and the eleven comrades they had left behind.

  And Nansen, once he had resumed writing in his diary, went off on his metaphysical flights, pondering the place of human beings in the cosmos: “Is, then, the whole thing but the meteor of a moment? Will the whole history of the world evaporate like a dark, gold-edged cloud in the glow of the evening—achieving nothing, leaving no trace, passing like a caprice?”

  In May, as they prepared to continue their southward journey, the men dug up their cache. All the precious food was spoiled: “the pemmican—well, it had a strange appearance, and when we tasted it—ugh! It, too, had to be thrown away.”

  On May 19, after their third winter in the Arctic, the men bade farewell to their hut and started onward. For a month they made their way farther south, eventually crossing the 80th parallel. During this peregrination, on June 12 they blundered into a disaster as perilous as men in the Arctic have ever survived. All it took was a moment of careless inattention.

  After a long day of paddling, Nansen and Johansen pulled up to an ice shelf “to stretch our legs a little” and to climb a hummock to scout the route ahead. Having grown casual about tying off the kayaks, they anchored them to a flimsy stake. When they returned, they found the boats floating out to sea. Without the kayaks, the men were as good

  as dead.

  Without hesitation, Nansen stripped off half his clothes, dived into the water, and swam toward the drifting kayaks. The cold shocked his whole body. Before he could reach the boats, “I felt . . . that my limbs were gradually stiffening and losing all feeling, and I knew that in a short time I should not be able to move them.” There was no alternative but to swim on. With a desperate
last surge, he caught the nearest kayak and managed to clamber aboard, but he was shaking so uncontrollably that he could paddle only in short bursts. Once on shore again, Nansen let his partner strip off his clothes, pack him into the sleeping bag spread on the ice, and stand vigil as he shivered for hours before his body regained its warmth.

  On June 7 the men’s provisions were reduced to a single day’s supply of meat. Yet once again, they were able to shoot a walrus and replenish their store.

  They still wondered where exactly they were, though Nansen became convinced not only that they were on Franz Josef Land, but that they might be nearing the spot where an English yachtsman named Leigh Smith had wintered over in 1881–82, after his boat had been crushed in the ice. On June 17, as he crawled out of the tent to fix a breakfast of walrus meat, Nansen froze in incredulity: “[A] sound suddenly reached my ear so like the barking of a dog that I started.” He returned to the tent to report the event to a disbelieving Johansen. The two men set out to investigate.

  They followed dog tracks in the sod, heard more barking, turned a corner, and saw “a dark form moving among the hummocks farther in.” It was indeed a dog. And moments later, Nansen and Johansen waved their hats at the first other human they had seen in fifteen months. They closed the gap.

  With Victorian formality, the stranger shook Nansen’s hand, murmuring in English, “I’m immensely glad to see you.”

  Nansen rejoined, “Thank you; I also.”

  The man kept staring. Suddenly he blurted out, “Aren’t you Nansen?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “By Jove! I am glad to see you!”

  The stranger was Frederick Jackson, in charge of an expedition tasked by the Royal Geographic Society with exploring Franz Josef Land. The meeting point was Cape Flora on Northbrook Island, the very same place where Leigh Smith had wintered over.