Thirty-five months after his departure, Nansen returned to civilization like a ghost rising from the grave, to be hailed as the greatest explorer of his day – greater by far than any of his detractors – and the founder of a new school of Viking explorers whose crowning ornament would be Roald Amundsen, the future conquerer of both the North West Passage and the South Pole.
The Scandinavian explorers were a different breed from the hidebound British and the impetuous Americans. They were, after all, a subarctic people, used to cold weather and high winds, familiar with skis, sledges, and dogs. They were also immensely practical. Nansen was daring but never rash; bold but never impulsive; fatalistic but never foolhardy; poetic but never naïve. A cool professional, he admired the British explorers for their grit, but he also learned from their mistakes and lack of experience. He believed in careful preparation. He watched every detail himself, leaving nothing to chance. He scorned men like Kane, whose polar expedition he called a “reckless, unjustifiable proceeding.” Nansen was the first explorer to take a ship into the Arctic that was custom-built to his own specifications – neither a whaler nor a naval bomb vessel. This was the Fram, perhaps the most famous vessel in Arctic history and certainly the most practical.
Nansen was thirty-one when he set off on his extraordinary journey – a Norse demi-god, tall, fair, blue-eyed, and physically tough. He had become an explorer by design. As a young science graduate he had, at twenty-one, shipped aboard a Greenland sealer to gain experience in zoology. At that point the Arctic captivated him. By 1888, after completing his scientific studies, he was prepared for his first adventure – nothing less than an attempt to ski across the unexplored Greenland ice cap, from coast to coast.
Skis had never before been used for such a journey. Nansen was later to write that “most people considered it simple madness … and were convinced that I was either not quite right in the head or was simply tired of life.” His hero, Baron A.E. Nordenskiöld, who had failed in his attempt to cross the ice sheet in 1866, was one of the early sceptics. Nansen’s enthusiasm and confidence won him over. The risk, Nordenskiöld finally decided, was worth it. But the Norwegian government thought differently and refused to fund the venture.
Nansen was determined to keep the risks to a minimum. He designed his own equipment, ranging from a new kind of portable cooker to flexible new sledges, running on skis and equipped with sails. He took lessons in the Eskimo language. An expert skier himself, he recruited five other experts, the toughest he could find, including Otto Sverdrup, the future master of the Fram and later a notable Arctic explorer. The party landed on the bleak, unpeopled east coast of Greenland both because Nansen wanted the prevailing wind behind him as he moved west across the great ice cap and because he wanted to cut off all lines of retreat. Behind was nothing but rock and ice; ahead lay the inhabited coastal strip on the shores of Baffin Bay. There could be no turning back.
The zigzag journey through this lifeless land covered four hundred miles over highlands that exceeded eight thousand feet. The conditions were so severe that one of Nansen’s companions, a Laplander, teetered on the verge of madness. Nansen, a born leader, managed to calm him down, and the party confounded the experts by succeeding. Unable to get a ship for home out of Disco Bay that fall, the industrious young man spent the winter in Greenland studying the Eskimos. When he returned to Norway he was famous – a popular hero. In the welcoming crowd that day, “with beating heart” stood a young seventeen-year-old student, Roald Amundsen. “All the dreams of my boyhood woke to storming life,” Amundsen was later to recall. “And for the first time I heard, in my secret thoughts, the whisper clear and insistent: ‘If you could do the North-West Passage!’ ”
For all of this time, a second adventure had been percolating through Nansen’s brain. The catalyst was an odd throwback to the past – to 1875, when Allen Young, M’Clintock’s sledgemate on the Franklin search, had set off in his little ship Pandora to try to force his way through Peel Sound and complete the Passage. Young had failed, and eventually the Pandora was sold to James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald to be refitted and renamed the Jeannette, the vessel that took the ill-fated De Long expedition north to the Bering Sea to try to reach the Pole. The Jeannette foundered off the coast of Siberia, but in 1884 pieces of the wreckage began turning up on the coast of Greenland. This suggested the presence of an Arctic current leading from Siberia around the Pole toward North America. There were other clues: Nansen, on his own expedition, had collected traces of sediment from the drift ice east of the island that, on examination, proved to have come from Siberian rivers. Eskimo throwing sticks, peculiar to Alaskan natives along the Bering Strait, and driftwood from Siberian trees had also been found along Greenland’s east coast. Why not, then, put a ship into the floes off east Siberia and let the ice carry her westward across the unknown polar basin toward Greenland – perhaps across the Pole itself?
In short, instead of fighting the ice as other explorers had done, Nansen proposed to use the moving ice stream as a propellant, albeit a sluggish one. For that he would require a special kind of craft with straight sides, like a tub, which the ice could not grip or crush, and with a reasonably flat bottom – a ship that, in his words, could “slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice.”
He would also require a special breed of explorer – men who could withstand three or four years of sheer monotony without going mad or resorting to violence. Only Norwegians, he felt, were equal to that ordeal. As he put it, with dry humour, two Norwegians, alone of all other nationals, could sit face to face on a cake of ice for three years without hating each other. Nansen had learned the art of patience from the Eskimos. He liked to tell the story of one group of natives who had travelled up a fiord seeking grass for hay. When they arrived at the field and found the grass too short to cut, they simply sat down and waited for it to grow.
Greely was not the only critic of the Norwegian’s scheme. When Nansen addressed the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1892, he found many old Arctic hands highly sceptical. George Nares, “in a friendly spirit,” indicated that he didn’t think there was such a thing as polar drift. Allen Young, knighted in 1877, believed there was land around the Pole that would frustrate Nansen’s plans. Sir Joseph Hooker, who had been to the Antarctic with James Clark Ross, thought the risks not worth taking. Another naval veteran, Admiral Sir George Richards, called it “an amateur nautical expedition.” Leopold M’Clintock, on the other hand, praised Nansen and called the project “the most adventurous programme ever brought under the notice of the Royal Geographical Society.”
Nansen himself was supremely confident. This time he got the financing he needed, most of it from his government but some from private subscribers who included the king himself. On June 24, 1893, from Christiania, Norway, to the cheers of the multitudes on shore, the little Fram set off. Everything about this tightly organized, carefully streamlined journey was in sharp contrast to the cumbersome expeditions of the British Navy. The Fram carried only thirteen men, each hand-picked by Nansen himself. There would be no feeling of rank or hierarchy. The work was to be apportioned evenly among Nansen, his captain, Otto Sverdrup, and the others.
The day was dull and gloomy, and Nansen’s own feelings matched the weather as he left his home and took the little launch out to the ship. He knew he faced years of exile in the frozen world. “Behind me lay all I held dear in life. And what before me? How many years should pass ere I should see it all again? What would I not have given at that moment to be able to turn back!” He could see his little daughter, Liv, framed in the window of his home, clapping her hands. How long would it be before he saw her again?
But in Nansen’s journal there are no entreaties to a protecting Deity, no fevered calls to ambition or even to national sentiment. “If, after all, we are on the wrong track, what then?” he wrote. “Only disappointed human hopes, nothing more. And even if we perish, what will it matter in the endless cycles of eternity?”
The main worry, he wrote in a bantering aside, was that they would have nothing to write about when they got home. In spite of the hours spent in scientific study – soundings and temperatures to be taken, magnetic observations to be recorded – there was a sense of lassitude that Nansen found hard to shake. “Here I am whining like an old woman,” he wrote. “Did I not know all this before I started?” At one point he dreamed that he had got to the Pole – but had taken no accurate observations! To Nansen, a dedicated scientist, the dream was close to being a nightmare.
To while away the time, he read Darwin, Schopenhauer, and the published journals of the earlier explorers, and edited a weekly journal, Framjaa. He agreed with David Hume, the English philosopher, that “he is more excellent who can suit his temperament to any circumstances”; that, he wrote, was the philosophy he was practising at the moment. It wasn’t always easy: “I long to return to life.… The years are passing here.… Oh! at times this inactivity crushes one’s very soul; one’s life seems as dark as the winter night outside; there is sunlight on no other part of it except the past and the far, far distant future. I feel I must break through this deadness, this inertia and find some outlet for my energies.”
How ironic that Nansen, in the indestructible Fram, almost hoped for something close to a catastrophe to break the monotony in the same way that the earlier explorers had prayed for a break from the grinding ice and screaming storms that threatened to wreck their vessels! “Can’t something happen?” he asked. “Could not a hurricane come and tear up this ice, and set it to rolling in high waves like the open sea?” But no untoward incident marred the voyage. The ice could not nip or crush the round-sided vessel. When the pressure built up around her she was simply squeezed upward to ride easily over the surrounding floes.
One thing was becoming clear: she would not pass over the Pole. With that knowledge Nansen found the excuse he needed to shake himself free of inaction. Scientific considerations were thrown aside as he prepared for another audacious exploit. He could no more resist the lure of the Pole than could his predecessors. In January 1895, he made plans for a dash by dogteam to the top of the world. Nansen, the pragmatic scientist, had been replaced by Nansen, the romantic adventurer.
The “exulting feeling of triumph deep in the soul” that swept over him when he realized his ship had reached a record latitude was tempered by “a wave of sadness … like bidding farewell to a dear friend” – the Fram. Never again, he wrote, “shall I tread this snow-clad deck … never again sit in this friendly circle.” Nor would he be on hand when the ship burst the bonds of ice and turned her prow homeward.
He well knew the danger he faced in setting off across that ravaged and frozen sea with a single companion. He wrote that a chill crept over him every time he gazed upon the map of the polar world. “The distance before us seems so long and the obstacles in our path may be many.” Yet he remained both optimistic and philosophical. In the immensity of the polar night, under the glittering vault of stars, bathed in the light of the flaming aurora, he felt his own insignificance. “Toiling ant,” he wrote, “what matters it, whether you reach your goal … or not!” On the other hand, he reassured himself that “everything is too carefully prepared to fail now.”
He fashioned his own snowshoes: “smooth, tough and light … they shall be well rubbed with tar, stearine and tallow, and there shall be speed in them.” He had no doubt his legs were up to the test. His companion would be Hjalmar Johansen, “a plucky fellow [who] never gives in.” They would take three light sledges, twenty-eight dogs, three kayaks, and food for one hundred days. On March 14, after a couple of false starts, they set off across a hummocky desert that no man had trodden before.
By early April, the going was so hard that Nansen began to have doubts about continuing. He had already recognized that they couldn’t reach the Pole. As Parry had discovered almost seventy years before, the ice was moving south as Nansen and Johansen struggled north. Yet he hated to give up. On the verge of despair, he almost turned back, but something impelled him to go on. He gave himself one more day – and then another. He had already gone farther north than any previous explorer, but he wanted to squeeze out the last possible mile for his record. At last, on April 8, 1895, he quit. He had reached 86° 13′ N.
Nansen’s Arctic drift and polar attempt, 1893-96
Now began a race with time. The closest wintering point would be Franz Josef Land, more than four hundred miles to the southwest. Could they make it before they starved or dropped from exhaustion? The prospect was horrifying, for there was no straight or positive path to their goal. Lanes of water known to the whalers as “leads” opened up before them, making it impossible to reckon the length of a day’s march. “What would I not give,” Nansen wrote, “to have a certain way before me … and be free from this never ending anxiety and uncertainty.… I am so tired that I stagger on my snowshoes, and when I fall down, only wish to lie there to save myself the trouble of getting up again.…”
He was forced to kill his dogs, one by one, as food for both men and beasts, using a knife to save precious bullets. Yet there was no use for bullets; for almost three months they saw no living creature – only an endless expanse of drift ice. In May they began to scan the horizon longingly, seeking land. A fortnight passed; nothing.
Nansen couldn’t understand it: they should have reached Franz Josef Land by this time. Perhaps they were farther east than they had thought. “We do not know where we are and we do not know when this will end,” he wrote on June 11. And later: “Shall we reach land while yet we have food …? A quarter of a year we have been wandering in this desert of ice, and here we are still. When we shall see the end of it. I can no longer form any idea.…”
The snow turned wet and “as soft and loose as scum,” clinging like glue to the sledge runners and to their boots, slowing their march to a crawl and exhausting the dogs. By June 16 there were only three animals left. More leads of water barred their way. That meant that the two men were forced to launch their kayaks, unload the sledges and place them across the little boats, and repeat the process in reverse when they reached the far side. On the last day of June, Nansen grimly surveyed their position: “Here we lie far up in the north: two grim, black soot-stained barbarians, stirring up a mess of soup in a kettle and surrounded on all sides by ice; by ice and nothing else – shining and white, possessed of all the purity we ourselves lack.…”
For days they were immobilized by the stickiness of the snow. Then, in mid-July, when the temperature rose, they began to push forward again, climbing pressure ridges that seemed as high as mountains with clefts between, splashing through ponds and puddles, and paddling across the dark, jagged leads in their kayaks. At last, on July 24, Johansen remarked on a curious black stripe on the horizon. At first he thought it was a cloud, but as they drew closer Nansen thought he saw something rising above the never-ending white line on the horizon. Could it be land?
As they approached, they realized that for the first time in almost two years they were seeing something other than the endless ice-choked sea. To Nansen it was like a vision, a fairyland. “Drift white, it arches above the horizon like distant clouds, which one is afraid will disappear every minute.” But it took the pair another month to reach it in their kayaks. It was some time before they realized they had reached one of the islands north of Franz
Josef Land.
Their ordeal was not over. The island was uninhabited; winter was closing in. They dug a three-foot hollow in the ground, piled stones above it, roofed it over with walrus skins, and, in this hovel, prepared to sit out the winter.
Since the land was teeming with walrus and polar bear they had plenty to eat. But the monotony was maddening. There was nothing to read but Nansen’s navigation table and pocket almanac: “… the sight of the printed letters gave one the feeling that there was, after all, a little bit of civilized man left.” They had exhausted all conversation and were reduced to playing fantasy games, talking of life at home and how they would spend the following winter. Most of the time they slept. Formal to the end, in the Norwegian manner they did not address each other by their Christian names.
On May 19, 1896, they headed south, hoping somehow to reach Spitzbergen. A month later they had crossed a frozen sound and reached one of the southern islands of Franz Josef Land. There, on the early morning of June 17, Nansen, having set a pot on the fire for breakfast, was about to creep back into his sleeping bag when he heard a sound from out of the mist above the screeching of auks and kittiwakes, a sound that reminded him of a barking dog. He dismissed it, but then he heard it again – a succession of barks. He woke Johansen, who didn’t believe him. Nansen, however, set off in the direction of the sound, finding what looked like dog tracks in the snow. Soon, he heard a series of canine yelps. For a moment, he thought he was in a dream, but then the sound of a human voice and a series of halloos caused his heart to pound and the blood to rush to his brain.
He stumbled forward through the ice ridges and saw in the distance, picking his way between the hummocks, the dark figure of a man approaching. This apparition wore an English checked suit and a pair of high rubber boots. The contrast was startling as the two raised their hats and greeted one another. The Englishman, shaved and well groomed, brought with him, in Nansen’s description, “a perfume of scented soap, perceptible to the wild man’s sharpened senses.” The wild man, clad in dirty rags, black with oil and soot, with long, uncombed hair and a shaggy beard, was unrecognizable.
The Arctic Grail Page 57