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In 1888 Norwegian explorer and scientist Fridtjof Nansen led an expedition to the North Pole in the Fram, a ship designed specially to withstand the pressure of ice in the frozen waters of the Arctic Ocean. Nansen’s expedition was part of a decades-long rivalry among explorers who sought to be the first to reach the North Pole or the South Pole. This article from an October 1896 issue of National Geographic reports on Nansen’s expedition and the hardships that Nansen and his crew faced. An American expedition led by Robert E. Peary is generally credited with being the first to reach the North Pole, arriving there on April 6, 1909.
Special Report of the Hon. Ernest A. Man,
On the 17th day of June, 1896, as some of the men of the English Jackson and Harmsworth expedition, in Franz Josef land, were looking out over the ice they discovered a weird figure advancing towards them, with long straggling hair and beard and garments covered with grease and blood stains, who proved to be none other than Dr Fridtjof Nansen, who fifteen months previous had left his ship, the Fram, at 83° 59′ north latitude and 102° 27′ east longitude in order to push on with sleds, boats, and dogs towards the Pole. In a shelter some distance off was Dr Nansen's companion, Lieutenant Johansen.
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A few weeks later the Fram arrived safely at Skjervö, Norway, some days after Nansen's return home. While Nansen did not reach the hoped-for goal, the results of the expedition promise to be of value to the scientific world and of inestimable assistance to future efforts in the same direction.
The Fram, with a company of thirteen men, left Vardö, Norway, the 21st of July, 1893, and proceeded eastward through the Kara sea, rounded cape Chelyuskin, and on the 10th of September was off the mouth of the Olenek river. There they expected to go in to obtain additional dogs, but, finding that owing to the shoals and rocks and lateness of the season they would probably get locked in the ice and thus be delayed a year, they at once took a northerly course into the open Arctic Ocean until September 22, when at 78° 50′ north latitude and 138° 37′ east longitude they made the vessel fast to an ice-field. From this point they began drifting with the ice in a northerly and northwesterly direction, according to the plan laid out by Nansen, and by which be hoped to drift near or over the Pole, as was supposed to have been the process by which the effects of the Jeannette expedition reached the eastern coast of Greenland.
As had been anticipated, the drift was most rapid in the winter and spring. During the summer months they were hindered by the prevailing north winds. They continued drifting with the ice in this manner for nearly eighteen months, when, having reached on March 3, 1895, 84° 4′ north latitude, and finding they were drifting to the southward again, Nansen determined that the time had come in which to leave the ship and make the attempt to reach the highest possible north by other methods—a decision in which he was perfectly justified, as the Fram was over then at a more northerly point than had been attained by any previous expedition.
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Having given the command of the Fram over to Sverdrup, who had been his companion on his Greenland expedition, and accepted the offer of Lieutenant Johansen, who volunteered to accompany him—though warned by Dr Nansen that it was at the risk of his life to do so—the two men, on the 14th of March, 1895, at 83° 59′ north latitude and 102° 27′ east longitude, left the ship. They took with them 28 dogs, 3 sleds, 2 kayaks or canvas-covered canoes, food for the dogs for thirty days, and provisions for themselves for three months. From the 14th of March until the 7th of April they struggled onward, making their way on snowshoes or drifting on ice-floes, either northerly or southerly, with loose ice driving up around them into formidable heights over which it was wellnigh impossible to transport the boats and sleds, and with the thermometer almost steadily at 40° below zero, Fahrenheit.
On April 7 the odds against which they were laboring became decisive; there was no prospect of scaling the ice-barriers around them. They were then at 86° 14′ north latitude. Dr Nansen put on his snowshoes and took a last reconnoitering tour to the northward. As far as the eye could reach lay great bodies of ice driving before the wind, with no land or any indication of the same perceptible. It was apparent to Nansen that under these circumstances, and with the number of their dogs already decreasing, they had proceeded as far as it was practicable, and he therefore decided that they would start upon their return journey, taking a southerly course toward Franz Josef land, intending to proceed from there to Spitzbergen, where he knew they would be sure to find a ship which would carry them home.
They set forth on the 8th day of April, 1895, and on the 12th their watches stopped, which of course threw them out of their longitudinal reckoning somewhat, but they bravely went on, overcoming the most discouraging obstacles, sometimes gaining long distances on their snowshoes, and again drifting with the ice several miles back to the northward. Toward the last of June they concluded to make a sort of camp and wait for the ice to break up somewhat. Their food was giving out and they had but two dogs left, so they began to depend on walrus and bear meat for their sustenance. It was a month of hardships, but on the 23d of July they pushed on again with health unbroken, toward land, which they sighted the next day. July 24, at about 82° north latitude.
At that time of the year the ice was considerably broken up, and, as it was unsafe in the boats, they were obliged to travel over the floating ice, leaping from one ice-field to another, and in this difficult and dangerous way proceeded towards the land they had sighted, and which was reached the 6th day of August, at 81° 38′ north latitude and about 63° east longitude, and proved to be three snow-covered islands, to the west of which they found open water, and through this they made their way in a westerly and southwesterly direction until August 26th, at 81° 12′ north latitude and about 56° east longitude, when they set foot upon land—Franz Josef land—where Dr Nansen considered it advisable to prepare themselves for spending the dark winter months, as it was too late to continue the journey to Spitzbergen. Thus they had been more than five months wandering over the Arctic ice-fields and in the Polar sea without a roof to cover them, even without furs, which they had left in order to limit their impediments to the strictest necessities.
The hut they put up was constructed of stone and turf, covered with walrus skins, and was twelve feet long and six feet wide, with a door made of bear skin. Here they spent nine dreary months, depending upon their own efforts for food, as their last dog had been killed before they reached land. They had started with twenty-eight dogs, but as soon as the provisions for them gave out they had to kill the weakest, one after another, in order to feed the remaining pack. During this terrible winter bear meat was their main dependence—in fact, these two men shot nineteen bears during their adventurous fifteen months. The fat was used both as fuel and light, a lamp having been constructed out of the metal work of the sleds. They were also obliged to make themselves sleeping bags and winter clothing of furs.
On the 19th of May, 1896, the days having become sufficiently bright, and with a supply of bear meat and the hope of finding some game on the way and making a speedy journey homeward, they set out for Spitzbergen. On May 23d they came to open water, at 81° 5′ north latitude, but were delayed by a heavy gale until the 3d of June. They saw a large body of land in the west, with open water spreading out to the north and west of it, but they concluded to go over the ice to the southward, into a broad unknown strait. When they reached the southern end of this strait they found the open sea to the westward. It was while struggling over the ice off the coast of this land that they came upon the Jackson-Harnsworth expedition, which happened on the morning of the 17th of June, 1896. It was Nansen's turn to cook that day, and he had risen early to get breakfast, while Johanson lay in under the shelter they had constructed of the two kayaks and the sails of their sleds. Suddenly Nansen called out. 'I hear the barking of dogs; there must be people near.' Johanson sprang up, but could hear nothing. In the meantime they decided to finish their meal, and then Nansen went forth to search for the source of the sounds he had heard. He had not been gone long when Johansen distinctly heard the barking of dogs himself, and not long thereafter a party of men from the Jackson expedition made their appearance. They prepared at once to take Johansen and the camping effects with them to the Jackson headquarters, where Nansen had preceded them. Among the articles they took with them were the kayaks, or flat-bottomed canvas boats, which had carried the two men for so many days. They were made of a frame of bamboo, covered with sailcloth. One boat had been made by Nansen and the other by Mogstad, the carpenter on the Fram. They weighed some twenty pounds each, and were about twenty feet long, completely decked over, with a hole in the middle for the rower, and in each end a smaller opening through which to get at the provisions and anything else stowed under the bows and stern. These boats were now perfectly black with the grease and oil which had been smeared over them continually to keep them water-tight. Besides the boats, there were the sleeping-bags, old and ragged, their snowshoes, paddles, guns, bear-skin traces for dragging the sleds, etc. Their only cooking utensil was exceedingly primitive, and in the bottom of it were left the remains of the last meal cooked in it, a sort of soup, made of salt water, the meal of a young walrus, and a little corn meal. It is said that it would be impossible for the civilized world to picture to itself the appearance of Nansen and Johansen as they stood before the English explorers, their beards long and unkempt, their hair hanging in wild disorder upon their shoulders, and their clothing stiff and dark with the accumulated grease and blood of the animals they had slaughtered and cooked during fifteen months of unexampled existence.
On August 13, 1896, the Jackson expedition's ship, the Windward, landed them at Vardö, Norway, and on the 20th of the same month the Fram came steaming into Skjervö, near Hammerfest, and thus the whole expedition was once more on its native shores, every man alive and hearty, and the Fram itself without a timber injured.
After Nansen left the Fram in Captain Sverdrup's charge it continued its, on the whole, northwesterly drift, sometimes veering a little to the southward, and then gaining something in the wished-for direction northward, and again lying cradled in ice, from which it was several times freed by charges of powder, sometimes as large a charge as 110 pounds being exploded in the ice.
On the 16th of October, 1895, seven months after Nansen left them, the Fram reached her highest latitude, viz., 85° 57′ north latitude, in longitude 66° east. After this the drift was to the southward again, and when the ice broke up this summer of 1896 the most energetic efforts were made to free the Fram and get her through the vast fields of ice out to open water. This was finally successful, and on the 13th of August, the very day of Nansen's arrival at Vardö, the Fram reached the open sea, with no more obstacles between her and a home port. No one had been ill or injured during the voyage and not a case of scurvy had occurred. Cheerfulness reigned, and the amusements with which the long, dark winters were beguiled were only disturbed now and then by a feeling of anxiety caused by the crunching and grinding of the masses of ice crowding against the ship's sides. The electric light, with its windmill and accumulators, was a great success. When the wind failed, the men were ready and willing to take needed exercise by turning the capstan, and thus supplying the deficiency. No land was seen above the 82° of latitude. During the Fram's voyage soundings from the north of the New Siberian islands to north of Spitzbergen showed the minimum depth to be 1,600 fathoms and minimum 2,000 fathoms, which upsets all theories as to a shallow Polar basin in the European Arctic ocean. One peculiar feature of this Polar sea is that the upper space of water to a depth of about 100 fathoms is ice cold, while below it there is a stratum of water showing a half degree of warmth (Celsius) and reaching to a depth of about 380 fathoms, below which it is again cold. This may, possibly, be owing to the Gulf stream. There was a great dearth of organic life, none whatever being found in the greater ocean depths, and no signs of animal life in the higher latitudes, excepting an occasional migratory bird, so that the idea of organic life prevailing in the upper regions about the Pole is erroneous.
While many contend that Nansen's theory of a Polar current flowing across the Pole on to the east coast of Greenland seems to have been correct, there are strong arguments against it, and Sverdrup, who was in command of the Fram when she made her most northerly record, seems to think that there is no regular current, but that the movements of the ice masses are mainly governed by the winds. On the other hand, from a look at the chart showing the entire drift of the Fram, there would seem to be a reasonable probability that if the Fram had taken the course originally intended by Nansen, viz., had gone farther to the eastward and entered the ice-fields to the northeast of the New Siberian islands instead of the northwest, she might have drifted farther north, if not over the Pole itself. However that may be, it is said that Dr Nansen himself has stated that should he undertake another expedition in that direction it would not be by means of a ship, but with sleds, kayaks, and dogs, with Franz Josef land as a starting-point, and depending mainly on the resources of the regions about him for subsistence.
Whatever may be thought of the wisdom and usefulness of such expeditions, all must admire the superior courage of these two Norwegians, and especially Dr Nansen, who, fully appreciating the full extent of the deadly perils they were to encounter, had also the sagacity and ability to foresee and prepare for almost the minutest details of their undertaking. The fact of these men, after having passed through the terrible rigors of two Arctic winters, stepping over the side of their sheltering ship into the unknown wastes of this high latitude, with no expectation of rejoining her there, and marching with their dogs straight into the terrible north, required an amount of splendid courage impossible to excel; and that they were able to live through fifteen months of these conditions shows a physical superiority as great as their daring, in which, no doubt, their well-known abilities as sportsmen and athletes was a very important factor.
Source: Man, Ernest A. “The Nansen Polar Expedition.” National Geographic, October 1896.
Appears in
Nansen, Fridtjof; Exploration, Geographic; Fram; Sverdrup, Otto Neumann Knoph; Polar Exploration; Arctic
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