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been named Thule—from Shetland to Iceland, then to Norway, Estonia, Greenland and finally to Spitsbergen.

FORWARD
    THE MAN OF BONE CONFIRMS HIS THRONE
IN CAVE WHERE FOSSILS BE
 
OUTDATING EVERY MUMMY KNOWN,
NOT OLDER CUVIER’S MASTODON,
NOR OLDER MUCH THE SEA:
 
OLD AS THE GLACIAL PERIOD, HE;
AND CLAIMS HE CALLS TO MIND THE DAY
 
WHEN THULE’S KING, BY REINDEER DRAWN,
HIS SLEIGH-BELLS JINGLING IN ICY MORN,
SLID CLEAN FROM THE POLE TO THE WETTERHORN
 
OVER FROZEN WATERS IN MAY!
    Â 
“THE MAN OF THE CAVE OF ENGIHOUL,” HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)
    Â 
 
By way of prelude I made a trip to Oslo, to look at Nansen’s boat, the boat he made to sail beyond Thule in. I wanted to start my trail with him, with his polar ambitions and his sense of the far north. Of all the polar explorers, he was the most compelling to me. He had lived through a crux time, when a great surge of explorers was coming closer and closer to the unknown edges of the globe: the North and South Poles. Once these points were reached, thousands of years of fantasy and speculation about what lay at the extremes of the earth would be replaced by concrete knowledge. Nansen was born in 1861, when Norway was a poor country, its inhabitants struggling to survive on fishing and farming. Powered from an early age by ravenous ambition, Nansen stared intently out of early photographs, a man with blond hair and a powerful jaw, tall and strong. He looked excellent on a horse; he cut a fine figure in a uniform, but was equally suited to the rags and beards of Arctic exploration. He was a neurologist, he was awarded a doctorate; he hunched himself over microscopes in Norwegian research laboratories, but became restless. Yearning for grand vistas, the empty spaces of the north, he set off for Greenland, making the first known crossing of the ice-bound country in 1888. He returned to Norway a national hero, hailed as an explorer in the Viking tradition. In 1889, still short of thirty, he decided he needed another challenge and opted for the North Pole, a place still taunting explorers, lingering out of sight in the shadows beyond the maps. Nansen decided he would build the perfect Arctic boat, and end the ancient argument about the far north.
    Writing an account of his journey towards the North Pole, a brilliant and egomaniacal description called Farthest North , Nansen reached for a way to attach his expedition to the ancient history of exploration in the far north. He rummaged in his remembered store of tales, and found the old idea of Thule. He used lines from Seneca as the epigraph to the book, creating a symbolic focus for his journey: ‘A time will come in later years when the Ocean will unloose the bands of things, when the immeasurable earth will lie open, when seafarers will discover new countries, and Thule will no longer be the extreme point among the islands.’ The extract from Seneca’s Medea hinted at it all, entwining the longings and optimism, the silence of the Arctic night and the terrible beauty of the drifting ice with the old story of the land of Thule. Nansen had been much preoccupied with the deathly kingdom he planned to enter and by the presumptuous nature of his enterprise. By opening his account with Thule he claimed a victory against the old superstitions, the dusty old pile of fantasies about the far north. Thule had been the most northerly place for the early geographers, but Nansen was aiming to clear up the lingering mysteries, and sail even beyond Thule.
    The mountains were coated in frosted trees and on the streets of Oslo the snow was stacked up. The tramtracks were slender pencil lines on a white page. The pavements were coated in layers of sludge snow and ice, trampled down during the winter. Everyone shuffled on the ice, a city of people wrapped in winter clothes. Snow fell, white swirls from a blank sky. The mountains loomed into the whiteness. There was a castle, glazed with ice, and a