The Worst Journey in the World Read Online Free Page A

possible to, the Pole. For this purpose the
most famous of Arctic ships was built, called the Fram. She was designed
by Colin Archer, and was saucer-shaped, with a breadth one-third of her
total length. With most of the expert Arctic opinion against him, Nansen
believed that this ship would rise and sit on the top of the ice when
pressed, instead of being crushed. Of her wonderful voyage with her
thirteen men, of how she was frozen into the ice in September 1893 in the
north of Siberia (79° N.) and of the heaving and trembling of the ship
amidst the roar of the ice pressure, of how the Fram rose to the occasion
as she was built to do, the story has still, after twenty-eight years,
the thrill of novelty. She drifted over the eightieth degree on February
2, 1894. During the first winter Nansen was already getting restive: the
drift was so slow, and sometimes it was backwards: it was not until the
second autumn that the eighty-second degree arrived. So he decided that
he would make an attempt to penetrate northwards by sledging during the
following spring. As Nansen has told me, he felt that the ship would do
her job in any case. Could not something more be done also?
    This was one of the bravest decisions a polar explorer has ever taken. It
meant leaving a drifting ship which could not be regained: it meant a
return journey over drifting ice to land; the nearest known land was
nearly five hundred miles south of the point from which he started
northwards; and the journey would include travelling both by sea and by
ice.
    Undoubtedly there was more risk in leaving the Fram than in remaining in
her. It is a laughable absurdity to say, as Greely did after Nansen's
almost miraculous return, that he had deserted his men in an ice-beset
ship, and deserved to be censured for doing so. [13] The ship was left in
the command of Sverdrup. Johansen was chosen to be Nansen's one
companion, and we shall hear of him again in the Fram, this time with
Amundsen in his voyage to the South.
    The polar traveller is so interested in the adventure and hardships of
Nansen's sledge journey that his equipment, which is the most important
side of his expedition to us who have gone South, is liable to be
overlooked. The modern side of polar travel begins with Nansen. It was
Nansen who first used a light sledge based upon the ski sledge of Norway,
in place of the old English heavy sledge which was based upon the Eskimo
type. Cooking apparatus, food, tents, clothing and the thousand and one
details of equipment without which no journey nowadays stands much chance
of success, all date back to Nansen in the immediate past, though beyond
him of course is the experience of centuries of travellers. As Nansen
himself wrote of the English polar men: "How well was their equipment
thought out and arranged with the means they had at their disposal!
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. Most of what I prided myself
upon, and what I thought to be new, I find they had anticipated.
M'Clintock used the same things forty years ago. It was not their fault
that they were born in a country where the use of snowshoes is
unknown...." [14]
    All the more honour to the men who dared so much and travelled so far
with the limited equipment of the past. The real point for us is that,
just as Scott is the Father of Antarctic sledge travelling, so Nansen may
be considered the modern Father of it all.
    Nansen and Johansen started on March 14 when the Fram was in latitude 84°
4' N., and the sun had only returned a few days before, with three
sledges (two of which carried kayaks) and 28 dogs. They reached their
northern-most camp on April 8, which Nansen has given in his book as
being in latitude 86° 13.6' N. But Nansen tells me that Professor
Geelmuyden, who had his astronomical results and his diary, reckoned that
owing to refraction the horizon was lifted, and if so the observation had
to be reduced accordingly. Nansen therefore gave the reduced latitude in
his book, but he