Foreword
Fergus Fleming
By 1890 governments in Europe and America were sick of the North Pole. They had been trying to reach it for so long; the race had cost so much in terms of money and lives; and, frankly, what was the point of it? Wild fantasies abounded as to what lay there — a continent, a sea, a hole leading to the centre of the globe — but if it was nothing save a sheet of empty ice, as an increasing number suspected was the case, then further expeditions were futile; science could be served equally profitably and far more safely by the ring of Arctic observatories that had been set up in the International Polar Year of 1882. Anyway, the question was hypothetical because the North Pole was unattainable. Certain individuals thought otherwise. Between 1894 and 1914 they launched repeated expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic, raising funds where they could find them and utilising every new piece of technology as it became available. Their exploits, which climaxed with the conquest of the North Pole by Robert Peary in 1909 (so he said) and that of the South Pole by Roald Amundsen in 1911, were a triumph of private enterprise over public intervention. But they were also a triumph of sensationalism over sense — all too often the desire for fame resulted in death and disaster. It was a peculiarly driven era, marked by examples of courage and incompetence, failure and success, fierce individualism and hamfisted planning, wild dreams and sober assessments. Historians have dubbed it the Age of Heroes; and they credit Fridtjof Nansen as its inaugurator.
Nansen never particularly wanted to be a polar explorer. Born on 10 October 1861, he was by training a neuroscientist — rather a good one: certain nerves still bear his name — but he came to prominence in 1888 when, on a whim, and to prove that traditional man-hauled sledging methods were wrong, he used skis to make the first crossing of Greenland’s ice cap. Thereafter he was infected by what 19th-century writers called “the Arctic virus.” As he apologised to an inquirer in 1892, “It is rather more accidental circumstances that have forced me into this line… A great many plans and ideas how to explore the unknown Arctic regions have forced themselves upon my mind almost without my help and will, and now I think it my duty to try whether they are not right (as I feel convinced they are) though it is almost with pain that I think of my microscope and my histological work.” On 24 June 1893, he sailed aboard theFram from Christiania (modern Oslo) to put his plans to the test.
The voyage of theFramwas the most audacious and most successful polar experime
