Introduction
In the summer of 1882 I was on board the Viking, a Norwegian sealer, which was caught in the ice off that part of the east coast of Greenland which is still unexplored, or, more precisely, somewhere in the neighbourhood of lat. 66° 50’ N. For more than three weeks we were absolutely fixed, and every day, to the terror of the crew, we drifted nearer to the rocky coast. Behind the fields of floating ice lay peaks and glaciers glittering in the day-light, and at evening and through the night, when the sun sank lowest and set the heavens in a blaze behind them, the wild beauty of the scene was raised to its highest. Many times a day from the maintop were my glasses turned westwards, and it is not to be wondered at that a young man’s fancy was drawn irresistibly to the charms and mysteries of this unknown world. Unceasingly did I ponder over plans for reaching this coast, which so many had sought in vain, and I came to the conclusion that it must be possible to reach it, if not by forcing a ship through the ice, which was the method tried hitherto, then by crossing the floes on foot and dragging one’s boat with one. One day, indeed, I incontinently proposed to make the attempt and walk over the ice to shore alone, but this scheme came to nothing because the captain conceived that he could not in the circumstances allow any one to leave the ship for a length of time.
On my return I was asked to write an article in the Danish Geografisk Tidskrift, and in this I expressed it as my opinion that it would be possible to reach the east coast of Greenland without any very great difficulty if the expedition forced their way as far as practicable into the ice on board a Norwegian sealer, and then left the ship and passed over the floes to shore. I will not say that I had not at this time some notion more or less visionary of penetrating from the coast into the interior, but it was not till a later occasion that the idea took a definite form.
One autumn evening in the following year – I remember it still as if it were only yesterday – I was sitting and listening indifferently as the day’s paper was being read. Suddenly my attention was roused by a telegram which told us that the explorer Nordenskiöld had come back safe from his expedition to the interior of Greenland, that he had found no oasis, but only endless snowfields, on which his Lapps were said to have covered, on their ski,1 an extraordinary long distance in an as
