“In the flaming aurora borealis, the spirit of space hovers over the frozen waters. The soul bows down before the majesty of night and death.”

The great ordeal is over. I have finished reading Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North (okay, I skipped the final chapter, where Captain Otto Sverdrup finishes the ship Fram’s voyage, after Nansen and his companion have left on their own trek, kind of equivalent to an untethered space walk. Enough is enough). Although the book was interesting and vivid, the sheer length of the thing – along with the pain and discomfort involved in much of the adventure – made it feel as I’d been on the expedition myself. And I’m no outdoorsman.

I’ve been aboard Nansen’s ship Fram. They keep it in a museum in Oslo, near the Viking Ship Museum. So sturdy is the old tub that they permit tourists to clamber aboard and poke around in the cabins (I call it a “tub” advisedly, for reasons I’ll explain). I was looking around yesterday for a picture of me on board, to post here, but I don’t seem to have had one taken. I’d just seen the Viking ships for the first time, and that was about all I could think about.

Nansen was a young, innovative scientist and explorer, a 19^th Century rationalist. He was the arctic explorer who figured out that large, ship-borne expeditions weren’t the way to approach the North Pole. Dog teams and sleds, those were his idea (or so I understand). But his initial theory was that a current carries polar ice westward from north of Siberia, and that that current would carry a ship to the North Pole, if the ship was built properly. Fram was not built for its sailing qualities (which were poor) but for its smooth, round hull shape. He calculated that a properly constructed ship (if heavily braced within) would not be crushed by the pack ice but lifted by it. This idea proved correct. The Fram was essentially a manned buoy. It worked so well that it also served several later expeditions, including Roald Amundsen’s. Nansen’s account of the year he spent in the ice on the ship makes it sound positively “koselig” (as the Norwegians say). They seldom needed to use the stoves, and the men fretted about gaining weight.

The part of the theory that involved drifting to the Pole worked out less well. They got up to 85⁰ north latitude, but then realized they wouldn’t get any further that way. So Nansen, along with his companion Hjalmar Johansen, set off with dog sleds and skis. What followed was harrowing. The ice and snow of the ice cap proved to be extremely rugged and difficult to cross, and in time, somewhere above 86⁰ N., they gave it up. They had at least traveled further north than any human beings ever had, and that record stood a while.

Their retreat was even worse than the push north. As their supplies dwindled, they began (as planned) to kill their dogs one by one to feed to the other dogs. They often came to open water hard to cross, and faced attack from walruses and polar bears (though they got their own back, eating both whenever they could kill them). Finally the dogs and the ice pack both gave out and they took to their kayaks. They spent a miserable winter in a stone-built hut, huddled in a double sleeping bag, trying to hibernate. And at last, in the third year, they encountered an English expedition in Frans Josef Land and got passage home, national heroes.

The sheer endurance of these explorers is almost incomprehensible to a couch potato like me. Good planning prevented their suffering much from malnutrition, but they nearly worked themselves to death, shivered through storms, got dunked in subzero sea water, went months without seeing the sun, and were never entirely sure where they were. (Oddly, they gained weight, even on the final retreat, probably because of their idle winter in the hut.) The achievement is nearly unbelievable.

Readers of tender heart should be warned – many animals were harmed in the making of this story. Generally animals are killed for food (though not always), but Nansen tends to describe them in anthropomorphic terms, which makes one pity them. He seems to feel badly about it himself.

If you’re interested in arctic adventure, Farthest North is a compelling story. For this reader it was too long, but that’s just me. It’s a mark of the book’s inherent interest and good writing (decent translation, too) that I read it through pretty much to the end.

One odd point – Nansen keeps talking about “snow-shoes.” Eventually one figures out he means skis. The translator didn’t use that word because skis weren’t familiar to English speakers at that point in history.