A hand photogravure of "the Fram" in the ice.

The idea was a simple one - so simple that the story that accompanies it sounds apocryphal. Fridtjof Nansen, famed athlete - he won the national cross-country skiing championship twelve times in succession, and at eighteen broke the world record for one-mile skating - and holder of a doctorate in neuroanatomy had got involved in exploration when he completed the first crossing of Greenland in 1888. Having got a taste for it he decided to try for the north pole. The story goes that years earlier he was on board a ship when he observed driftwood in the ice and guessed that it had been carried along by the current. That was when the idea came to him. The plan was to sail north east until they encountered ice, allow the ship to be trapped then let the ice carry it and him to the north pole.All he needed was a ship, with a specially designed bottom which would enable it to sit on the ice without breaking up and a crew who could afford to spend three years sitting around doing nothing (slight exaggeration here).

The ship was "the Fram" and the idea was a clever one. Nansen and his crew set off in 1893 and neither he nor the crew got back until 1896. I say he and the crew because although the idea was clever the ice was not quite so predictable as he thought and it became apparent that "the Fram" would travel north but not all the way to the north pole. Undaunted, Nansen and Johansen, one of the crew, set off across the ice with two sledges and two dog teams. Their intention was to race for the pole with a minimum of rations then return eating their dogs along the way.

One of Nansen's excellent sketches

They got to latitude 86° 14' N before they were forced to give up. They then headed south across the ice until they reached the chain of islands around Franz Josef Land, alternately canoing and sledgehopping the islands. They spent the long (nine months) winter of 1895/96 in the darkness of a hut writing by candlelight. Unable to wash, Nansen notes that the dirt from his hands makes the paper blacker than the marks of the pencil.

Nansen, Johansen and the last dogs.

When the spring came they resumed their island hopping, finally reaching Cape Flora where they arrive at a British base. Nansen writes how he encounters an Englishman, named Jackson, whom he recognised. Jackson is described as having a "an English check suit and high rubber water-boots, well shaved, well groomed, bringing with him a perfume of scented soap..." whilst Nansen is "the wild man clad in dirty rags, black with oil and soot, with long, uncombed hair and shaggy beard, black with smoke, with a face in which the natural fair complexion could not possibly be discerned through the thick layer of fat and soot".

Nansen and Johansen then boarded a ship for Norway. "The Fram", meanwhile had continued to frift until it had broke free of the ice. It then headed for Norway. The two separate parties reached Norway within a week of each other.

Nansen' exploring days were now over. He failed to reach the pole but encouraged another Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, who was to reach the south pole ahead of Scott. Nansen even lent Amundsen "the Fram". Thereafter Nansen became alternately a campaigner for Norwegian independence from Sweden, Norway's first ambassador to London, supporter of the League of Nations and Nobel prizewinner for his work with Russian refugees. He was also looked the part of the handsome Victorian hero as this picture of him with his wife shows. He was also reputed to be a bad husband, bad father and great womaniser. Whilst Scott was busily getting himself killed in Antarctica, Nansen was shagging Mrs Kathleen Scott in a Berlin hotel room.

Nansen's last dog, "Kaifas"

As an expedition leader he had none of Shackleton's qualities of leadership but his many of his ideas were sound and his expeditions were very successful. His attitude to dogs, for example, was pragmatic. He was capable of admiring the pulling power and courage of a dog and still feed it to the other dogs.

"On Wednesday evening 'Haren' was killed; poor beast, he was not good for much latterly, but he had been a first rate dog, and it was hard, I fancy, for Johansen to part with him; he looked sorrowfully at the animal before it went to the happy hunting-grounds, or wherever it may be that draught-dogs go to.."

The two last dogs were killed when they were no longer useful.

"Faithful and enduring, they had followed us the whole journey through; and now that better times had come, they must say farewell to life. Destroy them in the same way as the others, we could not; we sacrificed a cartridge on each of them. I shot Johansen's, and he shot mine."

Gets you right there don't it.

Still if Scott had listened to Nansen he wouldn't have died out in the antarctic and he could have returned to give Nansen a good thumping.

Next - Nansen and the Polar Bears