#nansen

Fridtjof Nansen (10 October, 1861- 13 May 1930) was born at Store  Frøen, near Oslo. His father, a prosperous lawyer, was a religious man  with a clear conception of personal duty and moral principle; his mother  was a strong minded, athletic woman who introduced her children to  outdoor life and encouraged them to develop physical skills.

And Nansen’s athletic prowess was to prove of the utmost importance to his career. He became expert in skating, tumbling, and swimming, but it was  his expertise in skiing that was to play such a large role in his life.  Not massively built, Nansen was tall, supple, strong, hard. He possessed  the physical endurance to ski fifty miles in a day and the  psychological self-reliance to embark on long trips, with a minimum of  gear and only his dog for company.

As a boy Nansen strapped improvised skis to his feet at the age of two and soon became proficient. At the age of 10 he defied his parents to  attempt the ski jump at Huseby – a forerunner of the Holmenkollbakken –  and almost met an untimely end when his skis stuck on landing and threw  the young boy forwards. His school friends were concerned until he  showed signs of life and then broke into cheers and laughter at his  crazy feat!

At school, Nansen was fairly average, much preferring sports to  studying. He’d frequently take off into the forest and live like a  survivalist for weeks on end. He became a highly accomplished skier and  skater. At the age of 18 he broke the world record for one-mile skating  and a year later won the first of his 12 national cross-country skiing  championships.

In 1880, Nansen secured a place at The Royal Frederick University in Oslo and chose to read Zoology – a subject he hoped would lead to an active,  outdoor life.

Fridtjof Nansen and his wife, Eva. Eva Helene Nansen was a celebrated Norwegian mezzo-soprano singer. She was also a pioneer of women's skiing.

His life course was perhaps set in 1882 when a professor  suggested he take a sea voyage to study Arctic zoology at first hand. He shipped on the sealer Viking to the east coast of  Greenland. On this trip of four and a half months, the scientist in him  made observations on seals and bears which, years later, he updated and  turned into a book; but at the same time the adventurer became entranced  by this world of sea and ice.

The trip then was a success, allowing Nansen to develop and demonstrate various theories about the Gulf stream, the formation of Arctic Ice etc.  He also first got the idea that Greenland could be traversed –  something no one had done at this point. He never returned to his  studies. In  the next fifteen years he united his athletic ability, his scientific  interests, his yearning for adventure, and even his talent for drawing  in a series of brilliant achievements that brought him international  fame.

Obtaining the post of zoological curator at the Bergen Museum later  that year, Nansen spent the next six years in intensive scientific  study, punctuating his work with visits to some of the great  laboratories on the Continent and once by an extraordinary trek across  Norway from Bergen to Oslo and back on skis. In 1888 he successfully  defended his dissertation on the central nervous system of certain lower  vertebrates for the doctorate at the University of Oslo.

All throughout his time in Bergen, Nansen had the idea of crossing  the Greenland icecap. The furthest anyone had managed was around 100  miles East of Disko Bay before turning back. But Nansen had though a lot  about this, and he had an idea! The problem, he figured, was that the West of Greenland was inhabited  but the East was a harsh and barren wasteland. Therefore, any trek East  from civilisation would ultimately have to be a double-trek across and  back because no ships could get close enough to the East coast. So, any  such journey was doomed to fail. Instead, Nansen planned to travel West  from the harsh East towards civilisation.

Nansen developed his plan to cross Greenland after reading the accounts  of Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and Robert Peary, who had travelled eastwards  from Disko Bay in 1883 and 86 respectively. Both had travelled by  dog-sled. The interior of Greenland was still a blank spot on the maps,  so expeditions did not even fully know what conditions they had to  prepare for. Nansen was convinced by Peary’s report that Greenland was  entirely covered by ice and snow. However, he did not have an experience  with hauling animals, since dog-sleds were entirely unknown in  Scandinavia. The Lapps used Reindeer, and Nansen briefly considered  using those, but they would not find any food in Greenland, so he  abandoned the idea, and instead chose to cater to his greatest strength:  skiing.

Skiing was a popular method of transportation in 19th century Norway and  had already become a national sport with competitions held in major  cities. Peary had pioneered using skis on polar expeditions,  but Nansen’s super-human skiing ability was what set him apart.  He had already in 1884 undertaken a ski tour from Bergen to Kristiania,  covering over 300 km in only 6 days, to take part in a ski race two days  after his arrival. Even with modern equipment that would be an  outstanding feat, but with 19th-century skis, it becomes downright  insane. As we all know, skiing is still the primary means of transport  for Polar explorers today.

Nansen had only 6 months to prepare for his Greenland expedition, so he  had to make the best of the skills he already had. He knew that he could  not cross Greenland alone, so he had to recruit a small team to help  him out, and he had to do it fast. Since skiing was his strength, his  team could not slow him down and he focused his team composition efforts  on getting accomplished skiers on board. This was probably the weakest  area of Nansen’s planning for Greenland, and could well have sunk his  whole expedition.

At first, though, it seemed like he was off to a great start. On the  same day the newspaper published his plans, he received an application  to join the expedition from Henrik Angell. Angell was a ski pioneer  himself and an army officer. In spring of 1884, he had made the first  documented ski crossing of the Hardangervidda, a Norwegian plateau that  is famous for its primordial landscapes offering hostile conditions  similar to the ones encountered in the Arctic. Many Polar expeditions  trained here, and many companies today still offer training courses on  the plateau. Nansen, however, did not want educated Norwegians like  Angell to join his expedition. Despite being the best example of the  contrary himself, he was under the impression that simple countryfolk  would be better suited to the extreme conditions posed by the Arctic.  What he did not realise was that it was the educated Norwegians whose  imagination was sparked by the idea of crossing Greenland. A simple  farmer did not share Nansen’s desire to achieve the extraordinary.

Perhaps one of the gravest mistakes in terms of composing his team  was to literally buy two Lapps via telegram from Northern Norway to join  his expedition, without ever having met any of them. One did not even  speak Norwegian. Unsurprisingly, the Lapps felt out of place during the  expedition, with the older one even refusing to do his assigned tasks at  times.

But it wasn’t only the Lapps who contributed to friction within the  team. Nansen did not trust the others enough to take on some tasks. He  was the only one allowed to handle the stove to heat snow because he was  afraid the others would try to drink the high-percentage alcohol used  as fuel.

Today, team psychology is its own area of research and getting the  right composition of personalities is emphasised. Dr Nathan Smith has an  excellent introductory online course on the topic, that I recommend to  everyone planning to work in extreme environments. Nansen soon learnt  many of these lessons for himself though, and for his second expedition,  he took much greater care to compose a functioning team.

Nansen was right, however, to realise that taking more people would  not grant any advantage on the kind of expedition he had planned. A team  can only move as fast as its weakest member. Travelling in small groups  has become the norm in Polar exploration, with many historic firsts  having been achieved by only two people working together.

A new style of expedition requires a new kind of equipment. Nansen  knew that, and he was busy finding the best providers for items he  required. As with the team, everything started with skiing. While Nansen  could carry all his supplies for his tour from Bergen to Oslo on his  back, crossing Greenland would require him to man-haul a sledge. The  sledges of the time had very narrow runners, which sank deeply into soft  snow, making them impossible to pull via skis which are designed to  glide, not grip.

The Lapps used a boat-like form, the pulk, but that was designed for  soft snow and hard ice would destroy a sledge very fast. Nansen finally  found inspiration in the sledges used by Norwegian farmers, which had  broad ski-like runners. He designed a new type of expedition sledge by  himself and ordered a local carpenter to build a prototype. His design  was tailored to minimise weight by using leather thongs instead of iron  joints. Of course with modern plastic today, the pulk form has proven to  be the most efficient shape for the snow conditions in the Arctic.

Nansen also was advised to use furs on the bottom of his skis, to  increase the grip in the snow while dragging the sledge. Originally made  from animal skin, these skins are today made of nylon, and can be found  on the skis of every polar explorer dragging a pulk. 50 years before  steel edges for skis were officially invented in Austria, a letter from a  fellow mountain skiing pioneer tells him of skiers attaching iron  strips to the edges of their skis, in order to preserve the edges and  increase the grip in the snow, but for unknown reasons, Nansen chose not  to modify his skies that way.

The sledge and skis were only one aspect of Nansen’s gear where he  demonstrated innovative spirit. But explaining them all in detail would  be an article in itself. But just to give you a quick idea: he invented a  new type of sleeping bag made out of reindeer fur. He was the first to  introduce the layer principle in outdoor clothing, separating wind  protection from warmth. He had a tent specially assembled so the  individual pieces could be used as sails for the sledges. He designed a  new type of spirit stove, with improvements to the cooking vessel’s  capability to retain heat. He also was the first explorer to plan the  expedition’s food based on nutritional science, although it turned out  later that the pemican he ordered did not contain fat as promised. This  lead to a nutritional deficit over the whole expedition, so bad that  Otto Sverdrup considering drinking the expedition’s shoe polish, old  linseed oil.

In all his endeavours, Nansen always challenged the status quo and  sought to improve every piece of equipment, ranging from a simple piece  of clothing to the ship he had purpose-built for his second expedition,  the Fram. He took nothing for granted and believed in  experimenting and innovation. He was the original gear-head and his  perfectionist approach and attention to detail are shared by many  successful explorers throughout history.

Nansen was a scientist and all his adventures could not take that away  from him. He always displayed a great attention to everything going on  around him and took every opportunity to study. He first encountered the  Inuit native to Greenland on the east coast of the island. His party  spent several days in the company of an Inuit tribe and while several of  the men, most notably the Lapps, were trying to stay separate from the  supposed barbarians, Nansen realised their superior abilities to travel  in the Arctic and tried to learn as much as possible from them. After  arriving on the west coast, Nansen spent eight months among the natives,  learning much about their clothing, how to train dogs for dog-sledding,  and how to kayak. These lessons would later be invaluable to him on his  North Pole attempt during the first Fram expedition. Roald Amundsen  emulated Nansen by spending time with the Inuit as well and learned many  skills he used during his successful South Pole expedition 1911.

Nansen originally estimated the costs of his expedition to be 5,000  Kroner, the equivalent of 12,000-20,000 USD today. He applied for  government funds but was summarily rejected. The overwhelming public  opinion was that his plan was utter madness. Nansen was prepared to  cover the costs himself, but would rather not have to. So he was  searching for private investors and found one in Augustin Gamél, a  Copenhagen businessman, who was happy to fund the expedition. In the  end, Nansen’s Greenland expedition cost almost four times his estimate,  and Gamél paid about half of it. Searching for companies to sponsor  their expeditions is a common theme for modern explorers. Gamél did not  profit from association with Nansen directly, as modern brands do, but  his motives were also different. Back when there were still white spots  on the maps, there were other ways to honour expedition sponsors.  Nansen, for example, did name a mountain in Greenland after his  sponsor: Gamel Nunatak.

Nansen understood that publicity is everything as an explorer. He was  keen to publish accounts of his ski tours in various newspapers before  starting his planning for Greenland. Even in the chaotic six months  leading up to his crossing, he found time to write an article about his  plans for a children’s magazine. But all this was nothing to what came  after his successful Greenland crossing. Nansen had reached the west  coast just in time to send a message out on the last ship but was then  cut off from the rest of the world for the duration of the winter. While  he was learning from the Greenlanders, unknown to him, a Nansen fever  broke out from New Zealand to America, but particularly in Norway.  Products advertising with his name popped up all over the place. While  this contributed to his popularity, he did not earn any money from this  ongoing craze at first. However, after he was back, a public collection  quickly covered his outstanding expedition debt of about 10,000 Kroner.

What stands out for me isn’t just the fact that Nansen prefigured the  modern explorer with all the commercial sponsorship trappings but his  unflinching determination to succeed or die.

His expedition fitted in with Nansen’s general ‘no retreat’ philosophy as  there would literally be no chance of turning back. Suffice to say that  after a gruelling and calamitous time, the team made it all the way  across Greenland. Before leaving Norway, Nansen had defended his  doctoral thesis – the traditional last step before being granted or  denied. On his arrival in Godthaab he found out he had been successful, a  fact which was the furthest thing from his mind at that point in time!

In 1926, explaining his  philosophy to the students at St. Andrews in his rectorial address,  Nansen said that a line of retreat from a proposed action was a snare,  that one should burn his boats behind him so that there is no choice but  to go forward. The party of six survived temperatures of -45° C,  climbed to 9,000 feet above sea level, mastered dangerous ice,  exhaustion, and privation to emerge on the west coast early in October  of 1888 after a trip of about two months, bringing with them important  information about the interior.

After his triumphant return from crossing Greenland, you might expect  an explorer to relax for a while. Nansen did. He took almost a whole  year – getting married in the meantime – before announcing he intended  to seek the North Pole.

Before that though geographic societies all over the world lined up to  request presentations from Nansen. His employer, the University of  Bergen, gave him an annual allowance of 3,000 Kroner and time off to  write a book about his endeavour. In the years between Greenland and the  Fram expedition, he earned his money with lectures in Norway, Germany  and Britain, and by selling his book Paa ski over Grønland. En skildring af Den norske Grønlands-ekspedition,  which was translated into many languages. Public speaking and authoring  have remained a reliable source of income for explorers today. He also  got attention from several companies he mentioned in his talks, whose  brands he had used in the crossing.

Over the next four years, Nansen served as curator of the Zootomical  Institute at the University of Oslo, published several articles, two  books, The First Crossing of Greenland (1890) and Eskimo Life  (1891), and planned a scientific and exploratory foray into the Arctic.

Photograph taken on 14 March 1895 as Nansen prepares to leave his ship Fram and begin his sledge journey to the North Pole.

For Nansen going to the North Pole became his nexy big challenge and it had been brewing for a while. He was  convinced that polar currents would allow an explorer to drift very  close, if not all the way, to the pole. His plan, therefore, was  literally to sail into ice until the shop became immobile and let it be  led by the currents.

Basing his plan on the revolutionary theory that a current carried the  polar ice from east to west, Nansen put his ship, the Fram  [Forward], an immensely strong and cunningly designed ship, into the ice  pack off Siberia on September 22, 1893, from which it emerged  thirty-five months later on August 13, 1896, into open water near  Spitzbergen. Nansen was not aboard.

Realising that the ship would not pass over the North Pole, Nansen  and one companion, with thirty days’ rations for twenty-eight dogs,  three sledges, two kayaks, and a hundred days’ rations for themselves,  had set out in March of 1895 on a 400-mile dash to the Pole. In  twenty-three days they traveled 140 miles over oceans of tumbled ice,  getting closer to the Pole than anyone had previously been. Turning  back, they made their way southwest to Franz Josef Land, wintered there  in 1895-1896, started south again in May, reached Vardo, Norway, the  same day the Fram reached open water and were reunited with the crew on August 21 at Tromsø.

The voyage was a high adventure but it was also a scientific expedition, the Fram  serving as an oceanographic-meteorological-biological laboratory. Nansen never saw his mission as a failure. Crucially, to Nansen “polar exploration without science was egotism, vanity and the cheapest form of nationalist flag-waving”. A third of Oslo turned up to cheer him when he returned.

Holding a research professorship at the University of Oslo after 1897,  Nansen published six volumes of scientific observations made between  1893 and 1896. Continuing thereafter to break new ground in oceanic  research, he was appointed professor of oceanography in 1908.

Nansen interrupted his research in 1905 to urge the independence of  Norway from Sweden and, after the dissolution of the Union, served as  his country’s minister to Great Britain until May of 1908.

His  main goal was to secure Norway’s position as an independent and nation  in the eyes of the world. In November 1907, the ‘Treaty between the  United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway, and Russia respecting the  independence and territorial integrity of Norway’ was signed and  Nansen’s mission was complete. Shortly after, while he was still in  London as a guest of Kind Edward VII, his wife passed away.

Nansen then spent a period of time travelling and pursuing  Oceanography – a subject that had overtaken Zoology in his interests. He  wrote many scholarly papers and his work was crucial in defining a  phenomenon called the Ekman Spiral.

In the next  few years he led several oceanographic expeditions into polar regions,  but once the world was plunged into war in 1914 and exploration was  halted, he became increasingly interested in international political  affairs.

For almost a year in 1917-1918, as the head of a Norwegian delegation  in Washington, D. C., Nansen negotiated an agreement for a relaxation  of the Allied blockade to permit shipments of essential food. In 1919,  he became president of the Norwegian Union for the League of Nations and  at the Peace Conference in Paris was an influential lobbyist for the  adoption of the League Covenant and for recognition of the rights of  small nations. From 1920 until his death he was a delegate to the League  from Norway.

In the spring of 1920, the League of Nations asked Nansen to  undertake the task of repatriating the prisoners of war, many of them  held in Russia. Moving with his customary boldness and ingenuity, and  despite restricted funds, Nansen repatriated 450,000 prisoners in the  next year and a half.

In June, 1921, the Council of the League, spurred by the International Red Cross  and other organizations, instituted its High Commission for Refugees  and asked Nansen to administer it. For the stateless refugees under his  care Nansen invented the «Nansen Passport», a document of identification  which was eventually recognized by fifty-two governments. In the  nine-year life of this Office, Nansen ministered to hundreds of  thousands of refugees – Russian, Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian,  Assyro-Chaldean – utilizing the methods that were to become classic:  custodial care, repatriation, rehabilitation, resettlement, emigration,  integration.

The Red Cross in 1921 asked Nansen to take on yet a third  humanitarian task, that of directing relief for millions of Russians  dying in the famine of 1921-1922. Help for Russia, then suspect in the  eyes of most of the Western nations, was hard to muster, but Nansen  pursued his task with awesome energy. In the end he gathered and  distributed enough supplies to save a staggering number of people, the  figures quoted ranging from 7,000,000 to 22,000,000.

In 1922 at the request of the Greek government and with the approval  of the League of Nations, Nansen tried to solve the problem of the Greek  refugees who poured into their native land from their homes in Asia  Minor after the Greek army had been defeated by the Turks. Nansen  arranged an exchange of about 1,250,000 Greeks living on Turkish soil  for about 500,000 Turks living in Greece, with appropriate  indemnification and provisions for giving them the opportunity for a new  start in life.

Nansen’s fifth great humanitarian effort, at the invitation of the  League in 1925, was to save the remnants of the Armenian people from  extinction. He drew up a political, industrial, and financial plan for  creating a national home for the Armenians in Erivan that foreshadowed  what the United Nations Technical Assistance Board and the International  Bank of Development and Reconstruction have done in the post-World War  II period. The League failed to implement the plan, but the Nansen International Office for Refugees later settled some 10,000 in Erivan and 40,000 in Syria and Lebanon.

He died of a heart attack on 13 May 1938 after a bout of pneumonia that came to  light while he was skiing with old friends. He had a state funeral on 17 May,  Norway’s Constitution Day. His ashes were scattered at his home – now home to the  Fridtjof Nansen Institute.

A great number of advances in all manner of fields are built directly  off the back of Nansen’s work. He pioneered techniques for Arctic  Exploration and developed the skills needed to survive in such harsh and  impenetrable conditions.

Nansen’s name lives on in so many places. There’s the Nansen Refugee  Award, given annually by the United Nations High Commissioner for  Refugees. There’s a Nansen Basin in the Arctic, as well as various  mountains and islands in the Earth’s coldest regions.

Beyond our planet, there’s a Nansen Crater on the moon, one on Mars  and there’s even an asteroid called 853 Nansenia in our solar system!

Finally, cruise and sea-adventure company Hurtigruten has an  exploration ship called MS Fridtjof Nansen while the Norwegian navy has a  whole ‘Nansen Class’ of vessels named after famous explorers of  Norwegian origin.

After his death, his ethos was summed up by his ex-colleague Lord  Robert Cecil. “Every good cause had his support. He was a fearless  peacemaker, a friend of justice, an advocate always for the weak and  suffering.”

Fridtjof Nansen was a trailblazer in many ways, and I think he can rightfully be called the father of modern Polar exploration. But he was so much more. A truly tenacious individual of whom Norwegians remain justly proud,  Nansen once summarised his lust for life by explaining, “I demolish the  bridges behind me... Then there is no choice but to move forward.”

In an Oslo museum I once came across a young woman considering a pair  of Nansen’s frayed salopettes in a glass case, and saw that her face  was drenched in tears. I remember (jealously) thinking – when was the  last time anybody felt like that! The 1970s? The 1930s? These days, when  an “explorer” gets dysentery in Papua New Guinea, we just roll our  eyes. Their labours seem so self-aggrandising, so willed. Just as we no  longer automatically assume that American novelists have important  things to say, or European directors are going to describe for us human  consciousness, we intrinsically doubt the sacrifice of the modern  explorer. (Not to be too 21st-century about it: the map has been filled  in.)