Continuing with our series of guest posts from Continuum authors, author of Two Planks and a Passion and the recent Race for the South Pole Roland Huntford shares his thoughts on Fridtjof Nansen, pioneer of modern polar exploration and 150 years old this October.
This year is the centenary of Roald Amundsen's triumph in the race for the South Pole. What may not be so well-known is that it is also the 150th anniversary of the birth of Fridtjof Nansen. By his attainment of the last great terrestrial goal, Amundsen sealed the latter-day Scandinavian ascendancy in high latitudes. Nansen, a fellow Norwegian, established it. He pioneered modern polar exploration.
In 1888, Nansen made the first crossing of Greenland. It was not so much his exploit that made history, but the way he did it. A leading skier from the country that invented modern skiing, he skied over the ice cap, becoming the first man to use skis in the completion of a major polar journey. By thus introducing the ski, and making snow travel easy and economical of effort, Nansen revolutionised polar exploration. In the process, he demythologised the polar environment by showing that it was subject to rational treatment, which abolished the need for heroic suffering. On the same expedition, he also shaped polar travel for the next century by inventing a new kind of flexible sledge with broad ski-like runners, based on a pattern used by Norwegian farmers and some Siberian tribes.
Almost by accident, Nansen made the critical innovation in polar travel during his second Arctic expedition of 1893-96. This was an attempt to reach the North Pole by freezing a specially built ship, the Fram, into the polar pack ice, and letting her drift with the current. On the crossing of the Greenland, Nansen had been tortured by man hauling his sledges, and swore never to do so again. He took dogs on the Fram. One day, practising around the ship, he made the momentous discovery that the speed of dogs before a loaded sledge was that of a cross-country skier moving at his natural pace. They followed each other with ease.
Nansen soon put this discovery into practice. The interplay of dogs and skis was the technique he used when, having grasped that the Fram would not reach a high enough latitude, he left the ship and struck out across the pack ice to reach the North Pole. He failed in the attempt, only reaching a latitude of 86º14'. It was a new record for the furthest north, but it was not the Pole. Nonetheless Nansen had devised the system of polar travel that lasted until the advent of mechanised transport in the snows. It was the system that took Amundsen and his companions to the South Pole and back without undue inconvenience. Without Nansen there would have been no Amundsen.
In a familiar way, both Amundsen and Nansen owed a historic debt to a lesser known but great precursor. He was Baron Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, a Finnish-born Swede. In 1883, Nordenskiöld had tried to cross Greenland. He also saw the possibility of skis. However, being no skier himself - he was a long-distance skater on the Baltic sea ice - he took two Swedish Lapps. Traditionally Lapps were accomplished skiers, but these ones could not complete the crossing either. Nonetheless their presence on Nordenskiöld's expedition was the impulse that drove Nansen successfully to use skis on Greenland. As auxiliaries, incidentally, Nansen took two Lapps as well.
Nordenskiöld was best known for his traverse of the North-East Passage in 1878-79. It made him a hero of his times. The North-East Passage was the fabled short cut to the East along the Arctic coast of Siberia. It had been attempted by the British since Elizabethan times, but Nordenskiöld, the Swede, was the first successfully to complete it. This is the story of the classic age of polar exploration in a nutshell.
Nordenskiöld had explored the Arctic since 1858. He virtually invented the polar expedition as a scientific enterprise. For example, he had visited Greenland in 1870 to 'see an ice age in being', as he put it.
What Nordenskiöld, Nansen and Amundsen had in common was a rational attitude to the polar environment. They were free of heroic ideals, and simply wanted conspicuous achievement with the least possible discomfort. So in celebrating Amundsen's deceptively unadventurous triumph, spare a thought for the man who started it all. In the background, the looming shadow of Nordenskiöld deserves a share of the centenary celebrations.
Roland Huntford, 2011
