The Worst Journey in the World | Page 9

pure and applied, and it had been pointed out in 1893 that "we
knew more about the planet Mars than about a large area of our own
globe." The Challenger Expedition of 1874 had spent three weeks
within the Antarctic Circle, and the specimens brought home by her
from the depths of these cold seas had aroused curiosity. Meanwhile
Borchgrevink (1897) landed at Cape Adare, and built a hut which still
stands and which afforded our Cape Adare party valuable assistance.
Here he lived during the first winter which men spent in the Antarctic.
Meanwhile, in the Arctic, brave work was being done. The names of
Parry, M'Clintock, Franklin, Markham, Nares, Greely and De Long are
but a few of the many which suggest themselves of those who have
fought their way mile by mile over rough ice and open leads with
appliances which now seem to be primitive and with an addition to
knowledge which often seemed hardly commensurate with the
hardships suffered and the disasters which sometimes overtook them.
To those whose fortune it has been to serve under Scott the Franklin
Expedition has more than ordinary interest, for it was the same ships,
the Erebus and Terror, which discovered Ross Island, that were crushed
in the northern ice after Franklin himself had died, and it was Captain
Crozier (the same Crozier who was Ross's captain in the South and
after whom Cape Crozier is named) who then took command and led
that most ghastly journey in all the history of exploration: more we
shall never know, for none survived to tell the tale. Now, with the noise

and racket of London all round them, a statue of Scott looks across to
one of Franklin and his men of the Erebus and Terror, and surely they
have some thoughts in common.
Englishmen had led the way in the North, but it must be admitted that
the finest journey of all was made by the Norwegian Nansen in
1893-1896. Believing in a drift from the neighbourhood of the New
Siberian Islands westwards over the Pole, a theory which obtained
confirmation by the discovery off the coast of Greenland of certain
remains of a ship called the Jeannette which had been crushed in the ice
off these islands, his bold project was to be frozen in with his ship and
allow the current to take him over, or as near as possible to, the Pole.
For this purpose the most famous of Arctic ships was built, called the
Fram. She was designed by Colin Archer, and was saucer-shaped, with
a breadth one-third of her total length. With most of the expert Arctic
opinion against him, Nansen believed that this ship would rise and sit
on the top of the ice when pressed, instead of being crushed. Of her
wonderful voyage with her thirteen men, of how she was frozen into
the ice in September 1893 in the north of Siberia (79° N.) and of the
heaving and trembling of the ship amidst the roar of the ice pressure, of
how the Fram rose to the occasion as she was built to do, the story has
still, after twenty-eight years, the thrill of novelty. She drifted over the
eightieth degree on February 2, 1894. During the first winter Nansen
was already getting restive: the drift was so slow, and sometimes it was
backwards: it was not until the second autumn that the eighty-second
degree arrived. So he decided that he would make an attempt to
penetrate northwards by sledging during the following spring. As
Nansen has told me, he felt that the ship would do her job in any case.
Could not something more be done also?
This was one of the bravest decisions a polar explorer has ever taken. It
meant leaving a drifting ship which could not be regained: it meant a
return journey over drifting ice to land; the nearest known land was
nearly five hundred miles south of the point from which he started
northwards; and the journey would include travelling both by sea and
by ice.
Undoubtedly there was more risk in leaving the Fram than in remaining
in her. It is a laughable absurdity to say, as Greely did after Nansen's
almost miraculous return, that he had deserted his men in an ice-beset

ship, and deserved to be censured for doing so.[13] The ship was left in
the command of Sverdrup. Johansen was chosen to be Nansen's one
companion, and we shall hear of him again in the Fram, this time with
Amundsen in his voyage to the South.
The polar traveller is so interested in the adventure and hardships of
Nansen's sledge journey that his equipment, which is the most
important side of his expedition to us who have gone South, is liable to
be overlooked.