Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  On September 25, 1894, the Fram marked a full year of frozen drift. Nansen made the gloomy calculation that during that year, she had gained only 189 miles in her northward quest. The daunting span of some 550 miles of pack still stretched between the expedition and the pole. On October 21, the Fram finally passed the 82nd parallel of latitude. The team celebrated with a “grand banquet,” whose printed menu extolled the courses ranging from “fish pudding, with melted butter and potatoes” to honey-cakes specially baked for the occasion. “[T]here is not a soul aboard who doubts that we shall accomplish what we came out to do,” Nansen boasted to his diary, as he suppressed his dark misgivings about the ship’s wayward wandering in the ice.

  Greely’s record of 83˚ 23' N still posed the challenge of 95 miles of further progress. Indeed, it would take another two and a half months for the Fram to break the record, and when that landmark event arrived, the men were in no mood to enjoy it. On January 3, 1895, a huge pressure-ridge of ice bore down on the ship, threatening a catastrophic collision. The Fram began to list dangerously to the port side. The advance of the pressure-ridge was signaled by louder roaring than the men had heard before. Slowly, over three days, the crisis intensified. On January 5, Nansen was awakened by Sverdrup at 5:30 AM. In the darkness the commander “heard a thundering and crashing outside in the ice, as if doomsday had come.”

  The nightmare scenario had arrived. Nansen ordered all the equipment and provisions for a retreat placed on the ice or on the deck ready to be offloaded at a moment’s notice. By now the pressure-ridge had closed with the ship, not in a collision but with the grip of a gigantic vise. Massive blocks of ice rose so high they spilled over the railing onto the upper deck. The men futilely attacked the encroaching tons of ice with shovels and spades. “We are now living in marching order on an empty ship,” Nansen wrote in his diary.

  Yet when January 6 passed with no worsening of the Fram’s predicament, the men began to believe that the ship would survive. That day, a meridian observation revealed that the expedition had broken Greely’s record by eleven minutes of latitude. The men attempted a nervous celebration with punch and cigars, but never let down their guard. “Perhaps the growth of this ridge has come to an end now, perhaps not;” wrote Nansen, “the one thing is as likely as the other.”

  It was not until January 15 that the team could rest in the conviction that the crisis had passed. At once Nansen pushed forward his preparations for the jaunt toward the pole. He had decided that he would take only one companion. Sverdrup might have been the obvious choice, but the team could not part with both its leader and the captain of the ship. Privately, Nansen had settled on Frederik Johansen, officially the expedition stoker, a twenty-seven-year-old with a military background. “[H]e is in all respects well qualified for that work,” Nansen wrote. “He is an accomplished snow-shoer, and few can equal his powers of endurance—a fine fellow, physically and mentally.”

  Before announcing his choice to the team, Nansen sought out Johansen in private to invite him. He warned his comrade that if he agreed to go, “neither of us may ever see the face of man again.” Johansen accepted on the spot. Nansen asked him if he would like to think over his decision. “He did not need any time for reflection, he said; he was quite willing to go.”

  In his thoroughly methodical way, Nansen had plotted the logistics of the polar dash. The two men would take twenty-eight dogs to haul the sledges, food for 110 days—2,100 pounds of gear and food altogether. At an average rate of 9½ miles per day, the men should be able to close the nearly 500 miles to the pole in sixty days. (In Greenland, Nansen’s team had covered 345 miles of glacier in sixty-five days, but that was “at an elevation of 8000 feet, without dogs and with defective provisions, and [we] could certainly have gone considerably farther.” As the loads dwindled and the dogs were played out, Nansen and Johansen would not hesitate to supplement their rations by killing and eating them.

  Nansen fixed a tentative launching date of March 1. As spring crept over the Arctic, his congenital impatience surged. But it was tempered by an existential sense of fate, sharpened by the strange conundrum that his team’s lonely mission in an inhuman wasteland posed. “What is life thus isolated?” he asked his diary. “A strange, aimless process; and man a machine which eats, sleeps, awakes; eats and sleeps again, dreams dreams, but never lives. Or is life really nothing else? And is it just one more phase of the eternal martyrdom, a new mistake of the erring human soul, this banishing of oneself to the hopeless wilderness, only to long there for what one has left behind? Am I a coward? Am I afraid of death?”

  The polar duo suffered false starts on February 26 and 28, when their first trials with dogs and sledges revealed glaring flaws in Nansen’s program. Back on board the Fram, he reduced the cargo loads and strengthened the fragile sledges. As disheartening as those setbacks were, Nansen tasted his ambivalence about the daring thrust he and Johansen were determined to pursue. “It was undoubtedly very pleasant once more to stretch my limbs on the sofa in the Fram’s saloon,” he wrote on March 6, “to quench my thirst in delicious lime-juice with sugar, and again to dine in a civilized manner.”

  At last, on March 14, the two men set out for good. Some of the crew went with them on the first day’s leg of their journey. Again Nansen was awash in ambivalence. Watching Sverdrup stride back toward the ship from an ice hummock where they bid each other farewell, Nansen reported, “I half wished I could turn back with him and find myself again in the warm saloon . . .”

  The last reading aboard ship had given a latitude of 84˚ 4' N. For the utterly uncertain future Nansen and Johansen faced—a trek that might last months or even years—their choices of clothing, gear, and food were absolutely crucial. Some of their decisions would prove inspired, others sadly misjudged.

  Because they had sweated profusely during their trial runs on the ice, Nansen decided at the last minute not to take the wolfskin outer garments that so effectively warded off the cold and wind, relying mainly on wool instead. Within a week, the men would bitterly regret that omission, as their clothes got soaked, then froze into mantles of ice. On the other hand, Nansen decided to take not only skis but snowshoes, which ended up being vital for much of the march over broken pressure ridges.

  Twenty-eight dogs, as planned, took to the ice along with the men. But in the end, only three sledges, as opposed to the original six, were deployed to carry the considerable weight of food and gear. Nansen requisitioned two of his beloved kayaks, built from scratch on board the Fram, for the journey. Hauled on top of the sledges, they suffered punctures in the rugged jostling inflicted by the pressure ridges that rendered them almost useless for crossing leads of open water.

  Nansen opted for a silk tent without a floor (since the built-in canvas floors he had tried out earlier on the expedition tended to absorb moisture and add unwanted weight), but this meant that the men’s sleeping bags lay directly on the ice. (Air mattresses, though invented in Massachusetts in 1889, were still far from becoming standard items on polar voyages.) Having also tried out lightweight calfskin sleeping bags, Nansen wisely chose a bulkier double bag made out of reindeer skin with the hair intact. Even so, each night the two men lay shivering in their cocoon as they went to bed, until body heat raised the temperature enough so they could sleep.

  For boots the men relied on finnesko, a Norwegian specialty, made of reindeer skin with the hair turned inward. They were lined with sennegrass, a sedge that had the additional virtue of drying up perspiration from the feet. Though too soft and flexible to be of much use for mountaineers, finnesko were ideal for Arctic travelers. Despite the extreme cold Nansen and Johansen would soon face, neither man developed frostbite of the toes or feet.

  Nansen swore by Dr. Jaeger’s woolen shirts and drawers, topped with camel’s hair coats and canvas leggings. Felt hats protected the men’s heads. The only concession to wolfskin garb came in outer mittens worn over woolen inner mitts.

  Nansen designed the all-important cuisi
ne to be as rich as possible in calories. The store of butter alone weighed twice as much (86 pounds) as the sledge that carried it. Among the staples were foods that few explorers in our own day have ever tasted, including Va°´ge’s fish flour. (Nansen wrote, “if boiled in water and mixed with [corn or wheat] flour and butter or dried potatoes, it furnishes a very appetizing dish.”) That Arctic standby, pemmican (a concentrated mixture of dried meat, animal fat, and berries), scored high with Nansen. On the pack ice, the men soon craved their favorite dinners—“lobscouse” (pemmican and dried potatoes) and fiskegratin (a melange of Våge’s fish flour, regular flour, and butter). “Johansen preferred the ‘lobscouse,’ while I had a weakness for the ‘fiskegratin.’ ”

  Rounding out the gear were ample repair and medical kits (“chloroform in case of an amputation”), surveying instruments, and a rifle with a generous but not unlimited supply of cartridges.

  The first few days on the ice filled the two men with joy. On March 22, Nansen calculated their day’s jaunt to have covered 21 miles. “If this goes on,” he wrote in his diary, “the whole thing will be done in no time.” Temperatures hovered around minus 40 Fahrenheit, with clear skies. “Beautiful weather for travelling in, with fine sunsets; but somewhat cold, particulary in the bag, at nights . . .”

  That same day the men killed their first dog after she failed to recover from some mysterious illness. They tried to feed Livjaegeren’s carcass to the other dogs, but “many of them went supperless the whole night in preference to touching the meat.” Later the dogs would grow less squeamish, wolfing down their dead companions “hair and all.”

  Johansen had a close call on March 31, when the pack split under his feet and he went up to his waist in seawater. The men set up camp as soon as possible. “Johansen’s nether extremities were a mass of ice and his overalls so torn that extensive repairs were necessary.”

  Thanks to their own sweat, the men’s wool clothing gradually froze and restricted movement. The aggravation was extreme. Their outer layers were “transformed into complete suits of ice-armor,” wrote Nansen. “These clothes were so stiff that the arm of my coat actually rubbed deep sores in my wrists during our marches.”

  Bedding down inside the tent each evening became a dreaded ordeal. “We packed ourselves tight into the bag, and lay with our teeth chattering for an hour. . . . At last our clothes became wet and pliant, only to freeze again a few minutes after we had turned out of the bag in the morning.”

  The smooth going across flat ice over the first few days degenerated into a gauntlet of pressure ridges. Across the worst of these, the men had to seize the sledges by hand to keep them from capsizing and to force them over talus piles of ice blocks. “[T]he dogs are growing rather slow and slack, and it is almost impossible to get them on,” wrote Nansen. “And then this endless disentangling of the hauling-ropes, with their infernal twists and knots, which get worse and worse to undo!”

  The men beat the dogs with lashes and wooden sticks to make them obey, a treatment that went against their better natures. “It made one’s heart bleed to see them,” wrote Nansen, “but we turned our eyes away and hardened ourselves. . . . [O]ne systematically kills all better feelings, until only hard-hearted egoism remains.”

  Still, Nansen and Johansen were full of optimism as they gamely drove north in the face of all their obstacles. The first hint that something was drastically wrong came on March 28, after Nansen took a noon sighting that gave a latitude of 85˚ 30' N. “I could not understand this,” he wrote in his diary; “thought that we must be in latitude 86˚, and, therefore, supposed there must be something wrong with the observation.”

  That discouraging discovery was reinforced six days later, just after the men killed their second dog, when the theodolite gave a reading of 85˚ 59' N. “It is astonishing that we have not got farther; we seem to toil all we can, but without much progress.” Slowly the explanation, which had been nagging at the back of Nansen’s mind, came to the fore. There was nothing wrong with the theodolite. “It was becoming only too clear to me . . . that the ice was moving southward, and that in its capricious drift, at the mercy of wind and current, we had our worst enemy to combat.”

  The heroic daily marches the men were making, fighting the cold in frozen “armor,” manhandling the sledges over chaotic ridges, beating the dogs to summon their best efforts, were being stymied by the inexorable southward drift of the pack. The team was fighting a treadmill that reduced each day’s dogged thrust to a pitiful increment of progress. Even as they slept inside the tent in the icy “cocoon” of their double sleeping bag, the drift robbed them of minutes of latitude.

  On April 8, Nansen succumbed to the inevitable. “There is not much sense in keeping on longer,” he wrote in his diary; “we are sacrificing valuable time and doing little.” The men pitched a last camp and tried to cheer themselves with a final “banquet” of lobscouse, chocolate, and red whortleberries. A careful sighting gave their final latitude of 86˚ 13.6' N. They had broken Greely’s record by two degrees and fifty minutes, or some 144 miles.

  The new farthest north offered Johansen and Nansen scant satisfaction. As they turned southward, the only challenge they now faced was survival.

  In the twenty-first century, the North and South Poles have been in some fundamental sense trivialized. The main agent behind this transformation is modern aircraft, whose capacity to reach previously inaccessible places on the surface of the earth could scarcely have been imagined in 1895. The unknown loci that Nansen and his twelve companions—and Greely and De Long and Peary and countless others—were willing to risk their lives to attain have become landing strips for latter-day “explorers” dabbling in watered-down versions of adventure.

  In 2017 the bustling Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, a research facility regularly resupplied by giant Hercules cargo planes, occupies the barren plateau at 90˚ S. And a number of so-called adventure travel companies offer “last degree” expeditions, on which clients are plunked down by plane at 89˚ N, shepherded by guides on a sixty-nine-mile ski jaunt to the pole, and picked up there by helicopter, not before celebrating with champagne, photographs, and diplomas.

  From the vantage point of more than a century of motorized progress in the exploration of the globe, the quests of Scott and Amundsen and Nansen seem somehow quaint, the earnest heroics of their struggles with ice and storm reduced to historical oddities. If those men could have anticipated how aircraft would reconfigure polar discovery, would they have committed their lives to their bold voyages?

  Nansen at least anticipated the brave new world of aerial discovery. In 1897 the Swede Salomon Andrée, with two companions, set off by balloon from the shores of Svalbard, intent on flying to the North Pole. His scheme was dismissed by experts as foolhardy and suicidal, but then kindred pundits had said as much about the voyage of the Fram four years earlier. Nansen awaited the outcome with a gloomy premonition of the eclipse of his farthest north. But no news came from the balloonists.

  It was not until 1930 that the fate of Andrée’s team was learned. The men had stayed airborne for only three days before their balloon crashed at 83˚ N. Making their way to remote White Island, the trio had prepared to live off the land. Diaries and photographs (developed, remarkably, after thirty-three years in the cold) suggested that they may have perished from trichinosis after eating undercooked meat from a polar bear they shot.

  Even the most hardened polar adventurers today, seeking new firsts in the Arctic and Antarctic, must recognize a fundamental difference between their own exploits and those of their paragons from a century before. As much as aircraft have transformed terrestrial exploration, electronic communication by means of satellite phones, radios, and the Internet has changed the exploratory game even more profoundly.

  Mountaineers attempting Everest today, as well as skiers man-hauling sledges on “unsupported” journeys in the polar regions, count on daily contact not only with their backup teams but with audiences in the outsid
e world that hang on every up-to-the-minute dispatch. Yet surprisingly few of these latter-day adventurers really own up to the gulf between what they hope to achieve and what Nansen and Amundsen undertook.

  No watershed in exploratory history has been more dramatic than the revolution in what might be called connectedness. Thanks to the radio and the sat phone and EPIRB gadgets that send out automated distress calls with precise coordinates, today’s polar trekkers not only get rescued by plane and chopper, they count on such exit strategies when they get in trouble.

  The only kind of connectedness the men on the Fram could hope for was inscribed in the letters they sent back with the last supporters on the Arctic coast who saw them off into the unknown—one-way messages to the loved ones they left behind.

  Between 1963 and 1975, I led or co-led thirteen expeditions to the mountain ranges of Alaska and the Yukon. On none of those journeys were my companions and I connected with the outside world except by a handshake agreement with the bush pilot to pick us up on a certain date. On three of the expeditions, eschewing the pilot, we hiked into and out of the ranges. On four others we hiked or boated out of the mountains.

  In recent years, when I’ve chatted with much younger climbers about their cutting-edge forays in Alaska or the Andes or the Himalaya, I sometimes twit them with the change in expeditionary connectedness since my day. How come, I needle, they didn’t choose to do without the radio and the sat phone? How come they had to stay in daily contact with the spouses or lovers they left at home?