Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  Greely’s expedition had in some respects been very successful. It had reached a new furthest north, and it had brought back a fund of data concerning meteorology, geology, astronomy, oceanography and biology. When published, his discoveries filled a two-volume, 13,000-page report, accompanied by charts and photographs, which comprised one of the most comprehensive bodies of Arctic research to date. In human terms, however, it had been a disaster. On every side, and at every opportunity, since August 1883 the expedition had been marked by incompetence and ill-judgement. Not only had Greely led his men into danger, from which the authorities had failed to rescue them, but he had actually shot one of them. (He was officially exonerated on this count, it being treated as a case of mutiny.) Even worse, it was found that some of the bodies had been eaten. Six of the corpses bore clear signs of having been tampered with. Someone had taken a knife, or scalpel, and cut strips of flesh from their limbs, carefully stripping the skin and then folding it back to disguise the incisions. Greely and the rest denied all knowledge of it. In retrospect, Dr Pavy was a possible culprit: he had the necessary surgical skills; he had (now the survivors thought of it) made a number of trips to fetch water from a pool near where the bodies had been buried; and before his death he had been in suspiciously good health. But maybe it had been someone else. Without evidence it was impossible to say.

  Combined with the casualty rate, the evidence of cannibalism among Greely’s men brought Arctic exploration into even further disrepute. If this was what happened to even a scientific expedition then the whole business was not worth the candle. ‘The scientific information secured,’ declaimed the President, ‘could not compensate for the loss of human life.’ The press agreed. ‘Let there be an end to this folly,’ said the New York Times. Needless to say, nobody in the Arctic fraternity paid the slightest attention. And after a while, neither did the public.

  SKIING TO THE NORTH POLE

  Fridtjof Nansen (1893–6)

  In 1888, almost on a whim, a young Norwegian neuroscientist named Fridtjof Nansen decided to become the first person to cross Greenland on skis. The casual ease with which he completed the task changed his life. Abandoning his studies, he began to raise funds for an expedition to the North Pole – an expedition, as he explained to would-be sponsors, that would be unlike any other. He proposed not to fight the Arctic, as others had done, but to go (quite literally) with the flow. Noting that debris from De Long’s Jeannette, which had sunk off Siberia in 1881, had washed up on the shores of Greenland, he concluded that an east-west current ran beneath the ice; therefore, if he set a ship in the pack above Siberia it would eventually be deposited in the Atlantic, having traversed the Arctic Ocean and possibly, even, having touched the North Pole. His plan met with approval, the money was raised, and on 24 June 1893 he left Christiania (modern Oslo) aboard the Fram on a journey that would change the face of polar exploration and make him one of the greatest celebrities of the age.

  The Fram was no ordinary vessel. Rounded at prow and stern, and in cross-section shaped somewhat like an egg, it was constructed specifically for Arctic travel: if squeezed by the ice it would simply pop up and rest on the surface. It also contained a generator that could be driven by wind-power, a store of provisions so varied as to supply whatever magical ingredient was necessary to fend off scurvy, plus a 600-volume library to provide intellectual stimulus during the five years the journey was expected to last. There was the usual collection of compasses, chronometers, pendulums, reels of line for sounding the ocean floor and a host of other instruments – for, as Nansen swore, the Fram’s voyage was primarily scientific. But there were other items too, none of which had an obvious scientific application: some portable paraffin stoves by the name of ‘Primus’ that were 600 per cent more efficient than standard coal – or oil-fuelled models; a stock of skis to suit every snow condition; several light and flexible sledges designed by Nansen himself; a new type of conical tent, also designed by Nansen, which could be erected and dismantled in seconds; and a couple of kayaks similar to the Inuit versions he had encountered in Greenland but with watertight compartments in the bows. In addition, the Fram carried a team of dogs. This supercargo was included for one reason only: if the Fram did not reach the North Pole Nansen intended to jump ship and ski there.

  On 25 September 1893 the Fram entered the ice north of the Lena Delta and began its long voyage west. Everything worked to perfection: the ship rose from every nip as it had been designed to do, the crew were not attacked by scurvy, the wind generator did its job faultlessly – everything was fine. Caught, initially, in the triangular drift that had bedevilled Weyprecht and De Long, the Fram worked its way slowly north. The months passed, the crew became bored and complacent, the ship’s doctor began to dabble with drugs. The inaction made Nansen furious: ‘Can’t something happen?’ he wrote in his journal. But nothing did happen, beyond the occasional ice-squeeze, from which the Fram emerged, as always, intact. During the first long winter Nansen roamed the pack, peering ever northwards. On 15 January 1894 he saw a flat icescape that stretched to the horizon and, for all he knew, to the Pole itself. ‘It might almost be called an easy expedition for two men,’ he wrote.

  Throughout that year he prepared for the forthcoming odyssey. The sledges and kayaks, which had been packed in kit form, were assembled, the skis were treated with Stockholm pitch and, after much moody perusal, Nansen selected a travelling companion. His name was Hjalmar Johanssen, a dour but capable drifter who, before signing on as a stoker, had been among other things a prison warden and an international gymnast. On 14 March 1895, with the Fram sittingly slightly above the 84th parallel – a record north for a ship – Nansen and Johanssen departed for the Pole.

  Nansen’s plan was scary. He and Johanssen would ski north with a couple of dog teams hauling their kayaks and supplies for 100 days. As the food ran out they would feed the dogs to each other and then, when they had gone as far they could, they would retreat to Franz Josef Land, where they hoped to meet a whaler. If no whaler was to hand they would paddle – and maybe sail, for Nansen had equipped his kayaks with bamboo masts – to Norway. It was 350 nautical miles to the Pole, another 500 back to Franz Josef Land and yet another 1,000 to Norway. To call the proposed journey foolhardy would have been an understatement. It was a monumental gamble, involving unsupported travel in one of the world’s coldest and most unpredictable climates, across an unexplored ocean riddled with potential hazards, with an escape route so uncertain as scarcely to merit the name.

  Initially it looked as if the gamble would pay off. The ice was smooth, and the two Norwegians swept over it at an unprecedented rate, covering 20 miles per day for the first week. By 29 March they were at a record north of 85° 09’; if conditions held good and they continued at the same pace they would be at the top of the earth within a fortnight. Conditions did not hold. During the second week they encountered rough ice interspersed with leads of open water; the tents, which had been made of light material for ease of transport, provided chilly shelter, despite the use of the Primus stoves; at the same time the pack started drifting south; in the course of five days they made only 50 miles. By 8 April they had crossed the 86th parallel and Nansen called a halt. It was just conceivable that they would reach the Pole if they carried on, but if they did they would never return to tell the tale; as it was, their provisions were barely sufficient to last them back to Franz Josef Land. They allowed themselves a congratulatory feast of ‘lobscouse, bread-and-butter, dry chocolate, stewed whortle berries, and our hot whey drink’, before crawling into the tent in preparation for the trek home.

  Extraordinarily, the ice that had given them so much trouble during the last ten days was now a flat plain over which they sped south as rapidly as they had travelled north during that first halcyon week. On 13 April, however, Johanssen found that his chronometer had stopped. Of itself this was no cause for worry; both men carried a chronometer and, as had happened in the past, if one stopped all they had to do was reset it
against the one that still ticked. But when they came to do so they discovered that Nansen’s chronometer had stopped too. The consequences were potentially disastrous: without knowing the exact Greenwich Meridian Time, to which their chronometers had been set in Christiania, they could not calculate their longitude. Without knowing their longitude they could not chart their east-west progress, and unless they could do that they would be unable to steer accurately for Franz Josef Land. Hesitantly, Nansen reset his chronometer to what he thought was the right time, but with a deliberate eastward bias, so that when they hit the latitude of Franz Josef Land all they had to do was march west until they reached safety. Even so, without knowing when the timepiece had stopped he had no idea if the exaggeration was sufficient. If it was not, and they arrived at the correct latitude but to the west of Franz Josef Land, they would walk until they either starved or fell into the Atlantic.

  On that same day Nansen also found he had left their compass behind at the last stop. He skied back to fetch it, leaving Johanssen on his own. A follower rather than a leader, Johanssen was immediately struck by doubts. Would Nansen fall through the ice? Would he be able to find his way back through the wilderness? If he did not return what would Johanssen do next? Johanssen’s description of his wait is a terrifyingly evocative description of Arctic solitude. ‘Never have I felt anything so still,’ he wrote. ‘Not the slightest sound of any kind disturbed the silence near or far; the dogs lay as if lifeless with their heads on their paws in the white snow, glistening in the gleaming sun. It was so frighteningly still, I had to remain where I sat, I dared not move a limb; I hardly dared to breathe.’ When he heard the swish of Nansen’s skis he was overcome with relief – testimony both to the loneliness of their position and the power of Nansen’s presence.

  Nansen’s was, indeed, a gigantic personality. Tall, fit, single-minded, possessed of tremendous drive and supreme self-confidence, he conquered everyone he met with sheer force of charisma and intellect. Yet, at the same time, he was prone to dark mood shifts in which he identified with ancient Norse gods. Inspirational on first acquaintance, overpowering on prolonged contact, dangerous in confined spaces, Nansen was not a man with whom one dealt lightly. Johanssen found him self-centred, humourless, ‘unsociable and clumsy in the smallest things; egoistic in the highest degree’. Then again, Johanssen was a born complainer, physically strong but psychologically weak, who depended upon the guidance of others. (He would later become an alcoholic, whose directionless career ended in suicide.) Probably this was why Nansen chose him for the North Pole journey in the first place. He could not brook a travelling companion who might voice opinions or, unthinkably, question his decisions. And firm decisions were needed if they were ever to get home.

  On 4 June, at 82° 17’ N, Nansen judged Franz Josef to be 25 miles distant. It was a guess, of course, because nothing was certain now the chronometers had stopped. In recent days their progress had been pitifully slow, hampered by poor weather, uneven ice and open leads. On 3 June they had travelled less than a mile. On the bright side, they were now so far south that they could augment their diminishing supplies by shooting seals, walruses and polar bears. But having enough to eat was of little use if they could not find their way home. ‘Here we are then,’ Nansen wrote during a blizzard, ‘hardly knowing what to do next. What the going is like outside I do not know yet, but probably not much better than yesterday, and whether we ought to push on the little we can, or go out and try to capture a seal, I cannot decide.’ In the event they did both and, on 24 July, they saw land. The trouble was, it was not like any land on their maps. As described by Julius von Payer in 1873, the northernmost point of Franz Josef Land, Cape Fligely, looked nothing like what rose from the sea before them. Had they reached Franz Josef Land or an undiscovered island to its west? They no longer cared. Shooting their last dogs, they abandoned their sledges and took to the kayaks (damaged during the long journey, but repaired hastily with candle wax) and paddled towards what had to be at least interim salvation. It was 146 days since they had left the Fram.

  The island on which they landed in early August 1895 was part of Franz Josef Land, and as they made their way through the archipelago they met more and more territory that accorded with their maps. There were no whaling ships in the vicinity, however, and by the end of the month, as the weather began to deteriorate, Nansen realized they would have to spend the winter in the Arctic. They therefore set up camp on a desolate and uncharted spit of land and resigned themselves to a long, cold wait.

  The shelter in which they intended to survive the winter comprised a three-foot-deep trench surrounded by a parapet of stones, roofed with walrus hides on a ridge-pole of driftwood. Before the cold came in earnest they were able to shoot enough polar bears, seals and walruses to see them through the season. Then, their larder amply stocked, they crawled into what they called ‘The Hole’, and resigned themselves to an imprisonment that would not end until the arrival of spring. The situation was not life-threatening: they had enough meat to keep starvation and scurvy at bay; and the blubber on the carcases provided fuel to cook their meals, melt snow into drinking water, and give them light. But life was dull, uncomfortable and unhygienic. The diet made them constipated and, after a while, gave them piles; in the absence of washing facilities they were reduced to scraping the grease from their underwear and adding it to the blubber lamps; they had nothing to do except talk, read over and over again Nansen’s navigational tables (the only printed material they possessed) and, when those stimuli were exhausted, sleep. For Nansen the enforced stillness presented an opportunity to reflect upon Scandinavian mythology. For Johanssen it was a time of undistilled loneliness: the only sign that he existed as a person rather than an adjunct to his leader’s ambition came when Nansen addressed him in the familiar tense for the first time in the entire journey. In this manner they passed eight long months in a snow-covered ditch on a strip of land whose existence was unknown to anybody save themselves.

  On 19 May the ice cleared and they resumed their journey. But within a month they were struggling: on 12 June Nansen had to swim after their kayaks when they drifted into the sea while he and Johanssen took bearings from an iceberg; and on 13 June both vessels were fatally punctured by a pack of irate walruses. Dragging the craft on to yet another strip of uncharted land, they spent four days over the repairs and then, as they were about to re-embark, Nansen heard dogs barking. Johanssen listened closely, but said it was nothing: just seabirds, he assured his commander. Nansen was insistent, and skied inland to investigate. The decision saved both their lives.

  Nansen and Johanssen were not the only people on Franz Josef Land during the winter of 1895–6. A British expedition under Frederick Jackson had been at Cape Flora throughout the season. When Jackson was alerted by a team member to an unusual human outline on the ice he pooh-poohed it. ‘Oh nonsense,’ he said, ‘it is a walrus, surely?’ Like Nansen, however, he thought it best to make sure. So he, too, donned his skis. If nothing else the trip would be good exercise. What he found was not a walrus but a black, greasy, shaggy-haired, foul-smelling creature whom he took at first for a shipwrecked Scandinavian whaler. Yet something about the man’s bearing seemed familiar. As Jackson drew closer, he realized that the ragamuffin looked remarkably like a polar fundraiser he had met at the Royal Geographical Society four years previously. When their skis were almost touching, Jackson put a name to the memory. ‘Aren’t you Nansen?’ he asked.

  On a par with Stanley’s ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Jackson’s understated query was one of the great moments of 19th-century exploration. It was sheer luck that the only two parties in Franz Josef Land that year had bumped into each other. No fiction writer could have contrived such an encounter, each group initially dismissing the other as a chimera until, driven respectively by curiosity and desperation, their leaders came together in the heart of the Arctic. And what made their meeting so incredible was the fact that Nansen and Johanssen had spent three-quarters of a year
in ‘The Hole’ while, just around the corner, Jackson and his men had been quartered in fully provisioned, wooden-hutted splendour. If not for the walrus attack, Nansen and Johanssen might never have known there were other explorers in the region and would have perished in their battered, leaky kayaks. As Jackson wrote: ‘I can positively state that not a million to one chance of Nansen reaching Europe existed, and that but for our finding him on the ice, as we did, the world would never have heard of him again.’ He was so amazed by the encounter that, when Johanssen was also rescued, he refused to let either man change their clothes so that he could take staged photographs of their arrival.

  Jackson’s support ship arrived on 25 July, and by 9 September the two Norwegians were home. Here they learned that the Fram had completed its drift and had arrived intact at Spitsbergen. Nansen’s theories had been proved correct, his rash adventure to the Pole had ended without casualty, and he had proved indisputably that the best means of polar exploration was by skis and dog sled, carrying the lightest, most efficient equipment and taking as few team members as possible. Beneath the mountains that circled Christiania, smoke belched from yachts, tugs and steamers as every available ship, private or public, came to greet them. Nansen was invited to dine at the royal palace, and two months later published a 300,000-word account of the expedition. Well written, with photographs, drawings and colour illustrations by Nansen himself, the two-volume journal was a bestseller. When the British mountaineer Edward Whymper reviewed it he wrote: ‘almost as great an advance as has been accomplished by all other voyages in the nineteenth century put together ... He is a Man in a Million.’