Like a modern Viking, 32-year-old Nansen set sail from Norway in 1893 to reach the North Pole. Experts warned him that his voyage was tantamount to suicide. Compact and nimble, his ship the Fram was equiped with the latest tools to gather scientific data. As yet untested, the ship was specially built to withstand the relentless pressure of the polar ice cap. To complete the final leg, Nansen was to strike out into the polar desert by sledge. Nansen became an overnight sensation when - having been given up for dead - he emerged three years later, alive. His single-minded struggle against snow drifts, ice floes, polar bears, scurvy, gnawing hunger and the loneliness of the polar night would inspire young explorers such as Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen a generation later to make new conquests. Even Sigmund Freud was enthused. Today, Nansen's adventure journal is a rare, heroic window on an untamed Arctic world still untouched by man and rising temperatures.
Fridtjof Nansen was a Norwegian polymath and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He gained prominence at various points in his life as an explorer, scientist, diplomat and humanitarian. He led the team that made the first crossing of the Greenland interior in 1888, traversing the island on cross-country skis. Fridtjof Nansen was a Norwegian polymath and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He gained prominence at various points in his life as an explorer, scientist, diplomat and humanitarian. He led the team that made the first crossing of the Greenland interior in 1888, traversing the island on cross-country skis and launched the conquest of the arctic with his daring expedition to the North Pole that experts thought could never succeed.
'Nansen was the last of the Nordic gods... Tall, blond, and ridiculously handsome... The First Crossing Of Greenland is a... thrilling account of his earliest adventure... It was a hideous journey... Hair froze fast to headgear, beards solidified so that the lips could not be opened to speak... Polar exploration tends to attract more testosterone than talent... One man towers over the other ice-encrusted sledgers: Fridtjof Nansen, colossus of the glaciers... Of all the frozen beards... only Nansen communicated a sense of the true subjugation of the ego that endeavour can bring. Failure, he acknowledged, would mean "only disappointed human hopes, nothing more".' Sara Wheeler, Guardian 'Seminal... demythologised the polar environment and revolutionised modern polar travel with the introduction of skis.' Roland Huntford, The Times 'Nansen defied that conventional wisdom, which dictated explorers proceed from the known to the unknown to maintain a line of retreat, by sailing first to the largely uncharted eastern coast of Greenland.' Times Higher Education 'The visionary Norse explorer.' Jon Krakauer
