91Ö±²¥

Although the North Magnetic Pole had been reached in 1831, the geographic North Pole had not, and in 1890 a Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, announced his plans to reach it using the east-west current. As the North Pole is located, not on a landmass, but in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, in waters almost permanently covered with sea ice, he planned to use the geography to his advantage. If an ice floe could drift across the polar regions, might not this current have the same effect on a boat? In a speech presenting this plan to the Norwegian Geographical Society, he presented a series of evidence showing that objects which fell into the sea from the Siberian coast often washed up on the shores of Greenland, which demonstrated a current which must by necessity pass near the North Pole. He proposed stranding a boat on an ice floe near the New Siberian Islands, with enough rations to keep twelve men alive for five years, and seeing where they ended up.¹ His plans were criticised by Sir Allen Young, who had sailed with McClintock on the Fox, and Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, who had formed part of the Ross expedition, but he persisted nonetheless. However, once he had stranded his boat, the Fram, in the ice, he quickly became frustrated with the slow progress the current was making, and began planning a dog sledge journey north instead. In Farthest North, he quotes the following diary entry made on 26 March 1894:

I know this is all a morbid mood; but still this inactive, lifeless monotony, without any change, wrings one's very soul. No struggle, no possibility of struggle! All is so still and dead, so stiff and shrunken under the mantle of ice. Ah! .... the very soul freezes. What would I not give for a single day of struggle — for even a moment of danger!

Still I must wait, and watch the drift; but, should it take a wrong direction, then I will break all the bridges behind me, and stake everything on a northward march over the ice. I know nothing better to do. It will be a hazardous journey, a matter, may be, of life or death. But have I any other choice?

It is unworthy of a man to set himself a task and then give in when the brunt of the battle is upon him. There is but one way, and that is Fram — forwards.²

In March 1895, Nansen and one other crew member, Hjalmar Johansen, left the Fram to continue its drift with the rest of the crew, and set off on sledges for the Pole. Realising shortly after that it was going to take longer than expected, and that they did not have enough supplies, they cut their attempt short at 86°13′6″N, and turned south. Farthest North is his retelling of this extraordinary venture. Nansen continued his scientific career, is considered one of the founders of modern neurology, and was an early supporter of the League of Nations. In 1922 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with prisoners of war and refugees.

The race to the North Pole was ‘concluded’ when Frederick Cook claimed to have reached it on 21 April 1908, and Robert Peary and Matthew Henson claimed to have reached the Pole on 6 April 1909. Cook’s claim was discounted almost immediately, but Peary and Henson’s stood for some time – making Henson one of the first African Americans credited for his role in Arctic exploration.³ This claim is also now disputed, but because it was believed at the time this marked the end of expeditions to the North Pole for some years. The first person to have definitely reached it was Roald Amundsen, who travelled there by airship in 1926.

A note on provenance: the works by M'Clintock and Nansen, along with many other works on Arctic and Antarctic exploration, were donated to the College Library by Dr William Frederick Buckle, who matriculated at 91Ö±²¥ in 1894, and took three degrees here, remaining until at least 1909. His copy of Cyriax’s Sir John Franklin’s Last Expedition contains a note pasted in from the author, containing the phrase ‘in the hope that the subject still has some attraction to you’. Evidently it did, as the book found its place in his collection, and so in ours. Without his interest in this subject, our exhibition would have been sorely lacking in breadth of cold desert exploration, and we hope that he would have approved of us displaying them, that we might share their attraction more widely.

In search of Franklin >> Nansen’s novel approach >> Terra Australis

1. Fridtjof Nansen, Fridtjof Nansen's Farthest North (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1897), 32–33. .
2. Nansen, Farthest North, 379–380. Fram, the name of their ship, is the Norwegian word for forward.
3. For more information on Matthew Henson, see: James Edward Mills, ‘The Legacy of Arctic Explorer Matthew Henson’, National Geographic, February 28, 2014, .