Free Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram by Charles W. Johnson Page B

spite of my laughing at him,” wrote Nansen in Farthest North . But then the heavy doubts creep in: “How long will this last? The eye always turns to the northward as one paces the bridge. . . . Now we are almost in 77° north latitude. How long is it to go on?”
    It did not go on for long. In the morning of September 20, as they were nearing latitude 78° north, with Nansen in the chartroom studying the maps, “there was a sudden luff, and I rushed out. Ahead of us lay the edge of the ice, long and compact, shining through the fog.” He felt they still needed to go further east to find the current, but the ice arced south there and blocked their way. So they cruised northwest as the ice allowed, away from their desired course, to gain more latitude. After two more days, the ice lay before them, a wall from east to west. The sky, when they saw it in between bouts of fog, was “whitish-blue everywhere on the horizon”—“ice-blink” reflected from the ice (if open water, the sky would be dark). They had reached the limit of open water and had gone as far as they would go. Nansen, still ruminating over a desire to go east toward “Sannikoff Land,” or even Bennett Island yet farther east, quickly put those thoughts aside. “It was the drift I wanted to get into, and what I feared most was being blocked by land” andpossibly being caught in a “gyre,” an endless loop of current from which there would be no escape. So instead they moored the Fram to a large floe and waited, beginning to prepare for what would be.
    FIGURE 23
    Lars Pettersen and Bernhard Nordahl taking a break from bird hunting (note hanging quarry). All the men had both rifles and shotguns, and plenty of ammunition, for any eventuality that came up, from polar bears to little auks. Photograph by Sigurd Scott-Hansen.
    Just as they came face-to-face with freeze-up in the Arctic winter, they also had to confront the torment of little things. Lice had infested the ship, probably from their Siberian guests earlier. So, just as the ice was about to take them in as one of its own, they spent the whole day cleaning bedding, steaming clothes, and washing and disinfecting both men and dogs. Surely Nansen, even in this critical time, despite worry and aggravation, would have taken note of a somewhat humorous irony: the simultaneously external battle against the ice and internal one against the lice.
    Nansen’s diary entries, and passages later in Farthest North , from this period of the voyage are revealing. Pages and pages are devoted to hunting big prey, perhaps indicating how important it was to the future of the mission, or maybe also because recounting the stalking and the killing made for good stories. He also references new discoveries and corrections or revisions to those made earlier. Themany detailed descriptions of, and his speculations about, the physical environment they pass through show his love of simple observation and pure science. Yet he is also the poet, expressing, often lyrically, awe or reverie at transcendent, unearthly wonders, or even just of little, ordinary things (“Oh! How the snow refreshes one’s soul, and drives away all the gloom and sadness from this sullen land of fogs! Look at it scattered so delicately, as if by a loving hand, over the stones and the grass flats on shore!”). He offers glimpses into private quandaries and worries masked by his uncompromising outward stance as leader (“Sverdrup thought it would be safer to stay where we were. . . . I gave orders to set sail”). Sometimes, too, the melancholy steals in, a familiar but haunting shadow that is to come and go for the rest of his life.
    ››› There was an eerie, tragic coincidence in this region where the Fram lay next to the ice. Bennett Island, where Nansen had wished to go, had been discovered in 1881 by George De Long on the Jeannette and named by him for the owner of the ship and sponsor of the expedition. After the Jeannette had been crushed