after twenty-eight years, the thrill of novelty.  She drifted over the eightieth degree on February 2, 1894.  During the first winter Nansen was already getting restive:  the drift was so slow, and sometimes it was backwards:  it was not until the second autumn that the eighty-second degree arrived.  So he decided that he would make an attempt to penetrate northwards by sledging during the following spring.  As Nansen has told me, he felt that the ship would do her job in any case.  Could not something more be done also?

This was one of the bravest decisions a polar explorer has ever taken.  It meant leaving a drifting ship which could not be regained:  it meant a return journey over drifting ice to land; the nearest known land was nearly five hundred miles south of the point from which he started northwards; and the journey would include travelling both by sea and by ice.

Undoubtedly there was more risk in leaving the Fram than in remaining in her.  It is a laughable absurdity to say, as Greely did after Nansen’s almost miraculous return, that he had deserted his men in an ice-beset ship, and deserved to be censured for doing so.[13] The ship was left in the command of Sverdrup.  Johansen was chosen to be Nansen’s one companion, and we shall hear of him again in the Fram, this time with Amundsen in his voyage to the South.

The polar traveller is so interested in the adventure and hardships of Nansen’s sledge journey that his equipment, which is the most important side of his expedition to us who have gone South, is liable to be overlooked.  The modern side of polar travel begins with Nansen.  It was Nansen who first used a light sledge based upon the ski sledge of Norway, in place of the old English heavy sledge which was based upon the Eskimo type.  Cooking apparatus, food, tents, clothing and the thousand and one details of equipment without which no journey nowadays stands much chance of success, all date back to Nansen in the immediate past, though beyond him of course is the experience of centuries of travellers.  As Nansen himself wrote of the English polar men:  “How well was their equipment thought out and arranged with the means they had at their disposal!  Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.  Most of what I prided myself upon, and what I thought to be new, I find they had anticipated.  M’Clintock used the same things forty years ago.  It was not their fault that they were born in a country where the use of snowshoes is unknown...."[14]

All the more honour to the men who dared so much and travelled so far with the limited equipment of the past.  The real point for us is that, just as Scott is the Father of Antarctic sledge travelling, so Nansen may be considered the modern Father of it all.