Nansen and Johansen started on March 14 when the Fram was in latitude 84 deg. 4’ N., and the sun had only returned a few days before, with three sledges (two of which carried kayaks) and 28 dogs.  They reached their northern-most camp on April 8, which Nansen has given in his book as being in latitude 86 deg. 13.6’ N. But Nansen tells me that Professor Geelmuyden, who had his astronomical results and his diary, reckoned that owing to refraction the horizon was lifted, and if so the observation had to be reduced accordingly.  Nansen therefore gave the reduced latitude in his book, but he considers that his horizon was very clear when he took that observation, and believes that his latitude was higher than that given.  He used a sextant and the natural horizon.

They turned, and travelling back round pressed-up ice and open leads they failed to find the land they had been led to expect in latitude 83 deg., which indeed was proved to be non-existent.  At the end of June they started using the kayaks, which needed many repairs after their rough passage, to cross the open leads.  They waited long in camp, that the travelling conditions might improve, and all the time Nansen saw a white spot he thought was cloud.  At last, on July 24, land was in sight, which proved to be that white spot.  Fourteen days later they reached it to find that it consisted of a series of islands.  These they left behind them and, unable to say what land they had reached, for their watches had run down, they coasted on westwards and southwards until winter approached.  They built a hut of moss and stones and snow, and roofed it with walrus skins cut from the animals while they lay in the sea, for they were too heavy for two men to drag on to the ice.  When I met Nansen he had forgotten all about this, and would not believe that it had happened until he saw it in his own book.  They lay in their old clothes that winter, so soaked with blubber that the only way to clean their shirts was to scrape them.  They made themselves new clothes from blankets, and sleeping-bags from the skins of the bears which they ate, and started again in May of the following year to make Spitzbergen.  They had been travelling a long month, during which time they had at least two very narrow escapes—­the first due to their kayaks floating away, when Nansen swam out into the icy sea and reached them just before he sank, and Johansen passed the worst moments of his life watching from the shore; the second caused by the attack of a walrus which went for Nansen’s kayak with tusks and flippers.  And then one morning, as he looked round at the cold glaciers and naked cliffs, not knowing where he was, he heard a dog bark.  Intensely excited, he started towards the sound, to be met by the leader of the English Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition whose party was wintering there, and who first gave him the definite news that he was on Franz Josef Land.  Nansen and Johansen were finally landed at Vardo in the north of Norway, to learn that no tidings had yet been heard of the Fram.  That very day she cleared the ice which had imprisoned her for nearly three years.