This period of time saw a great increase in the interest taken in science both pure and applied, and it had been pointed out in 1893 that “we knew more about the planet Mars than about a large area of our own globe.”  The Challenger Expedition of 1874 had spent three weeks within the Antarctic Circle, and the specimens brought home by her from the depths of these cold seas had aroused curiosity.  Meanwhile Borchgrevink (1897) landed at Cape Adare, and built a hut which still stands and which afforded our Cape Adare party valuable assistance.  Here he lived during the first winter which men spent in the Antarctic.

Meanwhile, in the Arctic, brave work was being done.  The names of Parry, M’Clintock, Franklin, Markham, Nares, Greely and De Long are but a few of the many which suggest themselves of those who have fought their way mile by mile over rough ice and open leads with appliances which now seem to be primitive and with an addition to knowledge which often seemed hardly commensurate with the hardships suffered and the disasters which sometimes overtook them.  To those whose fortune it has been to serve under Scott the Franklin Expedition has more than ordinary interest, for it was the same ships, the Erebus and Terror, which discovered Ross Island, that were crushed in the northern ice after Franklin himself had died, and it was Captain Crozier (the same Crozier who was Ross’s captain in the South and after whom Cape Crozier is named) who then took command and led that most ghastly journey in all the history of exploration:  more we shall never know, for none survived to tell the tale.  Now, with the noise and racket of London all round them, a statue of Scott looks across to one of Franklin and his men of the Erebus and Terror, and surely they have some thoughts in common.

Englishmen had led the way in the North, but it must be admitted that the finest journey of all was made by the Norwegian Nansen in 1893-1896.  Believing in a drift from the neighbourhood of the New Siberian Islands westwards over the Pole, a theory which obtained confirmation by the discovery off the coast of Greenland of certain remains of a ship called the Jeannette which had been crushed in the ice off these islands, his bold project was to be frozen in with his ship and allow the current to take him over, or as near as possible to, the Pole.  For this purpose the most famous of Arctic ships was built, called the Fram.  She was designed by Colin Archer, and was saucer-shaped, with a breadth one-third of her total length.  With most of the expert Arctic opinion against him, Nansen believed that this ship would rise and sit on the top of the ice when pressed, instead of being crushed.  Of her wonderful voyage with her thirteen men, of how she was frozen into the ice in September 1893 in the north of Siberia (79 deg.  N.) and of the heaving and trembling of the ship amidst the roar of the ice pressure, of how the Fram rose to the occasion as she was built to do, the story has still,