Fridtjof Nansen: A Book for the Young

by Jacob B. Bull

It was with wondrously mixed feelings that he turned his gaze toward the north as he stood on the deck that March morning. Behind him lay the beloved home of his childhood and youth. The first rays of the rising sun were shining over the silent forests whither the woodcock and other birds of passage would soon be journeying from southern climes, and the capercailzie beginning his amorous manœuvres on the sombre pine tops, while the whole woodland would speedily be flooded with the songs of its feathered denizens.

And there before him was the sea, the wondrous sea, where he would behold wrecked vessels drifting along in the raging tempest, with flocks of stormy petrels in attendance—and beyond, the Polar sea, that fairy region, was pictured in his dreams. Yes, he could see it in his spirit—could see the mighty icebergs, with their crests sparkling in the sunlight in thousands of varied forms and hues, and between these the boundless tracts of ice extending as far as the eye could reach in one level unbroken plain. When this dream became reality, how did he meet it?

Flat, drifting floes of ice, rocked up and down in the blue-green sea, alike in sunshine and in fog, in storm and calm. One monotonous infinity of ice to struggle through, floe after floe rising up like white-clad ghosts from the murky sea, gliding by with a soughing, rippling murmur to vanish from sight, or to dash against the ship’s sides till masts and hull quivered; and then when morning broke, a faint, mysterious light, a hollow murmur in the air, like the roar of distant surge, far away to the north.

This was the Arctic sea! this the drift ice! They were soon in the midst of it. The sea-gulls circled about, and the snow-bunting whirled around the floes of ice on which the new-fallen snow lay and glittered.

A gale set in; then it blew a hurricane; and the Viking groaned like a wounded whale, quivering as if in the agonies of death from the fierce blows on her sides. At last they approached the scene of their exertions, and the excitement of the impending chase for seals drove out every other feeling from the mind, and every one was wondering “were there many seals this year? would the weather be propitious?”

One forenoon “a sail to leeward” was reported by the man in the crow’s-nest, and all hands were called up on deck, every stitch of canvas spread, and all the available steam-power used to overtake the stranger.

There were two ships; one of them being Nordenskjöld’s famous Vega, now converted into a sealer. Nansen took his hat off to her; and it may well be that this strange encounter imbued his mind with a yearning to accomplish some exploit of a similar perilous nature and world-wide renown as that of the famed Vega expedition. It is a significant fact that the Vega was the first ship Nansen met with in the Arctic sea—a fact that forces itself upon the mind with all the might of a historic moment, with all the fateful force of destiny. It addresses us like one of those many accidental occurrences that seem as if they had a purpose—occurrences that every man who is on the alert and mindful of his future career will meet once at least if not oftener on his journey through life. Such things are beyond our finite comprehension. Some people may term them “the finger of God,” others the new, higher, unknown laws of nature; it may be these names signify but one and the same thing.

That year the Viking did not meet with great success among the seals, for the season was rather too advanced by the time she reached the sealing-grounds. But all the more did Nansen get to learn about the Arctic sea; and of the immense waste of waters of that free, lonely ocean, his inmost being drank in refreshing draughts.

On May 2, Spitzbergen was sighted, and on the 25th they were off the coast of Iceland, where Nansen for a while planted his foot once more on firm land. But their stay there was short, and soon they were off to sea again, and in among the seals. And now the continual report of guns sounded all around; the crew singing and shouting; flaying seals and boiling the blubber—a life forsooth of busy activity.

Toward the end of June the Viking got frozen in off the East Greenland coast, where she lay imprisoned a whole month, unfortunately during the best of the sealing season; a loss, indeed, to the owners, but a gain for Nansen, who now for the first time in his life got his full enjoyment in the chase of the polar bear.