During the second winter, Nansen, taking Frederik Johansen with him, and leaving Otto Sverdrup in charge of the ship, decided to leave the Fram and try to reach the Pole. A start was made in March, 1895, and in less than a month 86° 28' N. was reached. At that point the explorers had to turn south, and after many perilous adventures, they landed, at the end of August, on an island of the Franz-Josef group. There they decided to winter, and there they had to remain for nine long months. When at last they were able to proceed, a grave disaster was only prevented by Nansen's promptitude and courage. The explorers were on shore, when Johansen noticed that their kayaks (Eskimo canoes of light wooden framework covered with seal skins) were adrift. The loss of these boats could scarcely have meant less than death to the explorers, and Nansen immediately jumped into the icy water and swam to retrieve them. It was an action as prompt as it was heroic, and it saved the situation; but Nansen's condition, when he brought back the kayaks to land, has been described as "more dead than alive," and some time passed before he fully recovered from the results of his effort.
Some weeks later the kayaks were once more made as seaworthy as was possible under the circumstances, and Nansen and Johansen were again embarking on their adventurous voyage when, by good fortune, they were found by Frederick Jackson, the leader of the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition, which did such good work in Franz-Josef Land. This meeting between Nansen and Jackson has been compared with the famous one between Livingstone and Stanley, and even if the latter was the more dramatic, the former was as opportune, for there is no gainsaying that Nansen and his companion were in a most perilous position. In the meantime the drift of the Fram under Sverdrup's able leadership continued, and she did not return to Norway until August, 1896.
The results of the Fram expedition were exceptionally important. "They threw," Sir Clements Markham wrote, "new light on the whole Arctic problem. Nansen lifted the veil, and his expedition was the most important in modern times. It was discovered that there was a deep-sea ocean to the north of Spitzbergen and Franz-Josef Land, extending beyond the Pole...."
In 1897 a meeting was held in the Albert Hall in honour of Nansen, whose work, both geographically and scientifically, more than deserved the great welcome given to him in England. In an introduction to his In the Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times, Nansen quotes words from the old Norse chronicle, the King's Mirror, that are curiously illuminating:—
"If you wish to know what men seek in this land [the Arctic regions], or why men journey thither in so great danger of their lives, then it is the threefold nature of man that draws him thither. One part of him is emulation and desire of fame, for it is a man's nature to go where there is likelihood of great danger, and to make himself famous thereby. Another part is the desire of knowledge, for it is man's nature to wish to know and see those parts of which he has heard, and to find out whether they are as it was told him or not. The third part is the desire of gain, seeing that men seek after riches in every place where they learn that profit is to be had, even though there is great danger in it."
And, indeed, it may well be admitted that the factors which have helped to make the modern world are mainly a desire for fame, a desire for knowledge, and a desire for riches; and woe betide the nation that forgets the first and second of these factors, and loses its soul in concentration upon the last of them.
II
During the years succeeding Nansen's expedition the desire to reach the North Pole itself took possession of the minds of many brave men. Bit by bit the Arctic regions had been mapped out; gradually the obstacles that maintained the Pole in its splendid isolation were being overcome. Some years were to pass before its mysteries were unveiled, but in those years there was an almost continuous effort to probe those mysteries.
Nansen had discovered beyond any doubt that the Pole lay in an ice-covered sea, an inhospitable place enough; but this fact did not prevent explorers from wanting actually to locate it, and in 1900 the Duke of the Abruzzi tried to reach it by way of Franz-Josef Land. Owing to a frost-bitten hand, the Duke could not take part in the main journey of his expedition, and so Captain Cagni commanded it. The Pole withstood this effort, but Cagni did succeed in reaching 86° 33' N., and thus beat Nansen's record for "farthest north."
Previous to the Abruzzi expedition, Robert Peary had launched his first great attack upon the Pole. This expedition lasted for four years—1898 to 1902—but Peary encountered such dense packs of ice, which blocked his way to the Polar Ocean, that he failed in his main object.