Although Nansen achieved a great deal in his tremendously energetic lifetime – not least a Nobel Peace Prize, he never actually reached the North Pole. They were forced to abandon their attempt, however, when their chronometers failed and they had no reliable way to measure longitude and, therefore, their proximity to the pole. When his patience eventually ran out and he realised he was in fact drifting westward, he and his colleague, Hjalmar Johansen, grudgingly set off with dogs and sleds in traditional fashion.
Nineteenth century Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, tried to minimise the walk by embedding his ship, Fram, in the pack ice, and waiting 18months for natural drift to take the vessel as close as possible to 90° north. In the early days of polar exploration there was simply no choice but to travel by foot.
To quote Sarah Wheeler, author of Terra Incognita, the Poles tend to attract men who ‘like to see how dead they can get’ (The word pole derives from the Medieval Latin word polaris, which means heavenly and, as we know, the only way to reach heaven is to shuffle off this mortal coil, for which polar exploration, as Wheeler points out, offers the perfect opportunity). Which is why the history of polar exploration, like mountaineering, is littered with morbid accounts of suffering, personal sacrifice and what appears to be supreme self-indulgence. If you really want to go somewhere very few of your friends, colleagues and family have been already, there are operators who can take you, with very little discomfort to you or your traveling companions, all the way to the axis-mundi – the North and South Poles, the places where ancients believed planet Earth meets the celestial plane.īut it seems apposite that to journey to the cardinal limits of our physical world – the polar reaches, you should also be prepared to journey to the very limits of your physical and psychological self. You should be prepared, therefore, to go on foot.
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