ectric power. In this
situation, snugly on board their stout ship, Nansen and his crew
settled down into the unbroken night of the Arctic winter. The ice
that surrounded them was twelve feet thick, and escape from it, even
had they desired it, would have been impossible. They watched eagerly
the direction of their drift, worked out by observation of the stars.
For the first few weeks, propelled by northern winds, the _Fram_ moved
southwards. Then {142} slowly the northern current began to make
itself felt, but during the whole of this first winter the _Fram_ only
moved a few miles onward towards her goal. All the next summer the
ship remained fast frozen and drifted about two hundred miles. With
her rate of progress and direction, Nansen reckoned that she would
reach, not the Pole, but Spitzbergen, and would take four and a half
years more to do it. All through the next winter the _Fram_ moved
slowly northwards and westwards. In the spring of 1895 she was still
about five hundred miles from the Pole, and her present path would miss
it by about three hundred and fifty miles. Nansen resolved upon an
enterprise unparalleled in hardihood. He resolved to take with him a
single companion, to leave the _Fram_ and to walk over the ice to the
Pole, and thence as best he might to make his way, not back to his ship
again (for that was impossible), but to the nearest known land. The
whole distance to be covered was almost a thousand miles. Dr Nansen
and Lieutenant Johansen left the _Fram_ on March 13, 1895, to make this
attempt. They failed in their enterprise. To struggle towards the
Pole over the pack-ice, at times reared in rough hillocks and at times
split with lanes of open water, proved {143} a feat beyond the power of
man. Nansen and his companion got as far as latitude 86 deg. 13', a long
way north of all previous records. By sheer pluck and endurance they
managed to make their way southward again. They spent the winter on an
Arctic island in a hut of stone and snow, and in June of the next year
(1896) at last reached Franz Joseph Land, where they fell in with a
British expedition. They reached Norway in time to hear the welcome
news that the _Fram_, after a third winter in the ice, had drifted into
open sea again and had just come safely into port.

Equally glorious, but profoundly tragic, was the splendid attempt of
Professor Andree to reach the Pole in a balloon, which followed on the
heels of Nansen's