Farthest North

Nansen's three-year expedition to the North Pole with the Fram marked the beginning of the modern age of exploration. This book is an account, by Freidtjof Nansen, of that expedition. It describes his plan, ridiculed by his peers, to allow the specially designed Fram to become frozen in the treacherous pack ice of the Arctic Oceans. Drifting with the current, he and his crew of twelve would be carried to the Pole. Unfazed by the discovery that the plan is a failure, he sets out with a fellow crew member to cover the remaining distance across the ice on foot. It was to take them a further harrowing fifteen months during which they shared a sleeping bag of rotting reindeer fur and were forced to feed the weaker sled dogs to the stronger ones. They were to travel 146 miles farther north than any Westerner had gone before, representing one of the greatest single gains in polar exploration in four centuries.