Product Description

Diaries of Nansen's lunatic three-year long expedition to the North Pole, which made him the John Krakauer of his age. In 1893 Fridtjof Nansen set sail for the North Pole in the Fram, a ship specially designed to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand its crushing pressures, and so drift North. Experts said that such a mission was tantamount to suicide. This is the stirring first-person account of this historic voyage. Nansen tells of his expedition's struggle against snowdrifts, ice floes, polar bears, scurvy, gnawing hunger, and the seemingly endless polar night that transformed the Fram into a "cold prison of loneliness." Setting out in the end on a harrowing fifteen-month sledge journey to reach his destination by foot, he was required them to share a sleeping bag of rotting reindeer fur and to feed the weaker sled dogs to the stronger ones. Given up for dead, he traveled 146 miles farther north than anyone else in the past four hundred years.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #768671 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12-19
• Original language: Norwegian
• Binding: Paperback
• 600 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Modern Library has unearthed a classic. The long out-of-print Farthest North, one of the first titles in the library's "Exploration" series, recounts Dr. Fridtjof Nansen's epic 1893 pursuit of the North Pole. Like Jon Krakauer, the series' editor, Nansen was the chronicler of one his age's most sensational adventures. But he was also much more: statesman and explorer, scientist and sex symbol, Nansen's singular character and remarkable spirit demand attention and respect. It's hard to fathom how a story with such an alluring hero was forgotten in the first place.

The good doctor entered the limelight after his landmark first crossing of Greenland in 1888. Shorty after, he concocted a brilliant (or lunatic, depending on whom you asked) scheme to conquer the pole. He and a small crew would freeze a specially designed boat in the ice and drift with the Arctic current, which he believed would carry him from the coast of Siberia northwest to the pole. In mid-voyage, he realised that the current would not carry him far enough. Undaunted, he and a companion set out across the ice with a dogsled. Nansen was left for dead, but when he stumbled upon another exploration more than a year later--having reached farther north than anyone before him--he returned to Norway an international sensation.

This book, the chronicle of that journey, was hurriedly written to capitalise on that sensation. Penned in only two months, it lacks literary polish, but Nansen's eye for detail and his indomitable spirit shine through. Because he wrote while still thawing from his adventures, his story has an exciting immediacy, one that the passing of a century has done little to diminish. As a historical document, as an epic adventure and as a revival of a worthy hero long forgotten, Farthest North is a tale well worth remembering. --Andrew Nieland

From the Publisher
The god father of modern exploration in his own words
Born in Norway, Fridtjof Nansen was a renowned explorer, author, artist, scientist, athlete, oceanographer and statesman. His world-famous journey to the North Pole inspired Scott and the others that followed - he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

Edward Wymper, Conqueror of the Matterhorn

'Nansen made the most conspicuous advance towards the Pole that has ever been made, adn almost as great an advance as has been accomplished by all other voyages in the nineteenth century put together... a Man in a Million!'

'A modern Viking' The Daily Mail

Jon Krakauer

‘A first-person narrative by the visionary Norse explorer’

The New Yorker (John Banville)

‘A delight and worthy of Defoe, or the Swift of Gulliver’s Travels’

New York Review of Books

‘Should be in the libraries of adventure enthusiasts’

About the Author
Still an adolescent, Nansen brought arctic exploration within the realm of possibilities with his sensational shoestring expedition (1888) to the forbidding glaciers of Greenland. It made him world-famous and the inspiration for those who came after him, Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen. A scientist, celebrity and unlikely nineteenth-century sex-symbol, he went on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his refugee work.

Customer Reviews

Amazing!
I'm a third of the way through the book - it is an excellent read. Nansen's narrative is humorous in parts, caring and honest, his personality admirable - a man amongst men!