FRIDTJOF NANSEN

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 October 1933, Page 4

FRIDTJOF NANSEN

LAST OF. THE VIKINGS Fridtjof Nansen was born near Christiania, which is now called Oslo, in Norway, in 1861. At the ago of sixteen he won a skating championship in Norway; at seventeen he set up a world’s record for skating a mile; and at eighteen he entered, for the first time, and won, the great national cross-country ski-race, against all the experts of the land. Twelve years consecutively young Nansen competed in this race, and twelve years consecutively he won it. and then he retired, the invincible champion. During these early years he did nut specialise in skating and ski-ing. He was a superb horseman, an expert fisherman and shot, and, above all, he was a master of the forest crafts, the hunting, the tracking, the knowledge of the stars, the art of cooking, and the power of ,• long-sustained endurance. Nor was it a coincidence that his book-studies consisted of geography, ' zoology, meteorology, and oceanography. Everything was being done for one purpose. He was steadily equipping himself, bodily and mentally, for the task of exploration. with all the thoroughness and attention to small detail with which Sherlock Holmes equipped himself for the profession of detection. During the hard Norwegian Winters of 1887 and 1888 it was noticed that the young student slept .out-of-doors in a sleeping-bag in the snow, night after night, and no one knew the reason until he announced, in 1889, his crazy scheme of walking across Greenland. The thing was obyiously impossible, and everyone told him so. The centre, or ice-cap, of Greenland is ope of' the two coldest spots on the surface of the globe, the other being Verhovansk, in Siberia. Both are much colder than the Poles. Nansen, then twenty-eight years old, announced that he was determined to try. The State refused A subsidy, and he went off on his own. He sailed to the fiast coast of Greenland, literally burnt his boats and walked safely across to the other side and returned to Norway to find himself a national figure. But Nansen had done a trivial thing on the east coast of Greenland which had a far greater influence on his life than the actual crossing. He had picked up a handful of driftwood on the beach. Nothing much in that, perhaps? Any child can do it. But Nansen was a scientist, and he knew that that driftwood came from a tree which only grows .in the north of Siberia, at the other side of the world, and from that handful of splinters he deduced the great Arctic Drift from Siberia across the North Pole to Greenland. This deduction was enough for him. He determined to do what the driftwood had done and come across the Pole himself. So he went to an old Scottish shipwright of Tromso, called Colin Archer, and the two of them put their heads together and evoked a queer sort of ship. It was very wide and very flat, and they named it the “Fram,” which is Norwegian for “forward.” The world smiled, but not quite so incredulously as it had smiled at the Greenland lunacy. On June 24, 1893, the Fram sailed out of Oslo, and on September 25, Otto Sverdrup, the captain, drove her into the pack-ice on the north > coast of Siberia, and Nansen waited anxiously for the first trial of the queer ship. It worked perfectly. The ice closed in, tighter and tighter, and the flat, wide ship was squeezed neatly up until it lay all serene on the top of the floe, exactly as Nansen and Archer had designed that it should. The first test was passed. Then came the second. Month after month went by until it Was perfectly obvious that the Fram was doing just what the driftwood had done. It was drifting steadily across the Polar region.

/ SETTING OUT ON FOOT So far everything had gone exactly as Nansen had forseen. But as the Fram went steadily northwards it became clear that it would miss the actual Pole itself. So Nansen x took one comrade, Johansen, and three dogsledges, and set out on foot. They did not reach the Pole, but they went farther north than any human being had ever been, and after fourteen months of marching, the two men got back to Tromso.

Exactly a week later the Fram after three years’ absence, sailed into the harbour, and within forty-eight hours every man of the expedition, from Nansen and Sverdrup downwards was suffering for the first time for three years from a cold in the head.

From the moment tjiat the Fram sailed triumphantly up the Christiania Fiord to the booming of guns, the blaring of sirens, and the applause of a nation, Nansen became a. world figure, and he travelled Europe incessantly lecturing, at the urgent request of countless scientific bodies.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Nansen took an active part in the separation of Norway from Sweden, and it was largely due to his decisive intervention that the separation was brought about, not only Without bloodshed, but without illfeeling. He was the first Norwegian Minister at the Court of St. James l in 190 G. But two years of city life were more than enough for him, and in 1908 he went back to his snowfields and his forests. During the war he went to America, and negotiated a shipping treaty with the United States that was by far the most advantageous treaty that any neutral managed to obtain. But when he war was over he once again went back to Norway and gave up politics, as he thought, for ever, and resumed his work as professor of oceanography. But Nansen was not allowed a very long "rest. In the Spring of 1920 P. J. Baker, the famous Olympic half-mile runner, was sent by the newly-formed League of Nations at Geneva to dig the old lion out of his lair. Half a million prisoners of war in Russia, Siberia, and the very uttermost parts of Manchuria and Turkestan were still cut off from their home. Would Nansen undertake the -work of repatriation? That was the question that Philip Baker brought to Oslo. For eight hours he and Nansen talked, and within a month Nansen was off to Moscow, and he did not stop working until all of the half-million men had been brought back to their homes.

“NANSEN PASSPORTS." After that Nansen became the senior Samaritan of the League. Whenever men and women and children were in peril, it was always for Nansen that the cry went up, and never did the old Viking fail to come down from

his bills to which the world had lifted their eyes. A million “White” Russian emigres were starving in the Balkans because they had no passports and could not travel in search of work. Nansen persuaded the Governments to accept the “Nansen passport,” and organised the transference of tens of thousands of these unfortunates to countries where work -was available. In 1921 the great famine lay like a giant, locust in the valley of the Volga, and again Nansen was called in. After the Greek debacle in Asia Minor, when ("lie new Turkey Hung back the Greek armies and Smyrna was destroyed by lire, a million and a-quarter Greek refugees came back to Greece and had to be provided for. Again it was Nansen -who did it, organising relief, dealing with Governments, and stumping Europe in search of funds. Lord Curzon said of him in 1923 that Nansen was the only man alive to whom every Chancery in Europe was open at any hour. Fridtjof Nansen -was the last and the greatest of the Vikings. Physically he could compare with any of the heroes who rowed with Karl Thorsefne and Eric, the Red to Greenland and from Greenland to America in the eleventh century. At sixty-six Nansen made his last ski-ing expedition into the mountains; al 67 he was racing up hotel stairs; at 68 he was planning to fly with Dr. Eckcnci- over the North i Pole in the Graf Zeppelin. “a ni.jn [

may go to Geneva all his life,” he said to me once, “but he cannot shoot polar bears much after 70.” . But the last of the vikings brought this mighty physique, and this irresistible vitality, not to the old evils of incessant Viking warfare, but to the rebuilding of a tottering world on a basis of good will and kindliness. If ever sanity prevails and the world is rebuilt on that basis, it will be because of the three men who laboured so greatly at the foundations, Woodrow Wilson, Robert Cecil, and Fridtjof Nansen, the three men who never despaired and never retreated.—A. G. Macdonncll in “John o’ London’s Weekly.”