Quotes About Nansen

Yeah, it was fun at first, the novelty, the jobs, and then travelling around, but what are now except tourists once in a while when his high and mightiness Nansen lets us go?

Nansen had moreover introduced a startling new concept into Polar exploration. He had deliberately cut off his lines of retreat. His route was from the desolate east coast to the inhabited west. This was not bravado, but calculated exploitation of the instinct of self-preservation. It drove him on; there was no incentive to look back.

Perhaps Nansen, or at least the name of his ship, owed something to Verne as well. Jules Verne, the great French pioneer of science fiction, had also shown interest in the Arctic. Some thirty years earlier, he had published The English at the North Pole, in which there figured an expedition ship called Forward – of which Fram, naturally, was the Norwegian equivalent.

Nansen introduced what has come to be known as the layer principle. Still faithful to Dr Jaeger's precepts, he stuck to pure wool. There were to be four layers: underwear, shirt, sweater and, finally, jacket, knee breeches and leggings made of a tough, thick Norwegian woollen material called vadmel.