Farthest North: The Incredible Expedition to the Frozen Latitudes of the North - Softcover

Fleming, Fergus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903933099 ISBN 13: 9781903933091

Publisher: Gibson Square Books Ltd, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Gibson Square Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1903933099
• ISBN 13: 9781903933091
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320