59 Fun Facts About Fridtjof Nansen

Nansen was born in 1861 near which capital city, then called Christiania?

Oslo was still called Christiania then. From the family estate on its edge, the schoolboy Nansen would vanish into the Nordmarka forest for days at a time, sleeping outdoors whatever the weather.

Which body asked Nansen to run Russian famine relief?

The Red Cross asked him in 1921. With the Soviet regime distrusted abroad, governments held back, and Nansen had to raise most of the money from private charities instead.

How did Nansen's six-man team first traverse the Greenland interior in 1888?

On cross-country skis, but only after a false start: pack ice kept their boats from shore, and the party spent days camped on a floe that carried them far south before they could row back up the coast.

What made Nansen turn back at 86°14′N?

Ice ridges ahead: scouting in front, Nansen saw what he called a veritable chaos of ice blocks stretching to the horizon, and decided to stop wasting time and make for the nearest land.

What subject did Nansen study at the Royal Frederick University in Christiania?

Zoology appealed because he thought it promised a life outdoors, and it delivered: it soon had him aboard an Arctic sealing ship, studying the animals of the ice.

Nansen's early research on marine creatures helped establish which idea?

Neuron doctrine: in primitive sea creatures he could find no fusion between nerve cells, against the then-popular picture of one continuous nerve net. Cajal shared a 1906 Nobel for the same idea.

In 1905 Nansen campaigned for Norway to break its union with which country?

Sweden had shared a king with Norway since 1814. When the union collapsed in 1905, the prime minister sent the famous explorer abroad to argue Norway's case to the world.

In wartime Washington, what did Nansen negotiate for Norway?

Food shipments: when the United States joined the war, the tightened Allied blockade left neutral Norway short, and Nansen spent almost a year in Washington winning an exemption.

On which sealing ship did the young Nansen make his first Arctic voyage in 1882?

Viking carried the 20-year-old student into the ice off Greenland, where his first distant sight of the great ice cap planted the idea of crossing it.

Why did Nansen cross Greenland from the empty east to the settled west?

The party would have no line of retreat, so safety lay only ahead, in the settled west. Decades later Nansen told students that a line of retreat is a snare, and urged them to burn their boats.

How did Nansen and one companion reach Godthaab once off the ice cap?

In a boat made from their tent: with no way through overland, they stretched the tent floor over ribs cut from willow bushes, then rowed the tiny craft down the fjord for days.

Before sailing for Greenland, Nansen recruited two members of which people for his crossing party?

Sami: Nansen wanted men at home in snow and cold, so he sent to Karasjok in Norway's far north for Samuel Balto and Ole Ravna, and both made the full crossing.

Nansen's Greenland crossing ended at Godthaab, a town known today by which name?

Nuuk, now Greenland's capital, was the Danish colony of Godthaab in Nansen's day. He had aimed for a harbour farther north, but with the season running out he swung the party toward the nearer town.

Reaching Godthaab after crossing Greenland, Nansen was amused to be congratulated first on what?

His doctoral degree: he had defended his thesis days before leaving home, and found it comical to cross Greenland only to be congratulated on that. Nothing, he wrote, could have been more remote from his thoughts.

Why did the party spend seven months in Greenland after the crossing?

No ship would call until spring: the season's last vessel had already sailed when the party reached the coast, so they wintered among the Greenlanders, and Nansen later turned the stay into a book on Inuit life.

Whom did Nansen marry in September 1889, a few months after returning from Greenland?

Eva Sars was a celebrated concert singer. As the story goes, he first met her in the hills above the capital, when he went to investigate a pair of boots sticking out of a snowdrift.

What does Fram, the name of Nansen's polar ship, mean in English?

Forward: his wife christened the ship at her launch. Months into the drift, doubting the ice would carry them far enough, he wrote in his diary that there was but one way, and that is Fram, forward.

Wreckage from which sunken American ship suggested a current across the Arctic Ocean?

USS Jeannette was crushed in the ice north of Siberia in 1881. Three years later, clothing marked with her crewmen's names turned up frozen into a floe off southwest Greenland, on the far side of the polar sea.

What did the Fram's drift reveal about the central Arctic Ocean?

It was thousands of metres deep: Nansen himself had called the polar basin small and very shallow, but soundings through the ice ran past 3,000 metres, and the drift sighted no new land.

Who designed and built the Fram?

Colin Archer, born in Norway to Scottish parents, had made his name with pilot boats built to ride out the worst weather. Nansen later wrote that the expedition owed its success in no small degree to him.

Why was the Fram's hull rounded?

So ice lifted her instead of crushing her: Nansen wanted a ship that would slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice. Critics doubted any hull could survive, but at the first pressure she simply rose.

Who served as second-in-command on the Fram expedition?

Otto Sverdrup had already crossed Greenland with Nansen. When his leader left for the pole he took sole command, worked the Fram free of the ice and reached Norway only days after Nansen himself.

Hjalmar Johansen later shared Nansen's dash for the pole, but in what capacity did he sign on to the Fram?

Ship's stoker was the only post left, and Johansen, an army reserve lieutenant, wanted to go so badly that he took it. Nansen later chose him from the whole crew as his one companion on the ice.

What powered the Fram's electric lamps through the polar night?

A windmill on deck drove the dynamo once the engine fell silent. While the sun stayed below the horizon for months, the crew read, feasted and held concerts in a saloon bright with electric light.

Which phenomenon slowed the Fram along the Siberian coast?

Dead water strikes where fresh water lies over heavier salt water. A study Nansen later prompted showed why: the ship's power was going into raising hidden waves between the two layers.

Why did Nansen leave the Fram in 1895 to go on with dogs and sledges?

The drift would miss the pole, Nansen realised, carrying the ship past it well to the south. Satisfied she would ride out the ice without him, he handed her to her captain and set off with one companion.

What did Nansen do when the kayaks holding all his gear drifted away?

He swam after them through icy water and was almost too numb to haul himself aboard. Paddling back, stiff with cold, he still stopped to shoot two seabirds for supper.

What mistake left Nansen and Johansen unsure of their position?

They forgot to wind their chronometers, and both ran down. Restarted on Nansen's guess at the time, the watches could no longer give a sure longitude; weeks later he wrote that the pair had paid dearly for it.

Where did Nansen and Johansen spend the winter of 1895-96?

Franz Josef Land: they walled a hut of stones and moss and sat out the dark on bear meat and blubber. Far from starving, both men ended the winter heavier than when they had left the ship.

Which animal's attack on the kayaks caused the delay that led to the rescue?

A walrus drove its tusks through the side of Nansen's kayak, which was hauled onto the ice on the point of sinking. The halt for repairs kept the pair in place just long enough to be found.

Where did the Fram break out of the ice in 1896, much as Nansen's drift theory had predicted?

North and west of Spitsbergen, much where his drift theory said she should appear. She reached open water on 13 August 1896, the very day Nansen landed in Norway, yet he waited a week for the telegram saying she was safe.

What was the English title of Nansen's account of the Fram expedition?

Farthest North sold in huge editions at home and abroad, and his lecture tours of Europe and America became a triumphal progress. The fame gave his voice real weight when Norway sought independence in 1905.

Why did the Duke of the Abruzzi sit out his expedition's sledge run past Nansen's northern record?

Frostbitten fingers: parts of two had to be amputated that winter, so the duke stayed in camp and Captain Umberto Cagni led the run north. His Italians beat Nansen's mark by less than 40 kilometres and only just made it back.

What did Nansen name the grand house he built at Lysaker?

Polhøgda, or polar heights, was largely Nansen's own design, drawn up with an architect. He died there in 1930 and lies in its garden, and an institute bearing his name now works in the house.

On a secret 1905 mission, whom did Nansen persuade to accept the Norwegian throne?

Prince Charles of Denmark would not take the crown on parliament's word alone and asked that Norwegians vote on it first. They backed a monarchy by a wide margin, and he arrived as King Haakon VII.

What diplomatic post did Nansen hold from 1906 to 1908?

Norway's first Minister in London felt unsuited to a diplomat's life: he found court functions dull and missed his research. He left the post in 1908 and went back to science.

Nansen's Fram data helped a Swedish physicist establish which oceanographic principle?

Ekman concluded that wind on the sea surface produced currents like a spiral staircase down towards the depths.

What is a Nansen bottle used for?

Sampling sea water at a set depth took a trick: a weight slid down the wire, tipped the bottle upside down and snapped it shut. The flip also fixed the reading on its thermometer, so each sample came up with its temperature.

To whom did Nansen hand over the Fram, marking his retirement from exploration?

Roald Amundsen asked for her for a drift across the Arctic Ocean, and Nansen agreed. Amundsen then turned for the South Pole without a word to the man who had lent him the ship, and got there first.

Which fellow Norwegian explorer did Nansen dismiss as a fraud?

Carsten Borchgrevink had led the first party ever to winter on the Antarctic mainland, yet Nansen, by Scott's account, called him a tremendous fraud.

Which body made Nansen its first High Commissioner for Refugees in the early 1920s?

The League of Nations handed him some two million Russians scattered by revolution and civil war. The work claimed most of his energy for the rest of his life.

Whom did Nansen bring home by the hundred thousand between 1920 and 1922?

Prisoners of war: well over 400,000 men, many stuck in Russian camps long after the fighting had stopped. He got them home with a tiny staff and very little money.

The Nansen passport was a travel document for whom?

Stateless persons had no country to issue them papers, so they could not legally travel. Nansen's certificate, in time honoured by more than fifty governments, let them go wherever there was work.

What event prompted the Nansen passport in 1922?

Moscow revoking the citizenship of Russians abroad, by a decree of Lenin's in 1921, cut adrift about 800,000 people who had fled the civil war. Nansen's identity certificate followed the next summer.

Which future Nazi collaborator ran famine relief in Ukraine for Nansen in the early 1920s?

Vidkun Quisling ran relief in famine-struck Ukraine in 1922 and 1923, and went with Nansen to Armenia in 1925. He later traded on the connection when he went into Norwegian politics.

Nansen devised a population exchange between which two countries after their 1919-22 war?

Greece and Turkey agreed the swap at Lausanne in 1923. Greeks were already fleeing Asia Minor after their army's defeat, and Athens had asked Nansen for help; the treaty sent hundreds of thousands of Muslims the other way.

In which Swiss city did the Nansen Office, winner of the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize, carry on his work after his death?

Geneva was its base from 1931. Most of the aid it gave was paid for by the refugees themselves, through the fees charged on their Nansen papers, topped up by gifts and the sale of charity stamps.

Nansen served as Rector of which university, Scotland's oldest, addressing its students in 1926?

St Andrews heard him speak on the spirit of adventure, which he called rooted deep in every one of us. He looked back over his own life to make the case, and the talk was later printed as Adventure.

Late in life, Nansen led an international society that planned to explore the Arctic by what means?

Airship: the society had the Graf Zeppelin promised for a long Arctic flight. Nansen died in 1930 before it could go, and the Zeppelin flew north the following summer without him.

Nansen's funeral fell on 17 May 1930, the date of which Norwegian holiday?

Constitution Day, 17 May, is Norway's national day. Nansen held no religious belief, so the funeral he was given that day, four days after his death, went ahead with no priest and no hymns.

Which American was the first to receive the Nansen medal, the UN refugee agency's yearly honour, in 1954?

Eleanor Roosevelt had spent the war pressing her husband's government to admit more refugees from Nazi Europe, with limited success. She went on to chair the UN Human Rights Commission, and the first medal was hers.

Who played Nansen in the 1985 television serial The Last Place on Earth?

Max von Sydow took the part in a seven-part drama about the race for the South Pole. Look closely and you will spot Hugh Grant and Bill Nighy in early roles.

Which Swedish stove, new in the 1890s, did Nansen carry on his sledge journey towards the North Pole?

Primus stoves, a Swedish invention only a few years old, turn paraffin to gas before burning it. Nansen set his under a cooker of his own design, built so that hardly any of the heat got away.

Nansen's family came from Denmark, where his forefather Hans, once a White Sea trader, became mayor of which city?

Copenhagen made Hans Nansen a mayor in 1644. At the Estates meeting of 1660 he spoke for the burghers and pressed for a hereditary crown, a blow aimed at the nobles' privileges.

What became of most of Nansen's 28 sledge dogs on the ice?

Fed one by one to the rest: each dog that wore out was killed and cut up for the others, and by June only seven were left. The last two were shot that August, as the men took to their kayaks.

In which Norwegian city did Nansen work as a museum curator for most of the 1880s, before crossing Greenland?

Bergen meant years at the microscope, but late one winter he crossed the mountains alone to Christiania, entered a contest there and went back again. All through those years his Greenland plan was taking shape.

What did Nansen do with his Nobel Peace Prize money?

He donated it to international relief, and the Danish publisher Christian Erichsen gave a sum to match. Much of the money went into model farms in the famine country, one of them in Ukraine.

How did Nansen and Johansen mark Christmas Eve 1895 in their winter hut?

Turned their shirts inside out, which was as festive as things got in a stone hut. Supper was fish meal with train oil for butter, and Christmas morning brought chocolate and bread.

Which organisation did Nansen help launch in the mid-1920s to unite Norwegians against revolutionary socialism?

The Fatherland League was the idea of a young engineer, Joakim Lehmkuhl, and Nansen spoke at its opening rally. Its aim was to push Norway's quarrelling non-socialist parties into working together.