220 NANSEN, THE MODERN VIKING 



summer visitors of the north, which enhvened everything with their cheerful 

 twittering." 



• May 19 the travelers started south again, and coming to water, they tried 

 voyaging in 'their kayaks, with an improvised mast and sail. This proved an 

 adventurous trip. Says Nansen : 



"One day, when we had been sailing along the shore, we lay to in the 

 evening to reconnoiter our farther way westward. In leaving the kayaks, we 

 made them fast to the ice by a strong strap, which we thought was perfectly 

 reliable. While we were a little way off on the top of a hummock, however, 

 we discovered that our linked boats had broken from their moorings and were 

 rapidly drifting away from the ice, carried along by the wind. All our pro- 

 visions were on board, our whole outfit, our guns, and our ammunition. There 

 we stood upon the ice, entirely without resource. Our only safely lay in reach- 

 ing our kayaks, and I had no choice but to spring into the water and try to 

 reach them by swimming. It was, however, a struggle for life, for the kayaks 

 seemed to drift more rapidly before the wind than I could swim ; the icy water 

 gradually robbed my whole body of feeling, and it became more and more dif- 

 ficult to use my limbs. At length I reached the side of our craft ; but it was 

 only by summoning up my last energies that I finally succeeded in getting on 

 board, and we were saved." 



This remarkable journey was to have as its climax one of those meetings 

 of men in a strange country which are dramatic incidents in the world's history. 

 While cooking breakfast one day, and not in the least suspecting the presence 

 of a white man within hundreds of miles, he heard a dog bark, looked up, and 

 saw F. G. Jackson, an English explorer, who was studying Franz Joseph land. 

 Nansen embarked on Jackson's steamer and returned home in August, 1896, to 

 find himself the chief hero of Norway, and a man of redoubled fame in the rest 

 of the world. 



