CHAPTER LXIII 



THE RETURN AFTER THE FIFTH WINTER 



IN 1896 Nansen started on a voyage that was a new departure 

 in the method of polar exploration. On the basis of sound 

 and brilliant reasoning, he had concluded that if a ship were 

 put in the ice near the north coast of Alaska or the north coast of 

 eastern Siberia, it would float across the polar basin, coming out 

 into the north Atlantic in the vicinity of Spitsbergen, where huge 

 quantities of ice are known to be continually moving south to be 

 melted in the Gulf Stream. Nansen made a great step forward 

 with this plan in the methods of polar exploration and carried it 

 out successfully. 



In 1879 Lieutenant de Long's Jeannette was caught in the ice 

 in the vicinity of Wrangel Island and carried northwestward until 

 she was crushed north of the New Siberian Islands. It was in the 

 vicinity where the Jeannette was lost that Nansen put the Fram 

 into the ice, so that when the cruise of the Jeannette and the cruise 

 of the Fram are both plotted on a circumpolar map they make 

 nearly a continuous curved line from Wrangel Island to Spits- 

 bergen. In the fall of 1913 the Karluk had been set fast in the 

 ice not far northwest from Barter Island where we now were and 

 had been carried to the vicinity of Wrangel Island before she was 

 broken by the ice. If her drift is plotted on the same circum- 

 polar chart with those of the Jeannette and Fram, the three make a 

 nearly continuous line from the vicinity of Barter Island to Spits- 

 bergen. It seems, then, that there is not much point in putting a 

 ship into the ice anywhere on the north coast of Alaska or the 

 north coast of Siberia, for such a ship if frozen in far enough east 

 will duplicate first the Karluk drift, second the Jeannette drift, 

 and third the Fram drift, following their route approximately. 

 This at least seems likely to me. 



Nansen's idea of drifting in a ship was that a ship would be 

 a sort of floating boarding-house for his men, giving them a com- 

 fortable dwelling as they drifted and as they carried on such scien- 

 tific work as they might find possible, — soundings, zoological col- 

 lecting, magnetic observations, and the like. We had come to the 



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