xxx WORST JOURNEY AUN) THE WORLD 
ship would rise and sit on the top of the ice when pressed, 
instead of being crushed. Of her wonderful voyage with 
her thirteen men, of how she was frozen into the ice in 
September 1893 in the north of Siberia (79° N.) and of the 
heaving and trembling of the ship amidst the roar of the ice 
pressure, of how the Fram rose to the occasion as she was 
built to do, the story has still, after twenty-eight years, 
the thrill of novelty. She drifted over the eightieth degree 
on February 2, 1894. During the first winter Nansen 
was already getting restive: the drift was so slow, and 
sometimes it was backwards: it was not until the second 
autumn that the eighty-second degree arrived. So he de- 
cided that he would make an attempt to penetrate north- 
wards by sledging during the following spring. As Nan- 
sen has told me, he felt that the ship would do her job in 
any case. Could not something more be done also ? 
This was one of the bravest decisions a polar explorer 
has ever taken. It meant leaving a drifting ship which 
could not be regained : it meant a return journey over 
drifting ice to land; the nearest known land was nearly five 
hundred miles south of the point from which he started 
northwards; and the journey would include travelling both 
by sea and by ice. 
Undoubtedly there was more risk in leaving the Fram 
than in remaining in her. It is a laughable absurdity to say, 
as Greely did after Nansen’s almost miraculous return, that 
he had deserted his men in an ice-beset ship, and deserved 
to be censured for doing so.t The ship was left in the com- 
mand of Sverdrup. Johansen was chosen to be Nansen’s 
one companion, and we shall hear of him again in the Fram, 
this time with Amundsen in his voyage to the South. 
The polar traveller is so interested in the adventure and 
hardships of Nansen’s sledge journey that his equipment, 
which is the most important side of his expedition to us 
who have gone South, is liable to be overlooked. ‘The 
modern side of polar travel begins with Nansen. It was 
Nansen who first used a light sledge based upon the ski 
sledge of Norway, in place of the old English heavy sledge 
1 Nansen, Farthest North, vol. i. p. §2. 
