January 29, 2021 • 48 mins
By the second half of the 19th century, British explorers had competition from Americans and Norwegians in the race to claim the North Pole. Nowhere was the contrast in expedition styles more evident than between British naval officer George Strong Nares and Norwegian adventurer Fridtjof Nansen. While Nares stuck to tradition, Nansen ushered in a new era of polar exploration that favored tested theories over wishful thinking, self-organization over government sponsorship, and minimalism over the idea that bigger was better. The international competition to be the first at the Pole was on.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental Floss. It's June and Norwegian
polar explorer fritch Off Nonson is waking up after another
frigid night spent on Frontio's of Land. It's an uninhabited
(00:25):
archipelago north of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean. With his
assistant Yalmar Johansen still snoozing nearby, Nonsense starts a fire,
tosses some meat into a pot to make soup, and
climbs the top of Rocky Hill to admire the view.
That's when he hears it, the unmistakable sound of dog's bargain.
(00:46):
He's shocked because their last sled dog died months ago.
The two explorers haven't laid eyes on another human since
they abandoned their ice bound ship, the From on March.
They had left Norway, and soon after the From was
stuck in ice. This was by design. Nonson wanted to
(01:07):
drift to the North Pole on ocean currents, but after
a year and a half a drift, Nonson realized they
weren't going to make it. He and Johnson tried unsuccessfully
to ski to the pole. Now they'd retreated hundreds of
miles over ice and open water to this spot, and
they had many more to go before rescue could be contemplated.
(01:28):
So when Nonson hears far off barks, he tells himself
it's probably just birds. Then he hears the noise again.
Now he's almost certain that dogs and their human handlers
must be close by. He wakes Johnson, but his companion
doubts this news. Nonson locates what he thinks are dog tracks,
and then he hears an even more thrilling sound, a
(01:49):
human shout, which he returns with a mighty cry of
his own. He hurries towards the noise and sees a
figure he later describes as a civilized European in an
English check suit and high rubber water boots, well shaved,
well groomed, bringing with him a perfume of scented soap.
It's Frederick Jackson, a British explorer task with charting a
(02:11):
land route to the North Pole. Nonsense, shaggy hairt and
caked and soot in Walver's grease is much less identifiable.
Halfway through their conversation, Jackson finally places the face. Aren't
you nonsen? He exclaims, and Nonson confirms it. I congratulate
you most heartily, Jackson says, amid lots of beaming and handshaking.
(02:33):
You have made a good trip of it, and I'm
awfully glad to be the first person to congratulate you
on your return. A surprising encounter with any long lost
explorer is caused for celebration, but nonsense safe return was
extra thrilling. Until then, the quest for the North Pole
had been mostly a procession of massive expeditions. Government and
(02:54):
private investors had funneled their money into ships that carried
over a hundred crew and luxury is like libraries and
printing presses. Nonsense expedition was the opposite, a custom engineered
vessel with a small crew and equipment he designed for
polar travel. His success not only astonished people, it also
ushered in a new era of polar exploration that favored
(03:17):
test and theories over wishful thinking, self organization over government sponsorship,
and minimalism over the idea that bigger was better. But
before Nonsense triumph, British explorers were still trying to reach
the North Pole the old fashioned way. In the seventies,
polar explorers were professionals backed by world powers and independent
(03:39):
adventurers with big dreams but little experience. Some failed and
some died, but others got closer to the mythical point
on the map than ever before and lived to tell
about it. The international competition to be the first of
the poll was on from Mental Floss and I Heart Radio.
(04:06):
This is the Quest for the North Bowl. I'm your host,
Cat Long, Science editor at Mental Floss and this is
episode three, the turning Point. By the second half of
the nineteenth century, many of Britain's esteemed pioneers were no
(04:29):
longer leading the Arctic charge. Admiralty's second Secretary, Sir John Barrow,
who had spearheaded Britain's polar exploration campaign for decades, had
passed away in eighty eight. The fate of Sir John Franklin,
who became the most famous explorer on Earth because he
and all of his men perished in the Arctic, had
come to light in eighteen fifty nine. For all the
(04:52):
British effort put towards navigating the Northwest Passage, the discoveries
of the last several decades had proven what William Scoresby
asserted back in eighteen seventeen that it just wasn't worth
it commercially speaking, but the country's huge emotional and financial
investment in polar discovery made throwing in the tell now
(05:12):
seem almost disgraceful. As nations like Russia, the US and
what is now Norway set their sides on the region,
Britain started viewing the North Pole as a symbol of
its continuing dominance. As Arctic veteran and British Army general
Edward Saban wrote in the eighteen sixties, to reach the
Poll is the greatest geographical achievement which can be attempted,
(05:35):
and I own I should grieve if it should first
be accomplished by any other than an Englishman, it will
be the crowning enterprise of those Arctic researches in which
our country has hitherto had the pre eminence. The public
easily latched onto this idea of a single glamorous spot
on the map. The North Pole was a fundamentally romantic goal,
(05:56):
promising glory to anyone who could achieve it. That's Edward J. Larson,
a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and the author of An
Empire of Ice, Scott Shackleton and the Heroic Age of
Antarctic science. Now, the winner might cash in through publishing
contracts and speaking these in his country, I guess would
(06:16):
gain prestige in an ever more imperialistic and nationalist engage.
But no one, and this is important to remember as
distinguishing Arctic exploration with Antarctic, or with African or with
South Pacific exploration. No one expected a conquest of concrete
value because the North Pole was merely a point on
(06:39):
fifting ice with no appreciable scientific value. Maybe that last
part is a bit mean. In eighty five, Sir Clements
Robert Markham, then Secretary and future President of the Royal
Geographical Society, gave a long list of scientific advancements that
could only be accomplished by trying for the poll. The
British citiz sins and key officials were pushing for a
(07:01):
government sponsored expedition to plant the Union Jack at ninety
degrees north, and scientific value ranked much lower on the
list of priorities. While earlier Arctic exploration was all about
charting the entire Northwest passage, this latest phase focused on
simply getting to the North Pole. Here's Larson again. Once reached.
(07:23):
Some ask even at the time, who would ever want
to go again. But it was that sort of a
romantic goal. At a time when machines were replacing men
as the engines of production, and faceless bureaucrat seemed to
be taking the place of principal leaders, here was an objective,
a goal requiring invincible will, indefagable drive, and indomitable courage.
(07:46):
In short, attaining the goal was a fundamentally human achievement.
The British Admiralty would need a dauntless, dashing leader to
be the face of that uniquely human spirit for the
new mission. They found it in Sir George Strong Nare's
Nars was a forty four year old career naval officer
(08:09):
with a dynamite resume and limitless ambition. After enlisting in
the Royal Navy at the ripe old age of fourteen,
he embarked on a series of voyages that whisked him
through the Mediterranean, South Pacific, Red Sea, Australian Waters and beyond.
He was captain of the HMS Challenger on its mission
to study the Ocean. He served in the Crimean War.
(08:32):
He even authored a best selling naval manual titled Seamanship.
Naire's was no stranger to the Arctic either. In eighteen
fifty two, he joined an expedition to find Sir John
Franklin and his missing ships. They didn't, of course, but
they ended up saving a previous rescue expedition which was
marooned and ice. As the Admiralty prepared to send Nears
(08:54):
north again, the British public was swept up in a
nationalistic fervor, much like the feeling in the US during
the twentieth century space race. The North Pole was the moon,
George Naire's was a hopeful Neil Armstrong, and newspapers like
The Illustrated London News and The Graphic reported faithfully on
every emerging detail. It soon became clear that while the
(09:16):
government had updated its primary goal, it hadn't updated the
strategy or structure of the expedition at all. This wasn't surprising.
Most expeditions from the era followed a certain predictable pattern.
There's a series of absolute, catastrophically mismanaged and or fatal
expeditions to the North Pole or attempts on the North Pole.
(09:38):
That's p J. Cappellotti, a professor of anthropology at Penn
State Abington's and the author of the Greatest show in
the Arctic. The US Army had one, the Navy had
one in the U s Navy had one. The British
Nari's expedition in the middle of the eighteen seventies have
been pretty much of a disaster. So these big national
expeditions were turning out to be complete flops. The because
(10:00):
they were big, they were unwieldy, overplanned, staffed with the
East you know, dozens and dozens of crew members and
so forth. Nares Expedition, which was formally christened the British
Arctic Expedition, would consist of two similarly sized ships. Nares
would command the flagship, a one d and sixty foot
(10:20):
steam sloop named the HMS Alert, and Henry F. Stevenson
would captain the HMS Discovery, a one hundred and sixty
six ft steam whaler. Anticipating ice flows battery, the ships
builders had outfitted their holes with sturdy wooden beams and
iron plating. Each ship would house thirteen officers, which comprised captains, lieutenants, surgeons,
(10:43):
and scientific leaders, basically anyone allowed to give orders. The
rest of the men on board followed those orders. In
addition to able seamen, stewards, and cooks. This group also
included carpenters, Cooper's furnace stokers, and ice quartermasters. There was
even a rope maker. Altogether, one and twenty people would
(11:04):
set sail for the poll, just slightly smaller than the
number that perished with John Franklin a few decades earlier.
With that catastrophe still fresh in memory, the Admiralty might
have tried to risk fewer lives this time around, but
people were reluctant to entertain the idea that the Naires
expedition would be anything besides a smashing success. Naire's downplayed
(11:28):
the hazards in a lecture at the Winchester Guildhall weeks
before departure. According to the Paul Mall Gazette, he claimed
that the danger of the present expedition became mere child's
play when compared with what previous explorers had undergone. Naires
may have had enough experience to feel like he could
speak so confidently, but the same couldn't be said for
(11:50):
his officers, who had limited Arctic experience at best. This
might have been okay if they had taken the advice
of previous explorers and or study the time tested techniques
of Inuit. In the North. They didn't do either. For example,
Innuit favored loose fitting, fur lined sealskin for apparel, complete
with hooded parkas that prevented heat from escaping around their necks.
(12:14):
NAR's and his crew donned form fitting flannel and woolen
clothing that was a huge pain to strip off when
it got wet and froze, which happened often. There wasn't
a hood in sight. Hudson's Bay Company surveyor John Ray,
who had spent years exploring the Canadian Arctic, tried again
and again to share innuitat wisdom with the explorers Before
(12:36):
their departure. He told them that sheltering in snow instead
of intense would better insulate them from the cold and
also keep them from having to lug tense and heavy
betting around. They didn't listen. Ray even shared his Innuit
inspired design for a lighter, more streamlined sledge that was
less likely to sink or get stuck in deep snow.
(12:58):
There's expedition still did for the heavy, clumsy sledges used
on past Navy trips. One person did act on at
least one of Ray's recommendations and brought snowshoes, even though
other so called experts had assured everyone that they wouldn't
be necessary. When the other crew members spotted the snow
shoes on the ship, they burst into laughter. An a
(13:20):
side note, back in the eighteen fifties, Ray had learned
from the Inuit the fate of the doomed Franklin crew.
It seemed they had even resorted to cannibalism. Well true
that offended Victorian sensibilities so much that Ray became a pariah.
That may have played into nares reluctance to heat his advice.
(13:41):
On May seventy five, the Alert and the Discovery set
sail from Portsmouth Harbor with great fanfare, and the public
prepared to follow what they expected to be the greatest
adventure story ever told Beneath its confident surface. However, the
expedition was a disaster in the making, as the Canadian
historian Pierre Berton writes in his book The Arctic Graill.
(14:05):
Badly and hastily organized, with a smugness and an arrogance that,
in hindsight seem almost criminal. This band of amateurs set
off blithely, as so many had before it, without any
real idea of what they were facing. It wouldn't take
long for them to find out. The two ships sailed
up Kennedy Channel, with Canada's Ellesmere Island to the west
(14:28):
and Greenland to the east. They followed the path blazed
by American explorer Charles Francis Hall in eighteen seventy one
and hope to put the question of the open Polar
Sea to rest once and for all. As we've discussed
in previous episodes, this was a theory that a warm
ocean circled by a ring of ice surrounded the North Pole.
(14:48):
If a ship could break through the ice, they'd find
a navigable sea to take them to the pole. Nares
was smart enough to doubt this theory, and once the
ships were through the Kennedy Channel they saw massive ice
flow was over thirty ft tall, and a maze of
craggy ice that seemed to reach the horizon. The commander
realized immediately that no ship could sail to the pole.
(15:12):
Stevenson stationed the discovery in Lady Franklin Bay and started
preparing to spend the winter there. Nares, farther north than
Robeson Channel, needed to find somewhere safe to pass the
winter and fast before the ice froze around them. They
sailed northwest and ended up anchoring in an inlet near
the northern edge of Ellesmere Island, about five miles from
(15:32):
the pole. As the puffin flies just beyond their insulated refuge,
thirty thousand ton ice chunks formed a fifty foot Wallnar's
first mate, Albert Hastings Markham, later described the vista as
a solid, impenetrable mass that no amount of imagination or
theoretical belief could ever twist into an open polar sea.
(15:55):
They spent the long winter reading and playing parlor games
they construct at an observatory for skygazing, and even staged
plays in the Royal Arctic Theater in English polar traditions,
started by William Edward Perry in eighteen nas recalled owing
to the large size of the lower deck, we are
enabled to erect the stage there with a temperature of
(16:17):
fifty degrees, an advantage appreciated by both actors and audience.
A representation held on the upper deck with a temperature
of about twenty degrees below zero, leads everyone to long
for the finale. At an early hour. In spring eighteen
seventy six, two dogs led teams from the alert tried
(16:37):
and failed to reunite with the discovery. NAIs felt like
the dogs couldn't handle all the ice hammocks. In reality,
the untrained men and bulky sledges were probably more at
fault than the animals. How hard is it to drive
a dog's lad? Anyway? Here's Russell Potter, an expert on
Arctic history at Rhode Island College and the author of
Finding Franklin, The Untold story of a one heard in
(17:00):
sixty five year Search. I worked some years ago up
in the Arctic with a guy he was actually the
safety officer on the Nova show we did about the
Franklin expedition, and he's a dog driver and a guide.
And I said, well, what do you do to train
dogs to pull? And he said, you don't. You just
took them up in the pull. But having them pull
(17:20):
in an organized way, you know, the traditional innud way
as leads that are made out of sauce and sealskin,
making sure the leads don't get tangled, figuring out who
the lead dog is going to be, keeping your dogs
in order while you travel. That takes a fair amount
of practice. You can't just learn it like you riding
a bicycle or something. You would have to spend some months,
(17:41):
if not longer, sort of apprenticing to people who know
what they're doing, and eventually you get the hang of it.
But most explorers are in the Arctic to get someplace
or discover something, not to learn the art of dogs letting.
So few did, and their preference for manpower over dog
power was baked into British polar culture. I think there
is an aspect to it that is particularly British, the
(18:04):
idea that somehow if you were to use any labor
other than human labor, you would be cheating right that,
And that's certainly going native as some people would have
regarded it at the time, will be regarded as a
as a failing of some kind. So they did on
some of the Franklin searches, and Franklin himself brought some sleds,
but the idea of pulling them was to have men
(18:25):
pulled them instead of dogs, which was of course a
much worse way of traveling. On April three, Albert Markham
and another officer named Pelham Aldridge led to more teams
without dogs to explore the region. They promptly fell victim
to just about everything John Ray had tried to help
(18:45):
them avoid. Without snowshoes, they slogged through waste high snow,
which soaked their clothes and gear. They're sleeping bags froze
into solid slabs. Their supplies were saturated with water and ice,
adding weight to their all atty heavy loads. Miserable, yes,
but those issues were nothing compared to scurvy. Scurvy is
(19:07):
caused by a lack of vitamin C, which humans can't
produce on their own. As long as you occasionally eat
fresh fruits and vegetables, you're probably consuming enough vitamin C
that you never have to worry about developing it. Positions
in the nineteenth century didn't yet understand that scurvy is
caused by a vitamin C deficiency, since vitamin C was
(19:27):
only discovered in the twentieth century, but they did know
that eating fresh fruits and veggies seemed to cure it. Unfortunately,
for polar explorers, fresh produce was almost impossible to come
by on long journeys, so the Admiralty issued lemon or
lime juice rations to all sailors. The nearest expedition did
have lime juice on board, but the sledging parties didn't
(19:49):
bring any with them since it would freeze and break
its glass containers. Instead, each man had only about twelve
ounces of salted meat per day to see him through
all that grueling aabor, and nothing to prevent scurvy. Just
as naval officials had reassured nars as men that the
snug clothing, heavy sledges, and lack of snow shoes would
(20:10):
all be fine, so too did they wave away worries
about the potential for scurvy. When several members of the
sledging team started to feel under the weather, Marcom and
Aldrich chalked it up to fatigue. But fatigue is an
early symptom of scurvy. Others are joint pain, bruising, and irritability,
which could all be explained by their general situation. Severe
(20:33):
symptoms are a little more telling, spongy, blackened gums, teeth
that loosen or fall out, and healed wounds that start
to bleed again. Markham headed north and Aldridge continued westward.
As their men became more debilitated, each officer faced a
grave emergency. If they didn't turn around and get some
(20:55):
lime juice into their men, they would die. On May twelve,
Markham's stuck the British flag into the ice at eighty
three degrees twenty minutes north, still four hundred and sixties
statute miles from the pole, and high tailed it back
to the alert. Aldridge traveled another two hundred statute miles
west before turning back. Most of the men survived thanks
(21:18):
to the heroic efforts of Lieutenant A. A. C. Par
and some quick thinking on Nares's part. On June seven,
Par left Markham's party and traveled alone for forty miles
in twenty three hours to get help. Nara's deployed men
and dogsleds to rescue them and soon send a party
to Altridge's crew, assuming they were in a similar bind.
(21:38):
They were. Four men were lying on the sledges and
the others were dragging them through the snow. The rescuers
delivered everyone back to the alert, where scurvy was ripping
through the remaining men. Nara's realized it was time to
pack it in unless you lose the whole crew. He
used gunpowder to break up the ice around the ship
and set sail towards the disc every In mid September,
(22:02):
the Discovery was also battling scurvy and two men had
died on a sledging trip. Fortunately, the Inuit hunter, interpreter
and dog driver Hans Hendrick, a veteran of several British
and American polar expeditions, was a part of the Discovery's crew.
He had rescued the others by hunting seals and doling
out raw meat, which contains some vitamin C. This was
(22:27):
another helpful hint that white explorers could have picked up
from Innuit who staved off scurvy despite having few greens
in their diet. Their traditional foods included raw meat, and
they sometimes ate predigested plant matter from the stomachs of
caribou they killed. The crews of the Alert and Discovery
were too depleted to do much beyond staying alive long
(22:47):
enough to get home, and Nares knew it. Without reaching
their goal, the two ships charted a course towards England.
They arrived there on November two, eighty six to a
mixed reception. Banquets were held, medals were awarded, and Queen
Victoria even sent a congratulatory message, but the media lambasted
(23:08):
the expedition for falling short of its single goal and
embarrassing the nation on a global stage. The Admiralty agreed
and actually launched an investigation to find out why scurvy
was such an issue. They eventually came to the conclusion
that in future expeditions there should be less rum and
more lime juice. Objectively, the expedition wasn't a complete disaster.
(23:32):
It had surveyed land and recorded new scientific data, established
that Ellesmere Island was part of Canada and thus part
of the British Commonwealth, and set a new record for
northern progress. If the government and the press had both
set different expectations from the beginning, it could have been
considered victory. Alas there's his failure to achieve his one
(23:54):
note goal of reaching the North Pole made the whole
effort seem like a failure overall. The Royal Navy relinquished
its hope articulated by Edward Sabin, that British adventurers would
stand atop the world. In fact, Britain did a complete
one eighty and focused its attention on conquering the South Bowl.
(24:14):
That left a door open for other nations to succeed
in the North. We'll be right back. While Britain was
(24:39):
busy dealing with the fallout from Nares's expedition. A teenaged
fritsch Off Nonson was honing his skiing skills in Norway.
Nonson was born outside Oslo, then called Christiania, in sixty
one to a successful lawyer father and a mother who
raised capable, outdoorsy kids. By the time Nonson enrolled in
the University of oz Low in one, he was sort
(25:02):
of an ubermanch physically and mentally. He could skate, swim,
sketch and ski better than most, and he showed a
special aptitude for learning science. While studying zoology in college,
he spent months on a ceiling ship in Greenland, embarked
on long ski trips. Has served as the Bergen Museum's
(25:23):
zoological curator. Here's a portrait of nonsense, in Capalotti's words,
very cultured, educated, well read, multiple languages, all of that
on the one hand, and on the other hand, this
almost primitive human, which again is the other half of
the Norwegian character, living outdoors, playing outdoors, surviving out of
(25:46):
doors in all seasons at all ages. This is somebody
who strapped on his first pair of skis when he
was two, and later in life would sort of laugh
at people who were trying to learn how to ski.
I think he won the Norwegian Combined Norwegian skiing cross
country skiing skating competition, like a dozen years in a
row or something, just a phenomenal What today would be
(26:09):
he would be one of these people. You would absolutely
hate his guts, and a lot of people did hate
his guts. In his day. He was almost impossible to
work with because he was so smart, he was so athletic,
he was so good looking. But he, being Norwegian, was
had had a very dark moods where he loathed himself
and didn't think he was nearly accomplished as much as
he should be. I thought he was scattering his talents
(26:31):
too far and wide, not doing what the great men
of history did, which is finding a single furrow and
plowing it over and over again until they reached their goal.
In retrospect, it seems like Nonsen was destined for greatness
at the time. However, some of his ideas were considered
off the wall. After finishing his PhD, Nonsen hatched a
(26:52):
plan to traverse the entire Greenland ice cap, which no
white person had ever done before. If the trip itself
see Daunting nonsense. Strategy was even more so. A ship
deposited him in his five companions off the uninhabited east
coast of Greenland and then departed, leaving them no choice
(27:13):
but to make it to the populated west coast or
die trying. In fact, that was nanson slogan, death or
the West Coast. In August, Nonsen and the others put
on their snowshoes and started their uphill climb, dragging more
than two pounds of supplies on their sledges. Overnight temperatures
plunged to minus forty degrees fahrenheit or even colder. Nansen's
(27:38):
men realized that their pemmican, their main source of nourishment,
had accidentally been made without fat, an essential ingredient for energy.
They were ravenous throughout their trip. About three weeks later
they reached the peak of the ice cap, at eight
thousand nine and twenty four ft above sea level. They
switched to skis and headed downhill. Hungry and exhausted, they
(28:02):
even had to build a boat from stunted Arctic willow
trees to carry them across a fiord. By October, all
six men had landed in gotthaab a Danish settlement on
the west coast. It's now Nook, the capital of Greenland.
They had done it, but now they had to spend
the winter in Greenland, since it was too late in
the season to hitch a ride back to Norway. Nonson
(28:24):
practiced hunting and kayaking and tried to learn as much
as he could from native people in Greenland. When he
returned to Norway the following May, he was well equipped
for his next great adventure. The idea for the expedition
started with the U. S. S. Jeannette, a ship carrying
an American expedition to the North Pole via the Bearing Strait.
(28:45):
In June, ice floes had crushed and sunk the Jeannette
in the East Siberian Sea. Yet three years later, wreckage
thought to be from that very ship washed up in
southwest Greenland. Here's Capalati when he read about this wreckage
washing ashore, coming down in the ice and heard that
(29:06):
it was from the Jenette. He also read that there
was a Norwegian professor, a guy named Henrik Mon, speculating
that it had gotten from the north of Siberia where
the Jeanette was wrecked, all the way to the west
coast of Greenland very strange because there was a current
carrying it that way. And so Nonson looked at these
(29:26):
disastrous expeditions, overwrought over personnel and all the rest of it,
and looked at the Jeanette, of course, and said, you know,
I'd like to do a Jenette expedition. I just don't
want my ship crushed like the Janette, because if there
is a current that goes from Siberia over to Greenland,
if I can figure out a way to design and
build a ship that will go with the ice instead
(29:47):
of being crushed by the ice, then all I have
to do is do exactly what the Janette did. Go
to the north coast of Siberia, stick the bow of
my ship in the ice and let it get frozen in,
and let the ice just carry me across the North Pole.
In February, Nonson presented this far out notion to the
Christian Geographical Society. I believe. He said that if we
(30:10):
pay attention to the actually existent forces of nature and
seek to work with them and not against them, we
shall thus find the safest and easiest method of reaching
the poll Ships always ran the risk of being crushed
by the shifting ice flows. Nonson had an answer for
this too. He designed a small, strong ship with a
rounded hull so it would be pushed above the ice
(30:33):
instead of below it. Plenty of experts still consider this
plan sheer madness and nonsense own words, but there was
also enough hopeful curiosity to finance it. With funds from
the Norwegian Parliament and a mix of private sponsors, Nonson
commissioned a Norwegian shipbuilder named Colin Archer to construct a
(30:55):
highly unconventional wooden schooner. Nonsense wife Eva named it the
from Norwegian for a forward. It was designed to do
exactly what the Genette could not do. It was designed
like no other ship, so it was designed with this
kind of rounded stern, rounded bow, rounded sides, two ft
thick hulls of the strongest wood on the planet, and
(31:16):
at the bow that increased the fore ft and on
top of that fore feet of a very hardwood, was
some iron and an iron stem. It had a rudder
and a propeller mechanism at the stern for propulsion that
could be lifted out of the water so the ice
couldn't damage the rudder and the propeller. Nansen, I think
referred to it as as it was going to be
(31:37):
like an eel that would slip out of your hands.
It was, and some other people have referred to it
as like what happens when you pinch a watermelon seed
between your your fingers, and that's what he wanted the
ship to do in the ice. That when the ice
came to crush it, it would squeeze it, but it
would never get a grip on it because the sides
were all rounded and it would just ride up on
the ice. The Froms design also had some features to
(31:58):
keep the crew in comfort, especially during the long polar night.
It had what was likely the first electric lighting system
on an Arctic voyage, powered by a windmill. When it
worked and the lights came on, it was by all
accounts a spectacular site because here you are in the
middle of polar darkness on a frozen sea. You're absolutely
(32:19):
out in the middle of the back end of nowhere.
There's nobody coming for you if anything goes wrong, and
you know the natural depression that sets in with twenty
four hours of darkness, and here you have this creaking
windmill starting to turn in these lights coming on. It
must have been a spectacular thing to see and you
had the northern lights, you had you know, the stars
and moon and so forth. Even with the light show,
(32:40):
Nonsense crew would need almost superhuman patients during their years
in the polar desert. He thought. Norwegians were uniquely suited
for the task. According to Berton, Nonsense thought only Norwegians
could sit face to face on a cake of ice
for three years without hating each other. Auto's fair Drop
had proved himself a worthy companion during the Greenland expedition,
(33:03):
and Nonsen chose him to captain the From with eleven
other meddlesome Norwegians. They set sail from Christiania on June
and headed east along the Siberian coast. They stopped in
August to pick up thirty four sled dogs, and by
September twenty five, the From was successfully lodged an ice
(33:23):
around where the Jeannette had perished near the New Siberian
Islands for more than a year. The From slowly progressed northwest,
and the crew passed the time making scientific observations of
air and water temperatures, marine life, ice thickness, and electricity
in the air. Our object, he said, is to investigate
the great unknown region that surrounds the pole, and these
(33:45):
investigations will be equally important from a scientific point of view,
whether the expedition passes over the polar point itself or
at some distance from it. He considered reaching the North
Pole intrinsically of small moment. In their free time, the
men played games, performed songs on the organ and accordion,
and feasted on fresh bread, chocolate, and Cormette cheeses. Nonsen said,
(34:10):
we looked like fatted pigs. One or two even began
to cultivate a double chin with potatoes and vegetables in abundance.
No man showed signs of scurvy, and the overall health
of the crew was so good that the ship's doctor
started to get bored. According to Nonsen, he looked long
and vainly for patients, and at last had to give
(34:30):
it up and, in despair take to doctoring the dogs.
The From proved slight and sturdy enough to perform as
Nonson had intended, but it wasn't without issues. Here's Cappalatti.
They weren't going nearly as fast as they thought they
needed to, and secondarily, Nonson designed From to be a
shallow water vessel. Apparently it was just an emotion sickness machine,
(34:53):
and they were stuck. They had no ability to get
messages out of the world. They really weren't going anywhere
fast enough. He thought that this drift might go on
for five years and and still maybe not even get
to the poll. And that's when within a few months
really he took Otto Svedra, the captain of the Pharmacide,
and said, you know, we're gonna have to use our
dogs and make a dash for the pole. And so
after a year in the ice, they said, yeah, we're
(35:15):
gonna have to do that. Let's take a break here,
we'll be right back. Nonsen was a scientist, but he
was still an adventurer at heart. On March fourteen, he
(35:38):
and Jill Mari Johansson left the from with three sledges,
two kayaks, three months of provisions, and twenty eight dogs.
The ship continued drifting slowly towards Pittsburg and on the
Norwegian archipelago Sqalbard, and the two intrepid travelers trekked north alone.
Here's Cappellati. They were going great guns for a couple
of weeks. They had the supplies. Johanson was an expert
(36:01):
dog driver, and Nunson had taught himself to be an
adequate dog driver, and they were on their way. There
is no question he would have reached the North Pole
because the first hundred miles or so the ice was
perfectly smooth. When they left it from they were still
about four les from the pole. But then in about
a hundred twenty miles they just ran into absolute chaos, hummocks,
(36:21):
bad ice and all the rest of it. And they
and they were basically stopped in their tracks. Their speed
went from about ten miles a day down to about
nothing to four or five six miles a day, and
and of course their supplies are dwindling, and by April
seventh or eight, Knutson realizes that they don't turn around,
they're going to run out of food. It wasn't just
(36:42):
the landscape that made for slow progress. Like William Edward
Perry had discovered back in Nonson realized that the ice
flows were floating south. This was a useful revelation in
his study of pushyanic currents, but a disappointment for their
North Pole quest. Noson and Johnson were essentially trying to
walk up a down escalator on April eighth, Nonson wrote
(37:06):
in his journal, there is not much sense in keeping
on longer. We're sacrificing valuable time and doing little. That
same day, they reached eighty six degrees thirteen points six
minutes north, besting Markham's record by two hundred miles, and
then decided to turn around. Since the FROM had long
since drifted away, their only choice was to head for
(37:29):
the nearest land, that was four hundred miles southwest, the
islands of Francios off Land, they set off on what
ended up being the most difficult portion of the expedition.
The FROM had shielded its passengers from the ceaseless movement
of the ice floats. Now Nonson and Johansen experienced the
worst of it. They paddled through deep lanes of water
(37:52):
when the floes separated, and scrambled over icy hummocks when
they collided. As their food stocks dwindled, they killed and
ate the dogs on June Nonsense Road. A quarter of
a year have we been wandering in this desert of ice,
and here we are still. When we shall see the
end of it, I can no longer form any idea.
(38:16):
In late August, they finally came upon a small unoccupied
island just north of Frontios of Land, and resigned themselves
to settling in for the winter, since it would be
too dangerous to continue traveling in the cold and darkness. Here,
they constructed a shelter they called the whole. They cleared
away some fairly significant stones and kind of scraped along
the ground and carved out of place. It's about twelve
(38:39):
ft long by about three or four ft wide, and
then with the stones on the side, over the stones
longitudinally they laid an enormous piece of Siberian driftwood. And
this log is as thick as a telephone pole and
almost as big. So dragging this thing up to the
shelf where they had they constructed as kind of literally
(39:03):
like a little slit trench in the ground. And then
they dragged up this log, which for two men to
have done that at the end of what was a
very challenging expedition attempt on the pole was a feat
of herculean strength. And over that they draped some walrus hides,
and in that way they made kind of a lean
to into which the two of them shared a sleeping bag.
(39:26):
For the next just about the next six months, they
took walks for exercise. They slept as much as possible
simply to pass the time. Nonson wrote little beyond basic
meteorological data. As he later said, the very emptiness of
the journal really gives the best representation of our life
during the nine months we lived there. They hunted in
(39:47):
in a lot of food in the form of polar
bears and walrus. There was an attack by a polar bear,
and famously, even as one was being mauled by a
polar bear, they were speaking to each other in formal Norwegian.
They didn't used the familiar du form of you was
always Dr Nonson, Lieutenant Johnson. They never referred to each
other by their first names, and in that way they
(40:09):
survived the winter and in fact emerge in the spring
and Nonson's words, fat as seals. On Maine six, the
companions deemed it safe enough to set off again. Despite
heavy storms. They made it to Fronc josef Land's southern
islands within a month. That's where they were on June seventeenth,
when they were found by the English explorer Frederick Jackson,
(40:31):
who was on his own attempt at the North Pole.
Nonson accompanied Jackson, backed was Hut and some of the
others went to fetch Johnson. Soon they were clean, well fed,
and catching up with the Englishmen as if they had
known them for years. As Nonson later wrote, we could
not have fallen into better hands, and it is impossible
(40:52):
to describe the unequaled hospitality and kindness we met with
on all hands, and the comfort we feel. Nonsense and
Johnson hitched a ride back to Vardo, Norway, aboard Jackson's ship,
the s s windward at last, on August thirteenth, the
two explorers, who had been given up for dead, stepped
onto Norwegian soil. Meanwhile, back at the From, the rest
(41:16):
of the crew was in good health. The ship happened
to break free from the ice near Spitzbergen on the
very same day that Nonson and Johnson alighted in Vardo.
Just a week later, the from docked near Tromso, Norway.
Though Nonsen was never in it for fame or glory,
he earned quite a bit of both. Upon his return.
(41:37):
His small ship literally didn't crack under pressure. He found
evidence to support his theories about oceanic currents. He reached
farther north than anyone had before, and he did it
all without sacrificing a single human life. In short, his
mad plan had worked, and the world was in awe.
(41:59):
Norway had very high expectations of its new national hero.
Nationalism was already on the rise, and Nonson was the
perfect rallying point. He joined the movement for Norwegian independence
from Sweden, which was secured in nineteen o five. He
then served as the nation's ambassador to Great Britain until
eight and became a professor of oceanography at the Royal
(42:21):
Frederick's University now the University of Oslo. And that was
just the tip of the iceberg. During World War One,
Nonson negotiated humanitarian agreements as Norway's delegate to the League
of Nations in Washington, d C. After the war, he
created an international I D called the Nonson Passport that
stateless refugees could use to immigrate and re establish themselves.
(42:45):
He also oversaw the process of helping about half a
million prisoners of war get back home. In the early
nineteen twenties, the Red Cross enlisted Nonsen to manage relief
efforts for twenty two million Russians suffering in that country's
devastating amen. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in ninety
two for his ceaseless humanitarian actions. Eight years later, he
(43:08):
died at age sixty eight at his estate in Oslo,
which is now the Fritjof Nonsen Institute for Environmental Policy,
Law and Research. Nonsense extraordinary achievements might make George Nares
look like an underachiever, but that's not exactly accurate. Queen
Victoria knighted him, he was promoted to Vice Admiral, and
(43:29):
he received honors from the Geological Society of London and
the Geographical Society of Paris. Though he didn't return to
the Arctic, he surveyed the Strait of Magellan and spent
his later life as the appointed conservator of the River
Mersey near Liverpool. He died in nineteen fifteen and was
buried in Surrey, England. NAR's earlier exploration and the Challenger
(43:52):
also laid the foundation for the science of oceanography. The
data collected on temperature, currents, depths and more filled fifty
published volumes, and modern oceanographers still use them today. In fact,
it's likely that this research influenced nonsense theories on polar
currents and helped inspire his own journey north. However, with
(44:13):
the end of Nares's disastrous voyage, British Arctic exploration also ended.
Most of the northern regions had been fully explored and charted.
The real challenge now lay to the south. Nares's defeat
laid the groundwork for the next great phase of British exploration,
with Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and their Norwegian nemesis
(44:35):
Roald Amondson all vying to be the first at the
South Pole. Neares failed at his one goal so spectacularly
that he ended an entire era of polar exploration, while
Nonsense succeeded to such a stunning degree that he launched
a whole new one. Nonsense innovations in ship design, clothing,
and transportation totally transformed the race to the North Pole.
(45:00):
M Now on, adventurers would plan small expeditions, travel light,
usually with dog sleds, harness the power of nature, and
take cues from indigenous ways to achieve their goals. After nonsense,
if you didn't know how to drive dogs, and you
didn't know how to cross country ski, then you were
really wasting everybody's time and exploration, which is why you
(45:22):
had to be doing physical recordings, geomagnetism, atmospherics and so forth.
And so I'm trying to understand because the aurora, all
of these kind of things, if you weren't doing something
like that, you weren't going to get financial backing of
the newly created serious scientific societies. So all of that
is really a legacy of Nonsense being this kind of
towering figure that straddled both science and exploration and had
(45:45):
enormous clout with scientific societies and governments and corporations. Nonsen
was even savvy to the possibilities of corporate sponsorship and
product endorsement. People talk about Americans being brand conscious and
you know, haling their souls to advertise this, that and
the other. But Nonsense was one of the pioneers of that.
I mean, there was nothing he wouldn't endorse if it
(46:07):
would provide a few bucks for his exploration. So all
of those things were, you know, the way exploration was
going to be done in the first half of the
twentieth century. Nonsen was a born innovator, never settling for
the conventional way of doing things, and driven by curiosity, courage,
and conscience. As we shall see, Nonsense stature as a
(46:29):
polar hero spurred American explorer Robert E. Pearry to aim higher.
He would use some of the polar traveling techniques that
Nonsen invented and rely on his senior assistant, Matthew Henson
to attempt the one thing Nonson failed to do, reach
the North Pole. The Quest for the North Pole is
(47:14):
hosted by Me cat Long. This episode was researched by
Me and written by Ellen Kutowski, with fact checking by
Austin Thompson. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Klang.
The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The show is edited
by Dylan Fagan. For transcripts, a glossary, and to learn
(47:34):
more about this episode, visit Mental flaws dot com slash podcast.
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental floss. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more
(48:11):
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental Floss. It's June and Norwegian
polar explorer fritch Off Nonson is waking up after another
frigid night spent on Frontio's of Land. It's an uninhabited
(00:25):
archipelago north of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean. With his
assistant Yalmar Johansen still snoozing nearby, Nonsense starts a fire,
tosses some meat into a pot to make soup, and
climbs the top of Rocky Hill to admire the view.
That's when he hears it, the unmistakable sound of dog's bargain.
(00:46):
He's shocked because their last sled dog died months ago.
The two explorers haven't laid eyes on another human since
they abandoned their ice bound ship, the From on March.
They had left Norway, and soon after the From was
stuck in ice. This was by design. Nonson wanted to
(01:07):
drift to the North Pole on ocean currents, but after
a year and a half a drift, Nonson realized they
weren't going to make it. He and Johnson tried unsuccessfully
to ski to the pole. Now they'd retreated hundreds of
miles over ice and open water to this spot, and
they had many more to go before rescue could be contemplated.
(01:28):
So when Nonson hears far off barks, he tells himself
it's probably just birds. Then he hears the noise again.
Now he's almost certain that dogs and their human handlers
must be close by. He wakes Johnson, but his companion
doubts this news. Nonson locates what he thinks are dog tracks,
and then he hears an even more thrilling sound, a
(01:49):
human shout, which he returns with a mighty cry of
his own. He hurries towards the noise and sees a
figure he later describes as a civilized European in an
English check suit and high rubber water boots, well shaved,
well groomed, bringing with him a perfume of scented soap.
It's Frederick Jackson, a British explorer task with charting a
(02:11):
land route to the North Pole. Nonsense, shaggy hairt and
caked and soot in Walver's grease is much less identifiable.
Halfway through their conversation, Jackson finally places the face. Aren't
you nonsen? He exclaims, and Nonson confirms it. I congratulate
you most heartily, Jackson says, amid lots of beaming and handshaking.
(02:33):
You have made a good trip of it, and I'm
awfully glad to be the first person to congratulate you
on your return. A surprising encounter with any long lost
explorer is caused for celebration, but nonsense safe return was
extra thrilling. Until then, the quest for the North Pole
had been mostly a procession of massive expeditions. Government and
(02:54):
private investors had funneled their money into ships that carried
over a hundred crew and luxury is like libraries and
printing presses. Nonsense expedition was the opposite, a custom engineered
vessel with a small crew and equipment he designed for
polar travel. His success not only astonished people, it also
ushered in a new era of polar exploration that favored
(03:17):
test and theories over wishful thinking, self organization over government sponsorship,
and minimalism over the idea that bigger was better. But
before Nonsense triumph, British explorers were still trying to reach
the North Pole the old fashioned way. In the seventies,
polar explorers were professionals backed by world powers and independent
(03:39):
adventurers with big dreams but little experience. Some failed and
some died, but others got closer to the mythical point
on the map than ever before and lived to tell
about it. The international competition to be the first of
the poll was on from Mental Floss and I Heart Radio.
(04:06):
This is the Quest for the North Bowl. I'm your host,
Cat Long, Science editor at Mental Floss and this is
episode three, the turning Point. By the second half of
the nineteenth century, many of Britain's esteemed pioneers were no
(04:29):
longer leading the Arctic charge. Admiralty's second Secretary, Sir John Barrow,
who had spearheaded Britain's polar exploration campaign for decades, had
passed away in eighty eight. The fate of Sir John Franklin,
who became the most famous explorer on Earth because he
and all of his men perished in the Arctic, had
come to light in eighteen fifty nine. For all the
(04:52):
British effort put towards navigating the Northwest Passage, the discoveries
of the last several decades had proven what William Scoresby
asserted back in eighteen seventeen that it just wasn't worth
it commercially speaking, but the country's huge emotional and financial
investment in polar discovery made throwing in the tell now
(05:12):
seem almost disgraceful. As nations like Russia, the US and
what is now Norway set their sides on the region,
Britain started viewing the North Pole as a symbol of
its continuing dominance. As Arctic veteran and British Army general
Edward Saban wrote in the eighteen sixties, to reach the
Poll is the greatest geographical achievement which can be attempted,
(05:35):
and I own I should grieve if it should first
be accomplished by any other than an Englishman, it will
be the crowning enterprise of those Arctic researches in which
our country has hitherto had the pre eminence. The public
easily latched onto this idea of a single glamorous spot
on the map. The North Pole was a fundamentally romantic goal,
(05:56):
promising glory to anyone who could achieve it. That's Edward J. Larson,
a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and the author of An
Empire of Ice, Scott Shackleton and the Heroic Age of
Antarctic science. Now, the winner might cash in through publishing
contracts and speaking these in his country, I guess would
(06:16):
gain prestige in an ever more imperialistic and nationalist engage.
But no one, and this is important to remember as
distinguishing Arctic exploration with Antarctic, or with African or with
South Pacific exploration. No one expected a conquest of concrete
value because the North Pole was merely a point on
(06:39):
fifting ice with no appreciable scientific value. Maybe that last
part is a bit mean. In eighty five, Sir Clements
Robert Markham, then Secretary and future President of the Royal
Geographical Society, gave a long list of scientific advancements that
could only be accomplished by trying for the poll. The
British citiz sins and key officials were pushing for a
(07:01):
government sponsored expedition to plant the Union Jack at ninety
degrees north, and scientific value ranked much lower on the
list of priorities. While earlier Arctic exploration was all about
charting the entire Northwest passage, this latest phase focused on
simply getting to the North Pole. Here's Larson again. Once reached.
(07:23):
Some ask even at the time, who would ever want
to go again. But it was that sort of a
romantic goal. At a time when machines were replacing men
as the engines of production, and faceless bureaucrat seemed to
be taking the place of principal leaders, here was an objective,
a goal requiring invincible will, indefagable drive, and indomitable courage.
(07:46):
In short, attaining the goal was a fundamentally human achievement.
The British Admiralty would need a dauntless, dashing leader to
be the face of that uniquely human spirit for the
new mission. They found it in Sir George Strong Nare's
Nars was a forty four year old career naval officer
(08:09):
with a dynamite resume and limitless ambition. After enlisting in
the Royal Navy at the ripe old age of fourteen,
he embarked on a series of voyages that whisked him
through the Mediterranean, South Pacific, Red Sea, Australian Waters and beyond.
He was captain of the HMS Challenger on its mission
to study the Ocean. He served in the Crimean War.
(08:32):
He even authored a best selling naval manual titled Seamanship.
Naire's was no stranger to the Arctic either. In eighteen
fifty two, he joined an expedition to find Sir John
Franklin and his missing ships. They didn't, of course, but
they ended up saving a previous rescue expedition which was
marooned and ice. As the Admiralty prepared to send Nears
(08:54):
north again, the British public was swept up in a
nationalistic fervor, much like the feeling in the US during
the twentieth century space race. The North Pole was the moon,
George Naire's was a hopeful Neil Armstrong, and newspapers like
The Illustrated London News and The Graphic reported faithfully on
every emerging detail. It soon became clear that while the
(09:16):
government had updated its primary goal, it hadn't updated the
strategy or structure of the expedition at all. This wasn't surprising.
Most expeditions from the era followed a certain predictable pattern.
There's a series of absolute, catastrophically mismanaged and or fatal
expeditions to the North Pole or attempts on the North Pole.
(09:38):
That's p J. Cappellotti, a professor of anthropology at Penn
State Abington's and the author of the Greatest show in
the Arctic. The US Army had one, the Navy had
one in the U s Navy had one. The British
Nari's expedition in the middle of the eighteen seventies have
been pretty much of a disaster. So these big national
expeditions were turning out to be complete flops. The because
(10:00):
they were big, they were unwieldy, overplanned, staffed with the
East you know, dozens and dozens of crew members and
so forth. Nares Expedition, which was formally christened the British
Arctic Expedition, would consist of two similarly sized ships. Nares
would command the flagship, a one d and sixty foot
(10:20):
steam sloop named the HMS Alert, and Henry F. Stevenson
would captain the HMS Discovery, a one hundred and sixty
six ft steam whaler. Anticipating ice flows battery, the ships
builders had outfitted their holes with sturdy wooden beams and
iron plating. Each ship would house thirteen officers, which comprised captains, lieutenants, surgeons,
(10:43):
and scientific leaders, basically anyone allowed to give orders. The
rest of the men on board followed those orders. In
addition to able seamen, stewards, and cooks. This group also
included carpenters, Cooper's furnace stokers, and ice quartermasters. There was
even a rope maker. Altogether, one and twenty people would
(11:04):
set sail for the poll, just slightly smaller than the
number that perished with John Franklin a few decades earlier.
With that catastrophe still fresh in memory, the Admiralty might
have tried to risk fewer lives this time around, but
people were reluctant to entertain the idea that the Naires
expedition would be anything besides a smashing success. Naire's downplayed
(11:28):
the hazards in a lecture at the Winchester Guildhall weeks
before departure. According to the Paul Mall Gazette, he claimed
that the danger of the present expedition became mere child's
play when compared with what previous explorers had undergone. Naires
may have had enough experience to feel like he could
speak so confidently, but the same couldn't be said for
(11:50):
his officers, who had limited Arctic experience at best. This
might have been okay if they had taken the advice
of previous explorers and or study the time tested techniques
of Inuit. In the North. They didn't do either. For example,
Innuit favored loose fitting, fur lined sealskin for apparel, complete
with hooded parkas that prevented heat from escaping around their necks.
(12:14):
NAR's and his crew donned form fitting flannel and woolen
clothing that was a huge pain to strip off when
it got wet and froze, which happened often. There wasn't
a hood in sight. Hudson's Bay Company surveyor John Ray,
who had spent years exploring the Canadian Arctic, tried again
and again to share innuitat wisdom with the explorers Before
(12:36):
their departure. He told them that sheltering in snow instead
of intense would better insulate them from the cold and
also keep them from having to lug tense and heavy
betting around. They didn't listen. Ray even shared his Innuit
inspired design for a lighter, more streamlined sledge that was
less likely to sink or get stuck in deep snow.
(12:58):
There's expedition still did for the heavy, clumsy sledges used
on past Navy trips. One person did act on at
least one of Ray's recommendations and brought snowshoes, even though
other so called experts had assured everyone that they wouldn't
be necessary. When the other crew members spotted the snow
shoes on the ship, they burst into laughter. An a
(13:20):
side note, back in the eighteen fifties, Ray had learned
from the Inuit the fate of the doomed Franklin crew.
It seemed they had even resorted to cannibalism. Well true
that offended Victorian sensibilities so much that Ray became a pariah.
That may have played into nares reluctance to heat his advice.
(13:41):
On May seventy five, the Alert and the Discovery set
sail from Portsmouth Harbor with great fanfare, and the public
prepared to follow what they expected to be the greatest
adventure story ever told Beneath its confident surface. However, the
expedition was a disaster in the making, as the Canadian
historian Pierre Berton writes in his book The Arctic Graill.
(14:05):
Badly and hastily organized, with a smugness and an arrogance that,
in hindsight seem almost criminal. This band of amateurs set
off blithely, as so many had before it, without any
real idea of what they were facing. It wouldn't take
long for them to find out. The two ships sailed
up Kennedy Channel, with Canada's Ellesmere Island to the west
(14:28):
and Greenland to the east. They followed the path blazed
by American explorer Charles Francis Hall in eighteen seventy one
and hope to put the question of the open Polar
Sea to rest once and for all. As we've discussed
in previous episodes, this was a theory that a warm
ocean circled by a ring of ice surrounded the North Pole.
(14:48):
If a ship could break through the ice, they'd find
a navigable sea to take them to the pole. Nares
was smart enough to doubt this theory, and once the
ships were through the Kennedy Channel they saw massive ice
flow was over thirty ft tall, and a maze of
craggy ice that seemed to reach the horizon. The commander
realized immediately that no ship could sail to the pole.
(15:12):
Stevenson stationed the discovery in Lady Franklin Bay and started
preparing to spend the winter there. Nares, farther north than
Robeson Channel, needed to find somewhere safe to pass the
winter and fast before the ice froze around them. They
sailed northwest and ended up anchoring in an inlet near
the northern edge of Ellesmere Island, about five miles from
(15:32):
the pole. As the puffin flies just beyond their insulated refuge,
thirty thousand ton ice chunks formed a fifty foot Wallnar's
first mate, Albert Hastings Markham, later described the vista as
a solid, impenetrable mass that no amount of imagination or
theoretical belief could ever twist into an open polar sea.
(15:55):
They spent the long winter reading and playing parlor games
they construct at an observatory for skygazing, and even staged
plays in the Royal Arctic Theater in English polar traditions,
started by William Edward Perry in eighteen nas recalled owing
to the large size of the lower deck, we are
enabled to erect the stage there with a temperature of
(16:17):
fifty degrees, an advantage appreciated by both actors and audience.
A representation held on the upper deck with a temperature
of about twenty degrees below zero, leads everyone to long
for the finale. At an early hour. In spring eighteen
seventy six, two dogs led teams from the alert tried
(16:37):
and failed to reunite with the discovery. NAIs felt like
the dogs couldn't handle all the ice hammocks. In reality,
the untrained men and bulky sledges were probably more at
fault than the animals. How hard is it to drive
a dog's lad? Anyway? Here's Russell Potter, an expert on
Arctic history at Rhode Island College and the author of
Finding Franklin, The Untold story of a one heard in
(17:00):
sixty five year Search. I worked some years ago up
in the Arctic with a guy he was actually the
safety officer on the Nova show we did about the
Franklin expedition, and he's a dog driver and a guide.
And I said, well, what do you do to train
dogs to pull? And he said, you don't. You just
took them up in the pull. But having them pull
(17:20):
in an organized way, you know, the traditional innud way
as leads that are made out of sauce and sealskin,
making sure the leads don't get tangled, figuring out who
the lead dog is going to be, keeping your dogs
in order while you travel. That takes a fair amount
of practice. You can't just learn it like you riding
a bicycle or something. You would have to spend some months,
(17:41):
if not longer, sort of apprenticing to people who know
what they're doing, and eventually you get the hang of it.
But most explorers are in the Arctic to get someplace
or discover something, not to learn the art of dogs letting.
So few did, and their preference for manpower over dog
power was baked into British polar culture. I think there
is an aspect to it that is particularly British, the
(18:04):
idea that somehow if you were to use any labor
other than human labor, you would be cheating right that,
And that's certainly going native as some people would have
regarded it at the time, will be regarded as a
as a failing of some kind. So they did on
some of the Franklin searches, and Franklin himself brought some sleds,
but the idea of pulling them was to have men
(18:25):
pulled them instead of dogs, which was of course a
much worse way of traveling. On April three, Albert Markham
and another officer named Pelham Aldridge led to more teams
without dogs to explore the region. They promptly fell victim
to just about everything John Ray had tried to help
(18:45):
them avoid. Without snowshoes, they slogged through waste high snow,
which soaked their clothes and gear. They're sleeping bags froze
into solid slabs. Their supplies were saturated with water and ice,
adding weight to their all atty heavy loads. Miserable, yes,
but those issues were nothing compared to scurvy. Scurvy is
(19:07):
caused by a lack of vitamin C, which humans can't
produce on their own. As long as you occasionally eat
fresh fruits and vegetables, you're probably consuming enough vitamin C
that you never have to worry about developing it. Positions
in the nineteenth century didn't yet understand that scurvy is
caused by a vitamin C deficiency, since vitamin C was
(19:27):
only discovered in the twentieth century, but they did know
that eating fresh fruits and veggies seemed to cure it. Unfortunately,
for polar explorers, fresh produce was almost impossible to come
by on long journeys, so the Admiralty issued lemon or
lime juice rations to all sailors. The nearest expedition did
have lime juice on board, but the sledging parties didn't
(19:49):
bring any with them since it would freeze and break
its glass containers. Instead, each man had only about twelve
ounces of salted meat per day to see him through
all that grueling aabor, and nothing to prevent scurvy. Just
as naval officials had reassured nars as men that the
snug clothing, heavy sledges, and lack of snow shoes would
(20:10):
all be fine, so too did they wave away worries
about the potential for scurvy. When several members of the
sledging team started to feel under the weather, Marcom and
Aldrich chalked it up to fatigue. But fatigue is an
early symptom of scurvy. Others are joint pain, bruising, and irritability,
which could all be explained by their general situation. Severe
(20:33):
symptoms are a little more telling, spongy, blackened gums, teeth
that loosen or fall out, and healed wounds that start
to bleed again. Markham headed north and Aldridge continued westward.
As their men became more debilitated, each officer faced a
grave emergency. If they didn't turn around and get some
(20:55):
lime juice into their men, they would die. On May twelve,
Markham's stuck the British flag into the ice at eighty
three degrees twenty minutes north, still four hundred and sixties
statute miles from the pole, and high tailed it back
to the alert. Aldridge traveled another two hundred statute miles
west before turning back. Most of the men survived thanks
(21:18):
to the heroic efforts of Lieutenant A. A. C. Par
and some quick thinking on Nares's part. On June seven,
Par left Markham's party and traveled alone for forty miles
in twenty three hours to get help. Nara's deployed men
and dogsleds to rescue them and soon send a party
to Altridge's crew, assuming they were in a similar bind.
(21:38):
They were. Four men were lying on the sledges and
the others were dragging them through the snow. The rescuers
delivered everyone back to the alert, where scurvy was ripping
through the remaining men. Nara's realized it was time to
pack it in unless you lose the whole crew. He
used gunpowder to break up the ice around the ship
and set sail towards the disc every In mid September,
(22:02):
the Discovery was also battling scurvy and two men had
died on a sledging trip. Fortunately, the Inuit hunter, interpreter
and dog driver Hans Hendrick, a veteran of several British
and American polar expeditions, was a part of the Discovery's crew.
He had rescued the others by hunting seals and doling
out raw meat, which contains some vitamin C. This was
(22:27):
another helpful hint that white explorers could have picked up
from Innuit who staved off scurvy despite having few greens
in their diet. Their traditional foods included raw meat, and
they sometimes ate predigested plant matter from the stomachs of
caribou they killed. The crews of the Alert and Discovery
were too depleted to do much beyond staying alive long
(22:47):
enough to get home, and Nares knew it. Without reaching
their goal, the two ships charted a course towards England.
They arrived there on November two, eighty six to a
mixed reception. Banquets were held, medals were awarded, and Queen
Victoria even sent a congratulatory message, but the media lambasted
(23:08):
the expedition for falling short of its single goal and
embarrassing the nation on a global stage. The Admiralty agreed
and actually launched an investigation to find out why scurvy
was such an issue. They eventually came to the conclusion
that in future expeditions there should be less rum and
more lime juice. Objectively, the expedition wasn't a complete disaster.
(23:32):
It had surveyed land and recorded new scientific data, established
that Ellesmere Island was part of Canada and thus part
of the British Commonwealth, and set a new record for
northern progress. If the government and the press had both
set different expectations from the beginning, it could have been
considered victory. Alas there's his failure to achieve his one
(23:54):
note goal of reaching the North Pole made the whole
effort seem like a failure overall. The Royal Navy relinquished
its hope articulated by Edward Sabin, that British adventurers would
stand atop the world. In fact, Britain did a complete
one eighty and focused its attention on conquering the South Bowl.
(24:14):
That left a door open for other nations to succeed
in the North. We'll be right back. While Britain was
(24:39):
busy dealing with the fallout from Nares's expedition. A teenaged
fritsch Off Nonson was honing his skiing skills in Norway.
Nonson was born outside Oslo, then called Christiania, in sixty
one to a successful lawyer father and a mother who
raised capable, outdoorsy kids. By the time Nonson enrolled in
the University of oz Low in one, he was sort
(25:02):
of an ubermanch physically and mentally. He could skate, swim,
sketch and ski better than most, and he showed a
special aptitude for learning science. While studying zoology in college,
he spent months on a ceiling ship in Greenland, embarked
on long ski trips. Has served as the Bergen Museum's
(25:23):
zoological curator. Here's a portrait of nonsense, in Capalotti's words,
very cultured, educated, well read, multiple languages, all of that
on the one hand, and on the other hand, this
almost primitive human, which again is the other half of
the Norwegian character, living outdoors, playing outdoors, surviving out of
(25:46):
doors in all seasons at all ages. This is somebody
who strapped on his first pair of skis when he
was two, and later in life would sort of laugh
at people who were trying to learn how to ski.
I think he won the Norwegian Combined Norwegian skiing cross
country skiing skating competition, like a dozen years in a
row or something, just a phenomenal What today would be
(26:09):
he would be one of these people. You would absolutely
hate his guts, and a lot of people did hate
his guts. In his day. He was almost impossible to
work with because he was so smart, he was so athletic,
he was so good looking. But he, being Norwegian, was
had had a very dark moods where he loathed himself
and didn't think he was nearly accomplished as much as
he should be. I thought he was scattering his talents
(26:31):
too far and wide, not doing what the great men
of history did, which is finding a single furrow and
plowing it over and over again until they reached their goal.
In retrospect, it seems like Nonsen was destined for greatness
at the time. However, some of his ideas were considered
off the wall. After finishing his PhD, Nonsen hatched a
(26:52):
plan to traverse the entire Greenland ice cap, which no
white person had ever done before. If the trip itself
see Daunting nonsense. Strategy was even more so. A ship
deposited him in his five companions off the uninhabited east
coast of Greenland and then departed, leaving them no choice
(27:13):
but to make it to the populated west coast or
die trying. In fact, that was nanson slogan, death or
the West Coast. In August, Nonsen and the others put
on their snowshoes and started their uphill climb, dragging more
than two pounds of supplies on their sledges. Overnight temperatures
plunged to minus forty degrees fahrenheit or even colder. Nansen's
(27:38):
men realized that their pemmican, their main source of nourishment,
had accidentally been made without fat, an essential ingredient for energy.
They were ravenous throughout their trip. About three weeks later
they reached the peak of the ice cap, at eight
thousand nine and twenty four ft above sea level. They
switched to skis and headed downhill. Hungry and exhausted, they
(28:02):
even had to build a boat from stunted Arctic willow
trees to carry them across a fiord. By October, all
six men had landed in gotthaab a Danish settlement on
the west coast. It's now Nook, the capital of Greenland.
They had done it, but now they had to spend
the winter in Greenland, since it was too late in
the season to hitch a ride back to Norway. Nonson
(28:24):
practiced hunting and kayaking and tried to learn as much
as he could from native people in Greenland. When he
returned to Norway the following May, he was well equipped
for his next great adventure. The idea for the expedition
started with the U. S. S. Jeannette, a ship carrying
an American expedition to the North Pole via the Bearing Strait.
(28:45):
In June, ice floes had crushed and sunk the Jeannette
in the East Siberian Sea. Yet three years later, wreckage
thought to be from that very ship washed up in
southwest Greenland. Here's Capalati when he read about this wreckage
washing ashore, coming down in the ice and heard that
(29:06):
it was from the Jenette. He also read that there
was a Norwegian professor, a guy named Henrik Mon, speculating
that it had gotten from the north of Siberia where
the Jeanette was wrecked, all the way to the west
coast of Greenland very strange because there was a current
carrying it that way. And so Nonson looked at these
(29:26):
disastrous expeditions, overwrought over personnel and all the rest of it,
and looked at the Jeanette, of course, and said, you know,
I'd like to do a Jenette expedition. I just don't
want my ship crushed like the Janette, because if there
is a current that goes from Siberia over to Greenland,
if I can figure out a way to design and
build a ship that will go with the ice instead
(29:47):
of being crushed by the ice, then all I have
to do is do exactly what the Janette did. Go
to the north coast of Siberia, stick the bow of
my ship in the ice and let it get frozen in,
and let the ice just carry me across the North Pole.
In February, Nonson presented this far out notion to the
Christian Geographical Society. I believe. He said that if we
(30:10):
pay attention to the actually existent forces of nature and
seek to work with them and not against them, we
shall thus find the safest and easiest method of reaching
the poll Ships always ran the risk of being crushed
by the shifting ice flows. Nonson had an answer for
this too. He designed a small, strong ship with a
rounded hull so it would be pushed above the ice
(30:33):
instead of below it. Plenty of experts still consider this
plan sheer madness and nonsense own words, but there was
also enough hopeful curiosity to finance it. With funds from
the Norwegian Parliament and a mix of private sponsors, Nonson
commissioned a Norwegian shipbuilder named Colin Archer to construct a
(30:55):
highly unconventional wooden schooner. Nonsense wife Eva named it the
from Norwegian for a forward. It was designed to do
exactly what the Genette could not do. It was designed
like no other ship, so it was designed with this
kind of rounded stern, rounded bow, rounded sides, two ft
thick hulls of the strongest wood on the planet, and
(31:16):
at the bow that increased the fore ft and on
top of that fore feet of a very hardwood, was
some iron and an iron stem. It had a rudder
and a propeller mechanism at the stern for propulsion that
could be lifted out of the water so the ice
couldn't damage the rudder and the propeller. Nansen, I think
referred to it as as it was going to be
(31:37):
like an eel that would slip out of your hands.
It was, and some other people have referred to it
as like what happens when you pinch a watermelon seed
between your your fingers, and that's what he wanted the
ship to do in the ice. That when the ice
came to crush it, it would squeeze it, but it
would never get a grip on it because the sides
were all rounded and it would just ride up on
the ice. The Froms design also had some features to
(31:58):
keep the crew in comfort, especially during the long polar night.
It had what was likely the first electric lighting system
on an Arctic voyage, powered by a windmill. When it
worked and the lights came on, it was by all
accounts a spectacular site because here you are in the
middle of polar darkness on a frozen sea. You're absolutely
(32:19):
out in the middle of the back end of nowhere.
There's nobody coming for you if anything goes wrong, and
you know the natural depression that sets in with twenty
four hours of darkness, and here you have this creaking
windmill starting to turn in these lights coming on. It
must have been a spectacular thing to see and you
had the northern lights, you had you know, the stars
and moon and so forth. Even with the light show,
(32:40):
Nonsense crew would need almost superhuman patients during their years
in the polar desert. He thought. Norwegians were uniquely suited
for the task. According to Berton, Nonsense thought only Norwegians
could sit face to face on a cake of ice
for three years without hating each other. Auto's fair Drop
had proved himself a worthy companion during the Greenland expedition,
(33:03):
and Nonsen chose him to captain the From with eleven
other meddlesome Norwegians. They set sail from Christiania on June
and headed east along the Siberian coast. They stopped in
August to pick up thirty four sled dogs, and by
September twenty five, the From was successfully lodged an ice
(33:23):
around where the Jeannette had perished near the New Siberian
Islands for more than a year. The From slowly progressed northwest,
and the crew passed the time making scientific observations of
air and water temperatures, marine life, ice thickness, and electricity
in the air. Our object, he said, is to investigate
the great unknown region that surrounds the pole, and these
(33:45):
investigations will be equally important from a scientific point of view,
whether the expedition passes over the polar point itself or
at some distance from it. He considered reaching the North
Pole intrinsically of small moment. In their free time, the
men played games, performed songs on the organ and accordion,
and feasted on fresh bread, chocolate, and Cormette cheeses. Nonsen said,
(34:10):
we looked like fatted pigs. One or two even began
to cultivate a double chin with potatoes and vegetables in abundance.
No man showed signs of scurvy, and the overall health
of the crew was so good that the ship's doctor
started to get bored. According to Nonsen, he looked long
and vainly for patients, and at last had to give
(34:30):
it up and, in despair take to doctoring the dogs.
The From proved slight and sturdy enough to perform as
Nonson had intended, but it wasn't without issues. Here's Cappalatti.
They weren't going nearly as fast as they thought they
needed to, and secondarily, Nonson designed From to be a
shallow water vessel. Apparently it was just an emotion sickness machine,
(34:53):
and they were stuck. They had no ability to get
messages out of the world. They really weren't going anywhere
fast enough. He thought that this drift might go on
for five years and and still maybe not even get
to the poll. And that's when within a few months
really he took Otto Svedra, the captain of the Pharmacide,
and said, you know, we're gonna have to use our
dogs and make a dash for the pole. And so
after a year in the ice, they said, yeah, we're
(35:15):
gonna have to do that. Let's take a break here,
we'll be right back. Nonsen was a scientist, but he
was still an adventurer at heart. On March fourteen, he
(35:38):
and Jill Mari Johansson left the from with three sledges,
two kayaks, three months of provisions, and twenty eight dogs.
The ship continued drifting slowly towards Pittsburg and on the
Norwegian archipelago Sqalbard, and the two intrepid travelers trekked north alone.
Here's Cappellati. They were going great guns for a couple
of weeks. They had the supplies. Johanson was an expert
(36:01):
dog driver, and Nunson had taught himself to be an
adequate dog driver, and they were on their way. There
is no question he would have reached the North Pole
because the first hundred miles or so the ice was
perfectly smooth. When they left it from they were still
about four les from the pole. But then in about
a hundred twenty miles they just ran into absolute chaos, hummocks,
(36:21):
bad ice and all the rest of it. And they
and they were basically stopped in their tracks. Their speed
went from about ten miles a day down to about
nothing to four or five six miles a day, and
and of course their supplies are dwindling, and by April
seventh or eight, Knutson realizes that they don't turn around,
they're going to run out of food. It wasn't just
(36:42):
the landscape that made for slow progress. Like William Edward
Perry had discovered back in Nonson realized that the ice
flows were floating south. This was a useful revelation in
his study of pushyanic currents, but a disappointment for their
North Pole quest. Noson and Johnson were essentially trying to
walk up a down escalator on April eighth, Nonson wrote
(37:06):
in his journal, there is not much sense in keeping
on longer. We're sacrificing valuable time and doing little. That
same day, they reached eighty six degrees thirteen points six
minutes north, besting Markham's record by two hundred miles, and
then decided to turn around. Since the FROM had long
since drifted away, their only choice was to head for
(37:29):
the nearest land, that was four hundred miles southwest, the
islands of Francios off Land, they set off on what
ended up being the most difficult portion of the expedition.
The FROM had shielded its passengers from the ceaseless movement
of the ice floats. Now Nonson and Johansen experienced the
worst of it. They paddled through deep lanes of water
(37:52):
when the floes separated, and scrambled over icy hummocks when
they collided. As their food stocks dwindled, they killed and
ate the dogs on June Nonsense Road. A quarter of
a year have we been wandering in this desert of ice,
and here we are still. When we shall see the
end of it, I can no longer form any idea.
(38:16):
In late August, they finally came upon a small unoccupied
island just north of Frontios of Land, and resigned themselves
to settling in for the winter, since it would be
too dangerous to continue traveling in the cold and darkness. Here,
they constructed a shelter they called the whole. They cleared
away some fairly significant stones and kind of scraped along
the ground and carved out of place. It's about twelve
(38:39):
ft long by about three or four ft wide, and
then with the stones on the side, over the stones
longitudinally they laid an enormous piece of Siberian driftwood. And
this log is as thick as a telephone pole and
almost as big. So dragging this thing up to the
shelf where they had they constructed as kind of literally
(39:03):
like a little slit trench in the ground. And then
they dragged up this log, which for two men to
have done that at the end of what was a
very challenging expedition attempt on the pole was a feat
of herculean strength. And over that they draped some walrus hides,
and in that way they made kind of a lean
to into which the two of them shared a sleeping bag.
(39:26):
For the next just about the next six months, they
took walks for exercise. They slept as much as possible
simply to pass the time. Nonson wrote little beyond basic
meteorological data. As he later said, the very emptiness of
the journal really gives the best representation of our life
during the nine months we lived there. They hunted in
(39:47):
in a lot of food in the form of polar
bears and walrus. There was an attack by a polar bear,
and famously, even as one was being mauled by a
polar bear, they were speaking to each other in formal Norwegian.
They didn't used the familiar du form of you was
always Dr Nonson, Lieutenant Johnson. They never referred to each
other by their first names, and in that way they
(40:09):
survived the winter and in fact emerge in the spring
and Nonson's words, fat as seals. On Maine six, the
companions deemed it safe enough to set off again. Despite
heavy storms. They made it to Fronc josef Land's southern
islands within a month. That's where they were on June seventeenth,
when they were found by the English explorer Frederick Jackson,
(40:31):
who was on his own attempt at the North Pole.
Nonson accompanied Jackson, backed was Hut and some of the
others went to fetch Johnson. Soon they were clean, well fed,
and catching up with the Englishmen as if they had
known them for years. As Nonson later wrote, we could
not have fallen into better hands, and it is impossible
(40:52):
to describe the unequaled hospitality and kindness we met with
on all hands, and the comfort we feel. Nonsense and
Johnson hitched a ride back to Vardo, Norway, aboard Jackson's ship,
the s s windward at last, on August thirteenth, the
two explorers, who had been given up for dead, stepped
onto Norwegian soil. Meanwhile, back at the From, the rest
(41:16):
of the crew was in good health. The ship happened
to break free from the ice near Spitzbergen on the
very same day that Nonson and Johnson alighted in Vardo.
Just a week later, the from docked near Tromso, Norway.
Though Nonsen was never in it for fame or glory,
he earned quite a bit of both. Upon his return.
(41:37):
His small ship literally didn't crack under pressure. He found
evidence to support his theories about oceanic currents. He reached
farther north than anyone had before, and he did it
all without sacrificing a single human life. In short, his
mad plan had worked, and the world was in awe.
(41:59):
Norway had very high expectations of its new national hero.
Nationalism was already on the rise, and Nonson was the
perfect rallying point. He joined the movement for Norwegian independence
from Sweden, which was secured in nineteen o five. He
then served as the nation's ambassador to Great Britain until
eight and became a professor of oceanography at the Royal
(42:21):
Frederick's University now the University of Oslo. And that was
just the tip of the iceberg. During World War One,
Nonson negotiated humanitarian agreements as Norway's delegate to the League
of Nations in Washington, d C. After the war, he
created an international I D called the Nonson Passport that
stateless refugees could use to immigrate and re establish themselves.
(42:45):
He also oversaw the process of helping about half a
million prisoners of war get back home. In the early
nineteen twenties, the Red Cross enlisted Nonsen to manage relief
efforts for twenty two million Russians suffering in that country's
devastating amen. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in ninety
two for his ceaseless humanitarian actions. Eight years later, he
(43:08):
died at age sixty eight at his estate in Oslo,
which is now the Fritjof Nonsen Institute for Environmental Policy,
Law and Research. Nonsense extraordinary achievements might make George Nares
look like an underachiever, but that's not exactly accurate. Queen
Victoria knighted him, he was promoted to Vice Admiral, and
(43:29):
he received honors from the Geological Society of London and
the Geographical Society of Paris. Though he didn't return to
the Arctic, he surveyed the Strait of Magellan and spent
his later life as the appointed conservator of the River
Mersey near Liverpool. He died in nineteen fifteen and was
buried in Surrey, England. NAR's earlier exploration and the Challenger
(43:52):
also laid the foundation for the science of oceanography. The
data collected on temperature, currents, depths and more filled fifty
published volumes, and modern oceanographers still use them today. In fact,
it's likely that this research influenced nonsense theories on polar
currents and helped inspire his own journey north. However, with
(44:13):
the end of Nares's disastrous voyage, British Arctic exploration also ended.
Most of the northern regions had been fully explored and charted.
The real challenge now lay to the south. Nares's defeat
laid the groundwork for the next great phase of British exploration,
with Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and their Norwegian nemesis
(44:35):
Roald Amondson all vying to be the first at the
South Pole. Neares failed at his one goal so spectacularly
that he ended an entire era of polar exploration, while
Nonsense succeeded to such a stunning degree that he launched
a whole new one. Nonsense innovations in ship design, clothing,
and transportation totally transformed the race to the North Pole.
(45:00):
M Now on, adventurers would plan small expeditions, travel light,
usually with dog sleds, harness the power of nature, and
take cues from indigenous ways to achieve their goals. After nonsense,
if you didn't know how to drive dogs, and you
didn't know how to cross country ski, then you were
really wasting everybody's time and exploration, which is why you
(45:22):
had to be doing physical recordings, geomagnetism, atmospherics and so forth.
And so I'm trying to understand because the aurora, all
of these kind of things, if you weren't doing something
like that, you weren't going to get financial backing of
the newly created serious scientific societies. So all of that
is really a legacy of Nonsense being this kind of
towering figure that straddled both science and exploration and had
(45:45):
enormous clout with scientific societies and governments and corporations. Nonsen
was even savvy to the possibilities of corporate sponsorship and
product endorsement. People talk about Americans being brand conscious and
you know, haling their souls to advertise this, that and
the other. But Nonsense was one of the pioneers of that.
I mean, there was nothing he wouldn't endorse if it
(46:07):
would provide a few bucks for his exploration. So all
of those things were, you know, the way exploration was
going to be done in the first half of the
twentieth century. Nonsen was a born innovator, never settling for
the conventional way of doing things, and driven by curiosity, courage,
and conscience. As we shall see, Nonsense stature as a
(46:29):
polar hero spurred American explorer Robert E. Pearry to aim higher.
He would use some of the polar traveling techniques that
Nonsen invented and rely on his senior assistant, Matthew Henson
to attempt the one thing Nonson failed to do, reach
the North Pole. The Quest for the North Pole is
(47:14):
hosted by Me cat Long. This episode was researched by
Me and written by Ellen Kutowski, with fact checking by
Austin Thompson. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Klang.
The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The show is edited
by Dylan Fagan. For transcripts, a glossary, and to learn
(47:34):
more about this episode, visit Mental flaws dot com slash podcast.
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental floss. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more
(48:11):
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.