January 16, 2012 • 24 mins
Fridtjof Nansen was an artist, skier, zoologist and one of Norway's earliest heroes. The first part of this episode covers his early adventures, while part two covers his humanitarian career. Tune in to learn more about his first major expeditions.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm delanea Chocolate boarding and to Blina.
I don't know if you've heard of Felicity Austin. I
heard this dispatch from her on the radio the other week.
(00:22):
I haven't heard of her. She's a polar explorer, British
woman who's trying to make a solo ski track across Antarctica,
and of course, being a modern day lady, she's got
high tech equipment. For instance, she can tweet. I checked
out her Twitter feed this morning, in fact, and there
was an update from just a couple hours before. But still,
(00:44):
she's out there in Antarctica, all alone, with more than
one thousand miles to ski, certainly of physically difficult and
a mentally challenging thing to do. So it kind of
got me thinking. We've talked a lot about polar explorers
on the podcast. Keep really seem to love episodes about
polar explorers and their exploits, but the stories are usually
(01:07):
pretty grim, as you'd imagine, they're punctuated by this glory
above all attitude that a lot of times gets the
explorers or maybe even more often their crew, all of
their men killed at the end. And that's maybe why
when I suggested today's topic to you is something for
us to do a podcast on um polar explorer for
(01:30):
chi Off Nonsen, you were hoping maybe there'd be an exclamation,
and it did seem kind of promising, And I see exclamation.
I mean, I can't blame you for for thinking that.
But the first thing that I think everybody needs to
understand about Nonsen is that he was a different breed
of polar explorer. In fact, I almost think he has
less in common with his contemporaries or the polar explorers
(01:53):
who came before him, who were just sort of like,
get out there, run over whatever you need to to
get there, Bring lots of men, it doesn't matter if
they die, just achieve your goal. Um. I think he
has less in common with those guys than he does
with modern Arctic adventurers. So people like Felicity Aston, who
are just you know, trying to hope, trying to inspire
(02:15):
other people to achieve UM great things, or maybe more
more likely real scientists who are out there collecting real data. Yes,
so Nonson wasn't just out there for the recognition, and
consequently he wasn't willing to throw his life away, although
he did have some close calls, which will take a
look at later. As a result, Nonson also had the
(02:36):
odd distinction of being a polar explorer with a late
life story that's really more impressive even than his youthful adventures.
He became a diplomat, a humanitarian, a Nobel Peace Prize winner,
and so it's a life that has earned us a
two part of it with that kind of accomplishment, going
to break it up into two episodes whereth so it
(02:57):
all starts though on the skis forty off. Nonsen was
born October tenth, eighteen sixty one, near Christagna, which is
now Oslo in Norway. And at the time I think
it's kind of a developed suburban area now, but at
the time it was pretty rural. There were woods that
backed up to his family's property, a lot of countryside,
(03:18):
and his father was a lawyer. His mother was an
aristocratic athlete, and so he came from a comfortable background
but one that was still pretty rigorous to Both of
his parents emphasized uh good morals and um kind of
a kind of a simple lifestyle almost. They both had
kids from earlier marriages and everybody, all the kids were
(03:42):
encouraged to participate in sports which were really getting a
lot more popular at this time with the upper classes,
especially winter sports in Norway, and all of that dovetailed
to a bit with a nature craze. Perfect place to
grow up with these woods and countryside and opportunities to
get out there and experience nature all around him. And
(04:03):
Nonson didn't just grow up playing one sport. He grew
up swimming, tumbling, fishing, hiking, skating, and skiing. Ultimately he
got to a point where he could ski fifty miles
a day with just his dog for company. So imagine
skiing the distance of a marathon and then skiing back again.
And I mean, I haven't done it, but I've always
heard that cross country skiing is incredibly grueling, one of
(04:26):
the highest calorie burning sports that's out there. Yeah, I
haven't done it either, but it looks tough. When it
came time to choose a field of study, nonsense father
pushed him toward attending the Officers Academy, figuring tuition was
free and that the lifestyle would allow his son the
chance to continue the outdoor pursuits that he loves so much.
But nonsense art teacher, on the other hand, pushed him
(04:48):
to become a painter and professional artist, but Nonson decided
to go to university and study zoology instead. It was
a profession that he hoped would allow him to get
outdoors and sketch, so kind of the best of both world.
That's what he was hoping for, and he, being a
smart kid, really might have easily just gone to university
and continued in that scientific career, you know, maybe even
(05:10):
done so quite successfully, had it not been for an
offer that came up a year into college from one
of his father's friends who was looking for a zoology
student to join a whale and seal hunting expedition in
the Arctic Ocean aboard a ship called the Viking. Kind
of like he wanted an internal board or something almost
so Nonsen went on this four and a half month
(05:33):
long trip and took the time to study everything he saw, animals,
ice formations, currents, the northern lights. He'd take notes on
it all, he would do sketches, he'd take photos constantly,
really working quite diligently so when he came home he
put it all together, wrote a book and started dreaming
(05:55):
of going back. That was the most important part of
this expedition for him, on the Viking Arctic bug that
he caught. He also got a really sweet job after that,
and remember he's still only one year into college at
this point. His job was as the zoological curator at
the Bargain Museum. Bargain was one of Norway's most cosmopolitan
cities and had a strong scientific community, so Nanson got
(06:17):
to work with Daniel C. Danielson, an Arctic explorer from
the eighteen seventies, and his son in law, Dr. Gerhardt Hanson,
who discovered the leprosy Vassilists. He also made John's to
Germany and to Italy to work in some of the
continent's top labs, and the only thing that he didn't
like about this was the temperate winter. In eight four,
(06:37):
he skied across Norway from Bargain to Christiania in order
to take part in a ski jumping across country competition.
I think that was his first major athletic accomplishment or
public athletic accomplishment. Yeah, I got a lot of press
writing across Norway. Yes, it sounds like it would be
a difficult thing to do. But all of this time,
you know, ski jumping competitions, he was doing his research,
(07:02):
and in eighty eight he defended his dissertation on the
central nervous systems of certain lower vertebrates. And uh, the
really interesting thing about this, I mean, I think it
was a well received dissertation on its own, but what
interests me about it is that he translated it himself.
He spoke five different languages. He translated it into other
(07:23):
languages and kind of abbreviated it to made it more readable,
sort of maybe more like the Scientific American version of
his dissertation, so that it would get a wider readership
and people could see what he was working on. And
we've talked already about how great of an artist he was.
He illustrated it himself with his own lithographs, and he
(07:43):
used a device called a camera Lucida to copy directly
from the microscope to lithographical stone. So you can look
up his dissertation online and see these illustrations, and they
really do look like line drawings of what you would
under a microscope. So he did a really great job
with this and after that the job offer started rolling in,
(08:07):
but Nonson turned them down. He had something else on
his mind at the time, and that was a polar exploration.
He had caught that bag so years earlier. Actually, immediately
after returning from the Viking expedition, Nonson had started thinking
about maybe a trip to Greenland. Yeah, and he decided
to start with what he knew best, which was skiing.
(08:29):
In the eighteen eighties, the interior of Greenland was still unexplored,
and many people even believed that it might be ice free. Nonson, however,
believed it was not only icy but passable, and so
he decided he'd ski from Greenland's remote east coast to
its inhabited west. And this was just crazy. I mean
everyone thought that this was a crazy idea. Yeah, I
mean crazy is the right word to describe it. That
(08:50):
is what people people thought, or suicidal maybe, because skiing
east to west meant there would be no retreat, you know,
you couldn't decide um a few days, a few weeks
in to turn back and go back to the houses.
If winter was approaching too fast, you'd be stuck. And
then also another thing that disturbed people was that there
(09:11):
would be no base, and if you think about a
lot of the polar exploration episodes we've talked about, there
is usually a base and they go on these little
dashes from the base to to try to reach their goal. Uh.
The other thing that people were disturbed by was that
he was planning on going with skis, so no sleds,
no dogs, and that of course means that you can
(09:34):
only bring what you can carry and still be able
to ski across glaciers. Yeah. His Nobel Prize biography describes
it like this quote. In nine explaining his philosophy to
the students at St. Andrew's and his rictorial address, Nonson
said that a line of retreat from a proposed action
was a snare, and that one should burn his votes
(09:56):
behind him so that there is no choice but to
go forward. So I've seen this covered a few different
ways than different sources, kind of as a metaphoric thing,
burning boats, burning bridges. Where has he really burned his boat?
So I am curious to learn any more about that.
If if anybody knows or has read um more on
(10:17):
nonsense in this boat burning potential, it seems like your
line of retreat would already be removed even if the
boats were still there the time to burn the why
take them unless you just wanted one last big, warm
boss fire. Um. So. Consequently, because of the nature of
this expedition, Nonsen had trouble funding what seemed like suicide
(10:41):
to a lot of people. He finally got a grant
from a Danish politician and formed a five member team.
There were three Norwegians and two saw Me and UH
had a lot of trouble getting going on the mission
to or on the expedition. There were many delays and
UH they couldn't even start ascending the Eland Glacier until
(11:01):
about mid August, by which point Arctic summer was kind
of coming to an end and one of the crucial
things with to be able to make it across the
glacier before winter set in. So the party skied nine
thousand feet above sea level and temperatures as low as
negative forty nine degrees fahrenheit, with no choice but to
(11:22):
just keep on going. They had brought along some pemmican, which,
as I understand it is kind of like the original
power bar but portable food. But the mixture didn't have
enough fat in it, which was really I mean, they
were close to starvation. Well, they were suffering a lot
from that and um fortunately though, they were able to
have enough strength to keep going, and by late September
(11:45):
they reached the west coast, and by early October they
got to a settled area. Here another happy accident happened
for Nonsense Life. The last boat had left two months earlier,
so that it sounds like a bad It sounds like
a bad thing, but it did give him any other
spoor as a chance to spend the winter with the
local population. So Nonson took full advantage of this. He hunted,
(12:08):
he sketched, he learned to kayak, He made friends, so
when he came home to what was a hero's welcome,
he had enough material for two books, the First Crossing
of Greenland, which was published in eighteen ninety and Eskimo Life,
which was published in and that stint with the with
the people, they're learning how to kayak, learning how to
(12:29):
survive in these temperatures, really did prove vital for his
survival later on. And just kind of a high note
too that I really like. In addition to providing a
lot of new information about Greenland and its people and
their customs and just the Greenland topography. To the trip
was this huge pr campaign for skating, which was, as
(12:50):
we've mentioned, you know, something that was still kind of
catching on getting more popular. Kids started to form nonsin
clubs where they would go out and ski and do
outdoors the kind of pursuits, and um, he was a
really great ambassador for this, and I think this is
maybe a good opportunity to talk a little bit about
how he looked too. Nonsen is a popular suggestion, and
(13:12):
I wonder how much of it has to do with
the very impressive mustache he sported. I know, I think
Tico would be jealous. I think he would, Well, you
were hoping for a mustache exhumation if we're gonna really
lay it all out there, yeah, if we're going to
be honest, I wasn't just hoping for a regular exhamation.
We're hoping for another mustache exclamation, but really, like, go
(13:33):
look him up though. He's got a look of a
polar explorer, and I think that it will help too
when if Billy Idol were a Polar explorer. He does
look a lot like Billy Idol with the mustache. But
I think especially in the second episode where we talk
about some of his diplomatic work. People talk about his presence,
the presence he had, and the confidence he had, and
(13:55):
I think that that really comes across in pictures of
him and will help all of that makes sense. So
Nonson was a new hero not only of skiing but
of exploration, and he spent the next four years writing
and working as a curator of the Zotomical Institute of
the University of Oslo. He also married Avis Stars, a singer,
a daughter of a marine zoologist and an avid outdoors woman.
(14:18):
You can find pictures of her too, in a pretty
awesome little ski costume. I mean, and by little, I
do not mean little in anyway. It's got a large
skirt and full coverage. But by summer one Nonsen had
that polar itch again. He started to plan another trip,
and to understand his reasons for settling on this particular trip,
(14:41):
we have to go back a little bit back in
eighteen seventy nine, the American ship the US S. Jeanette,
had gotten caught in ice north of Siberia, and that's
pretty bad news. But the ship managed to hold together
and drift along for about twenty one months before finally
the coming to the pressure of the ice. From my
(15:03):
understanding of how this happens, the ice, you know, forms
around your boat, starts to cause immense pressure, eventually starts
to break up the boat and pull it down. So
that's what happened to the Jenette, and half of the
crew ultimately died trying to make a dash back to Siberia.
In three years later, though, remnants of the Jenette washed
(15:28):
up in Greenland and it was a major discovery and
that it proved the theory that currents went east to
west over the Arctic. So nonsense saw the news of
the Jennette and thought, Hey, if I had a boat
that didn't get crushed by the ice, I could ride
that current and maybe go right over the North Pole.
Sounds kind of crazy again, It sounds like part two
(15:51):
to Crazy Idea Land. And it was a really bold idea,
but it was one that wisely worked off of observation
and careful planning rather than the previous model we've alluded
to a little bit of arctic assault. Really, you know,
you get out there with like fifty to a hundred
guys and just go with the techniques, you know, don't
(16:13):
adapt to the climate. Really just bundle up and make
a dash for it, a technique that obviously often ended
in tragedy. There's a National and Geographic article by Hampton's
Sides on Nonsense expedition, and it quotes a nonsense biographer
named Roland Huntford as saying that it was very unusual
(16:35):
for an explorer to quote take note of the forces
of nature and try to work with them and not
against them. So to pay attention to what way the
currents were going. Think that maybe you could let yourself
be iced in and just literally go with the flow
instead of instead of just throwing everything you had at it.
It took some planning, though, to figure out exactly how
(16:57):
to work with nature in this way, I mean, Nonsen
had to put a lot of time and thought into this.
So the first step was the ship. Of course, Nonson
got together with the shipbuilder call An Archer, to design
a vessel that wouldn't be crushed by the ice pack,
one that would be pushed up instead of pulled down.
He also decided that for the mission to work, it
would have to be very small, so he started gathering
(17:19):
supplies for four or five years for about a dozen men,
so a really innovative way of thinking about it. Every
detail of spending years trapped an Arctic ice had to
be considered very carefully, from the strength of the whole
to the sanity of the men. The rudder and propeller,
for example, could be pulled up as ice moved in.
An insulation of reindeer hair, felt cork and tar kept
(17:43):
things warmer inside, and a windmill powered electric lights that
would keep the men in high spirits during those dark
polar winters, allowing them to read from a six hundred
book library that had been collected, listened to an automatic
organ or chat in the saloon that was created on
the vessel, which you know, maybe that sounds fruvolous, but
if you're seriously planning to be in the ice for
(18:05):
four or five years, in the dark for much of
that time, you know, you've got to take into account
the mental well being, yeah, the spirit of the of
the men. So Nansen's wife named the ship the From
which means forward, appropriately enough, and the expedition set off
in June from Oslo, headed towards the New Siberian Islands,
(18:30):
and by September they did what they were hoping to do.
The ship was frozen in and you can imagine how
harrowing that would be, waiting to see if it was
gonna work, or whether your ship would actually think. And
here's how Nonsen himself described it. He said, a deafening
noise began, and the whole ship shook. The noise steadily
(18:51):
grows till it is like all the pipes of an organ.
Two days after that, he wrote that the ice is
trying it's very utmost grind the From into powder. But
that construction worked. The ship held together, it didn't sink,
and the From was able to ride the drift, and
the crew did entertain themselves with scientific research and ski
(19:11):
trips and even a self published newspaper, which sounds very
interesting big events of the day. The drift, however, was
unpredictable and really slow, so Nonsense started to worry that
they'd never be able to get far enough north to
reach the pole, and that the whole thing might actually
take something like six to seven years instead of four
to five. So he had to make a major decision.
(19:33):
He decided to take one comrade a pack of dogs
and leave the relatively cushy newspaper filled from to make
a dash for the pole. The only problem here though,
was that besides bad maps, killer temperatures, and slushy ice,
there'd be no way that he could catch up with
the From when he was done. So the From of
course would have drifted too far for him to make
(19:55):
it back by then. So to go out on this
dash to the poll, he would have to find the
pole and then come back and then try to find
solid land civilization, or just be left out there on
the ice to die. So that's where we're going to
leave off. In the next episode, we have a polar
(20:15):
bear attack, a Nobel Prize, and because we did mention
that Nelson had a pretty impressive later career to saving
an estimated seven to twenty two million Russians from starvation,
and we do mean millions. So sometimes it's it's a
smart to be careful with your polar expedition planning because
(20:37):
you have great things ahead of you. Well, keeping with
this exploration theme, we're now going to move on to
a listener mail. So Delena, remember this summer when we
got a lot of postcards from a girl who was
taking a grand tour around Europe. I do that was
a pretty good postcard collection, as they're very impressive, and
(20:58):
I liked how she would tell us what she was
doing when she was when she was writing a postcard,
where she was sitting in these amazing which podcast she
listened to, which it was very fun. So I think
we have a kind of part two of that from
listener Hillary, who is sending us postcards while she's taking
a violin tour. She's violinist and she's touring around Europe
(21:21):
maybe beyond. She was in Hanover, Germany when she sent
us her first card. But I really like something she wrote.
She said that I've been particularly enjoying the episodes about
things that happened in the Civil War era. Is my
violin was made in eighteen sixty four in France. Caring
about that time is like finding out fascinating backtoys about
(21:42):
someone you know very well. Because I spent a lot
of time with this violin and it definitely has a personality.
So I thought that was such a neat commentary because
you obviously can't know a person who was born in
eighteen sixty four. I don't think there are any of
them left, but you can be so familiar with an instrument,
you know, as a professional violinist who spends much of
(22:04):
her time with this, this thing from eighteen sixty four,
and feels the connection to that that time, you know,
a very real connection. And whoever played that violin before well,
and presumably all the people who who've played it before,
and the person who made it. And um, I just
thought that was very neat. So Hillary has also sent
us a couple of postcards. Um. One of them is
(22:27):
from Palermo. I think that might be my favorite. It's
the Church of the Marcharana. And I think that while
you're googling pictures of Nonsen and his wife and skis, um,
you could go ahead and google this church too, because
to me it almost looks like three scoops of pink
(22:48):
sherbet on top. I mean that was I thought it
was a photoshopped or something when I first looked at it,
just because the colors though striking. Um. She wrote to
us too that she she must have felt the same way.
She said that it was so visually memorable that she
had to send it instead of a more dignified one.
She probably wrote that because the postcard does have a
(23:09):
again sherbet hued title above, labeling it his Lermo. But anyway, Hillary,
Thank you so much for keeping us up with your
travels and good luck with all your performances. And if
you would like to send us some information about your
own travels or history podcasts that have taken you places,
(23:32):
or ideas that you have for future podcasts, you can
write us at History podcast at how stuff works dot com,
or you can look us up on Facebook or on
Twitter and mist in history. And if you want to
learn a little bit more about nobs whose favorite sport,
we do have an article called how cross country Skiing works,
and you can find it by searching on our home
page at www dot how stuff where It's dot com.
(23:58):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm delanea Chocolate boarding and to Blina.
I don't know if you've heard of Felicity Austin. I
heard this dispatch from her on the radio the other week.
(00:22):
I haven't heard of her. She's a polar explorer, British
woman who's trying to make a solo ski track across Antarctica,
and of course, being a modern day lady, she's got
high tech equipment. For instance, she can tweet. I checked
out her Twitter feed this morning, in fact, and there
was an update from just a couple hours before. But still,
(00:44):
she's out there in Antarctica, all alone, with more than
one thousand miles to ski, certainly of physically difficult and
a mentally challenging thing to do. So it kind of
got me thinking. We've talked a lot about polar explorers
on the podcast. Keep really seem to love episodes about
polar explorers and their exploits, but the stories are usually
(01:07):
pretty grim, as you'd imagine, they're punctuated by this glory
above all attitude that a lot of times gets the
explorers or maybe even more often their crew, all of
their men killed at the end. And that's maybe why
when I suggested today's topic to you is something for
us to do a podcast on um polar explorer for
(01:30):
chi Off Nonsen, you were hoping maybe there'd be an exclamation,
and it did seem kind of promising, And I see exclamation.
I mean, I can't blame you for for thinking that.
But the first thing that I think everybody needs to
understand about Nonsen is that he was a different breed
of polar explorer. In fact, I almost think he has
less in common with his contemporaries or the polar explorers
(01:53):
who came before him, who were just sort of like,
get out there, run over whatever you need to to
get there, Bring lots of men, it doesn't matter if
they die, just achieve your goal. Um. I think he
has less in common with those guys than he does
with modern Arctic adventurers. So people like Felicity Aston, who
are just you know, trying to hope, trying to inspire
(02:15):
other people to achieve UM great things, or maybe more
more likely real scientists who are out there collecting real data. Yes,
so Nonson wasn't just out there for the recognition, and
consequently he wasn't willing to throw his life away, although
he did have some close calls, which will take a
look at later. As a result, Nonson also had the
(02:36):
odd distinction of being a polar explorer with a late
life story that's really more impressive even than his youthful adventures.
He became a diplomat, a humanitarian, a Nobel Peace Prize winner,
and so it's a life that has earned us a
two part of it with that kind of accomplishment, going
to break it up into two episodes whereth so it
(02:57):
all starts though on the skis forty off. Nonsen was
born October tenth, eighteen sixty one, near Christagna, which is
now Oslo in Norway. And at the time I think
it's kind of a developed suburban area now, but at
the time it was pretty rural. There were woods that
backed up to his family's property, a lot of countryside,
(03:18):
and his father was a lawyer. His mother was an
aristocratic athlete, and so he came from a comfortable background
but one that was still pretty rigorous to Both of
his parents emphasized uh good morals and um kind of
a kind of a simple lifestyle almost. They both had
kids from earlier marriages and everybody, all the kids were
(03:42):
encouraged to participate in sports which were really getting a
lot more popular at this time with the upper classes,
especially winter sports in Norway, and all of that dovetailed
to a bit with a nature craze. Perfect place to
grow up with these woods and countryside and opportunities to
get out there and experience nature all around him. And
(04:03):
Nonson didn't just grow up playing one sport. He grew
up swimming, tumbling, fishing, hiking, skating, and skiing. Ultimately he
got to a point where he could ski fifty miles
a day with just his dog for company. So imagine
skiing the distance of a marathon and then skiing back again.
And I mean, I haven't done it, but I've always
heard that cross country skiing is incredibly grueling, one of
(04:26):
the highest calorie burning sports that's out there. Yeah, I
haven't done it either, but it looks tough. When it
came time to choose a field of study, nonsense father
pushed him toward attending the Officers Academy, figuring tuition was
free and that the lifestyle would allow his son the
chance to continue the outdoor pursuits that he loves so much.
But nonsense art teacher, on the other hand, pushed him
(04:48):
to become a painter and professional artist, but Nonson decided
to go to university and study zoology instead. It was
a profession that he hoped would allow him to get
outdoors and sketch, so kind of the best of both world.
That's what he was hoping for, and he, being a
smart kid, really might have easily just gone to university
and continued in that scientific career, you know, maybe even
(05:10):
done so quite successfully, had it not been for an
offer that came up a year into college from one
of his father's friends who was looking for a zoology
student to join a whale and seal hunting expedition in
the Arctic Ocean aboard a ship called the Viking. Kind
of like he wanted an internal board or something almost
so Nonsen went on this four and a half month
(05:33):
long trip and took the time to study everything he saw, animals,
ice formations, currents, the northern lights. He'd take notes on
it all, he would do sketches, he'd take photos constantly,
really working quite diligently so when he came home he
put it all together, wrote a book and started dreaming
(05:55):
of going back. That was the most important part of
this expedition for him, on the Viking Arctic bug that
he caught. He also got a really sweet job after that,
and remember he's still only one year into college at
this point. His job was as the zoological curator at
the Bargain Museum. Bargain was one of Norway's most cosmopolitan
cities and had a strong scientific community, so Nanson got
(06:17):
to work with Daniel C. Danielson, an Arctic explorer from
the eighteen seventies, and his son in law, Dr. Gerhardt Hanson,
who discovered the leprosy Vassilists. He also made John's to
Germany and to Italy to work in some of the
continent's top labs, and the only thing that he didn't
like about this was the temperate winter. In eight four,
(06:37):
he skied across Norway from Bargain to Christiania in order
to take part in a ski jumping across country competition.
I think that was his first major athletic accomplishment or
public athletic accomplishment. Yeah, I got a lot of press
writing across Norway. Yes, it sounds like it would be
a difficult thing to do. But all of this time,
you know, ski jumping competitions, he was doing his research,
(07:02):
and in eighty eight he defended his dissertation on the
central nervous systems of certain lower vertebrates. And uh, the
really interesting thing about this, I mean, I think it
was a well received dissertation on its own, but what
interests me about it is that he translated it himself.
He spoke five different languages. He translated it into other
(07:23):
languages and kind of abbreviated it to made it more readable,
sort of maybe more like the Scientific American version of
his dissertation, so that it would get a wider readership
and people could see what he was working on. And
we've talked already about how great of an artist he was.
He illustrated it himself with his own lithographs, and he
(07:43):
used a device called a camera Lucida to copy directly
from the microscope to lithographical stone. So you can look
up his dissertation online and see these illustrations, and they
really do look like line drawings of what you would
under a microscope. So he did a really great job
with this and after that the job offer started rolling in,
(08:07):
but Nonson turned them down. He had something else on
his mind at the time, and that was a polar exploration.
He had caught that bag so years earlier. Actually, immediately
after returning from the Viking expedition, Nonson had started thinking
about maybe a trip to Greenland. Yeah, and he decided
to start with what he knew best, which was skiing.
(08:29):
In the eighteen eighties, the interior of Greenland was still unexplored,
and many people even believed that it might be ice free. Nonson, however,
believed it was not only icy but passable, and so
he decided he'd ski from Greenland's remote east coast to
its inhabited west. And this was just crazy. I mean
everyone thought that this was a crazy idea. Yeah, I
mean crazy is the right word to describe it. That
(08:50):
is what people people thought, or suicidal maybe, because skiing
east to west meant there would be no retreat, you know,
you couldn't decide um a few days, a few weeks
in to turn back and go back to the houses.
If winter was approaching too fast, you'd be stuck. And
then also another thing that disturbed people was that there
(09:11):
would be no base, and if you think about a
lot of the polar exploration episodes we've talked about, there
is usually a base and they go on these little
dashes from the base to to try to reach their goal. Uh.
The other thing that people were disturbed by was that
he was planning on going with skis, so no sleds,
no dogs, and that of course means that you can
(09:34):
only bring what you can carry and still be able
to ski across glaciers. Yeah. His Nobel Prize biography describes
it like this quote. In nine explaining his philosophy to
the students at St. Andrew's and his rictorial address, Nonson
said that a line of retreat from a proposed action
was a snare, and that one should burn his votes
(09:56):
behind him so that there is no choice but to
go forward. So I've seen this covered a few different
ways than different sources, kind of as a metaphoric thing,
burning boats, burning bridges. Where has he really burned his boat?
So I am curious to learn any more about that.
If if anybody knows or has read um more on
(10:17):
nonsense in this boat burning potential, it seems like your
line of retreat would already be removed even if the
boats were still there the time to burn the why
take them unless you just wanted one last big, warm
boss fire. Um. So. Consequently, because of the nature of
this expedition, Nonsen had trouble funding what seemed like suicide
(10:41):
to a lot of people. He finally got a grant
from a Danish politician and formed a five member team.
There were three Norwegians and two saw Me and UH
had a lot of trouble getting going on the mission
to or on the expedition. There were many delays and
UH they couldn't even start ascending the Eland Glacier until
(11:01):
about mid August, by which point Arctic summer was kind
of coming to an end and one of the crucial
things with to be able to make it across the
glacier before winter set in. So the party skied nine
thousand feet above sea level and temperatures as low as
negative forty nine degrees fahrenheit, with no choice but to
(11:22):
just keep on going. They had brought along some pemmican, which,
as I understand it is kind of like the original
power bar but portable food. But the mixture didn't have
enough fat in it, which was really I mean, they
were close to starvation. Well, they were suffering a lot
from that and um fortunately though, they were able to
have enough strength to keep going, and by late September
(11:45):
they reached the west coast, and by early October they
got to a settled area. Here another happy accident happened
for Nonsense Life. The last boat had left two months earlier,
so that it sounds like a bad It sounds like
a bad thing, but it did give him any other
spoor as a chance to spend the winter with the
local population. So Nonson took full advantage of this. He hunted,
(12:08):
he sketched, he learned to kayak, He made friends, so
when he came home to what was a hero's welcome,
he had enough material for two books, the First Crossing
of Greenland, which was published in eighteen ninety and Eskimo Life,
which was published in and that stint with the with
the people, they're learning how to kayak, learning how to
(12:29):
survive in these temperatures, really did prove vital for his
survival later on. And just kind of a high note
too that I really like. In addition to providing a
lot of new information about Greenland and its people and
their customs and just the Greenland topography. To the trip
was this huge pr campaign for skating, which was, as
(12:50):
we've mentioned, you know, something that was still kind of
catching on getting more popular. Kids started to form nonsin
clubs where they would go out and ski and do
outdoors the kind of pursuits, and um, he was a
really great ambassador for this, and I think this is
maybe a good opportunity to talk a little bit about
how he looked too. Nonsen is a popular suggestion, and
(13:12):
I wonder how much of it has to do with
the very impressive mustache he sported. I know, I think
Tico would be jealous. I think he would, Well, you
were hoping for a mustache exhumation if we're gonna really
lay it all out there, yeah, if we're going to
be honest, I wasn't just hoping for a regular exhamation.
We're hoping for another mustache exclamation, but really, like, go
(13:33):
look him up though. He's got a look of a
polar explorer, and I think that it will help too
when if Billy Idol were a Polar explorer. He does
look a lot like Billy Idol with the mustache. But
I think especially in the second episode where we talk
about some of his diplomatic work. People talk about his presence,
the presence he had, and the confidence he had, and
(13:55):
I think that that really comes across in pictures of
him and will help all of that makes sense. So
Nonson was a new hero not only of skiing but
of exploration, and he spent the next four years writing
and working as a curator of the Zotomical Institute of
the University of Oslo. He also married Avis Stars, a singer,
a daughter of a marine zoologist and an avid outdoors woman.
(14:18):
You can find pictures of her too, in a pretty
awesome little ski costume. I mean, and by little, I
do not mean little in anyway. It's got a large
skirt and full coverage. But by summer one Nonsen had
that polar itch again. He started to plan another trip,
and to understand his reasons for settling on this particular trip,
(14:41):
we have to go back a little bit back in
eighteen seventy nine, the American ship the US S. Jeanette,
had gotten caught in ice north of Siberia, and that's
pretty bad news. But the ship managed to hold together
and drift along for about twenty one months before finally
the coming to the pressure of the ice. From my
(15:03):
understanding of how this happens, the ice, you know, forms
around your boat, starts to cause immense pressure, eventually starts
to break up the boat and pull it down. So
that's what happened to the Jenette, and half of the
crew ultimately died trying to make a dash back to Siberia.
In three years later, though, remnants of the Jenette washed
(15:28):
up in Greenland and it was a major discovery and
that it proved the theory that currents went east to
west over the Arctic. So nonsense saw the news of
the Jennette and thought, Hey, if I had a boat
that didn't get crushed by the ice, I could ride
that current and maybe go right over the North Pole.
Sounds kind of crazy again, It sounds like part two
(15:51):
to Crazy Idea Land. And it was a really bold idea,
but it was one that wisely worked off of observation
and careful planning rather than the previous model we've alluded
to a little bit of arctic assault. Really, you know,
you get out there with like fifty to a hundred
guys and just go with the techniques, you know, don't
(16:13):
adapt to the climate. Really just bundle up and make
a dash for it, a technique that obviously often ended
in tragedy. There's a National and Geographic article by Hampton's
Sides on Nonsense expedition, and it quotes a nonsense biographer
named Roland Huntford as saying that it was very unusual
(16:35):
for an explorer to quote take note of the forces
of nature and try to work with them and not
against them. So to pay attention to what way the
currents were going. Think that maybe you could let yourself
be iced in and just literally go with the flow
instead of instead of just throwing everything you had at it.
It took some planning, though, to figure out exactly how
(16:57):
to work with nature in this way, I mean, Nonsen
had to put a lot of time and thought into this.
So the first step was the ship. Of course, Nonson
got together with the shipbuilder call An Archer, to design
a vessel that wouldn't be crushed by the ice pack,
one that would be pushed up instead of pulled down.
He also decided that for the mission to work, it
would have to be very small, so he started gathering
(17:19):
supplies for four or five years for about a dozen men,
so a really innovative way of thinking about it. Every
detail of spending years trapped an Arctic ice had to
be considered very carefully, from the strength of the whole
to the sanity of the men. The rudder and propeller,
for example, could be pulled up as ice moved in.
An insulation of reindeer hair, felt cork and tar kept
(17:43):
things warmer inside, and a windmill powered electric lights that
would keep the men in high spirits during those dark
polar winters, allowing them to read from a six hundred
book library that had been collected, listened to an automatic
organ or chat in the saloon that was created on
the vessel, which you know, maybe that sounds fruvolous, but
if you're seriously planning to be in the ice for
(18:05):
four or five years, in the dark for much of
that time, you know, you've got to take into account
the mental well being, yeah, the spirit of the of
the men. So Nansen's wife named the ship the From
which means forward, appropriately enough, and the expedition set off
in June from Oslo, headed towards the New Siberian Islands,
(18:30):
and by September they did what they were hoping to do.
The ship was frozen in and you can imagine how
harrowing that would be, waiting to see if it was
gonna work, or whether your ship would actually think. And
here's how Nonsen himself described it. He said, a deafening
noise began, and the whole ship shook. The noise steadily
(18:51):
grows till it is like all the pipes of an organ.
Two days after that, he wrote that the ice is
trying it's very utmost grind the From into powder. But
that construction worked. The ship held together, it didn't sink,
and the From was able to ride the drift, and
the crew did entertain themselves with scientific research and ski
(19:11):
trips and even a self published newspaper, which sounds very
interesting big events of the day. The drift, however, was
unpredictable and really slow, so Nonsense started to worry that
they'd never be able to get far enough north to
reach the pole, and that the whole thing might actually
take something like six to seven years instead of four
to five. So he had to make a major decision.
(19:33):
He decided to take one comrade a pack of dogs
and leave the relatively cushy newspaper filled from to make
a dash for the pole. The only problem here though,
was that besides bad maps, killer temperatures, and slushy ice,
there'd be no way that he could catch up with
the From when he was done. So the From of
course would have drifted too far for him to make
(19:55):
it back by then. So to go out on this
dash to the poll, he would have to find the
pole and then come back and then try to find
solid land civilization, or just be left out there on
the ice to die. So that's where we're going to
leave off. In the next episode, we have a polar
(20:15):
bear attack, a Nobel Prize, and because we did mention
that Nelson had a pretty impressive later career to saving
an estimated seven to twenty two million Russians from starvation,
and we do mean millions. So sometimes it's it's a
smart to be careful with your polar expedition planning because
(20:37):
you have great things ahead of you. Well, keeping with
this exploration theme, we're now going to move on to
a listener mail. So Delena, remember this summer when we
got a lot of postcards from a girl who was
taking a grand tour around Europe. I do that was
a pretty good postcard collection, as they're very impressive, and
(20:58):
I liked how she would tell us what she was
doing when she was when she was writing a postcard,
where she was sitting in these amazing which podcast she
listened to, which it was very fun. So I think
we have a kind of part two of that from
listener Hillary, who is sending us postcards while she's taking
a violin tour. She's violinist and she's touring around Europe
(21:21):
maybe beyond. She was in Hanover, Germany when she sent
us her first card. But I really like something she wrote.
She said that I've been particularly enjoying the episodes about
things that happened in the Civil War era. Is my
violin was made in eighteen sixty four in France. Caring
about that time is like finding out fascinating backtoys about
(21:42):
someone you know very well. Because I spent a lot
of time with this violin and it definitely has a personality.
So I thought that was such a neat commentary because
you obviously can't know a person who was born in
eighteen sixty four. I don't think there are any of
them left, but you can be so familiar with an instrument,
you know, as a professional violinist who spends much of
(22:04):
her time with this, this thing from eighteen sixty four,
and feels the connection to that that time, you know,
a very real connection. And whoever played that violin before well,
and presumably all the people who who've played it before,
and the person who made it. And um, I just
thought that was very neat. So Hillary has also sent
us a couple of postcards. Um. One of them is
(22:27):
from Palermo. I think that might be my favorite. It's
the Church of the Marcharana. And I think that while
you're googling pictures of Nonsen and his wife and skis, um,
you could go ahead and google this church too, because
to me it almost looks like three scoops of pink
(22:48):
sherbet on top. I mean that was I thought it
was a photoshopped or something when I first looked at it,
just because the colors though striking. Um. She wrote to
us too that she she must have felt the same way.
She said that it was so visually memorable that she
had to send it instead of a more dignified one.
She probably wrote that because the postcard does have a
(23:09):
again sherbet hued title above, labeling it his Lermo. But anyway, Hillary,
Thank you so much for keeping us up with your
travels and good luck with all your performances. And if
you would like to send us some information about your
own travels or history podcasts that have taken you places,
(23:32):
or ideas that you have for future podcasts, you can
write us at History podcast at how stuff works dot com,
or you can look us up on Facebook or on
Twitter and mist in history. And if you want to
learn a little bit more about nobs whose favorite sport,
we do have an article called how cross country Skiing works,
and you can find it by searching on our home
page at www dot how stuff where It's dot com.
(23:58):
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
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