finest journey of all was made by the Norwegian Nansen in 1893-1896.
Believing in a drift from the neighbourhood of the New Siberian Islands
westwards over the Pole, a theory which obtained confirmation by the
discovery off the coast of Greenland of certain remains of a ship called
the Jeannette which had been crushed in the ice off these islands, his
bold project was to be frozen in with his ship and allow the current to
take him over, or as near as possible to, the Pole. For this purpose the
most famous of Arctic ships was built, called the Fram. She was designed
by Colin Archer, and was saucer-shaped, with a breadth one-third of her
total length. With most of the expert Arctic opinion against him, Nansen
believed that this ship would rise and sit on the top of the ice when
pressed, instead of being crushed. Of her wonderful voyage with her
thirteen men, of how she was frozen into the ice in September 1893 in the
north of Siberia (79° N.) and of the heaving and trembling of the ship
amidst the roar of the ice pressure, of how the Fram rose to the occasion
as she was built to do, the story has still, after twenty-eight years,
the thrill of novelty. She drifted over the eightieth degree on February
2, 1894. During the first winter Nansen was already getting restive: the
drift was so slow, and sometimes it was backwards: it was not until the
second autumn that the eighty-second degree arrived. So he decided that
he would make an attempt to penetrate northwards by sledging during the
following spring. As Nansen has told me, he felt that the ship would do
her job in any case. Could not something more be done also?

This was one of the bravest decisions a polar explorer has ever taken. It
meant leaving a drifting ship which could not be regained: it meant a
return journey over drifting ice to land; the nearest known land was
nearly five hundred miles south of the point from which he started
northwards; and the journey would include travelling both by sea and by
ice.