winter, so soaked with blubber that the only way to clean their shirts
was to scrape them. They made themselves new clothes from blankets, and
sleeping-bags from the skins of the bears which they ate, and started
again in May of the following year to make Spitzbergen. They had been
travelling a long month, during which time they had at least two very
narrow escapes--the first due to their kayaks floating away, when Nansen
swam out into the icy sea and reached them just before he sank, and
Johansen passed the worst moments of his life watching from the shore;
the second caused by the attack of a walrus which went for Nansen's kayak
with tusks and flippers. And then one morning, as he looked round at the
cold glaciers and naked cliffs, not knowing where he was, he heard a dog
bark. Intensely excited, he started towards the sound, to be met by the
leader of the English Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition whose party was
wintering there, and who first gave him the definite news that he was on
Franz Josef Land. Nansen and Johansen were finally landed at Vardo in the
north of Norway, to learn that no tidings had yet been heard of the Fram.
That very day she cleared the ice which had imprisoned her for nearly
three years.

I cannot go into the Fram's journey save to say that she had drifted as
far north as 85° 55´ N., only eighteen geographical miles south of
Nansen's farthest north. But the sledge journey and the winter spent by
the two men has many points in common with the experience of our own
Northern Party, and often and often during the long winter of 1912 our
thoughts turned with hope to Nansen's winter, for we said if it had been
done once why should it not be done again, and Campbell and his men
survive.

Before Nansen started, the spirit of adventure, which has always led men
into the unknown, combined with the increased interest in knowledge for