Here Nansen and Lieutenant F. H. Johansen, who rather than not join the _Fram_ had shipped in her as stoker, left the ship with three sledges, two kayaks, and twenty-eight dogs to go as far northward as they could, their expectation being that they would reach the Pole in fifty days. Had they remained in the ship until November they would have saved themselves trouble, for, as matters turned out, the embarrassing drift took the _Fram_ within eight miles of the farthest north they attained after twenty-three days of strenuous endeavour. [Illustration: Yours sincerely Fridtjof Nansen.] The ice, fairly easy for a few days, soon became terrible in the difficulties it offered to progress over it, and the continual toil of hauling and carrying the sledges, and righting them when capsized, soon told on the two men to such an extent as to tire them out so thoroughly that sometimes in the evening they fell asleep as they went along. The cold, too, proved singularly searching and severe. During the course of the day the damp exhalations of the body little by little became condensed in their outer garments, which became transformed into suits of ice-armour, so hard that if they could have been got off they could have stood by themselves, and they crackled audibly at every movement. The clothes were so stiff that the sleeve of Nansen's coat rubbed deep sores in his wrist, one of which got frost-bitten, the wound growing deeper and deeper and nearly reaching the bone. "How cold we were," says Nansen, "as we lay there shivering in the bag, waiting for the supper to be ready! I, who was cook, was obliged to keep myself more or less awake to see to the culinary operations, and sometimes I succeeded. At last the supper was ready, was portioned out, and, as always, tasted delicious. These occasions were the supreme moments of our existence, moments to which we looked forward all day long. But sometimes we were so weary that our eyes closed, and we fell asleep with the food on its way to our mouths. Our hands would fall back inanimate with the spoons in them and the food fly out on the bag." The further they went the worse became the conditions. On the 8th of April, with ridge after ridge and nothing but rubble to travel over, the work became so disheartening that Nansen went on ahead on his skis and from the highest hummocks viewed the state of affairs; and as far as the horizon, lay a chaos of such character that progress across was impracticable if he and Johansen were to return alive. Here, then, they stopped, this being their northernmost limit, 128 miles from the _Fram_, 260 miles from the Pole, latitude 86° 13·6´, longitude 95°.