Of Nansen, on the contrary, I ought to say as much as I can, because his extraordinary voyage in the _Fram_ was perhaps more purely an examination of the Arctic _Sea_ than any other ever made. Dr. Fridtjoff Nansen was a young Norwegian who had already made his mark in Greenland, where, soon after 1880, articles began to be found that had belonged to the _Jeannette_, and apparently must have drifted thence from where she was lost off Siberia. This was only a part of the indications that convinced Dr. Nansen that a current flowed across the unknown polar space from the neighborhood of Alaska to the northeast coast of Greenland, and thence became the great Arctic current that we recognize south of Iceland. He argued that if a vessel could find this current north of eastern Siberia, she would be moved with it until she emerged into the Atlantic. Incidentally she might drift directly over the pole. With this in view, he raised funds to build and equip a small wooden vessel, furnished with both steam and sails, which was so shaped by the roundness of her bottom, and so amazingly braced and strengthened within, that before any “nips” of the ice would crush her, the pressure would lift her out of water—as, in fact, happened many times in the course of her wonderful excursion. Nansen chose twelve companions,[3] and though some of them were educated men of science, others skilful sea-captains, and others common sailors, all lived and worked together in one cabin as brothers—the happiest and healthiest lot of men that ever ventured into the hyperborean kingdom of desolation. Leaving Norway in July, 1893, he struggled through the Kara Sea, and it was not until late in September, 1894, that he found himself permanently frozen into the great polar pack, north of the New Siberian Islands; but even then he was neither so far north nor so far west as he hoped to get, and feared that he was south of his supposed current. For the story of the strange life led by those thirteen men on that drifting ship, safe, abundantly provisioned, dry, warm, lighted by electricity (power for the dynamos being gained by a windmill), I can only refer you to Dr. Nansen’s book, “Farthest North,” one of the most interesting Arctic volumes ever penned. Turning, zigzagging, now advancing and again retreating as the constantly moving ice swayed here and there under the pressure of wind or the dragging of currents, they nevertheless made a gradual progress westward.