Books: Viking

THE SAGA or FRIDTJOF NANSEX—Jon Sorensen—Norton ($4.50).

His Viking ancestors would have approved the first part of the late great Fridtjof Nansen’s life, would have misunderstood or laughed at the second.

Even his contemporaries may not be sure which was better: the three-year Arctic expedition in the From or the ten years as League of Nations man, during which Nansen won the Nobel Peace Prize. Biographer Sorensen is not concerned with casting up his hero’s accounts: he points to all of Nansen’s achievements with unwavering pride.

Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) was born into a carefully wealthy, sternly cultured family of Oslo, who insisted on his being a good student. With a scientific and mathematical bent. Fridtjof chose zoology as his specialty. That and his love of adventure led him into the Arctic. At 21 he made his first voyage, with the sealer Viking. Six years later he led an expedition across Greenland on skis. When he proposed to his wife he added a condition: “But I must take a trip to the North Pole.” In the From, specially constructed to resist ice pressure, he set off in 1893 on the three-year trip he described later in Farthest North. Leaving the From frozen solidly into the drifting ice pack, Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen headed north with dog sleds and kayaks to see how far they could get. Though they did not reach the Pole, they went 320 kilometers farther north than anyone else had been. Then they had to camp out for the rest of the winter. They got used to cold: when it rose to 18° below Zero Nansen sweated so much in his sleeping-bag he could hardly sleep. On the return trip the dogs died or had to be killed. Once their kayaks, with all their possessions aboard, drifted away from them. Nansen swam after them, just managed to get there.

When he and Johansen got safely back to Norway, a few weeks ahead of the From, they were national heroes.

Though sometimes tempted, Nansen made no more Arctic voyages, handed over the Pram to Roald Amundsen. A public figure now, he was needed at home.

When Sweden and Norway separated in 1905. Nansen’s diplomacy was useful in keeping the separation peaceful. He became Norway’s first Minister to the Court of St. James’s. During the War he served on the Norwegian Trade Commission to the U. S., helped keep his country, pinched between belligerents, from starving. After the War, as High Commissioner of the League of Nations, he soon became recognized as one of Europe’s rare internationalists, helped refugees and starving populations wherever he could, regardless of political boundaries. The League credited him with repatriating nearly half a million prisoners belonging to more than 30 different nations, of relieving “1,250,000 Greek, 1,000,000 Russian, 300,000 Armenian and some tens of thousands of Assyrian, Assyro-Chaldean, Bulgarian and Turkish refugees.” When Death came for him suddenly in 1930 at 69, Fridtjof Nansen, tall and spare as ever but his hair snow white, was sitting in his garden, thinking thoughts that no biographer can ever tell.