Death or the west coast: Nansen crosses Greenland

Before Fridtjof Nansen was an oceanographer, a diplomat, or a Nobel laureate, he was a twenty-seven-year-old with a reckless idea. In 1888 he proposed to cross the Greenland ice cap, something no one had done, and to cross it the wrong way round.

Every earlier attempt had started from the inhabited west coast, so a party in trouble could retreat to safety. Nansen reversed it. He would land on the uninhabited east coast and walk west, toward the settlements. There would be no line of retreat. The choice, as he framed it, was death or the west coast of Greenland. Burning the bridge was the point: it left only forward.

He took five companions, among them Otto Sverdrup, who would later captain the Fram, and two Sami skiers, Samuel Balto and Ole Nielsen Ravna. Drift ice forced them to row and march for days before they could even begin the climb. Then came nearly five hundred kilometres of glacier, rising to almost three thousand metres, in cold that split the skin, hauling sledges into a constant headwind.

They reached Godthab (today's Nuuk) in October, too late for the last ship home. So Nansen wintered among the Kalaallit, learning to handle a kayak and watching how a people lived well in a place Europeans found merely hostile.

The lightest, most disciplined party, travelling on skis, would always beat the heavy expedition.

That conviction ran straight into the Fram, into Amundsen, into Sverdrup and the Maud. Meridian Polar is one more vessel on the same line — the line Nansen drew the first time he chose forward over retreat.