Nansen

[The local sportfisher Gøte Nilsen from Tromsø caught this giant halibut on his rod just outside Ringvassøy in the middle of May 2013. The halibut measured 241 cm and weighed in at 183 kg ! Congratulations !! Now we go for the 200 + !!!]

I have now finished re-reading Nansen's book about crossing the Greenland ice cap a little to the south of the Arctic Circle in 1888, say at 65°N on the right hand map below. Including Nansen, a party of six. Two sleeping bags. No dogs, just the one pony, eaten very early on. So everything was carried or pulled, with the occasional break when sailing the sledges was possible. An easy read of around 450 pages, with a map at the front and a good scattering of line drawings, some of them taken from photographs, some from sketches.

Greenland is a bit like a smaller version of the Antarctic, being a bowl formed of a ring of mountains, with the bowl being full of ice and with the ice rising to a height of 9,500 feet. So twice the height of Ben Nevis, which I dare say is cold enough in the winter.

So the crossing fell into four parts: getting across the sea ice from the open sea to the right spot on the east coast, going up the eastern mountains from the ice, crossing in the inland sea of ice and, lastly, going down the western mountains to the western settlements. All four of which parts presented plenty of problems. The crossing of the inland sea might have been cold, hard work - but it was also monotonous and is dealt with in around 50 of the 450 pages. With the last 50 or so pages covering their winter wait for the boat home at a place called Godthaab.

The overall impression is that by modern standards the whole affair - with the crossing proper taking around two months - was terribly amateurish and could easily have ended in disaster. As it was there seemed to be plenty of dunkings in what must have been ice cold water. So a tribute to the physical and moral strength of all those involved.

It being early days for expeditions of this sort, they were short of both fat and fuel. The former resulted in a craving for fat, which resulted in turn in the guzzling of much butter when available. As I recall, twenty years later, Scott's pemmican included plenty of fat.

Quite struck by the numbers of birds and other animals which were slaughtered. Some in order to stay alive, some just for sport - and then there were the rather gruesome (and wasteful) activities of the sealers. Worse in some ways that what goes on in a modern abattoir, not having been sanitised a bit by the factory process. 

While the lack of fuel - and the customs of the place and time - meant that a lot of the meat that they were able to catch or shoot at the start and at the end of the transit - whether bird, fish, seal or four legged - was eaten (if not devoured) more or less raw. Quite a lot of the time eating the guts and all. But they did draw the line at raw bird meat which was still warm: better to let it cool down a bit before starting.

Nansen and his team seemed to work very long days, quite often through the night when the going was good enough. Perhaps even fit, youngish men could only keep this up for a couple of months.

Towards the end, I was reminded of the tricky business of catching halibut weighing a hundred pounds or more from a fragile, unstable and leaky kayak. Hence the snap included above.

Plenty of entertaining and interesting material about the lifestyle of the Eskimos (or Greenlandic Inuit as we call them now). With there being some settlements on the east coast and rather more on the west coast. With the Norwegians being rather struck, for example, by the state of undress which prevailed inside the east coast huts. Seemingly very cheerful people most of the time, despite their harsh lives.

I think reference 7 is the next stop, for a different take on it all.

PS: and thinking of disasters, the impression given is that plenty of Eskimos either drowned at sea or starved on land. Also that there must have been plenty of serious skiing accidents in the Norway of the time - not least in the course of the popular downhill races and jumping competitions.

References

Reference 1: The First Crossing of Greenland - Fridtjof Nansen - 1895.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/12/dubai.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/everest.html. A mention.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/slacking.html. A fisheries management project seemingly named for Nansen.

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-return-of-tarzan.html. Fresh flesh footnote. My memory of this incident seems to be defective, at least a confusion of several incidents.

Reference 6: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/03/first-fruits-and-bus-stops.html. A more substantive post.

Reference 7: Nansen - Roland Huntford - 1997. Ex Surrey Libraries, probably the prompt for reference 6, rather than reference 1.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet.

Reference 9: Elevation and elevation change of Greenland and Antarctica derived from CryoSat-2 - V. Helm, A. Humbert, and H. Miller - 2014. The source of the two elevation maps above. The product of a European Space Agency (ESA) Earth Explorer Mission that launched on April 8th, 2010.

Reference 10: https://www.bedmod.co.uk/. The Bedford Modern School, from which my copy of reference 1 originally came, still exists and comes with all the modern trappings. Things like mission statements and values.