Polar Wives by Kari Herbert

Author:Kari Herbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRV001000, BIO022000, BIO023000
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Published: 2012-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

12. Eva Nansen | A Man in a Million

Poor him, he will come too late. —EVA NANSEN

On October 10, 1893, Fridtjof Nansen came down with a fever. Confined aboard the Fram, powerless to influence the currents and ice that held the ship captive on the Arctic Ocean, he felt as though he had led his men directly to purgatory. It was his thirty-second birthday, and he was so shrouded in gloom that none of his companions could cheer him. In his diary he wrote:

So far far away from Eva. Eva, Eva, you are thinking a lot about me today, I feel that, and you are miserable. Why should we be separated... but what is the point of all this—don’t complain, in time, we will meet again.

His only consolation was the distant gleam of Jupiter, which he imagined represented his wife: “Ah how I love that star... It shines over our journey, it is your eye, no evil can befall us as long as I have it.” Constant yearning for his soulmate and the boredom of entrapment were affecting him deeply. It was increasingly unlikely that the Fram would ever successfully drift to the North Pole. Nansen took to walking out on the ice alone. He stood for hours gazing skyward. “Parted, parted,” he exclaimed, “for no one knows how long from the only one I love.” He had become a difficult companion. One minute he was “extravagantly cheerful and pleasant, almost to the point of puerility,” the next argumentative or withdrawn.

The following year, having made little progress, and with the darkness of yet another five-month-long winter descending upon them, Nansen gathered his men together and announced his new plan. He, together with Hjalmar Johansen—one of the strongest skiers in the party—would leave the ship as the light returned and use dogs and sledges to reach the Pole, then continue on to Franz Josef Land or the west coast of Greenland. The Fram and the rest of the men would continue their drift until the ice released them to return home. This, Nansen reasoned, was their only hope for success.

On February 17, 1895, with the preparations for his attempt at the Pole on skis finally complete, Nansen wrote a letter of farewell to his wife:

Now it seems a journey towards the sun and summer; towards the only thing that life holds for me... All the time the image rises up before me vividly and beautifully where you receive me when I arrive... And if it should happen that this journey is no bridal dance, you will know that your image will be the last I see... when I go to the eternal rest, where we will meet some time and rest for ever safely in each other’s arms. Ah Eva, my Eva, if it should happen, do not cry too hard. Remember no one escapes his fate.

By April 2, Nansen was beginning to have serious reservations about pushing farther north. He and Johansen were still 240 miles from the North Pole, and even farther from the closest known point of land.

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