Our visit to the Polar Museum has exposed some gaps in my knowledge of Arctic exploration. Seems Nansen was a bit of a boy who needs reading up on. From what I can grasp he came up with a plan that involved parking his ship in an ice flow & then drifting across the North Pole with it. A 3-5 year timespan he reckoned. Ambitious you might think, slightly mad? Here’s the thing – he found 12 others who said ‘Yeah, OK, I’m game.’ Nuts, the lot of them.
Amundsen – it turns out – wasn’t the nasty man who beat our brave boys to the flag & thus made their deaths even more heroically British but rather a superstar of exploration who eventually was lost whilst in a French seaplane searching for an Italian who’d crashed an airship into the ice.
More reading needed. Off to find something appropriate on kindle for the flight home.