ith an addition to knowledge which often seemed hardly
commensurate with the hardships suffered and the disasters which
sometimes overtook them. To those whose fortune it has been to serve
under Scott the Franklin Expedition has more than ordinary interest, for
it was the same ships, the Erebus and Terror, which discovered Ross
Island, that were crushed in the northern ice after Franklin himself had
died, and it was Captain Crozier (the same Crozier who was Ross's captain
in the South and after whom Cape Crozier is named) who then took command
and led that most ghastly journey in all the history of exploration: more
we shall never know, for none survived to tell the tale. Now, with the
noise and racket of London all round them, a statue of Scott looks across
to one of Franklin and his men of the Erebus and Terror, and surely they
have some thoughts in common.

Englishmen had led the way in the North, but it must be admitted that the
finest journey of all was made by the Norwegian Nansen in 1893-1896.
Believing in a drift from the neighbourhood of the New Siberian Islands
westwards over the Pole, a theory which obtained confirmation by the
discovery off the coast of Greenland of certain remains of a ship called
the Jeannette which had been crushed in the ice off these islands, his
bold project was to be frozen in with his ship and allow the current to
take him over, or as near as possible to, the Pole. For this purpose the
most famous of Arctic ships was built, called the Fram. She was designed
by Colin Archer, and was saucer-shaped, with a breadth one-third of her
total length. With most of the expert Arctic opinion against him, Nansen
believed that this ship would rise and sit on the top of the ice when
pressed, instead of being crushed. Of her wonderful voyage with her
thirteen men, of how she was frozen into the ice in September 1893 in the
north of Siberia (79 deg. N.) and of the heaving and trembling of the ship
amidst the roar of the ice pressure, of how the Fram rose to the occasion
as she was built to do, the story has still, after twenty-eight years,
the thrill of novelty. She drifted over the eightieth degree on February
2, 1894. During the first winter Nansen was already getting restive: the
drift was so slow, and sometimes it was backwards: it was not until the
second autumn that the eighty-second degree arrived. So he decided that
he would make an attempt to penetrate northwards by sledging during the
follow