/ the Nansen Group / Fridtjof Nansen
Fridtjof Nansen - Scientist, Diplomat and Humanist.
By Tore Gjelsvik, The FRAM Committe, Oslo, Norway.
© Tore GjelsvikIn my opinion, no Norwegian has made a deeper impression upon his contemporaries than Fridtjof Nansen. Even today, more than 60 years after he passed away, young people who want to make an extraordinary physical effort talk about walking in his footsteps - or skiing in his ski tracks. References to Nansen's humanitarian efforts after the first world war can be read almost daily in Norwegian newspapers in articles discussing aid to refugees, starving populations or ethnic minorities threatened with extermination. More than 200,000 people pr. year, many of them foreigners, visit Nansen's famous polar ship FRAM, housed on the peninsula Bygdøy, on the outskirt of Oslo.
Already on his first polar expedition, the crossing of the Greenland
inland ice in 1888 when he was 27 years old and immediately after
defending his pioneering doctoral thesis in zoology on the histology
of the central nervous system of the hagfish, he demonstrated three
aspects of his character: careful compilation and evaluation of all
available information, detailed study of all practical and logistical
aspects of the expedition, and a forceful execution of the expedition
plan. On the practical side he improved the finally Eskimo sledge to
a model named after him, the Nansen sledge, which, with small
modifications has been used up to this time. He developed cooking
gear that used all excess heat was to melt snow for drinking water.
Nansen adopted an expedition philosophy in direct opposition to the
conventional wisdom of his time: he started from the unpopulated,
hostile east coast of Greenland where retreat was impossible, rather
than from the milder, inhabited west coast as earlier explorers had
attempted. Nansen purposely burned the bridges behind him and
left no alternative for him and his men but to move forward . They
had to do it or die. No wonder that he named his specially
constructed polar vessel FRAM - which is the Norwegian phrase for
"forward". When - in 1892 - he outlined his plan for a North Pole
expedition in the Royal Geographic Society of London, he was met
with a thunderstorm of criticism and opposition by people who
were considered the most experienced Arctic explorers of the time.
One of them argued that Nansen violated the safety code for
expeditions by not securing a safe retreat line. Nansen could not
disagree more, and did not yield an inch.
The most important results of Nansen's FRAM expedition were: The
discovery of a deep, Arctic Ocean and the confirmation of the
existence of the Trans-Polar Current. Furthermore he observed that
FRAM and the ice pack drifted approximately 30 to the right of the
wind direction. This fact he interpreted as the effect of the earth's
rotation, which laid the concept for the Ekman Spiral and the
foundation for the modern wind-driven ocean circulation. In
connection with his polar expeditions, he involved himself in the
study of oceanography, meteorology, climatology, geomagnetism,
glaciology, geology and polar history. His papers on most of this
topics were of high quality and became widely quoted. As a
geologist, I have been struck with his skill in studies of the
morphology of the coastal shelves, and of other coastal and
glaciomorphological problems. Some of his papers on this topic have
also become classics, such as The strand flat and isostasy, which
was published in 1892.
As a scientist, Nansen was much aware of the need for precise and exact measurements, and during his later oceanographic investigations he found that some of the oceanographic measurements on the FRAM drift were not of sufficient precision. He was able to improve methods and instruments to a remarkable extent. The invention of the Nansen bottle for sampling ocean water at various depths is a well-known example. Nansen was a strong supporter of international cooperation in oceanography and was one of the founding fathers of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) in 1902. The successful outcome of Nansen's North Pole expedition and his report on the daring attempt to reach the North Pole by skis and sledges made Nansen a national hero and gave him a world-wide reputation. Shortly before he returned from the expedition there had been a deep crisis in the Swedish/Norwegian Union, and the Norwegians had to withdraw their demands.
The success of the FRAM expedition made the Norwegians raise their heads again, and Nansen involved himself in the political debate of the Swedish-Norwegian relationship. He played an important role in 1905 when the union was dissolved and Norway declared full independence. He was also instrumental in persuading the Danish Prince Carl to accept being king of Norway (the later King Haakon VII). Nansen wrote articles in leading newspapers of the world, explaining and defending the position of Norway. Because of his fame and reputation, the world listened. He was appointed Norway's first ambassador in London and succeeded in getting Great Britain and other great powers to recognise the new Norwegian state.
After two years in London he felt his job was done and returned to scientific work for some years. He never liked politicians and diplomats and did not want to be one of them. He had some good years studying the oceanography of the Norwegian Sea. One of the scientific questions he raised and tried to answer was the mode of formation of bottom water in the Greenland Sea, published jointly with Professor B. Helland-Hansen in the classic book The Norwegian Sea.
The first world war very much changed the course of Nansen's life.
He detested war, but came to use most of his later life cleaning up
the mess which the war had left. He was very critical of the great
powers and he wanted the international anarchy to be replaced by
a system founded on the principles of lawful order and human
rights. Disputes between states should be solved by negotiation and
arbitration instead of by military force. In 1920 he was appointed
Norwegian delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva, a
forerunner of the United Nations. In central
Russia and Siberia, a
large but unknown number of war prisoners were living under
appalling conditions - clothed in rags, freezing and starving,
ravaged by disease and unable to reach their homelands; some of
them lived as slaves. Nansen was asked by the League to be High
Commissioner for repatriation of the war prisoners, and he
undertook the task. A main problem was the bitter hostility and the
lack of diplomatic contacts between the revolutionary government
in Russia and the western governments. Although Nansen was
strongly against the communist ideology, he realised the need for
political and technical agreements with the Soviet-Russian
government. Obtaining the confidence of the Soviet foreign
minister, he succeeded in acquiring the necessary agreements. In
less than two years all the prisoners, numbering nearly a half
million, were back in their homelands.
During his travels in Soviet Russia, Nansen discovered that the Russian people were suffering from a severe famine because of lack of grain, and that without aid millions of people would inevitably die. Nansen appealed to the western governments to grant a loan to Soviet Russia for buying grain, but in vain. The International Red Cross asked Nansen to lead a relief action. In cooperation with private and religious charity organisations Nansen organised the Nansen Aid program to collect money and buy food for the starving Russian people. He was able to rescue about one million lives. Still several millions died during the famine in the early twenties. At the same time, 1.5 million Russians had fled after the October revolution and were living in desperate conditions in the cities of European countries. The International Red Cross asked the League of Nations to appoint Nansen as the first High Commissioner for refugees. Beside the material problems of the refugees, many were stateless, living in foreign states without national identity papers. As High Commissioner for refugees, Nansen issued identification papers in his own name, they were called Nansen passports and were recognised by more than 50 states. This gave the stateless refugees a new start in life. Again, Nansen had demonstrated his skill in solving difficult problems through unorthodox methods and means.
In 1922 Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work. The award became no sleeping pillow for Nansen - a new and terrible crisis had developed in Asia Minor in the wake of the Greek-Turkish war. Kemal Ataturk's armies swept westwards, crushing the Greek army and forcing 1.5 million Greeks out of their homes in Anatolia, where they had lived for several hundred years. They had to escape in a hurry, leaving everything behind, and taking little or no food and very little clothing with them. Many returned to their homeland, which accepted them; however, Greece was economically ruined and had no means of self help. Nansen quickly intervened with a bold and unconventional plan: The exchange of the Greek refugees with 400,000 Turks living in Greece. He also laid forth a plan describing how this costly operation could be organised and financed. At first the plan was met by opposition from both sides, but after a short time it was accepted and realised. Perhaps Nansen's scheme should be studied by those trying to appease the fighting ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia today.
Nansen's last humanitarian action was an attempt to help the Armenian refugees achieve a national homeland by irrigating the slopes of Mount Ararat. Because he was refused the necessary funding, the plan had to be abandoned. During his humanitarian activity Nansen applied the same philosophy as on his expeditions. Once he had studied all sides of a problem, made a plan and decided on his ways and means, he did not compromise. His only course was forward. His unconventional and uncompromising methods often met opposition from politicians and diplomats. Many considered him The enfant terrible of the League of Nations. His answer to them was: Charity is practical politics. The men and women who worked together with him or for him had the highest regard for him and found him to be a most effective leader.
The sufferings and tragedies of refugees and other war victims and the ceaseless charity work gradually wore Nansen down. Perhaps his worst frustrations were the heavy responsibilities and hard work that the governments loaded on him without providing the funding necessary for successfully carrying out the tasks. When he returned to science during the last years of his life, Nansen took a special interest in the possibility of using airships as scientific platforms in the Arctic. He chaired an international group to study the project. Because they were not able to raise the necessary funding, the plan never materialised.
In 1930, Fridtjof Nansen died, 70 years old, of heart failure . A Norwegian journalist once said that this was not true: Nansen died because his heart never failed....