>>688191Nansen and his crew drifted for 18 months, somehow surviving in the freezing-ass cold temperatures, but unfortunately the tides of the Arctic Sea decided not to cooperate with Nansen's plan, no matter how good it was or how intensely he tried to stare it down. Realizing that he was drifting too far from the pole and wouldn't cross it, Nansen obviously did the badass thing – he and one other guy jumped out of the drifting boat, jumped on a dog sled, and rushed 140 miles across open ice to get there.
Nansen didn't reach the pole – he was forced to turn back just a couple hundred miles away – but he had achieved the highest latitude ever reached at this point in history, which was definitely something to be proud of. Not convinced that he could find his still-drifting ship as it made its way through the polar ice, Nansen and his homedog instead headed south across Greenland. They spent a winter living in the inhospitable climate of the extreme North, building a hut out of stone and eating walrus blubber and polar bears he personally clubbed to death with his boner, and finally reached Norway by kayak the next summer. In addition to being awesome and also kicking ass, the six volumes of research material he published on his trip got him a post as a Professor of Oceanography at the University of Oslo and plenty of prestige in the legitimate scientific community. His ship, Fram, would go on to carry Roald Amundsen to the South Pole. To this day, it's still the wooden ship that has achieved the furthest North and furthest South latitudes, and this dude built it back in 1890 using ingenious mathematics-oriented ship-building techniques he devised himself.
