Fridtjof Nansen: The Polar Explorer Who Invented the Refugee Passport

He deliberately sailed a ship into the Arctic ice to drift toward the pole, reached a record farthest north and then turned back, and spent his last decade repatriating 400,000 prisoners of war and giving the world's stateless a passport, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

The turn

On April 7, 1895, a thirty-three-year-old Norwegian named Fridtjof Nansen climbed a pressure ridge of crushed sea ice somewhere north of every human being who had ever lived, and looked for a way on. There was none. What he saw he wrote down that night in his diary: "a veritable chaos of iceblocks stretching as far as the horizon." For days he and his one companion, Hjalmar Johansen, had dragged their sledges over ridges and across open lanes of black water, killing their dogs one by one to feed the rest. They were 86 degrees, 13.6 minutes north, almost three degrees beyond any recorded latitude in human history. The North Pole lay under three hundred miles of the same.

Nansen had staked his reputation on reaching it. For days his diary had been closing on the same conclusion, the sentence that may be the most disciplined a great explorer ever put to paper: "I have become more and more convinced we ought to turn before time."

The myth of polar exploration is the last grim push, the refusal to quit. Nansen's defining act was the opposite. He turned south. He turned because the ice told him the pole was unreachable that season, and because reading the ice correctly was the whole point of the voyage. The man who would later be called the supreme polar oracle, the mentor of Amundsen and Shackleton and Scott, became great not by reaching the pole but by knowing, at the one moment it cost his pride most, that he could not.

That decision is what let him live to do a second, stranger life, the one almost nobody remembers him for. The explorer who reached farthest north became, twenty-five years later, the man who invented the passport for people with no country.

Burn the boats

Nansen's method, from the start, was to remove his own escape. He came to it young. Born on October 10, 1861, at Store Frøen outside Christiania, the city now called Oslo, he was a lawyer's son who skied from the age of two and vanished into the woods for weeks at a stretch, living, as he later put it, "like Robinson Crusoe." At eighteen he broke the world record for the one-mile skating race; he would win Norway's national cross-country skiing championship twelve times. Sports were not a hobby for him. They were the laboratory in which he worked out how far a body could be pushed and how much privation a mind would accept.

In 1882, as a zoology student, he shipped aboard a sealing vessel, the Viking, to study Arctic marine life, and for the first time saw the unexplored east coast of Greenland locked behind its wall of ice. He called that voyage, looking back, "the first fatal step that led me astray from the quiet life of science." (Royal Scottish Geographical Society; Wikipedia)

Six years later he proposed to cross Greenland, and he crossed it by inverting the logic every previous explorer had used. The inhabited Danish settlements were on the west coast. Everyone had started in the west and pushed inland, which meant that at the moment of greatest exhaustion the warm colony was at their backs, beckoning retreat. Nansen would start on the desolate, uninhabited east coast and ski west. He explained the reasoning in his 1890 account, The First Crossing of Greenland: "In this way one would burn all one's ships behind one, there would be no need to urge one's men on, as the east coast would attract no one back, while in front would lie the west coast with all the allurements and amenities of civilisation. There was no choice of routes, 'forward' being the only word. The order would be, 'Death or the west coast of Greenland.'" (Nansen, The First Crossing of Greenland, 1890)

It was a plan designed to make failure lethal, and therefore impossible. When Norway's government and his own university refused to fund it, a Danish businessman, Augustin Gamél, paid the 5,000 kroner himself. Four days before he sailed, Nansen defended his doctorate, a thesis on the central nervous system of lower marine creatures that helped establish the neuron doctrine, the idea that nerve cells are separate units. (A later scientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on the same subject.) The examiners, the story goes, passed him partly out of charity, believing he was sailing to his death. (Fram Museum; Wikipedia)

He did not die. On August 15, 1888, after weeks trapped in the drift ice off the east coast, he and five companions, among them the seaman and farmer Otto Sverdrup and two Sami men, Samuel Balto and Ole Ravna, put on their skis at Umivik and headed inland. They hauled sledges, sailed sledges lashed together when the wind allowed, and crossed the ice cap in forty-one days, the first human beings to traverse Greenland. They reached the west coast too late for the last ship home and wintered with the Greenlanders at Godthaab. When Nansen finally returned to Christiania in May 1889, he was a national hero. His account, Paa Ski Over Grønland, published in English in 1890 as The First Crossing of Greenland, made skiing fashionable across Europe. The Britannica notes the sport's wider popularity "developed after the publication" of that book. (Britannica)

Surrender to the ice

Greenland taught Nansen to remove retreat. His next expedition taught him something harder, to surrender control altogether. The idea came from a piece of wreckage. In 1884 a Norwegian professor noted that relics from the doomed American ship Jeannette, which had been crushed and sunk in 1881 north of the New Siberian Islands, had drifted on an ice floe all the way to the southwest coast of Greenland. If a floe could cross the unknown polar sea, Nansen reasoned, a ship could ride the same current. He would not fight the ice. He would let it carry him. As his biographer Roland Huntford summarizes the principle, Nansen proposed to "take note of the forces of Nature and try to work with them and not against them." (Riffenburgh, reviewing Huntford in Polar Record)

It was, again, a plan the experts called lunacy. Nansen had the naval architect Colin Archer build a ship, the Fram, Norwegian for "Forward," with sloping rounded sides and a full hull designed not to resist the pressure of the ice but to be lifted by it, rising as the floes closed around her. On June 24, 1893, the Fram left Christiania. In September, near the New Siberian Islands, Nansen froze her into the pack and waited for the drift to do the work.

Then began the longest patience of his life. The ship moved, on its best days, barely a mile a day, sometimes backward. Through the polar night of 1893, with the Fram locked in darkness, Nansen sat writing by oil-lamp in a diary that is one of the strange documents of exploration. On November 8 he wrote:

"Here I sit in the still winter night on the drifting ice-floe, and see only stars above me... Why did you take this voyage? Could I do otherwise? Can the river arrest its course and run up hill? My plan has come to nothing. That palace of theory which I reared, in pride and self-confidence, high above all silly objections has fallen like a house of cards at the first breath of wind... And even if we perish, what will it matter in the endless cycles of eternity?" (Nansen, Farthest North, 1897)

The next summer, still drifting, he grew so bored he counted his cigars and found, to his delight, an unexpected extra box in his locker. "To while away time, that is an idea that has scarcely ever entered your head before," he mocked himself. "It has always been your great trouble that time flew away so fast, and now it cannot go fast enough to please you." (Nansen, Farthest North, 1897, via Lapham's Quarterly)

After eighteen months the drift was too slow and too far south of the pole. On March 14, 1895, Nansen and Johansen left the Fram with three dog sledges and skied for the top of the world. Three weeks later came the turn, and the retreat that saved them. For four months they sledged and paddled south over a chaos of pressure ridges and open leads, their longitude a guess after both their watches stopped, their course a bet on a land nobody had mapped. On July 23, 1895, Nansen sighted something through the fog. "At last the marvel has come to pass, land, land, and after we had almost given up our belief in it!" he wrote. (Nansen, Farthest North, 1897; Wikipedia, Fram expedition)

They wintered through 1895-96 in a stone hut lined with walrus hides on a Franz Josef Land beach, living on walrus and bear blubber through months of darkness. In one near-fatal moment their two kayaks, carrying everything they owned, drifted loose from the ice edge. Nansen, fully clothed, plunged into the freezing sea to swim them down. "All our hope was drifting there; all we possessed was on board, we had not even a knife with us," he wrote. His limbs stiffened as he swam, but he caught the stern, hauled himself to the edge, and wrote simply: "I grasped it, pulled myself in to the edge of the kayak, and we were saved!" (Nansen, Farthest North, 1897, via Bartleby)

On June 17, 1896, after more than a year alone, they met another human being, the British explorer Frederick Jackson, on the beach at Cape Flora. The encounter, contemporaries said, was matched only by Stanley finding Livingstone. Jackson carried them home on his ship. On August 13, 1896, the very day Nansen reached Norway, the Fram broke free of the ice near Spitsbergen, exactly where his current theory had predicted, and sailed home under Sverdrup. The expedition had not reached the pole. It had proved the drift, mapped the deep polar ocean, and returned every man alive. The record latitude, 86 degrees 13.6 minutes north, stood for five years. Nansen published his account as Farthest North in 1897, and the book made him an international celebrity on the order of Henry Morton Stanley. (Fram Museum; Wikipedia)

He never went back to the ice. But the techniques he had worked out on the Fram, the dogs, the skis, the lightweight layered clothing, the willingness to learn survival from the Inuit rather than impose European methods on the Arctic, became the textbook the next generation copied. Roald Amundsen took Nansen's own ship, the Fram, south with him, and reached the Pole in 1911 by the dogs-and-skis method Nansen had pioneered. When Robert Falcon Scott died on the same ice, the difference between the two was largely that one had studied Nansen and the other had not. (Riffenburgh, Polar Record)

The passport

The second life began where the first had left off, with the same instinct, to find the grain of an impossible situation and work along it instead of against it. Nansen had married Eva Sars in 1889; she died in 1907. He had helped push Norway out of its union with Sweden in 1905 and served as the new nation's first envoy to London, where he befriended King Edward VII. After the First World War broke out he went to Washington in 1917 to negotiate food shipments past the Allied blockade, then to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to lobby for the new League of Nations. (NobelPrize.org biographical; Wikipedia)

In April 1920 the League handed him a problem no one wanted. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, Germans, Austro-Hungarians, and Russians, were still stranded across a shattered, broke, and half-hostile Europe, many rotting in Siberia. Nansen chartered ships the German navy was meant to surrender to Britain and used them to carry the prisoners home. By the summer of 1922 he could report the repatriation of more than 400,000 men. (NobelPrize.org presentation speech; NobelPrize.org article)

Then came the famine. In 1921 the Volga basin starved. Twenty to thirty million people faced death. The Western governments would not help, because helping meant dealing with Lenin's Bolsheviks, whom they did not recognize and hoped would fall. Nansen went to Russia anyway, toured the famine districts in the winter, and argued to the League that the rescue of millions should not be blocked by politics. The Nobel committee would later recall his plea: "is there any man who dares come forward and say: It is better to allow twenty million people to die of starvation than to support the Soviet government?" The Western governments largely refused his loan; the bulk of the actual food that reached the Volga came from Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration. Nansen's own commission raised and distributed only a fraction as much. But he had done the thing the diplomats would not, name the starving as a category above politics. (NobelPrize.org presentation speech; ICRC Archives; de Gruyter)

His most lasting invention solved a problem the peace had itself created. When the Soviet government revoked the citizenship of Russians who had fled the revolution, hundreds of thousands of people became stateless, and statelessness meant no passport, which meant no border would let them through. Nansen's answer was a document that did not come from any country, the "Nansen passport," first issued in 1922 under the League's authority and eventually recognized by fifty-two governments. Around 450,000 Russians and Armenians carried one, paying five gold francs for it if they could afford it. Among them were Igor Stravinsky, Sergey Rachmaninov, Marc Chagall, and Anna Pavlova, artists who could begin new lives in the West because a Norwegian explorer had noticed that the world's newest disorder, statelessness, needed the world's first international identity paper. (UNHCR; NobelPrize.org article; Wikipedia, Nansen passport)

In 1922 he was also sent to untangle the human wreckage of the Greco-Turkish War, arranging the exchange of roughly 1.25 million Greeks living in Turkey for some half-million Turks living in Greece. It was a brutal, compulsory sorting that later historians would judge harshly, and that Nansen himself came to doubt was his to have proposed. He maintained it was necessary to prevent something worse. That December the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize, citing "his leading role in the repatriation of prisoners of war, in international relief work and as the League of Nations' High Commissioner for refugees." He had not even known he was nominated. (NobelPrize.org facts; NobelPrize.org biographical; Ross, Scandinavian Journal of History)

He held the refugee post until his death, and spent his last years on the Armenians, campaigning for a homeland for the survivors of the genocide, a cause Stalin finally blocked. On May 13, 1930, he died suddenly at his home at Lysaker, outside Oslo, aged sixty-eight. After his death the League created the Nansen International Office for Refugees to continue his work; it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938. (Wikipedia; NobelPrize.org)

The one thread

Read Nansen's life backward and a single logic runs through it. Cross Greenland from the wrong side so retreat is death. Sail a ship into the ice so the ice, not you, does the carrying. Turn back from the pole when the ice says so, because surviving is the job. Then, when the peace had made millions stateless and no government would touch them, invent a paper no country issued so the disowned could cross borders anyway. Each time the move was the same: stop fighting the force you cannot beat, find the way it already moves, and ride it. He applied the polar explorer's discipline to the ruined map of postwar Europe, and the man who had given the farthest north its record gave the stateless their first document.

Read the full life: Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero (Duckworth, 1997), the first full-scale biography, drawn from diaries and League of Nations archives by the Observer's former Scandinavian correspondent. For Nansen in his own words, his account of the drift is Farthest North (1897), and his companion Hjalmar Johansen told the same journey from the sled in With Nansen in the North (1899).