1893: Fridtjof Nansen sails a ship into the Arctic pack ice and deliberately lets it freeze solid, because he has worked out that the ice itself is a current and intends to ride it across the top of the world.
The Fram locks in on 22 September and the drift begins.
1895: the drift is not going to reach the Pole. So on 14 March, Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen step off the ship with dogs, sledges and two kayaks and set out to walk there.
On 8 April they turn back at 86°14′ north. Further than any human being has ever been, and not far enough. Behind them the ship has gone, ahead of them there is no land for hundreds of miles, and the provisions are finite.
They walk south for four months across shifting ice and open water. On 6 August they reach an island, the first ground either man has stood on in two years.
Then the food runs out entirely, and that is where the story actually starts.
They build a hut. Stone walls, a driftwood ridge pole, a roof of walrus hides. They move in on 26 August 1895 and they do not leave until 19 May 1896. Two men, one greasy sleeping bag, nine months of Arctic winter.
They live on polar bear and walrus. That is the whole diet. Bear meat fried in walrus blubber, bear broth, blubber burned in a lamp to cook the next lot. No flour. No vegetables. No fruit. No supplements. Nothing green enters that hut for the better part of a year.
They should have been dead by Christmas.
Every naval authority in Europe in 1895 knows what happens to men in the far north with no fresh vegetables. Scurvy is the thing that empties ships. It killed more sailors than every enemy combined, and the entire Royal Navy's provisioning doctrine is built on stopping it.
They walk out of that hut in May with their teeth in their heads.
On 17 June 1896 they meet Frederick Jackson on Northbrook Island, and Jackson does not recognise the man in front of him. Nansen is filthy, black with soot and blubber grease, hair to his shoulders. He is also, after nine months on nothing but bear and fat, in good health.
Now sit with the timing.
Vitamin C did not exist as a concept. Nobody isolated it until 1928. Nansen could not have told you why he was fine, because the word had not been invented yet. He had learned the method from Inuit hunters in Greenland in 1888 and he simply copied them: eat the fresh kill, eat the fat first, do not cook the life out of it.
The knowledge was available. Every Arctic people on earth had it. Nansen brought it home in his own body and published it, and Europe carried on believing that men need plants or they rot.
Sixteen years later Scott's men would die on the way back from the Pole, hauling their own sledges, eating from tins.
Modern polar expeditions still run on fat. Nobody crossing an ice cap is eating salad. The bodies of the men who do it are fuelled the way Nansen's was, because the alternative does not work and everybody in that field knows it.
We accept it as true at 86 degrees north and dispute it in a kitchen in Cheshire.
Nansen died in 1930, at 68, with a Nobel Peace Prize on the shelf for feeding starving people after a war.
He spent nine months proving what a human being can run on, and the profession that should have been most interested filed it under exploration.
