In 1893, Fridtjof Nansen set sail for the North Pole in the Fram, a ship specially designed to be frozen into the Polar ice cap, withstand the pressure of the ice and drift to the Pole. Experts said that such a mission was tantamount to suicide, but this is the first-person account of this historic success. Nansen tell of his expedition's struggle against snowdrifts, ice floes, polar bears, scurvy, gnawing hunger and the seemingly endless polar night that transformed the Fram into a cold prison of loneliness. Setting out in the end on a harrowing 15-month sledge journey to reach his destination by foot, he was required to share a sleeping bag of rotting reindeer fur and to feed the weaker sled dogs to the stronger ones. Given up for dead, he traveled 146 miles farther north than anyone else in the past 400 years. This edition is abridged from the two original volumes.