It was bad enough that, on the map of routes through the Northwest Passage, they failed to show the one actually taken by Amundsen in the Gjøa. But only one sentence on Nansen! Nansen!
You want to talk about science in polar exploration? Let's talk about Nansen. Nansen, who was not only a scientist himself (unlike the other well-known explorers like *spit* Scott) but one of the founders of modern neurology. Nansen, whose Fram expedition not only tested and confirmed his theory about ice drift but collected so much data on the Arctic ocean that the results took him years to analyse and publish; in six volumes. Nansen, who designed oceanographic equipment that is still in use today.
And that's even if you focus on the science alone and skip over the Nobel Peace Prize thing and the saving the lives of thousands.
The man is one of Norway's great national heroes, and rightly so.
One sentence. Pthah!
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Watched a programme yesterday about an explorer, John Rae, who mapped the Arctic for the Hudson Bay company. He found the North West passage and one of his men found the bodies of the failed Royal Navy expedition lead by Sir John Franklin some eight years earlier - all had died because they didn't know how to survive in the Arctic. John Rae was pretty well hailed as a hero until his report was published stating that the tracker had found evidence of cannibalism. So he got trashed and the commander of the RN expeditions got two statues and proclaimed finder of the North West Passage. You can read it two ways, although dead Franklin had found the North West passage first - or as this information died with him Rae who was able to return to tell the tale is the finder.New comment
I'd csrtainly not say that Franklin 'found' the passage. He sailed down Peel Sound to the coast of King William Island, got trapped in ice, and died. Unless you were thinking of his earlier expedition which explored East along part of the coast. By the time of his final expedition there was only a small part of the Northwest Passage route that was still unknown, and he neither found it nor sailed through it. Poor John Rae had the right idea, but in the Age of Empire the idea of small expeditions using native knowledge just wasn't at all palatable to the Royal Navy. No; the first crossing between Atlantic and Pacific over the north end of the Americas was by Roald Amundsen, in the Gjoa. And it took him three years. (He was also, incidentally, the first to the South Pole AND the first to the North Pole; by airship. All three prior claims to the North are of dubious veracity, though that wasn't known at the time. Despite his achievements, though, he never recovered -either personally or in the eyes if the public - from his association with Scott's death. And the book doesn't mention any of that, either.)