The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1961, Síða 48

46
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Summer 1961
no one has done more than Knud Ras-
mussen, whose father was a Dane and
whose mother a Greenlander. Most of
the seven so-called Thule expeditions
were headed by him, and he himself
travelled and explored thousands of
miles of Arctic territory and was the
first to traverse the Northwest Passage
by dog sled as part of the accomplish-
ments of the Fifth Thule expedition.
It fell to a Swede, born in Finland,
Baron Nordenskiold, to ibe the first to
sail the Northeast passage through the
Siberian Arctic. But his fame is not less
for his remarkable research into early
European geography. Less fortunate,
but no less a Viking, was his country-
man Andree, the first man to attempt
to fly across the North Pole, in 1897.
Typical of his dauntless courage is the
entry in his diary concerning his pro-
jected flight: “Dangerous? Perhaps.
But what am I worth?” Andree’s fate
was tragic, for when his balloon was
forced down in lat. 80° 56’N there was
no reason why he and his two com-
panions should not have been able to
reach civilization. But nothing more
was heard of them until in 1930 their
last camp was found with indications
that they had perished from carbon
monoxide poisoning.
Not till 1925 was the North Pole
again assailed by air. This time by that
true personification of a Viking—Roald
Amundsen—already long covered with
glory for his magnificent feat of being
the first man to reach the South Pole
He failed by 120 miles to reach the
Pole but attained his object in the
dirigible Norge in 1926 a few days after
Admiral Byrd’s successful flight to the
Pole. Amundsen’s death was in the
heroic Viking tradition, when he flew
to the rescue of the Italian, Nobile,
and failed to return.
Any people might well be satisfied
to count as their own one such man
as Amundsson in a century. But fate
blessed Norway with another equally il-
lustrious son in Fridtjof Nansen. Flis
exploits were numerous and his service
to humanity great in his work with dis-
placed persons after World War I. But
one venture of his will always stand
out—the voyage of his vessel Fram and
his crossing of the Polar Sea on foot
with one companion. It took the same
kind of courage, as Leifr Eiriksson
must have possessed when he, first of
all men, set his course from Norway
direct to Greenland, for Nansen to
deliberately imprison the Fram in the
polar ice pack north of Siberia in the
hope that she would drift with the
pack across the Pole. Even greater
courage must it have taken to leave
the security of the Fram and with one
companion set out on foot for the Pole.
In addition to such qualities Nansen
possessed the ability to produce that
classic work on Arctic exploration in
early times, In Northern Mists.
Today the Viking spirit still lives
among the American descendants of
the Vikings. Suffice lit to mention the
magnificent achievement of Sub-Inspec-
tor Henry Larsen in sailing the St.
Roch through the Northwest Passage,
from East to West and West to East,
in recent years, and in recalling the
name of the greatest living Arctic
explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a
man, who possessed of the same Viking
courage as Nansen, staked his life to
prove his theory that lit was possible
so to speak “to live off the country”
on the ice of the Arctic Sea far from
land. He has done possibly more than
any other man to make us realize that
the northern parts of the globe are not
just cold, inhospitable ice fields, but
are rather regions which we may call
the FRIENDLY ARCTIC.