Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm delanea Chocolate boarding and to Blina. I don't know if you've heard of Felicity Austin. I heard this dispatch from her on the radio the other week. I haven't heard of her. She's a polar explorer, British woman who's trying to make a solo ski track across Antarctica, and of course, being a modern day lady, she's got high tech equipment. For instance, she can tweet. I checked out her Twitter feed this morning, in fact, and there was an update from just a couple hours before. But still, she's out there in Antarctica, all alone, with more than one thousand miles to ski, certainly of physically difficult and a mentally challenging thing to do. So it kind of got me thinking. We've talked a lot about polar explorers on the podcast. Keep really seem to love episodes about polar explorers and their exploits, but the stories are usually pretty grim, as you'd imagine, they're punctuated by this glory above all attitude that a lot of times gets the explorers or maybe even more often their crew, all of their men killed at the end. And that's maybe why when I suggested today's topic to you is something for us to do a podcast on um polar explorer for chi Off Nonsen, you were hoping maybe there'd be an exclamation, and it did seem kind of promising, And I see exclamation. I mean, I can't blame you for for thinking that. But the first thing that I think everybody needs to understand about Nonsen is that he was a different breed of polar explorer. In fact, I almost think he has less in common with his contemporaries or the polar explorers who came before him, who were just sort of like, get out there, run over whatever you need to to get there, Bring lots of men, it doesn't matter if they die, just achieve your goal. Um. I think he has less in common with those guys than he does with modern Arctic adventurers. So people like Felicity Aston, who are just you know, trying to hope, trying to inspire other people to achieve UM great things, or maybe more more likely real scientists who are out there collecting real data. Yes, so Nonson wasn't just out there for the recognition, and consequently he wasn't willing to throw his life away, although he did have some close calls, which will take a look at later. As a result, Nonson also had the odd distinction of being a polar explorer with a late life story that's really more impressive even than his youthful adventures. He became a diplomat, a humanitarian, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and so it's a life that has earned us a two part of it with that kind of accomplishment, going to break it up into two episodes whereth so it all starts though on the skis forty off. Nonsen was born October tenth, eighteen sixty one, near Christagna, which is now Oslo in Norway. And at the time I think it's kind of a developed suburban area now, but at the time it was pretty rural. There were woods that backed up to his family's property, a lot of countryside, and his father was a lawyer. His mother was an aristocratic athlete, and so he came from a comfortable background but one that was still pretty rigorous to Both of his parents emphasized uh good morals and um kind of a kind of a simple lifestyle almost. They both had kids from earlier marriages and everybody, all the kids were encouraged to participate in sports which were really getting a lot more popular at this time with the upper classes, especially winter sports in Norway, and all of that dovetailed to a bit with a nature craze. Perfect place to grow up with these woods and countryside and opportunities to get out there and experience nature all around him. And Nonson didn't just grow up playing one sport. He grew up swimming, tumbling, fishing, hiking, skating, and skiing. Ultimately he got to a point where he could ski fifty miles a day with just his dog for company. So imagine skiing the distance of a marathon and then skiing back again. And I mean, I haven't done it, but I've always heard that cross country skiing is incredibly grueling, one of the highest calorie burning sports that's out there. Yeah, I haven't done it either, but it looks tough. When it came time to choose a field of study, nonsense father pushed him toward attending the Officers Academy, figuring tuition was free and that the lifestyle would allow his son the chance to continue the outdoor pursuits that he loves so much. But nonsense art teacher, on the other hand, pushed him to become a painter and professional artist, but Nonson decided to go to university and study zoology instead. It was a profession that he hoped would allow him to get outdoors and sketch, so kind of the best of both world. That's what he was hoping for, and he, being a smart kid, really might have easily just gone to university and continued in that scientific career, you know, maybe even done so quite successfully, had it not been for an offer that came up a year into college from one of his father's friends who was looking for a zoology student to join a whale and seal hunting expedition in the Arctic Ocean aboard a ship called the Viking. Kind of like he wanted an internal board or something almost so Nonsen went on this four and a half month long trip and took the time to study everything he saw, animals, ice formations, currents, the northern lights. He'd take notes on it all, he would do sketches, he'd take photos constantly, really working quite diligently so when he came home he put it all together, wrote a book and started dreaming of going back. That was the most important part of this expedition for him, on the Viking Arctic bug that he caught. He also got a really sweet job after that, and remember he's still only one year into college at this point. His job was as the zoological curator at the Bargain Museum. Bargain was one of Norway's most cosmopolitan cities and had a strong scientific community, so Nanson got to work with Daniel C. Danielson, an Arctic explorer from the eighteen seventies, and his son in law, Dr. Gerhardt Hanson, who discovered the leprosy Vassilists. He also made John's to Germany and to Italy to work in some of the continent's top labs, and the only thing that he didn't like about this was the temperate winter. In eight four, he skied across Norway from Bargain to Christiania in order to take part in a ski jumping across country competition. I think that was his first major athletic accomplishment or public athletic accomplishment. Yeah, I got a lot of press writing across Norway. Yes, it sounds like it would be a difficult thing to do. But all of this time, you know, ski jumping competitions, he was doing his research, and in eighty eight he defended his dissertation on the central nervous systems of certain lower vertebrates. And uh, the really interesting thing about this, I mean, I think it was a well received dissertation on its own, but what interests me about it is that he translated it himself. He spoke five different languages. He translated it into other languages and kind of abbreviated it to made it more readable, sort of maybe more like the Scientific American version of his dissertation, so that it would get a wider readership and people could see what he was working on. And we've talked already about how great of an artist he was. He illustrated it himself with his own lithographs, and he used a device called a camera Lucida to copy directly from the microscope to lithographical stone. So you can look up his dissertation online and see these illustrations, and they really do look like line drawings of what you would under a microscope. So he did a really great job with this and after that the job offer started rolling in, but Nonson turned them down. He had something else on his mind at the time, and that was a polar exploration. He had caught that bag so years earlier. Actually, immediately after returning from the Viking expedition, Nonson had started thinking about maybe a trip to Greenland. Yeah, and he decided to start with what he knew best, which was skiing. In the eighteen eighties, the interior of Greenland was still unexplored, and many people even believed that it might be ice free. Nonson, however, believed it was not only icy but passable, and so he decided he'd ski from Greenland's remote east coast to its inhabited west. And this was just crazy. I mean everyone thought that this was a crazy idea. Yeah, I mean crazy is the right word to describe it. That is what people people thought, or suicidal maybe, because skiing east to west meant there would be no retreat, you know, you couldn't decide um a few days, a few weeks in to turn back and go back to the houses. If winter was approaching too fast, you'd be stuck. And then also another thing that disturbed people was that there would be no base, and if you think about a lot of the polar exploration episodes we've talked about, there is usually a base and they go on these little dashes from the base to to try to reach their goal. Uh. The other thing that people were disturbed by was that he was planning on going with skis, so no sleds, no dogs, and that of course means that you can only bring what you can carry and still be able to ski across glaciers. Yeah. His Nobel Prize biography describes it like this quote. In nine explaining his philosophy to the students at St. Andrew's and his rictorial address, Nonson said that a line of retreat from a proposed action was a snare, and that one should burn his votes behind him so that there is no choice but to go forward. So I've seen this covered a few different ways than different sources, kind of as a metaphoric thing, burning boats, burning bridges. Where has he really burned his boat? So I am curious to learn any more about that. If if anybody knows or has read um more on nonsense in this boat burning potential, it seems like your line of retreat would already be removed even if the boats were still there the time to burn the why take them unless you just wanted one last big, warm boss fire. Um. So. Consequently, because of the nature of this expedition, Nonsen had trouble funding what seemed like suicide to a lot of people. He finally got a grant from a Danish politician and formed a five member team. There were three Norwegians and two saw Me and UH had a lot of trouble getting going on the mission to or on the expedition. There were many delays and UH they couldn't even start ascending the Eland Glacier until about mid August, by which point Arctic summer was kind of coming to an end and one of the crucial things with to be able to make it across the glacier before winter set in. So the party skied nine thousand feet above sea level and temperatures as low as negative forty nine degrees fahrenheit, with no choice but to just keep on going. They had brought along some pemmican, which, as I understand it is kind of like the original power bar but portable food. But the mixture didn't have enough fat in it, which was really I mean, they were close to starvation. Well, they were suffering a lot from that and um fortunately though, they were able to have enough strength to keep going, and by late September they reached the west coast, and by early October they got to a settled area. Here another happy accident happened for Nonsense Life. The last boat had left two months earlier, so that it sounds like a bad It sounds like a bad thing, but it did give him any other spoor as a chance to spend the winter with the local population. So Nonson took full advantage of this. He hunted, he sketched, he learned to kayak, He made friends, so when he came home to what was a hero's welcome, he had enough material for two books, the First Crossing of Greenland, which was published in eighteen ninety and Eskimo Life, which was published in and that stint with the with the people, they're learning how to kayak, learning how to survive in these temperatures, really did prove vital for his survival later on. And just kind of a high note too that I really like. In addition to providing a lot of new information about Greenland and its people and their customs and just the Greenland topography. To the trip was this huge pr campaign for skating, which was, as we've mentioned, you know, something that was still kind of catching on getting more popular. Kids started to form nonsin clubs where they would go out and ski and do outdoors the kind of pursuits, and um, he was a really great ambassador for this, and I think this is maybe a good opportunity to talk a little bit about how he looked too. Nonsen is a popular suggestion, and I wonder how much of it has to do with the very impressive mustache he sported. I know, I think Tico would be jealous. I think he would, Well, you were hoping for a mustache exhumation if we're gonna really lay it all out there, yeah, if we're going to be honest, I wasn't just hoping for a regular exhamation. We're hoping for another mustache exclamation, but really, like, go look him up though. He's got a look of a polar explorer, and I think that it will help too when if Billy Idol were a Polar explorer. He does look a lot like Billy Idol with the mustache. But I think especially in the second episode where we talk about some of his diplomatic work. People talk about his presence, the presence he had, and the confidence he had, and I think that that really comes across in pictures of him and will help all of that makes sense. So Nonson was a new hero not only of skiing but of exploration, and he spent the next four years writing and working as a curator of the Zotomical Institute of the University of Oslo. He also married Avis Stars, a singer, a daughter of a marine zoologist and an avid outdoors woman. You can find pictures of her too, in a pretty awesome little ski costume. I mean, and by little, I do not mean little in anyway. It's got a large skirt and full coverage. But by summer one Nonsen had that polar itch again. He started to plan another trip, and to understand his reasons for settling on this particular trip, we have to go back a little bit back in eighteen seventy nine, the American ship the US S. Jeanette, had gotten caught in ice north of Siberia, and that's pretty bad news. But the ship managed to hold together and drift along for about twenty one months before finally the coming to the pressure of the ice. From my understanding of how this happens, the ice, you know, forms around your boat, starts to cause immense pressure, eventually starts to break up the boat and pull it down. So that's what happened to the Jenette, and half of the crew ultimately died trying to make a dash back to Siberia. In three years later, though, remnants of the Jenette washed up in Greenland and it was a major discovery and that it proved the theory that currents went east to west over the Arctic. So nonsense saw the news of the Jennette and thought, Hey, if I had a boat that didn't get crushed by the ice, I could ride that current and maybe go right over the North Pole. Sounds kind of crazy again, It sounds like part two to Crazy Idea Land. And it was a really bold idea, but it was one that wisely worked off of observation and careful planning rather than the previous model we've alluded to a little bit of arctic assault. Really, you know, you get out there with like fifty to a hundred guys and just go with the techniques, you know, don't adapt to the climate. Really just bundle up and make a dash for it, a technique that obviously often ended in tragedy. There's a National and Geographic article by Hampton's Sides on Nonsense expedition, and it quotes a nonsense biographer named Roland Huntford as saying that it was very unusual for an explorer to quote take note of the forces of nature and try to work with them and not against them. So to pay attention to what way the currents were going. Think that maybe you could let yourself be iced in and just literally go with the flow instead of instead of just throwing everything you had at it. It took some planning, though, to figure out exactly how to work with nature in this way, I mean, Nonsen had to put a lot of time and thought into this. So the first step was the ship. Of course, Nonson got together with the shipbuilder call An Archer, to design a vessel that wouldn't be crushed by the ice pack, one that would be pushed up instead of pulled down. He also decided that for the mission to work, it would have to be very small, so he started gathering supplies for four or five years for about a dozen men, so a really innovative way of thinking about it. Every detail of spending years trapped an Arctic ice had to be considered very carefully, from the strength of the whole to the sanity of the men. The rudder and propeller, for example, could be pulled up as ice moved in. An insulation of reindeer hair, felt cork and tar kept things warmer inside, and a windmill powered electric lights that would keep the men in high spirits during those dark polar winters, allowing them to read from a six hundred book library that had been collected, listened to an automatic organ or chat in the saloon that was created on the vessel, which you know, maybe that sounds fruvolous, but if you're seriously planning to be in the ice for four or five years, in the dark for much of that time, you know, you've got to take into account the mental well being, yeah, the spirit of the of the men. So Nansen's wife named the ship the From which means forward, appropriately enough, and the expedition set off in June from Oslo, headed towards the New Siberian Islands, and by September they did what they were hoping to do. The ship was frozen in and you can imagine how harrowing that would be, waiting to see if it was gonna work, or whether your ship would actually think. And here's how Nonsen himself described it. He said, a deafening noise began, and the whole ship shook. The noise steadily grows till it is like all the pipes of an organ. Two days after that, he wrote that the ice is trying it's very utmost grind the From into powder. But that construction worked. The ship held together, it didn't sink, and the From was able to ride the drift, and the crew did entertain themselves with scientific research and ski trips and even a self published newspaper, which sounds very interesting big events of the day. The drift, however, was unpredictable and really slow, so Nonsense started to worry that they'd never be able to get far enough north to reach the pole, and that the whole thing might actually take something like six to seven years instead of four to five. So he had to make a major decision. He decided to take one comrade a pack of dogs and leave the relatively cushy newspaper filled from to make a dash for the pole. The only problem here though, was that besides bad maps, killer temperatures, and slushy ice, there'd be no way that he could catch up with the From when he was done. So the From of course would have drifted too far for him to make it back by then. So to go out on this dash to the poll, he would have to find the pole and then come back and then try to find solid land civilization, or just be left out there on the ice to die. So that's where we're going to leave off. In the next episode, we have a polar bear attack, a Nobel Prize, and because we did mention that Nelson had a pretty impressive later career to saving an estimated seven to twenty two million Russians from starvation, and we do mean millions. So sometimes it's it's a smart to be careful with your polar expedition planning because you have great things ahead of you. Well, keeping with this exploration theme, we're now going to move on to a listener mail. So Delena, remember this summer when we got a lot of postcards from a girl who was taking a grand tour around Europe. I do that was a pretty good postcard collection, as they're very impressive, and I liked how she would tell us what she was doing when she was when she was writing a postcard, where she was sitting in these amazing which podcast she listened to, which it was very fun. So I think we have a kind of part two of that from listener Hillary, who is sending us postcards while she's taking a violin tour. She's violinist and she's touring around Europe maybe beyond. She was in Hanover, Germany when she sent us her first card. But I really like something she wrote. She said that I've been particularly enjoying the episodes about things that happened in the Civil War era. Is my violin was made in eighteen sixty four in France. Caring about that time is like finding out fascinating backtoys about someone you know very well. Because I spent a lot of time with this violin and it definitely has a personality. So I thought that was such a neat commentary because you obviously can't know a person who was born in eighteen sixty four. I don't think there are any of them left, but you can be so familiar with an instrument, you know, as a professional violinist who spends much of her time with this, this thing from eighteen sixty four, and feels the connection to that that time, you know, a very real connection. And whoever played that violin before well, and presumably all the people who who've played it before, and the person who made it. And um, I just thought that was very neat. So Hillary has also sent us a couple of postcards. Um. One of them is from Palermo. I think that might be my favorite. It's the Church of the Marcharana. And I think that while you're googling pictures of Nonsen and his wife and skis, um, you could go ahead and google this church too, because to me it almost looks like three scoops of pink sherbet on top. I mean that was I thought it was a photoshopped or something when I first looked at it, just because the colors though striking. Um. She wrote to us too that she she must have felt the same way. She said that it was so visually memorable that she had to send it instead of a more dignified one. She probably wrote that because the postcard does have a again sherbet hued title above, labeling it his Lermo. But anyway, Hillary, Thank you so much for keeping us up with your travels and good luck with all your performances. And if you would like to send us some information about your own travels or history podcasts that have taken you places, or ideas that you have for future podcasts, you can write us at History podcast at how stuff works dot com, or you can look us up on Facebook or on Twitter and mist in history. And if you want to learn a little bit more about nobs whose favorite sport, we do have an article called how cross country Skiing works, and you can find it by searching on our home page at www dot how stuff where It's dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how staf work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The Houstuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm delanea Chocolate boarding and to Blina. I don't know if you've heard of Felicity Austin. I heard this dispatch from her on the radio the other week. I haven't heard of her. She's a polar explorer, British woman who's trying to make a solo ski track across Antarctica, and of course, being a modern day lady, she's got high tech equipment. For instance, she can tweet. I checked out her Twitter feed this morning, in fact, and there was an update from just a couple hours before. But still, she's out there in Antarctica, all alone, with more than one thousand miles to ski, certainly of physically difficult and a mentally challenging thing to do. So it kind of got me thinking. We've talked a lot about polar explorers on the podcast. Keep really seem to love episodes about polar explorers and their exploits, but the stories are usually pretty grim, as you'd imagine, they're punctuated by this glory above all attitude that a lot of times gets the explorers or maybe even more often their crew, all of their men killed at the end. And that's maybe why when I suggested today's topic to you is something for us to do a podcast on um polar explorer for chi Off Nonsen, you were hoping maybe there'd be an exclamation, and it did seem kind of promising, And I see exclamation. I mean, I can't blame you for for thinking that. But the first thing that I think everybody needs to understand about Nonsen is that he was a different breed of polar explorer. In fact, I almost think he has less in common with his contemporaries or the polar explorers who came before him, who were just sort of like, get out there, run over whatever you need to to get there, Bring lots of men, it doesn't matter if they die, just achieve your goal. Um. I think he has less in common with those guys than he does with modern Arctic adventurers. So people like Felicity Aston, who are just you know, trying to hope, trying to inspire other people to achieve UM great things, or maybe more more likely real scientists who are out there collecting real data. Yes, so Nonson wasn't just out there for the recognition, and consequently he wasn't willing to throw his life away, although he did have some close calls, which will take a look at later. As a result, Nonson also had the odd distinction of being a polar explorer with a late life story that's really more impressive even than his youthful adventures. He became a diplomat, a humanitarian, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and so it's a life that has earned us a two part of it with that kind of accomplishment, going to break it up into two episodes whereth so it all starts though on the skis forty off. Nonsen was born October tenth, eighteen sixty one, near Christagna, which is now Oslo in Norway. And at the time I think it's kind of a developed suburban area now, but at the time it was pretty rural. There were woods that backed up to his family's property, a lot of countryside, and his father was a lawyer. His mother was an aristocratic athlete, and so he came from a comfortable background but one that was still pretty rigorous to Both of his parents emphasized uh good morals and um kind of a kind of a simple lifestyle almost. They both had kids from earlier marriages and everybody, all the kids were encouraged to participate in sports which were really getting a lot more popular at this time with the upper classes, especially winter sports in Norway, and all of that dovetailed to a bit with a nature craze. Perfect place to grow up with these woods and countryside and opportunities to get out there and experience nature all around him. And Nonson didn't just grow up playing one sport. He grew up swimming, tumbling, fishing, hiking, skating, and skiing. Ultimately he got to a point where he could ski fifty miles a day with just his dog for company. So imagine skiing the distance of a marathon and then skiing back again. And I mean, I haven't done it, but I've always heard that cross country skiing is incredibly grueling, one of the highest calorie burning sports that's out there. Yeah, I haven't done it either, but it looks tough. When it came time to choose a field of study, nonsense father pushed him toward attending the Officers Academy, figuring tuition was free and that the lifestyle would allow his son the chance to continue the outdoor pursuits that he loves so much. But nonsense art teacher, on the other hand, pushed him to become a painter and professional artist, but Nonson decided to go to university and study zoology instead. It was a profession that he hoped would allow him to get outdoors and sketch, so kind of the best of both world. That's what he was hoping for, and he, being a smart kid, really might have easily just gone to university and continued in that scientific career, you know, maybe even done so quite successfully, had it not been for an offer that came up a year into college from one of his father's friends who was looking for a zoology student to join a whale and seal hunting expedition in the Arctic Ocean aboard a ship called the Viking. Kind of like he wanted an internal board or something almost so Nonsen went on this four and a half month long trip and took the time to study everything he saw, animals, ice formations, currents, the northern lights. He'd take notes on it all, he would do sketches, he'd take photos constantly, really working quite diligently so when he came home he put it all together, wrote a book and started dreaming of going back. That was the most important part of this expedition for him, on the Viking Arctic bug that he caught. He also got a really sweet job after that, and remember he's still only one year into college at this point. His job was as the zoological curator at the Bargain Museum. Bargain was one of Norway's most cosmopolitan cities and had a strong scientific community, so Nanson got to work with Daniel C. Danielson, an Arctic explorer from the eighteen seventies, and his son in law, Dr. Gerhardt Hanson, who discovered the leprosy Vassilists. He also made John's to Germany and to Italy to work in some of the continent's top labs, and the only thing that he didn't like about this was the temperate winter. In eight four, he skied across Norway from Bargain to Christiania in order to take part in a ski jumping across country competition. I think that was his first major athletic accomplishment or public athletic accomplishment. Yeah, I got a lot of press writing across Norway. Yes, it sounds like it would be a difficult thing to do. But all of this time, you know, ski jumping competitions, he was doing his research, and in eighty eight he defended his dissertation on the central nervous systems of certain lower vertebrates. And uh, the really interesting thing about this, I mean, I think it was a well received dissertation on its own, but what interests me about it is that he translated it himself. He spoke five different languages. He translated it into other languages and kind of abbreviated it to made it more readable, sort of maybe more like the Scientific American version of his dissertation, so that it would get a wider readership and people could see what he was working on. And we've talked already about how great of an artist he was. He illustrated it himself with his own lithographs, and he used a device called a camera Lucida to copy directly from the microscope to lithographical stone. So you can look up his dissertation online and see these illustrations, and they really do look like line drawings of what you would under a microscope. So he did a really great job with this and after that the job offer started rolling in, but Nonson turned them down. He had something else on his mind at the time, and that was a polar exploration. He had caught that bag so years earlier. Actually, immediately after returning from the Viking expedition, Nonson had started thinking about maybe a trip to Greenland. Yeah, and he decided to start with what he knew best, which was skiing. In the eighteen eighties, the interior of Greenland was still unexplored, and many people even believed that it might be ice free. Nonson, however, believed it was not only icy but passable, and so he decided he'd ski from Greenland's remote east coast to its inhabited west. And this was just crazy. I mean everyone thought that this was a crazy idea. Yeah, I mean crazy is the right word to describe it. That is what people people thought, or suicidal maybe, because skiing east to west meant there would be no retreat, you know, you couldn't decide um a few days, a few weeks in to turn back and go back to the houses. If winter was approaching too fast, you'd be stuck. And then also another thing that disturbed people was that there would be no base, and if you think about a lot of the polar exploration episodes we've talked about, there is usually a base and they go on these little dashes from the base to to try to reach their goal. Uh. The other thing that people were disturbed by was that he was planning on going with skis, so no sleds, no dogs, and that of course means that you can only bring what you can carry and still be able to ski across glaciers. Yeah. His Nobel Prize biography describes it like this quote. In nine explaining his philosophy to the students at St. Andrew's and his rictorial address, Nonson said that a line of retreat from a proposed action was a snare, and that one should burn his votes behind him so that there is no choice but to go forward. So I've seen this covered a few different ways than different sources, kind of as a metaphoric thing, burning boats, burning bridges. Where has he really burned his boat? So I am curious to learn any more about that. If if anybody knows or has read um more on nonsense in this boat burning potential, it seems like your line of retreat would already be removed even if the boats were still there the time to burn the why take them unless you just wanted one last big, warm boss fire. Um. So. Consequently, because of the nature of this expedition, Nonsen had trouble funding what seemed like suicide to a lot of people. He finally got a grant from a Danish politician and formed a five member team. There were three Norwegians and two saw Me and UH had a lot of trouble getting going on the mission to or on the expedition. There were many delays and UH they couldn't even start ascending the Eland Glacier until about mid August, by which point Arctic summer was kind of coming to an end and one of the crucial things with to be able to make it across the glacier before winter set in. So the party skied nine thousand feet above sea level and temperatures as low as negative forty nine degrees fahrenheit, with no choice but to just keep on going. They had brought along some pemmican, which, as I understand it is kind of like the original power bar but portable food. But the mixture didn't have enough fat in it, which was really I mean, they were close to starvation. Well, they were suffering a lot from that and um fortunately though, they were able to have enough strength to keep going, and by late September they reached the west coast, and by early October they got to a settled area. Here another happy accident happened for Nonsense Life. The last boat had left two months earlier, so that it sounds like a bad It sounds like a bad thing, but it did give him any other spoor as a chance to spend the winter with the local population. So Nonson took full advantage of this. He hunted, he sketched, he learned to kayak, He made friends, so when he came home to what was a hero's welcome, he had enough material for two books, the First Crossing of Greenland, which was published in eighteen ninety and Eskimo Life, which was published in and that stint with the with the people, they're learning how to kayak, learning how to survive in these temperatures, really did prove vital for his survival later on. And just kind of a high note too that I really like. In addition to providing a lot of new information about Greenland and its people and their customs and just the Greenland topography. To the trip was this huge pr campaign for skating, which was, as we've mentioned, you know, something that was still kind of catching on getting more popular. Kids started to form nonsin clubs where they would go out and ski and do outdoors the kind of pursuits, and um, he was a really great ambassador for this, and I think this is maybe a good opportunity to talk a little bit about how he looked too. Nonsen is a popular suggestion, and I wonder how much of it has to do with the very impressive mustache he sported. I know, I think Tico would be jealous. I think he would, Well, you were hoping for a mustache exhumation if we're gonna really lay it all out there, yeah, if we're going to be honest, I wasn't just hoping for a regular exhamation. We're hoping for another mustache exclamation, but really, like, go look him up though. He's got a look of a polar explorer, and I think that it will help too when if Billy Idol were a Polar explorer. He does look a lot like Billy Idol with the mustache. But I think especially in the second episode where we talk about some of his diplomatic work. People talk about his presence, the presence he had, and the confidence he had, and I think that that really comes across in pictures of him and will help all of that makes sense. So Nonson was a new hero not only of skiing but of exploration, and he spent the next four years writing and working as a curator of the Zotomical Institute of the University of Oslo. He also married Avis Stars, a singer, a daughter of a marine zoologist and an avid outdoors woman. You can find pictures of her too, in a pretty awesome little ski costume. I mean, and by little, I do not mean little in anyway. It's got a large skirt and full coverage. But by summer one Nonsen had that polar itch again. He started to plan another trip, and to understand his reasons for settling on this particular trip, we have to go back a little bit back in eighteen seventy nine, the American ship the US S. Jeanette, had gotten caught in ice north of Siberia, and that's pretty bad news. But the ship managed to hold together and drift along for about twenty one months before finally the coming to the pressure of the ice. From my understanding of how this happens, the ice, you know, forms around your boat, starts to cause immense pressure, eventually starts to break up the boat and pull it down. So that's what happened to the Jenette, and half of the crew ultimately died trying to make a dash back to Siberia. In three years later, though, remnants of the Jenette washed up in Greenland and it was a major discovery and that it proved the theory that currents went east to west over the Arctic. So nonsense saw the news of the Jennette and thought, Hey, if I had a boat that didn't get crushed by the ice, I could ride that current and maybe go right over the North Pole. Sounds kind of crazy again, It sounds like part two to Crazy Idea Land. And it was a really bold idea, but it was one that wisely worked off of observation and careful planning rather than the previous model we've alluded to a little bit of arctic assault. Really, you know, you get out there with like fifty to a hundred guys and just go with the techniques, you know, don't adapt to the climate. Really just bundle up and make a dash for it, a technique that obviously often ended in tragedy. There's a National and Geographic article by Hampton's Sides on Nonsense expedition, and it quotes a nonsense biographer named Roland Huntford as saying that it was very unusual for an explorer to quote take note of the forces of nature and try to work with them and not against them. So to pay attention to what way the currents were going. Think that maybe you could let yourself be iced in and just literally go with the flow instead of instead of just throwing everything you had at it. It took some planning, though, to figure out exactly how to work with nature in this way, I mean, Nonsen had to put a lot of time and thought into this. So the first step was the ship. Of course, Nonson got together with the shipbuilder call An Archer, to design a vessel that wouldn't be crushed by the ice pack, one that would be pushed up instead of pulled down. He also decided that for the mission to work, it would have to be very small, so he started gathering supplies for four or five years for about a dozen men, so a really innovative way of thinking about it. Every detail of spending years trapped an Arctic ice had to be considered very carefully, from the strength of the whole to the sanity of the men. The rudder and propeller, for example, could be pulled up as ice moved in. An insulation of reindeer hair, felt cork and tar kept things warmer inside, and a windmill powered electric lights that would keep the men in high spirits during those dark polar winters, allowing them to read from a six hundred book library that had been collected, listened to an automatic organ or chat in the saloon that was created on the vessel, which you know, maybe that sounds fruvolous, but if you're seriously planning to be in the ice for four or five years, in the dark for much of that time, you know, you've got to take into account the mental well being, yeah, the spirit of the of the men. So Nansen's wife named the ship the From which means forward, appropriately enough, and the expedition set off in June from Oslo, headed towards the New Siberian Islands, and by September they did what they were hoping to do. The ship was frozen in and you can imagine how harrowing that would be, waiting to see if it was gonna work, or whether your ship would actually think. And here's how Nonsen himself described it. He said, a deafening noise began, and the whole ship shook. The noise steadily grows till it is like all the pipes of an organ. Two days after that, he wrote that the ice is trying it's very utmost grind the From into powder. But that construction worked. The ship held together, it didn't sink, and the From was able to ride the drift, and the crew did entertain themselves with scientific research and ski trips and even a self published newspaper, which sounds very interesting big events of the day. The drift, however, was unpredictable and really slow, so Nonsense started to worry that they'd never be able to get far enough north to reach the pole, and that the whole thing might actually take something like six to seven years instead of four to five. So he had to make a major decision. He decided to take one comrade a pack of dogs and leave the relatively cushy newspaper filled from to make a dash for the pole. The only problem here though, was that besides bad maps, killer temperatures, and slushy ice, there'd be no way that he could catch up with the From when he was done. So the From of course would have drifted too far for him to make it back by then. So to go out on this dash to the poll, he would have to find the pole and then come back and then try to find solid land civilization, or just be left out there on the ice to die. So that's where we're going to leave off. In the next episode, we have a polar bear attack, a Nobel Prize, and because we did mention that Nelson had a pretty impressive later career to saving an estimated seven to twenty two million Russians from starvation, and we do mean millions. So sometimes it's it's a smart to be careful with your polar expedition planning because you have great things ahead of you. Well, keeping with this exploration theme, we're now going to move on to a listener mail. So Delena, remember this summer when we got a lot of postcards from a girl who was taking a grand tour around Europe. I do that was a pretty good postcard collection, as they're very impressive, and I liked how she would tell us what she was doing when she was when she was writing a postcard, where she was sitting in these amazing which podcast she listened to, which it was very fun. So I think we have a kind of part two of that from listener Hillary, who is sending us postcards while she's taking a violin tour. She's violinist and she's touring around Europe maybe beyond. She was in Hanover, Germany when she sent us her first card. But I really like something she wrote. She said that I've been particularly enjoying the episodes about things that happened in the Civil War era. Is my violin was made in eighteen sixty four in France. Caring about that time is like finding out fascinating backtoys about someone you know very well. Because I spent a lot of time with this violin and it definitely has a personality. So I thought that was such a neat commentary because you obviously can't know a person who was born in eighteen sixty four. I don't think there are any of them left, but you can be so familiar with an instrument, you know, as a professional violinist who spends much of her time with this, this thing from eighteen sixty four, and feels the connection to that that time, you know, a very real connection. And whoever played that violin before well, and presumably all the people who who've played it before, and the person who made it. And um, I just thought that was very neat. So Hillary has also sent us a couple of postcards. Um. One of them is from Palermo. I think that might be my favorite. It's the Church of the Marcharana. And I think that while you're googling pictures of Nonsen and his wife and skis, um, you could go ahead and google this church too, because to me it almost looks like three scoops of pink sherbet on top. I mean that was I thought it was a photoshopped or something when I first looked at it, just because the colors though striking. Um. She wrote to us too that she she must have felt the same way. She said that it was so visually memorable that she had to send it instead of a more dignified one. She probably wrote that because the postcard does have a again sherbet hued title above, labeling it his Lermo. But anyway, Hillary, Thank you so much for keeping us up with your travels and good luck with all your performances. And if you would like to send us some information about your own travels or history podcasts that have taken you places, or ideas that you have for future podcasts, you can write us at History podcast at how stuff works dot com, or you can look us up on Facebook or on Twitter and mist in history. And if you want to learn a little bit more about nobs whose favorite sport, we do have an article called how cross country Skiing works, and you can find it by searching on our home page at www dot how stuff where It's dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how staf work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The Houstuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes