Beginning at the North Pole, the pair had skied 600 miles to this spot off the northern coast of Franz Josef Land, the remote Siberian archipelago where Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen had ...

Boredom was a constant companion—one crewman cursed "the monastic life we lead in this dead zone"—but Nansen's men did not ... journey across the open water to Spitsbergen, where they nursed ...