Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship “Fram” 1893-96 and of a Fifteen Months’ Sleigh Journey by Dr. Nansen and Lieut. Johansen

By Fridtjof Nansen

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897. First US Edition. 8vo. Volume One: [x] 587 pp. Volume Two: [x] 729 pp. + 4 pp. of publisher’s ads. Bound in dark olive-brown cloth, with bright gilt-stamped lettering and decoration on the spine, and bright gilt-stamped lettering within a gilt, green, red, and silver nautical motif on the front board. The tops of the leaves are gilt. Both volumes are clean inside and out. Includes all four original color maps in front and rear pockets of Volume One; 120 full-page text illustrations, 16 colored plates from Nansen’s own sketches, an etched portrait frontispieces with tissue guards, and photogravures. With an Appendix by Otto Sverdrup, Captain of the Fram. A very well preserved and complete set. —Arctic Bibliography 11983.

Nansen’s first person account of this highly important journey to prove that a drift-current sets across the polar regions from the Bering Strait and the neighborhood of the New Siberia Islands towards the east coast of Greenland. Nansen’s theory was based on a number of indications, not the least of which was the discovery of portions of the wreck of the “Jeannette” which had been lost off the New Siberia Islands in 1881 but which were found on drift ice off the south-west coast of Greeenland. His ship, the “Fram”, was specially built of extraordinarily strong materials and of a design to be lifted by rather than crushed by the ice. The validation of the theory, the expedition and the trek made northward over the ice on foot to a point farthest north is documented in these two volumes.

$400.00 -