"The
noise grows steadily till it is like all the pipes of an organ; the ship
trembles and shakes, and rises by fits and starts, or is sometimes gently
lifted." F. Nansen, Farthest North: The Exploration of the Fram
1893-1896. Edinburgh, 2002.
D.F.
Pelly, “How Inuit Find Their Way in the Trackless Arctic.” Canadian
Geographic. Aug/Sept 1991.
Fridtjof
Nansen (1861-1930) was a writer, scientist, athlete, and arctic explorer.
He initiaIly gained his reputation for skiing
across
Greenland,
and then, in 1893,
for
his famous
voyage on the Fram, which proved that a current runs from Siberia
to Greenland. In 1922, the Norwegian received the Nobel Peace Prize for his
work in repatriating
prisoners
of
war. See,
R.
Huntford's
biography, Nansen:
The Explorer as Hero.
New York, 1998.
P'u-Yüan
Nan-ch’üan (Nansen Fugan), 748-834, was an outstanding Ch'an
(Zen) master. He appears many times in the Mumonkan, one of Zen's central
collections
of koans and commentary.
In
Japanese folklore, Fox is a trickster. There are many ghost stories in which
Fox appears. In Chinese folklore there are stories of the fox-fairy.
I cannot imagine drifting in
a wooden ship, rucks of ice pressuring and
lifting the keel to musical heights,
without Fridtjof
Nansen and Nansen
Fugan, two exemplary men
who lived eleven centuries
and
a
world apart, one an explorer
of
the cold North, the other of the
windy Mind.
For those few who can stop
drifting in circles, and set out toward the Pole, there is no
farthest North; they continue trekking
over
the trackless tundra. I marvelled as time after time he
pulled up beside an insignificant hump in the snow and thrust his snowknife
beneath the crust to exhume a
a steel foxtrap.
I was witnessing, for the first time, two amazing processes: an Inuk’s
navigation
over great distances of seemingly featureless terrain, and
only when they arrive
where they began have they gone as far north as any human can.
