Fridtjof Nansen
1861 – 1930 · Norway
Known for: Norwegian polar explorer and scientist who became the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
“First across Greenland, farthest north, and at the last a homeland on paper for the stateless.”
Biography
Fridtjof Nansen was born on 10 October 1861 at Store Frøen, an estate north of Christiania, the son of a reporter to the Supreme Court of Norway. The country around the house shaped his childhood: summers of fishing, autumns in the forest, long winters on skis, which he had begun to use at the age of two. He was an unremarkable pupil and a remarkable athlete, breaking the world one mile skating record at eighteen and winning the national cross country skiing championship twelve times. In 1881 he entered the Royal Frederick University in Christiania to read zoology, partly because the subject promised a life in the open air, and a five month voyage on the sealer Viking in 1882 showed him Arctic ice for the first time.
As a curator at the University Museum of Bergen he studied the central nervous system of simple marine animals, work that earned him a doctorate and supported the neuron doctrine. In 1888 he led the first crossing of the Greenland interior, taking his party over the island on skis from the uninhabited east coast towards the west, a direction that made turning back impossible. The Fram expedition of 1893 to 1896 rested on a stranger idea: that a ship built to be lifted by the pack ice rather than crushed could drift with the current across the polar basin. When the drift proved slower than he had hoped, Nansen left the ship with Hjalmar Johansen and pushed north by sledge and kayak to 86 degrees 14 minutes, a record latitude, before wintering in the Arctic and reaching home the next summer. His clothing, sledges and cooking equipment were copied by polar expeditions for a generation, and after 1896 he turned to oceanography.
His standing at home made him a public man. In 1905 he spoke for ending the union with Sweden and helped persuade Prince Carl of Denmark to accept the throne of the newly independent Norway, then served from 1906 to 1908 as its representative in London. The last decade of his life belonged to the League of Nations, which appointed him High Commissioner for Refugees in 1921. He organised the return of prisoners of war, relief for famine in Russia and, above all, the identity certificate for stateless people that became known as the Nansen passport and was recognised by more than fifty countries. The Nobel Peace Prize followed in 1922. He died suddenly on 13 May 1930, and the League set up the Nansen International Office for Refugees to continue the work; it received the Peace Prize in 1938.