almd

Fridtjof Nansen has the best true story of any human being of the last two hundred years, and there is still no film of it. Before he was twenty-seven, working at the Bergen Museum on hagfish and sea squirts with a new Zeiss lens, he found that nerve cells do not fuse into one continuous network, and wrote that the theory had to be abandoned. That is the neuron doctrine. It is the ground floor of every piece of brain science since. Cajal published his version the following year. He and Golgi took the Nobel Prize for it in 1906. By then Nansen was in the footnotes, because he had left. He defended the thesis on 28 April 1888. Four days later he was in Copenhagen with a pair of skis, heading for Greenland, and he learned he had passed his doctorate months afterwards on the far side of the ice cap. He crossed from the east coast deliberately, because the east coast was uninhabited. Once the ship put him down there was no depot behind him and no settlement to crawl back to, so the only survivable direction was forward across an unmapped ice sheet until he hit a town. He deleted the retreat before he took a step. He hit the town, missed the last boat of the season, and spent the winter with Inuit hunters learning the kayak, the clothing, the dogs and the food, which was the fresh kill eaten fresh, fat first. Five years later he had a ship built with a rounded hull so the ice would squeeze it upwards instead of crushing it, sailed it into the pack and let it freeze solid on purpose, because he had worked out that the ice was a current and he intended to ride it over the top of the planet. When the drift fell short he got off and walked north with one companion, two kayaks and a team of dogs, reached 86°14′, further than any human being had ever been, and turned round with the ship gone, no land within hundreds of miles and the food running down. They spent nine months in a stone hut roofed with walrus hides. Two men, one greasy sleeping bag, living on bear meat fried in blubber. And because they were Norwegian and had never been properly introduced, they addressed each other with the formal form of "you" for the entire winter. They walked out in May with their teeth still in. That is the halfway point of the man's life. He then stopped exploring altogether, helped prise Norway out of its union with Sweden, ran famine relief in Russia in 1921, and invented a travel document for stateless people because no government on earth would issue them one. The Nansen passport, honoured by more than fifty countries. Nobel Peace Prize, 1922. Kenneth Branagh has played Shackleton on television. This one is still sat there unmade. He died of a heart attack at sixty-eight. There it is, they say. The meat got him. February 1930: skiing in the mountains with two old friends, who noticed he was slow and tiring easily. Home, and then months flat on his back with influenza and then phlebitis, which is an inflamed vein with a clot sitting in it. On 13 May he was on the balcony talking to his daughter-in-law, stopped in the middle of a sentence and was dead before she crossed the floor. Three months immobile, a clot in the leg, sudden collapse. Every doctor reading this recognises that shape, and it is not a furred artery. There was no autopsy. In 1930, at home, heart attack was a phrase people used rather than a finding anybody established. He also ate ordinary Norwegian food for sixty-seven of his sixty-eight years. The bear and the blubber were nine months, thirty-four years before the end, and he came out of them heavier and stronger than he went in. A man eats steak, reaches ninety and dies in his sleep, and a stranger on the internet files it under saturated fat. Shackleton dropped dead at forty-seven in a bunk at South Georgia and nobody has spent a hundred years interrogating his dinner. Nansen crossed Greenland, reached 86 north, rewrote the science of the brain, fed a continent, and died with the plans for another Arctic expedition on his desk. Somebody make the film.