Early in the second year, however, it became apparent that Fram would not reach the Pole. To achieve his goal, Nansen would have to get out on the ice with sleds and dogs and make a dash for it. He selected a companion, Hjalmar Johansen, and in March of 1895, after two false starts, they left the comfort of the Fram. A cannon volley boomed as the two skiers, dragging three sleds, carrying two kayaks, and accompanied by 28 dogs, headed north. Nansen and Johansen soon ran into trouble—impossible terrain, equipment failures, fast-shifting floes that canceled out their progress. As their provisions dwindled, they began to butcher the weakest dogs to feed the others. By April they had traveled as far north as they could go—86° 14 N. Although they were still 226 miles shy of the Pole, they had ventured farther north than any human ever had. It was the largest single advance in nearly 400 years of Arctic exploration.

Nansen had promised Eva he would make it back alive, and that was far more important to him than risking death—and immortality—at the Pole. "You are thinking of me," he had written her in his diary one night. "Your thoughts fly northwards in the great desolation. They do not know where to look for me."

And so, prudently, Nansen turned the expe­dition around. The two men aimed not for the Fram, which had drifted out of reach anyway, but for the distant archipelago of Franz Josef Land, some 600 miles to the south. Their desperate journey over the floes must surely rank as one of the most miserable and arduous polar slogs ever attempted. Over the weeks and months, they killed off their remaining dogs (cutting their throats to save on ammunition), and at one particularly low point were forced to eat a porridge made of canine blood. "If I say that it was good, I lie," Johansen wrote. "But it went down, and that is the main thing."

Through the summer of 1895 Nansen and Johansen searched in vain for Franz Josef Land. "For a quarter of a year we have been wandering in this desert of ice," Nansen despaired, "and here we are still." Traveling sometimes by skis, sometimes on foot, sometimes in kayaks, they negotiated endless mazes of rafted ice intersected by slushy leads. Nansen admitted that he and Johansen had "no prospect for the moment to get on, impassable packed ice in every direction, rapidly diminishing provisions, and now, too, nothing to be caught or shot … I lie awake at night by the hour racking my brain to find a way out of our difficulties."

Finally, on August 6, the two men reached an island—the first land on which they had stood for two years—and their fortunes turned. Hunting polar bear and walrus, they soon had fresh meat aplenty and regained their strength. Threading south through the icy archipelago, they realized by August 26 that they would have to spend another dismal Arctic winter far from home. Using a broken sled runner as a pick, Nan­sen and Johansen built an improvised lair. There they stayed for the next nine months, sharing the same greasy sleeping bag and subsisting on polar bear broth and bear meat fried in walrus blubber. Trapped in such harsh circumstances, they kept their sanity remark­ably intact. "We didn't quarrel," Johansen would say later. "The only thing was that I have a bad habit of snoring … and Nansen used to kick me in the back." As Nansen wrote in his diary, "Johansen is asleep, and making the hut resound. I am glad his mother cannot see him now … so black and grimy and ragged as he is."