In 1893 Fridtjof Nansen set sail for the North Pole in the Fram, a ship specially designed to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand its crushing pressures and drift to the Pole. Experts said that such a mission was tantamount to suicide, but this is the stirring first-person account of its historic success. Nansen tells of his expedition's struggle against snowdrifts, ice floes, polar bears, scurvy, gnawing hunger, and the seemingly endless polar night that transformed the Fram into a "cold prison of loneliness." Setting out in the end on a harrowing fifteen-month sledge journey to reach his destination by foot, he was required to share a sleeping bag of rotting reindeer fur and to feed the weaker sled dogs to the stronger ones. This edition contains new abridgement from the original famous two volumes (1896).