a 'remarkable achievement in polar exploration'
NANSEN, Fridtjof. "Farthest North". Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship Fram 1893-96 and of a Fifteen Months' Sleigh Journey by Dr. Nansen and Lieut. Johansen with an Appendix by Otto Sverdrup Captain of the Fram. Westminster, Constable and Company, 1897.
8vo, 2 volumes. Original green cloth gilt, upper board lettered in gilt, vol. I blocked in gilt with design of the Fram, vol. II blocked in gilt with design of dogs, sledge and driver, spines lettered in gilt; pp. xiii, [3], 510, [2]; xiii, [3 (blank], 671; etched portrait frontispiece in vol. I and photogravure frontispiece in vol. II, both retaining tissue guards, 16 colour-printed lithographic plates by McLagan & Cumming, 111 half-tone, lithographic and photogravure plates after J. Nordhagen, H. Egidius, Otto Sinding, et al., 4 folding colour-printed lithographic maps by John Bartholomew & Co, illustrations, diagrams and charts in the text, some full-page, titles printed in red and black; lower outer corners with slight bumps, the binding otherwise very sharp and clean, occasional light spotting internally, far less than usually encountered, a little offsetting from endpapers, a very good set in the original cloth with contemporary bookplates of Frederick Arthur Robinson inside front covers and the author's obituary pasted onto front fly-leaf of volume one.
First English edition. First published in Norway under the title Fram over polhavet, den norske polarfaerd 1893-1896 (Oslo: 1896-1897), this first English edition appeared very shortly afterwards. The work is a 'narrative of the First Fram Expedition, 1893-1896, led by Nansen, with the object of investigating the polar basin north of Eurasia by drifting in the ice with the currents northwest from the New Siberian Islands across or near the pole [and] contains descriptions of the voyage in the Fram from northern Norway July 1893, across the Kara Sea to the New Siberian Islands and the drift thence across the polar sea, Sept. 1893-March 1895. [It] includes [an] account of Nansen's and Johansen's sledge journey toward the North Pole, their wintering on Franz Josef's Land and trip home, March 1895-Aug. 1896, with excerpts from Nansen's diary; also a supplement by Otto Sverdrup on the Fram's drift in the ice, March 1895-Aug. 1896' (Arctic Bibliography, 11983). Nansen's expedition achieved a 'farthest North ' of 86°13.6′, which stood for another five years.
NMM I, 991; cf. Arctic Bibliography 11983 (first US ed.); PMM 384 (first ed.: 'A remarkable achievement in polar exploration').
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