Mr. Joshua

In 1893 a Norwegian scientist deliberately froze his ship into the Arctic ice, let it drift for three years, and lost not a single man to scurvy or anything else. Then he walked off it and spent nine months in a hole in the ground eating bear. Fridtjof Nansen was thirty-two, a zoologist with a doctorate on the nervous system of a worm. His theory was that the polar current would carry a ship across the top of the world if the ship was built not to be crushed. He built one. He called it the Fram, took twelve men, and sailed into the pack. For three years they lived in the dark and the cold with no fresh food arriving from anywhere. On every previous expedition that had meant scurvy, the disease that had killed more sailors than the sea. Nansen's crew had none. They shot polar bear and seal, and ate the meat fresh and barely cooked, as the Inuit did. The doctor on board had almost nothing to do. In 1895 Nansen and one companion left the ship on skis to make for the Pole. They got further north than any human had been, turned back, and were caught by winter on an empty island. They built a hut of stones and walrus hide, and for nine months they ate bear meat and walrus blubber and nothing else. No vegetable, no grain, no fruit. They came out in the spring fatter than they went in. Then they walked home. Nansen went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and lived to 68. Every schoolchild is taught that a diet without vegetables will rot you from the inside. Two men spent a winter underground on nothing but fat and meat and came out fit to walk across the Arctic, and that was 130 years ago.

In April 1916 six men sailed 800 miles across the worst sea on earth in a 22-foot open boat. They were soaked to the skin for 16 days, and what kept them alive was wool they had been wearing for nearly two years. Shackleton's ship had been crushed in the Antarctic ice. He had got his 28 men to a bare rock called Elephant Island, where nobody would ever look for them. The only hope was the whaling station on South Georgia. He picked five men, decked over a lifeboat with canvas and packing cases, and set off. It was the Southern Ocean at the start of winter. Waves broke over the boat every few minutes. Ice built up on the deck until she began to sink under it, and they crawled out to chip it off. The reindeer-skin sleeping bags rotted and shed hair into everything. Nobody was dry for a single hour. Underneath, each man wore the same heavy woollen underclothes and jerseys he had put on when the ship went down. They had not been washed since 1914. Wet cotton pulls the heat out of a body. A man soaked in it at those temperatures would have been dead in a day. Wool does something no other fibre does. It goes on trapping warm air when it is drenched, and it gives off a little heat of its own as it takes up water. They hit South Georgia after sixteen days. Then three of them crossed its mountains on foot, in the same clothes, with screws from the boat driven through their boot soles. Every one of the 28 came home. No explorer since has been asked to test a fabric that hard. It passed.