FARTHEST NORTH: Being a Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-96 and of a Fifteen Months' Sleigh Journey...

Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1897. 2 volumes. First edition. 16 chromolithographic colour plates from Nansen's own sketches, 120 plates, a profusion of illustrations in text, 4 large folding coloured maps at the rear of the volumes. Royal 8vo, publisher's original turquoise green cloth lettered in gilt on spines and covers with gilt pictorial decorations of the Fram and a journey through the drift-snow on the covers of both volumes. 510; 671, including index pp. A very handsome set, the cloth is bright and well preserved with no fading whatsoever and only very light evidence of use or age, two corners just a bit bumped, internally very clean and solid and in excellent order, folding maps all very well preserved. A HANDSOME FIRST EDITION COPY of the account of this highly important journey to prove that a drift-current sets across the polar regions from the Bering Strait and the neighborhood of the New Siberia Islands towards the east coast of Greenland. Nansen's theory was based on a number of indications, not the least of which was the discovery of portions of the wreck of the "Jeannette" which had been lost off the New Siberia Islands in 1881 but which were found on drift ice off the south-west coast of Greeenland.
His ship, the "Fram" was specially built of extraordinarily strong materials and of a design to be lifted by rather than crushed by the ice. The success of the theory, the expedition and the trek made northward over the ice on foot to a point farthest north is related in these two fine volumes. The text is accompanied by a profusion of fine illustration of which many are executed in color.