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Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen 1861 - 1930

Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen was born on October 10, 1861 in Oslo Norway, and died at age 68 years old on May 13, 1930 at Polhøgda eiendom AS 11 Riiser-larsens vei, in Trondheim County, Trøndelag. Family, friend, or fan, this family history biography is for you to remember Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen.

Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen

October 10, 1861

Oslo, Norway

May 13, 1930

Polhøgda eiendom AS 11 Riiser-larsens vei, in Trondheim County, Trøndelag, 7020, Norway

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Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen Fridtjof Nansen (1861 - 1930)

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Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen's History: 1861 - 1930

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Introduction

Fridtjof Nansen - Norwegian Explorer Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen was a Norwegian polymath and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He gained prominence at various points in his life as an explorer, scientist, diplomat, and humanitarian. He led the team that made the first crossing of the Greenland interior in 1888, traversing the island on cross-country skis. Born: October 10, 1861, Oslo, Norway Died: May 13, 1930, Polhøgda Children: Odd Nansen, Kåre Nansen, Liv Nansen, Irmelin Nansen Spouse: Sigrun Munthe (m. 1909–1930), Eva Nansen (m. 1889–1907) Born: October 10, 1861, Oslo, Norway Died: May 13, 1930, Polhøgda Children: Odd Nansen, Kåre Nansen, Liv Nansen, Irmelin Nansen Spouse: Sigrun Munthe (m. 1909–1930), Eva Nansen (m. 1889–1907)
10/10

1861

Birthday

October 10, 1861

Birthdate

Oslo Norway

Birthplace

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Professional Career

Fridtjof Nansen Biographical Fridtjof Nansen (October 10, 1861-May 13, 1930) was born at Store Frøen, near Oslo. His father, a prosperous lawyer, was a religious man with a clear conception of personal duty and moral principle; his mother was a strongminded, athletic woman who introduced her children to outdoor life and encouraged them to develop physical skills. And Nansen’s athletic prowess was to prove of the utmost importance to his career. He became expert in skating, tumbling, and swimming, but it was his expertise in skiing that was to play such a large role in his life. Not massively built, Nansen was tall, supple, strong, hard. He possessed the physical endurance to ski fifty miles in a day and the psychological self-reliance to embark on long trips, with a minimum of gear and only his dog for company. In school Nansen excelled in the sciences and in drawing and, upon entering the University of Oslo in 1881, decided to major in zoology. In the next fifteen years he united his athletic ability, his scientific interests, his yearning for adventure, and even his talent for drawing in a series of brilliant achievements that brought him international fame. In 1882 he shipped on the sealer Viking to the east coast of Greenland. On this trip of four and a half months, the scientist in him made observations on seals and bears which, years later, he updated and turned into a book; but at the same time the adventurer became entranced by this world of sea and ice. Obtaining the post of zoological curator at the Bergen Museum later that year, Nansen spent the next six years in intensive scientific study, punctuating his work with visits to some of the great laboratories on the Continent and once by an extraordinary trek across Norway from Bergen to Oslo and back on skis. In 1888 he successfully defended his dissertation on the central nervous system of certain lower vertebrates for the doctorate at the University of Oslo. For a long time Nansen had been evolving a plan to cross Greenland, whose interior had never been explored. He decided to cross from the uninhabited east to the inhabited west; in other words, once his party was put ashore, there could be no retreat. In 1926, explaining his philosophy to the students at St. Andrews in his rectorial address, Nansen said that a line of retreat from a proposed action was a snare, that one should burn his boats behind him so that there is no choice but to go forward. The party of six survived temperatures of -45° C, climbed to 9,000 feet above sea level, mastered dangerous ice, exhaustion, and privation to emerge on the west coast early in October of 1888 after a trip of about two months, bringing with them important information about the interior. In the next four years, Nansen served as curator of the Zootomical Institute at the University of Oslo, published several articles, two books, The First Crossing of Greenland (1890) and Eskimo Life (1891), and planned a scientific and exploratory foray into the Arctic. Basing his plan on the revolutionary theory that a current carried the polar ice from east to west, Nansen put his ship, the Fram [Forward], an immensely strong and cunningly designed ship, into the ice pack off Siberia on September 22, 1893, from which it emerged thirty-five months later on August 13, 1896, into open water near Spitzbergen. Nansen was not aboard. Realizing that the ship would not pass over the North Pole, Nansen and one companion, with thirty days’ rations for twenty-eight dogs, three sledges, two kayaks, and a hundred days’ rations for themselves, had set out in March of 1895 on a 400-mile dash to the Pole. In twenty-three days they traveled 140 miles over oceans of tumbled ice, getting closer to the Pole than anyone had previously been. Turning back, they made their way southwest to Franz Josef Land, wintered there in 1895-1896, started south again in May, reached Vardo, Norway, the same day the Fram reached open water and were reunited with the crew on August 21 at Tromsø. The voyage was a high adventure but it was also a scientific expedition, the Fram serving as an oceanographic-meteorological-biological laboratory. Holding a research professorship at the University of Oslo after 1897, Nansen published six volumes of scientific observations made between 1893 and 1896. Continuing thereafter to break new ground in oceanic research, he was appointed professor of oceanography in 1908. Nansen interrupted his research in 1905 to urge the independence of Norway from Sweden and, after the dissolution of the Union, served as his country’s minister to Great Britain until May of 1908. In the next few years he led several oceanographic expeditions into polar regions, but once the world was plunged into war in 1914 and exploration was halted, he became increasingly interested in international political affairs. For almost a year in 1917-1918, as the head of a Norwegian delegation in Washington, D. C., Nansen negotiated an agreement for a relaxation of the Allied blockade to permit shipments of essential food. In 1919, he became president of the Norwegian Union for the League of Nations and at the Peace Conference in Paris was an influential lobbyist for the adoption of the League Covenant and for recognition of the rights of small nations. From 1920 until his death he was a delegate to the League from Norway. In the spring of 1920, the League of Nations asked Nansen to undertake the task of repatriating the prisoners of war, many of them held in Russia. Moving with his customary boldness and ingenuity, and despite restricted funds, Nansen repatriated 450,000 prisoners in the next year and a half. In June, 1921, the Council of the League, spurred by the International Red Cross and other organizations, instituted its High Commission for Refugees and asked Nansen to administer it. For the stateless refugees under his care Nansen invented the «Nansen Passport», a document of identification which was eventually recognized by fifty-two governments. In the nine-year life of this Office, Nansen ministered to hundreds of thousands of refugees – Russian, Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian, Assyro-Chaldean – utilizing the methods that were to become classic: custodial care, repatriation, rehabilitation, resettlement, emigration, integration. The Red Cross in 1921 asked Nansen to take on yet a third humanitarian task, that of directing relief for millions of Russians dying in the famine of 1921-1922. Help for Russia, then suspect in the eyes of most of the Western nations, was hard to muster, but Nansen pursued his task with awesome energy. In the end he gathered and distributed enough supplies to save a staggering number of people, the figures quoted ranging from 7,000,000 to 22,000,000. In 1922 at the request of the Greek government and with the approval of the League of Nations, Nansen tried to solve the problem of the Greek refugees who poured into their native land from their homes in Asia Minor after the Greek army had been defeated by the Turks. Nansen arranged an exchange of about 1,250,000 Greeks living on Turkish soil for about 500,000 Turks living in Greece, with appropriate indemnification and provisions for giving them the opportunity for a new start in life. Nansen’s fifth great humanitarian effort, at the invitation of the League in 1925, was to save the remnants of the Armenian people from extinction. He drew up a political, industrial, and financial plan for creating a national home for the Armenians in Erivan that foreshadowed what the United Nations Technical Assistance Board and the International Bank of Development and Reconstruction have done in the post-World War II period. The League failed to implement the plan, but the Nansen International Office for Refugees later settled some 10,000 in Erivan and 40,000 in Syria and Lebanon. Nansen died on May 13, 1930, and was buried on May 17, Norway’s Constitution Day.
05/13

1930

Death

May 13, 1930

Death date

Unknown
Cause of death

Polhøgda eiendom AS 11 Riiser-larsens vei, in Trondheim County, Trøndelag 7020, Norway
Death location

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Obituary

Nobel Peace Prize Recipient. Fridtjof Nansen received worldwide recognition after being awarded the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize. Already famous worldwide as the Norwegian, who had explored areas of the frozen Arctic, Nansen became the first High Commissioner for Refugees appointed by the League of Nations. After World War I, he accepted the position of director of the exchanges of 400,000 prisoners of war between Russia, Germany, and the former Austria-Hungary Empire. In addition, he engaged in humanitarian relief work in 1921 during the severe famine in the Soviet Union. His work for prisoners of war and starving people earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. Being one of the few candidates who received the Nobel Peace Prize in the first year of nomination, he received 3 nominations within 18 months. He was justified in receiving the coveted award. Born the son of a lawyer, he was a proud Norwegian patriot whose ancestry contains brave warriors for centuries. Although his family was wealthy, they enjoyed a simple, plain lifestyle. He excelled in sports such as skating, tumbling, swimming, and skiing, which would play a prominent role in his life. He won the national cross-country skiing championship twelve times in succession and at age eighteen, broke the world record for one-mile skating. He had the physical endurance to ski fifty miles in one day and the psychological and emotional self-reliance to have only his dog as a companion on long, isolated trips. In 1881, he entered the University of Oslo, studying zoology. The next year he accepted a position at the University Museum of Bergen, where he researched the central nervous system of lower marine creatures and wrote the classic scientific paper "The Structure and Combination of Histological Elements of the Central Nervous System," which earned him a doctorate degree in physiology in 1887. He led several expeditions to the Arctic starting in 1893, 1895 to 1896, which was followed by an oceanographic expedition in the North Atlantic from 1900 and again in 1910 to 1914. The Norwegian Parliament, along with private sources, funded the cost of his team's explorations. One trip in 1888 involved traveling across Greenland from the unpopulated eastern shore to the west over mountains reaching a peak of 8,920 feet. No European had penetrated this far into Greenland's inland snowfields. At this point in his life, he married Eva Helene Sars, a promising opera singer. Although the trip was considered suicidal, he sailed on a three-year voyage to the frozen polar ice cap of the North Pole, traveling further than anyone had ever done before. On March 14, 1895, Nansen and a colleague left the ship with dogs, kayaks, and sleds, making a desperate bid for the North Pole, yet the cold freezing winds kept them 300 miles south of their goal and not reaching the north pole. At this point, he and his colleagues spent the winter surviving on walrus blubber and polar bear steaks. A map of the Fram Voyage and Nansen's Journey is on display at the Fram Museum in Frammuseet, Norway. He published a host of detailed books about his journeys, which include his drawings and are still very popular in the 21st century. In 1905 as Norway desired to break from Swedish rule and become a free and separate country, stress between the two countries was tense to the point of the war, but he acted as a diplomat in arbitration, settling a smooth separation. He was offered the position of Norwegian king or president but refused, yet became Norway's Ambassador to Great Britain serving from 1906 to 1908. He helped to design Polhøgda, his home, which was a 3-story English manor house in Italian Renaissance style and was finished by 1910. While he was away in England, his wife Eva died of pneumonia in December of 1907, leaving him with five young children. With his long periods away from home traveling, his children had surrogate parents. A long-time friend Sigrun Munthe became Nansens' second wife in 1919. In the spring of 1920, the League of Nations invited him to undertake his first humanitarian effort of repatriating the prisoners of war, many of them held in Russia. In June of 1921, while helping several organizations, he created a legal document called the "Nansen Passport," which was recognized by 52 countries to help displaced refugees to return to their homeland or settle elsewhere instead of being in refugee camps without papers. In 1921 he was invited by the Red Cross to direct relief for millions of Russians dying in the famine of 1921 to 1922. In 1922 he was invited by the Greek government, with the approval of the League of Nations, to help with Greek refugees from Asia Minor after the Turks had defeated the Greek army. He arranged the exchange of 1,250,000 Greeks living on Turkish soil for 500,000 Turks living in Greece. Using his Nobel Prize monetary funds, he appropriated funds to give many refugees provisions to start a new life. In 1925 he was invited by the League of Nations to do his fifth humanitarian effort by relocating 10,000 Armenians, which he did. His health had declined after a bout with influenza and later phlebitis, yet he continued to work. He campaigned for Norwegian disarmament but suddenly died of heart failure before this occurred. After a six-year-long bureaucratic halt, his ashes were buried on October 10, 1936, in the gardens surrounding his home, Polhøgda, instead of a cemetery with the King of Norway attending the small service. Family Members Spouse Eva Helene Sars Nansen 1858–1907 Children Kaare Nansen 1897–1960 Odd Nansen 1901–1973 Polhøgda Cemetery Lysaker Bærum kommune Akershus fylke Norway Records on Ancestry Fridtjof Nansen

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Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen lived 8 years shorter than the average family member when died at the age of 68.

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