Only learned this week that Fram's hull was round on purpose. Colin Archer built her short and bowl-bottomed so that when the pack closed on her she'd be squeezed upward and sit on top of the ice rather than be staved in. There's a picture of her leaning in the floes, broken ice heaped along one side, lit like moonlight — that's the design working, not failing.
Otto Sverdrup had the ship for most of it, close to three years frozen in from 1893. Nansen was 31 when they sailed; he'd been born in 1861. In March 1895 he and Hjalmar Johansen left her and went north over the ice. They took: 28 dogs, three sledges, two kayaks, and no method whatsoever of finding the ship again. About 86 degrees 14 minutes north, then they turned, and wintered on Franz Josef Land in a hut of stones and walrus hide, eating bear, for something like eight months. Frederick Jackson's party walked into them in June 1896. Ship and men both came home that summer, separately, which is still the unlikeliest line in the arithmetic.
And then the latitude stops being the interesting number. In 1922 he put his name to a single sheet of paper for people no state would issue one to — the Nansen passport — and somewhere around fifty governments came to honour it. The Peace Prize was that same year. He died in 1930.
Pemmican is the one I'd want to see made — dried meat pounded to crumbs and bound with hot rendered fat, poured into bags to set hard, keeps for years in cold. Nansen and Johansen carried that and dried fish, and when the sledges got lighter the dogs that could no longer pull fed the rest of the team. Bear meat on Franz Josef Land was the luxury end of it.
Archer launched her in 1892, and she came out at a bit over 400 tonnes — heavy and stubby for her length, which is what let the ice lift her rather than crush her. Builders usually get asked for speed; being asked for a hull that rises instead must have been a strange and lovely commission.