To Fridjof Nansen   26 August 1890

26/8/90

Let me offer my double felicitation, dear Dr Nansen, to your nuptial happiness¹ and also to the glorious prospects for your great and ingenious arctic enterprise.² It is most munificent, that the Parliament of Norway voted £11,000, especially as the money-value there is so different to that of many other parts of the world. This grand act of liberality will at the present juncture be a help also to us here, while we collect the £5000 for Baron Nordenskiold's antarctic expedition. His Excellency the Governor of Victoria, the Earl of Hopetoun, has given us for the antarctic exploit of your great compatriot his powerful support, and will preside at a great meeting this week for the furtherance of this expedition.³ Last week the Vict. branch of the R.G.S.A. held a meeting, under my Presidency, when the subject was also anew advocated.⁴ It is now nearly 6 years, when I moved and Mr Macdonald seconded a proposition for forming a joint antarctic Committee of the R.S. Vict. and R.G.S.A. Vict. Branch, and all the time we have struggled to bring practical measures about. The British Association followed in the year afterwards to form an antarctic Committee also; but it is really now only that we have bright prospects. In Baron Nordenskiolds new expedition as well as in your own forthcoming endeavour, I trust, balloons will become available, if even only captive ones for ascending to moderate hights. I believe, to have been the first, to recommend balloons for polar explorations, and fully referred to the subject in my presidential geographic adress some years ago here.⁵ No difficulty could exist in generating hydrogen from sulphuric acid and zink in sufficient quantity or by passing water vapours over iron-file in a heated tube, as calm weather does occasionally occur, as you are aware, also in polar regions during nightless summer-days, & thus from a balloon bearings might be obtained for additional mapping.

Sir Thomas Elder has just unexpectedly written to me, offering to defray the whole expenses of an other great Australian Land-Expedition,⁶ he thus following the glorious example, set in an other direction by Baron Dickson.⁷ I am now also engaged, to promote this enterprise, so that it may be carried through in 1891. Some of us here, for instance Capt Pascoe of the Royal Navy and myself, hardly like the idea, that a lonely ship, however much fortified, should proceed to very far southern latitudes, where not even any land-vegetation and known safe harbours exist; nor game such as in the northern polar regions and where no whalers pass, and no aborigines exist. We hoped, that two ships might cooperate, and even now Commander Foyn might send out a whaler, and a Depot for both ships might be on Macquarie-Island. This is however ony ⁸ a personal expression of my own . The movement here now is based on only one ship proceeding, i.e. Baron Nordenskiolds; for that we are collecting.

With every hopeful wish for a glorious success of your expedition I remain your attached friend

Ferd. von Mueller