The North Pole lies beneath perpetual ice. It can be reached only on snowshoes, by dogsled expeditions, if at all. In summer, however, the broad expanse of ice is crisscrossed by fissures and crevasses that have emerged from the melting ice sheet under the weak rays of the sun. Yet in winter, when these breaks in the ice are frozen over, the rigors of the weather are too great. For four months, night is total. One must therefore make use of the short summer.

To best reach the pole by water, daring explorers had occasionally entrusted their lives to an enormous ice floe! But they did not find this method a happy one. For they moved northward on the ice floe (it was vast), the floe drifted southward, and all was in vain. But in those years, at the end of the nineteenth century, a world-renowned arctic explorer (it was not my father) came as close to that coveted piece of cold ground as was possible given the technical means of the time, that is, without the use of radiotelegraphic devices and without airplanes or airships. His method was the same as my father’s; here, as in much else, there was only one practical way. For him it succeeded. Not for my father. Was the other more astute? Perhaps not. He merely had fewer rats on board.

Now what was the method? Many expeditions had undertaken the quixotic journey to the legendary pole without success. All had failed in different ways, at different places.

Years earlier one of these ships, the Jeanette, had arrived at a spot north of the North Siberian Islands where it could advance no further in the pack ice. Captain and crew leave the ship. Save themselves. The three-master remains. Masses of ice pile up titanically. More and more icebergs approach, irresistibly propelled, the entire horizon, the broad steel-blue expanse of sea is filled with them. Gleaming greenish-blue, hung with long beards of melted ice, sparkling in the northern lights, they gradually sail up to the ship’s walls from all sides. The day comes when they join, soundlessly pressed together by tremendous forces. The little ship is squashed like a bug between two smooth fingernails. It cracks. It is done for. The dense ice mass stands like a mountain range grown up over millions of years. Polar bears, arctic foxes, arctic hares, seals, occasional birds, and many other animals draw near and pass by. The timbers of the ruined, abandoned ship, the yards and chains, the planks and chests, the ropes and sails, all are frozen into the masses of ice. Snow covers them. All is silent. The moon, a glassy ball, then a half moon, then a delicate crescent, then back again—it never vanishes from the sky, except when snowstorms obscure it. Then the sky lightens: the stars come out and shine. The polar foxes pursue their scents. Solitary birds hang in the misty, somber air, their pearly wings outstretched.

The hulk is not released until spring, when the ice breaks up under the oblique rays of the sun and the warmer breezes. The sea is open now.

Does it follow that years later one would necessarily find all the wreckage of the ship in the same area? No. It is discovered at a great distance from these North Siberian Islands. On the east coast of Greenland—that is, beyond the North Pole. A journey of thousands of miles. Blind, pilotless, the wreckage of the ship found the one practical route. Men with all their scientific knowledge and experience were unable to find it. A slow but steady current must thus lead from North Siberia over the North Pole to Greenland. What was the conclusion? A ship must be so solidly built, the sides, ribs, and keel reinforced in such a way as to be able to withstand even the tremendous pressure of the masses of ice bearing down upon them. If the pole is not reached on the first approach during the short summer, one must allow oneself to be frozen in at the spot where the Jeanette went down. At the next thaw the drift will then wash the ship into the region of the pole, close enough that it can perhaps be reached with dogsleds obtained from the natives.

The world-renowned arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen succeeded in this. My father would have succeeded before Nansen, if not for the rats.

No ship of any size without rats. But even the smaller ones have plenty of splendid specimens. New ships like my father’s are not spared them any more than old, run-down crates marinated in all sorts of harbor filth like my ship, the Mimosa. No sure method of ridding the old tubs of rats is known, and the new ships are tenanted by these boldest of seafarers immediately, the moment they take on their first cargo. On long voyages their numbers increase in geometric progression, provided they have enough to eat. On sailing ships like my father’s, which are provisioned for periods of years, they find colossal stores.