Why an Arctic explorer really did value flat ice
Yet scientific men are still organizing expeditions to find the North Pole, because they are so fond of flat country.
A polar explorer could indeed be fond of flat country for a practical reason. In Farthest North, volume I, chapter VI, Nansen's January 1894 diary contrasts difficult pressure ice with smooth ice excellent for sledging. On January 15 he connects the promising surface with a possible journey by dogs and sledges towards the Pole. The inspected witness is Project Gutenberg's transcription of the Harper & Brothers English edition, copyright 1897, the year the work first appeared.
This supplies contemporary substance for the comic preference: flat ice makes travel easier. It also exposes the joke's displacement of motives. In his introduction, Nansen presents polar exploration as a pursuit of knowledge, while the diary treats surface conditions as a means of travel. Chesterton turns that useful means into the absurd purpose of an expedition. No wording here establishes that he had Nansen specifically in mind. The final sentence then shifts from physical geography to the idiom of getting on someone's wrong side: the inability to locate a man's ‘heart’ becomes a failure of sympathy as well as a joke about anatomy.
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