Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (4 page)

So there, he seemed to say with the finality of absolute self-assurance, someone beyond questioning. And all this was from a man who led one of the most harrowing, inglorious, even infamous expeditions in Arctic exploration history, albeit not all of his own making (see chapter 12). Apparently, his tenure there, however marred by mistakes and tragedy, had earned him a self-proclaimed right to pass judgment on someone who, it turned out, was far more prepared than he to head into the far unknown north. This is a common irony, as others have noted, in the legacy of polar exploration: there is often more honor in failure than in success, more victory in defeat than in victory. Human error and suffering in such extreme circumstances, it seems, make for much more compelling, enduring tales than those where everything goes just right.

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EEL & ELEPHANT

U
ndaunted by the doubters and the prophesiers of doom, a resolute Fridtjof Nansen was able to secure enough money (or at least the promise of it) to proceed. Most of the funds came from the king of Norway, the Norwegian government, and several wealthy private contributors, including well-known magnates of the still-extant Ringnes Brewing Company (now part of the Carlsberg Group), brothers Ellef and Amund Ringnes and Axel Heiberg (the latter also a Norwegian consul). The funds were not lavish by any means, and ongoing financing was always a concern and struggle. Nansen had to dig into his own pockets to help.

Naturally, the first and largest expense was for design and construction of the ship that would carry Nansen and crew on their perilous journey. For this, Nansen arrived at the doorstep of Colin Archer, a well-known naval architect and shipwright from the nearby coastal town of Laurvig (now Larvik), some sixty-five miles down-fjord from Christiania. (Larvik, coincidentally, was also the hometown of Thor Heyerdahl, a Nansen-like figure as scientist-explorer with unconventional free thinking, who first gained fame for his 1947 Pacific voyage of the
Kon-Tiki
.)

Nansen had first approached a shipyard with experience in construction of sealers, craft that were reinforced to some extent to contend with the Arctic-born ice they often encountered. He thought that they could translate their techniques into his envisioned ship. The shipyard, which built vessels according to passed-down, conventional tradition, could not accommodate that which was, for it, a radical new concept. The sealers, for example, were reinforced mostly at the bow and stern, for plowing or powering through the ice, or backing up to try again. Nansen’s ship needed the reinforcement especially from side to side, where the greatest pressures came to bear as the ship lay to, immobilized in the pack. Archer, on the other hand, though totally self-educated, was one of the few shipbuilders in Norway who worked from carefully drawn plans of his own creation, tailoring the characteristics of vessels to the conditions in which they were to work.

The first of his designs to gain attention, in Norway and eventually in countries beyond, were pilot boats, which ferried pilots from home ports to arriving ships through often-rough, current-swept, and shallow coastal waters. For generations pilot boats of the region had been of a similar kind, awkwardly adapted from open, sluggish fishing boats that were rowed or sailed to their awaiting charges. Archer came up with a new design, which, initially, conservative pilots were reluctant to adopt, until they could see its superior performance for themselves.

His pilot boats were bigger and stronger than traditional ones. With full main decks to enclose spaces below, they were safer and more comfortable. Being double ended and deep drafted, they could maneuver deftly in close quarters, regardless of the magnitude and direction of the seas. They were faster, too, a definite plus in the economics of their business, with their greater length and narrower beam. Archer also switched the planking from the traditional lapstrake (clapboard-like)
to carvel (smooth sided), to preclude damage inflicted to the strakes when the boats came alongside ships in heavy weather.

Archer carried many features of this design over to his better-known sailing rescue boats, the first of which, appropriately named the
Colin Archer
, was launched in 1893 (just after the
Fram
set sail north) for the recently formed Norwegian Society for the Rescue of the Shipwrecked. These double-enders were sturdy workhorses for the rough-and-tumble conditions in which they often found themselves: heavily ballasted; rather broad with a length-to-width ratio of three to one (forty-five feet long with a fifteen-foot beam); deep drafted at more than seven feet; armored with two courses of thick oak planking; braced by close-spaced, sawed Norwegian pine frames; and made relatively watertight (thus less prone to sinking) due to transverse bulkheads that compartmentalized the below-deck spaces. They were not swift, but more importantly in the job they had to do, they were steady, reliable, and seaworthy. Many of these features were also there in his masterpiece, the
Fram
.

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A humble and modest man, and at fifty-eight twice as old as Nansen, the clear-eyed, contemplative Archer was at first reluctant to take on this grand and risky project. He had no experience building polar ships, he said, perhaps not realizing then that no one else really did either. There was little time, he added, to design and construct such a vessel, if Nansen’s urgency was to be satisfied (he wanted the expedition to begin within three years). He undertook it nonetheless, drawn to the challenge it presented to him as a naval architect and perhaps realizing what such an enterprise, if successful, might mean for his business. It is quite likely also that when Nansen first came to meet him in Larvik in December 1890, Archer, like so many others, came under the spell of this energetic, magnetic personality and got caught up in the polar fever. Perhaps, too, Nansen awoke in the older man something of his own remembered dreams, imagination, and adventures of his youth: from the boy of Scottish immigrants who grew up on the coast of Norway to the young man traveling to America, Hawaiian Islands, and Australia, where he worked for years tending sheep, till he finally came home to settle down and produce his special breed of boats and ships for others to sail in.

By June of the next year, they sealed the deal with a contract. In consultation with Otto Sverdrup, trusted member of Nansen’s Greenland crossing and an experienced northern-water sailor, they began discussing ideas, pouring over plans and rejecting many, and building one after another of half models. (Half models,
scaled-down versions of the full-sized hull split lengthwise from stem to stern, are not toys. They are, and have been from the earliest days, an important early step in conceptualizing a plan and a way to visualize the hull in three dimensions. In the words of modern master wooden-boat builder Greg Rössel in
Building Small Boats
, “It [a half model] catches the eye and the imagination in a way that no photograph or set of lines plan could. The lure of the half model probably has something to do with the synthesis of the visual and the tactile . . . it can be examined by touch in the same way one tests the full-sized hull for fairness [smooth, unbroken lines or curves].”)

In his retrospective contribution to
The Norwegian North Polar Expedition, 1893–1896: Scientific Results
, Archer laid out some fundamental considerations for any ship that was to face what the
Fram
ultimately did. First, he acknowledged that “no previous ship had been built with this in mind, for this purpose.” There were no maps of where Nansen was going and no previous experience for him to benefit by and plan from. He would be on his own. Similarly, there were no prototypes or existing models for Archer and thus no established standards to go by. He would be proceeding from his own experience and intuition, and from what had gone wrong with other ships. His ship could not be made over from one that originally had an entirely different purpose. Such retrofits had been tried in the Arctic ice, and all ultimately had failed in one way or another. A specific, one-of-a-kind ship would be needed for a voyage that had never been attempted before: to be frozen in on purpose rather than by accident, whether due to overconfidence or bad timing.

Second, he knew, based on a long, sorrowful history of others, what the ship could never do. “To attempt to force a way through such ice was no part of the scheme. The part the ship would have to play was mainly a passive one. She would have to lie still and be squeezed.” This concept, simple and realistic as it was, would go against the bravura grain of many sea adventurers, who prided themselves on their strength, force of will, and personal action to conquer nature, no matter how terrible the odds. To them, passivity was, in effect, the same as succumbing, the flawed and fatal weakness of giving up. It would prove to be just the opposite in this special situation, as Archer had foreseen: yielding to a much greater, inexorable force and working not against it but with it would be not just a sign of strength but also the only way to salvation. Inuit had known this for millennia, but most white European explorers, often with cultural prejudices and rigid traditions of honor, had been loath to adopt another lifestyle regarded
as more “primitive” (notable exceptions are the Scotsman John Rae, Norwegian Eivind Astrup, and American Charles Francis Hall).

Third, closely related to the second, “it is sometimes expedient in an encounter to evade the full force of a blow rather than oppose it . . . something could be done to break the force of a ‘nip,’ and thus deprive it of half its terrors.” In this Archer was advocating for avoidance rather than confrontation as a way of “winning,” or at least surviving. This is exemplified in the core philosophy of the Japanese martial art aikido: One cannot defeat a stronger, quicker attacker by counterattacking or escape by running away. But by joining forces with an enemy, becoming intimate with it, so to speak, one can turn the aggression against itself and thereby neutralize it. “Ordinary” ships and boats, of course, employ this concept in their basic designs, such that wind, waves, and wateriness are not opposed but accommodated and even used to advantage. Craft that regularly dealt with ice, such as sealers, Archer noted, were made to rise up on the ice if pinched, avoiding direct impact with it (as do modern icebreakers, which ride up on the ice then let their weight fracture it from above before plowing a channel through). For a polar ship of this new undertaking, living with, indeed embracing, the feared elements of almost perpetual, and often lethal, cold and ice would require an unusual mindfulness to this principle. Archer himself had the image: “The whole craft should be able to slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice.”

Fourth, “the strength of a ship will vary inversely with size.” In other words, the larger the ship, the more susceptible it would be to being crushed in the ice. It was simply a matter of physics. Therefore, he thought the ship should be as small as possible while still carrying a crew sufficient to perform the mission and storing enough food and supplies to last its duration, actually beyond it in case things went wrong or took longer than expected. (Based on the timing of drift of the
Jeannette
’s remains, Nansen estimated his journey would take three years, but Archer planned for five, for both men and dogs.) This aligned well with Nansen’s conviction that a small crew, say no more than fifteen, was an appropriate size for an Arctic expedition, being more nimble, easier to manage, and easier to feed where food might be scarce, rather than the large, unwieldy groups, sometimes numbered over a hundred, that the British and Americans often sent out into these wildernesses.

Fifth, Archer recognized that, despite spending most of its time out of water, in a rock-hard, quasi-terrestrial, unusually harsh environment, the ship would still have to be a ship, seaworthy and capable of traversing the great and unpredictable
oceans, as well as navigating the shallower, tricky coastal zones, to and from its main goal. Nansen originally planned to reach the vicinity where the
Jeannette
had been beset, a terribly long cruise down the Atlantic Ocean, into the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez Canal, to the Indian Ocean, thence to the Pacific, and north through the Bering Strait. Even his ultimate route, following Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld’s trailblazing of the Northeast Passage in the
Vega
fifteen years earlier (north around Scandinavia and then east along the Russian-Siberia coast), entailed a tough journey through mostly unknown waters north of a huge, bleakly wild section of the world.

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In the summer of 1891, with all the ideas and considerations boiled down and melded into a single vision, Archer lofted the
Fram
into reality, at least on paper and in the collective minds of those who conceived of it. Not surprisingly, it would bear a strong resemblance, in overall shape and character if not in every detail, to its smaller contemporary under construction nearby, his first rescue boat, eventually to be named the RS1
Colin Archer
(rescue ship 1). But it was more than just looking alike, or having the same builder, that bound the two vessels together: the
Colin Archer
was made of leftover lumber and other materials from the
Fram
. They were kin, from their very conception and in their bones and skin.

At the main deck, the
Fram
would be 128 feet long, with a beam of 36 feet, an ungraceful, even tubby, three-to-one ratio for a ship (mimicking, again, his pilot and rescue boats), but necessary for its special purpose and to accommodate extensive internal bracing and buttressing. (There have been many unflattering similes offered on its looks: Roland Huntford, for example, variously described it as “rather like an egg cut in half,” “a cockleshell,” “hinting at the shape of a shoe,” or “a cradle”
⁴
; my father called it a “bathtub.”) Its carvel-planked hull would be smooth and rounded, without protuberances, so that the ice could not catch or grip anywhere. Even the chainplates, the attachments for the mast-supporting shrouds, were inboard instead of where they would normally be, outboard, to keep this symmetry.