Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (6 page)

The coal (and sixteen tons of petroleum) would also serve other critical purposes: to cook the food and heat the living quarters. One coal-burning stove was in the common space (saloon) and one, a cookstove, in the galley; both radiated warmth not only in those spaces but also to the cabins, or sleeping quarters, which surrounded the saloon and galley. There were six cabins, four private for those “in command” of the expedition or its scientific activities and two four-man cabins for the remaining nine (originally, the crew was to be eight, but a ninth was taken on after the
Fram
left Christiania).

Besides the arrangement of rooms that allowed for efficient thermal pooling and distribution, interior construction was a marvel. The living spaces were, in effect, a collective box wrapped overhead (ceiling), bulkhead (wall), and floor in layer upon layer of materials that could, individually or together, do their best to ward off intruding cold, preserve what precious heat there was, and properly deal with a devil—moisture—that often became a problem if not a curse on many an Arctic sojourn. The most interior wall paneling was lined inside with a linoleum (invented in England forty years earlier) that served as a barrier to the warm, moist air, which otherwise would condense to frost and ice as it encountered cold air coming through the hull. Then, moving toward the outside, there were successive layers of, in order, wool felt, softwood paneling, cork, and finally, next to the ship’s inside planking, a thick layer of tarred wool felt. The ceilings, where most of the heat would be lost, had additional layers, including two of just air and one of reindeer hair, for a total of fifteen inches of insulating material.

Attention to detail meant everything when it came to the comfort, or misery, of the crew. The floor consisted of half-foot-thick cork padding on top of the deck planks, then a wood floor, and then linoleum. All interior doors leading to the outside were small and extra thick, with several layers of wood and the spaces between packed with reindeer hair. Door thresholds were fifteen inches high, to act as dikes against the low-lying flood of cold air just beyond. The skylight into the saloon, allowing blessed natural light to come into the interior of the ship, was a place where a great deal of heat could be lost, so it was triple paned and air sealed. Even the heads of through-bolts were covered with felt pads, to keep the moist warmth from being conducted out and turning to ice as it hit the colder zones.

For the crew there were other amenities, for example, the heated saloon with a well-stocked library and a player organ, and a dynamo (generator) for electric lights, to brighten the seemingly eternal winter’s dark, powered either by a wide-bladed windmill on the main deck or a human-driven treadmill below.

If everything failed in one crushing, final catastrophe somewhere in the great
oceans or in the great ice, there was yet one more contingency that Archer had not overlooked. The
Fram
carried eight boats on deck, ready at the davits for lowering. Two were to serve as lifeboats in case of the ultimate emergency, whether plunked down on the ice or sailing an ice-strewn sea. They were big enough (twenty-nine feet long, nine feet wide) for the entire crew to live in, were covered with a deck, and held supplies for several months. If somehow the boats, too, were lost, the men could take to sledges across the ice, carrying kayaks for if and when they came to water.

›››
Hundreds of people, including shipbuilders, sailors of the northern seas, workmen, family members, and friends, attended the launching at Archer’s yard on October 26, 1892. Nansen’s wife, Eva, christened the ship by breaking a bottle of champagne against the stem and speaking out its name officially for the first time: “
Fram
skal den hede” (“
Fram
shall she be called”). Then, as related by James Archer in his biography of his great-grandfather Colin, “one of the
carpenters hoisted a red pennant with white letters on the waiting flagstaff on board and foreman Ambjørnsen cut the last hawser. Tradition says that because of her weight
Fram
slipped down the ways a little early. She created a wave that took some spectators that stood too near, but no one was injured. A little boy, who had seen the whole ceremony, shouted enthusiastically, ‘Once more!’”

›››
In the years to come, the
Fram
would carry its new flags—the Norwegian and its own—into the farthest, most unexplored reaches of the world.

I ›››
THE FIRST EXPEDITION
1893–1896

THE ARCTIC OCEAN
‹‹‹

2 ›
TRIP TO NOWHERE

T
o reach the starting point of the icebound journey across the pole, Fridtjof Nansen intended to take the
Fram
near to where the
Jeannette
had been frozen in, off Herald Island in the Chukchi Sea, some two hundred miles north of the Siberian coast. Originally, he had planned to get there just as the
Jeannette
had, through the Bering Strait, a months-long trip the length of the Atlantic Ocean, around Cape Horn, and up the Pacific, with a last, brief stopover in Alaska to select sledge dogs. Instead, he decided on the shorter, though more unknown and undoubtedly more dangerous, route from the Norwegian Sea around Scandinavia and then east through the Barents, Kara, Laptev, and East Siberian Seas, tracking along the convoluted, and often ice-choked, north coast of Russia. This route is the Northeast Passage, which was cleared successfully for the first time only fourteen years earlier by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld in the
Vega
. Nansen would arrange to pick up dogs in Siberia, early in the trip. So north instead of south they would go.

On June 24, 1893, the
Fram
weighed anchor and slowly made its way out of the harbor of Christiania. The rainy, gray day did nothing to alleviate the melancholy that always pervades crews and loved ones left behind at the departure of ships on long voyages, more so for one of such unknown duration, with so uncertain an outcome. On Nansen, prone to periodic black moods anyway, it lay especially heavily. In
Farthest North
, he said,

Leaving Christiania, Nansen’s excitement and determination about the upcoming journey were high but clouded by doubts, regrets, and melancholy that shadowed his writing in
Farthest North
. He was not alone in all the conflicted feelings at such a time, as some of the diaries of the crew revealed.

The
Fram
made its way south and into Larvik Bay the next day, tying up at Colin Archer’s shipyard where it had been launched. Ostensibly, it had come to pick up the lifeboats and other last-minute provisions, but there was likely another reason for this last visit to the place of its birth, a more sentimental or symbolic one. Archer was there. When the
Fram
departed a couple of days later, Archer was at the wheel and guided it out. Finally, he disembarked into a small boat that also carried Nansen’s brothers and watched the
Fram
leave.

“It was sad and strange,” Nansen wrote in
Farthest North
, “to see this last relic of home in that little skiff on the wide blue surface . . . I almost think a tear glittered on that fine old face as he stood erect in the boat and shouted a farewell to us and the
Fram
. Do you think he does not love the vessel? . . . Full speed ahead, and in the calm, bright summer weather, while the setting sun shed his beams over the land, the
Fram
stood out towards the blue sea, to get its first roll in the long heaving swell. They stood up in the boat and watched us for long.”

After departing Larvik, the
Fram
rounded the southern end of Norway and headed into the North Sea, where it soon revealed its open-water character in the building swells. It “rolled like a log, the seas broke in over the rails on both sides. . . . Seasick I stood on the bridge, occupying myself in alternately making libations to Neptune and trembling for the safety of the boats and the men.”
¹

Aboard were expedition leader Nansen and ten of the eleven-man crew. Otto Sverdrup, already appointed captain, was to be picked up later near Trondheim, halfway up the coast, nearer his home (a twelfth member would be hired in Tromsø). Nansen had selected the rest of the crew from the applications that had deluged him from around the world once news of the expedition had gone public. Even with so many to choose from, it was not easy to pick the select few who would go, for each man had to be a complete package of appropriate skills, physical strength, seamanship, skiing ability, and mental acuity. Nansen, out of national pride (especially as Norway at the time was struggling for independence
from Sweden) and the desire for cohesiveness, had also wanted an all-Norwegian crew. Moreover, each would have to possess a personality blending patience, forbearance, resiliency, and sufferance of privation, both social and material, qualities impossible to gauge from a written application. Only when all were on board, living and working in such close quarters, in such conditions, would these come to the fore, and be tested. He had wanted scientists, too, but none had applied for such a long and dangerous expedition.

Whalers and other long-distance merchant mariners of those times were accustomed to extended trips away from home, sometimes, like the
Fram
’s projection, for two or three or more unbroken years. For them there was at least assurance of relief by a change of scenery or of climate, through meeting other ships, or by landfall on a new and foreign shore to pick fruit, gather bird eggs, or engage in some kind of diversion. The men of the
Fram
would be stuck with each other on a solitary, isolated ship in an unremitting, lifeless expanse of ice, enduring months of sunless winters and unspeakable cold, day after day, month after month, year after year, until they broke free and went home, if and when that might be. Yes, it would take a special breed of person, more than just a smart, tough, skiing sailor, to make it through to the end and without going crazy in the process.

As on many ocean-going ships even today, the crew was a cast of characters, with varied backgrounds, training, education, and personalities. Some were married, some not. Some were outgoing, even boisterous, and others were quiet and reserved. Besides being relatively young men (most in their thirties), their only other common denominator was that they were all Norwegian—or were supposed to be—to satisfy Nansen’s prideful nationalistic intent and for the bond and concord arising, in theory at least, from sharing the same cultural identity.

The personnel organization was not as rigid and hierarchical as in the navy, with everyone assigned a rate and rank within departments, but more as on a merchant ship around duties and skills, and, because the crew was small, assisting others as situations demanded. Everyone worked side by side and ate meals together. Notwithstanding, there was a recognized formal cadre of “officers” in charge and “mates” to carry out their orders, the officers with the luxury of their own private cabins: Nansen as expedition leader (overall commander), Sverdrup as captain of the
Fram
, and Sigurd Scott-Hansen as navigator and second-in-command, while Henrik Blessing was in the special category of ship’s doctor. (The roles of “expedition leader” and “captain” sometimes got confused in their overlapping, fuzzy jurisdictional, and ego lines.)

Nansen readily picked Sverdrup, then aged 38, for the post of captain, based on what he knew about him, had seen for himself on the Greenland crossing, and with the respect he had that had grown out of their close association. He was strong in body, a highly proficient skier if not a flamboyant one, good with his hands, a sharpshooting hunter, and an experienced sailor, having spent many years at sea, eventually becoming mate and commanding officer of a coast guard boat. His poise and clearheadedness under duress were remarkable, exhibited years earlier when he was shipwrecked off the coast of Scotland and directed the rescue of the entire crew before he himself was saved from the foundering ship.

There were perhaps other, subtler, reasons Nansen had tapped Sverdrup for the job. They had similar childhoods, in spending a great deal of time outdoors, developing a physical and emotional closeness to the land and sea. There was a family tie: Nansen’s younger brother Alexander was a friend of Sverdrup’s and
had recommended him for the Greenland expedition. Sverdrup had participated in designing the
Fram
and had moved to Larvik to oversee the day-to-day construction. And, for all his brilliance, drive, and vision, Nansen, in the words of Roland Huntford, “was not exactly a leader of men, but he could inspire them.”
²
Or, as Arctic trekker, writer, and photographer Jerry Kobalenko put it, “Nansen’s strength was conception; Sverdrup’s was execution.”
³
Once inspired, however, the men would follow Sverdrup more willingly and loyally. Sverdrup’s calm, quiet steadiness was the counterpoise for Nansen’s more roller-coaster moodiness, impatience, and occasional irascibility. Sverdrup had the shipboard experience and thus the credibility with the men that Nansen lacked. Sverdrup was six years older, and those years were packed with experience that, combined with his laconic demeanor and unflinching, focused gaze, gave him a natural authority. In short, Nansen needed Sverdrup, for practical, but also subconscious, reasons.

At twenty-five, Sigurd Scott-Hansen was the youngest member of the crew and on active duty in the military. He had persuaded the navy to grant him a leave of absence to participate in the expedition, having attained the rank of first lieutenant in the Norwegian Navy the year before the
Fram
left. His hyphenated surname came from the union of a Norwegian father and Scottish mother. In contrast to most of the other crew, Sigurd was small in stature, with dark hair, reflecting his transnational heritage. Like Nansen, he was well educated and well spoken, an outcome of his graduation from the Naval Academy in Horten. In addition to his shipboard role as second-in-command, he was also in charge of the regular observations (meteorological, astronomical, and magnetic) to be conducted throughout the journey, work that Nansen deemed of high importance, indeed the primary purpose of the voyage.