by Lynne Cox
On September 22, Nansen fell through a snow bridge into a seemingly bottomless fissure and would have been lost forever. The only thing that saved him was that the gap was narrow, and he was able to pull himself out. Finally, after a enduring a month of unfathomable physical and mental challenges, on September 24 they sighted water, climbed off the ice cap, and reached Ameralik Fjord. They had completed the first crossing from the east coast to the west coast of Greenland. Nansen wrote: “Words can not describe what it was for us only to have the earth and stones again beneath our feet, or the thrill that went through us as we felt the elastic heather on which we trod, and smelt the fragrant scent of grass and moss.” Thanks to that achievement, they were able to draw a more detailed map of Greenland, and gather a wealth of observations and scientific data about Greenland’s ice cap, climate, and geography.
Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Neumann Sverdrup, Oluf Christian Dietrichson, and Kristian (Kristiansen) Trana after completing their forty-two-day crossing of the Greenland ice cap. They practiced using Greenland Inuit kayaks to explore the coastal area, 1888–89.
Nansen and his crew built a boat in Ameralik Fjord, and one of his crew successfully rowed north along the west coast of Greenland and reached Godthaab, a Danish and Greenlandic town.
The crew wintered in Godthaab, then sailed back on the Hvidbjørnen to Copenhagen on May 21 and then home to Christiania Fjord on May 30, 1889.
They were greeted by a flotilla of sailboats, a fleet of steamers, and crowds of people waiting at the head of the fjord, some holding on to dogs that were barking and wagging their tails expectantly. The air crackled with energy and warmth as cheer after cheer rose from the crowd. People pressed closer together and balanced on the sparkling slabs of granite rock that rounded the edges of the fjord. Deeper into the fjord, people climbed on top of black volcanic rock striated like the pages of a closed book. People stood on tiptoe, bounced up and down, twisted and turned, strained their necks to see where Nansen was.
CHAPTER 4
Amundsen’s Inspiration
Seventeen-year-old Roald Amundsen was in that crowd. He wrote: “It was the day Fridtjof Nansen returned from his Greenland expedition. The young Norwegian ski runner came up the Christiania Fjord, on that bright sunny day, his erect form surrounded by the halo of universal admiration at the deed he had accomplished, the miracle, the impossible.”
In those moments of seeing Fridtjof Nansen, the course of Amundsen’s life suddenly became apparent to him. He knew what he wanted to do. Amundsen wrote in his memoirs: “I wandered with throbbing pulses amid the bunting and the cheers, and all my boyhood’s dreams reawoke to tempestuous life. For the first time something in my secret thoughts whispered clearly and tremulously: If you could make the North West Passage!”
This was an enormous goal. For four hundred years men had attempted to find a better sea route to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Many had died in the attempt. No one had ever successfully navigated through the Northwest Passage.
The attempts to find the Northwest Passage had helped map the uncharted coastlines of North, South, and Central America and segments of the Arctic.
Amundsen dreamed of finding this passage, but his mother diverted his dreams, and she landlocked him. Her husband and three other sons were in the shipping business, but she decided that Roald would be different. He would not be allowed to sail; instead, she insisted that he study medicine and become a physician.
Amundsen went through the motions and entered medical school and halfheartedly tried to live up to her expectations. But he held on to his dream and secretly began to train. He also kept close track of what Nansen was doing.
Something very significant had caught Nansen’s attention. In 1884, before his crossing of Greenland, he had read an article by Professor Henrik Mohn, the director of the Meteorological Institute in Christiania, in the Norwegian Morgenblad that resulted in a theory of transpolar drift. Items from the wreck of the Jeannette had been discovered by an Eskimo near Julianehåb, on the southwest shores of Greenland. The artifacts included a list of provisions signed by Lieutenant Commander De Long, a list of the Jeannette’s boats, and a pair of oilskin pants labeled with the name Louis Noros, one of the Jeannette’s crew. Professor Mohn thought that these items must have drifted right across the Arctic Ocean.
Nansen had a moment of great insight and clarity. He deciphered what the tall tales and Mohn’s theory meant and wrote: “It immediately occurred to me that here lay the route ready to hand. If a floe could drift right across the unknown region, that drift might also be enlisted in the service of exploration—and my plan was laid.”
Nansen proposed to the Christiania Geographical Society, one of his supporters, the idea that he could use the ice. Instead of fighting the ice barrier as other polar explorers had done, he would drift with the ice.
I believe that if we pay attention to the actually existent forces of nature, and seek to work with and not against them, we shall thus find the safest and easiest method of reaching the Pole. It is useless, as previous expeditions have done, to work against the current, we should see if there is not a current we can work with. The Jeannette expedition is the only one, in my opinion, that started on the right track, though it may have been unwittingly and unwilling. (Farthest North, 11)
What Nansen proposed had never been achieved; he knew that there would be many naysayers, but he saw there was a wealth of knowledge that could be attained just by venturing out into the unknown and doing it in a new way—using the ice to carry the ship north, rather than fighting it. Nansen wrote:
Many people however, will certainly urge: “In all currents there are eddies and backwaters; suppose, then, you get into one of these, or perhaps stumble on an unknown land up by the Pole and remain lying fast there, how will you extricate yourselves?” To this I would merely reply, as concerns the backwater, that we must get out of it just as surely as we got into it, and that we shall have provisions for five years. And as regards to the other possibility, we should hail such an occurrence with delight, for no spot on earth could well be found of greater scientific interest. (Farthest North, 19)
Like almost anyone who attempted to do something new or different or creative or who wanted to explore the unknown, Nansen faced an onslaught of expert naysayers, including one of the world’s most respected Arctic explorers, Admiral Sir Leopold Francis McClintock. Admiral McClintock was in the British Royal Navy, and he had been persuaded by Lady Jane Franklin to participate in a series of searches from 1848 to 1859 to find her husband, Sir John Franklin, a British Royal Navy explorer who had attempted to find the Northwest Passage.
Lady Jane Franklin had explored Tasmania and other parts of Australia at a time when this wasn’t done by women. She had heard reports from Dr. John Rae, a physician and Arctic explorer who had also searched for the Northwest Passage, and who had received information from the Inuit living on King William Island, that Franklin and his men were dead, and that some men had reverted to cannibalism.
Lady Jane would not believe Dr. Rae’s account, and she lobbied hard and also offered a reward to find out more about the fate of her husband and his expedition. Admiral McClintock set out on a series of searches largely financed by Lady Franklin. McClintock was only able to find the official record of Franklin’s expedition. Both of Franklin’s ships, the Erebus and Terror, were crushed by ice and sank in the Arctic waters off northern Canada. But in the course of McClintock’s search he explored and mapped eight hundred miles of land that had been previously unknown. McClintock had had enormous experience in polar waters, and he had every reason to doubt Nansen’s theory.
McClintock wasn’t alone. Sir Allen Young also had extreme doubts. Young had assisted McClintock as the sailing master aboard the Fox from 1857 to 1869 and had helped search for John Franklin. After they completed these expeditions with little new information about Franklin’s fate, Sir Allen Young decided to mount two subsequent Arctic expeditions in 1875 and 1876. He sailed on the
Pandora in 1875 but made little headway. The Pandora’s path in the Arctic was blocked by ice, and he and his expedition had to return to port. The following year, Young made a second attempt with the intended destination of King William Island, but the British Admiralty requested instead that he check on a depot for the British Nares expedition. So Young diverted his course and assisted the British scientific expedition.
The following year, James Bennett, the New York publisher, purchased the Pandora and refitted, reinforced, and renamed the ship—the Jeannette. The Jeannette would be the ship Lieutenant Commander De Long sailed in that illfated attempt to reach the North Pole via the Bering Strait. Young knew the Jeannette had been crushed in the icy waters off northern Siberia. He was concerned that Nansen might meet a similar fate, and at that time, no one knew if the North Pole was floating on the ice or if it was a part of the land.
Young wrote:
Dr. Nansen assumes the blank space around the axis of the earth to be a pool of water or ice: I think the great danger to contend with will be the land in nearly every direction near the Pole. Most previous navigators have continued seeing land again and again farther and farther north. These Jeannette relics may have drifted through narrow channels, and thus finally arrived at their destination, and, I think, it would be an extremely dangerous thing for the ship to drift through them, where she might impinge upon the land, and be kept for years. (Farthest North, 23)
Another reputable polar explorer who doubted Nansen was Adolphus Greely, a U.S. Army general who led the Lady Franklin Bay expedition from 1881 to 1884, an expedition that was meant to establish a chain of meteorological observation stations as part of the First Polar Year and make astronomical and magnetic observations. Greely believed that Nansen was making a grave mistake. Greely and his crew explored the northwestern coastline of Greenland and crossed Ellesmere Island from east to west, but they were in desperate shape when their two relief ships failed to find them. Henrietta, Greely’s wife, insisted that the search for her husband and the crew continue. The crew of the Bear found Greely on Cape Sabine. Of the twenty-five men who had been on Greely’s expedition, nineteen had died from starvation, hypothermia, and drowning. Greely had endured great hardship, and in response to Nansen’s idea, he wrote a bleak and discouraging article in 1891:
It strikes me as almost incredible that the plan here advanced by Dr. Nansen should receive encouragement or support. It seems to me to be based on fallacious ideas as to the physical conditions within the Polar Regions, and to foreshadow, if attempted, barren results, apart from the suffering and death among its members. (Farthest North, 23)
There were a few polar authorities who endorsed Nansen’s plan; the most esteemed and helpful was the scientist Alexander Georg Supan, an Austrian geographer and editor of Petermanns Mitteilungen, who supported Nansen’s ideas and lent some advice. Professor Supan believed that the prevailing winds in the polar basin would aid a person attempting to sail north.
Based on Professor Supan’s theory and his own research, Nansen established an enormous and bold goal: to “investigate the great unknown region that surrounds the Pole, and these investigations will be equally important, from a scientific point of view, whether the expedition passes over the polar point itself or at some distance from it.”
What was exceptional about Nansen was that he listened to his critics and considered what McClintock, Young, and Greely had written, and with those comments in mind, he developed a better plan. He believed it would take up to three years to achieve his goal, but decided to prepare a ship for men and dogs for a five-year journey. He also knew he needed plenty of warm clothing. Equally important to the success of the expedition was the ship he would use. On May 30, 1890, Nansen managed to gain support and funds for the expedition from the king of Norway and the Norwegian government, and he obtained sponsorship from private donors. He demonstrated his brilliance when he created a new design for the ship, one he believed could not be crushed by the ice—Nansen, along with shipbuilder Colin Archer, designed the Fram in the shape of an egg.
The bow, stern, and keel were rounded to prevent the ice from gripping the ship. And the Fram was small and light, but very strong in proportion to her weight, to be able to maneuver in and navigate through the ice. Nansen and Archer believed that the sides of the ship needed to be superstrong. They chose Italian oak, and the thickness of the Fram’s sides were from twenty-four to twenty-eight inches as a way to externally resist the ice, and internally, the ship was reinforced with braces and stanchions and built so it would be watertight. A 220-horsepower engine powered the ship. In calm weather the ship could reach up to seven knots.
The living quarters were abaft under the half deck. In many ways the interior looked like a small floating hotel. There was a salon with a mechanical organ, a large dining room, and a drawing room in the middle of the ship and sleeping cabins on either side with electric lights. Nansen had also thought of how to make the ship warm and comfortable. The six very small shared bedrooms on the ship were arranged in a way to protect them from the cold environment outside. There was a large library on board and room for Nansen’s collection of instruments used to gather data throughout the expedition.
While the Fram was being built, Nansen began selecting his crew, and everyone who applied had to be examined and deemed strong and healthy. There would be a total of thirteen members of the expedition including Nansen.
On June 24, 1893, the day Nansen was about to set off with his crew to attempt to reach the farthest north, he reflected heavily on leaving his home, his wife, and his daughter. He wrote:
Behind me lay all I held dear in life. And what before me? How many years would pass ere I should see it all again? What would I not have given at that moment to be able to turn back; but up at the window little Liv was sitting clapping her hands. Happy child, little do you know what life is—how strangely mingled and how full of change. Like an arrow that little boat sped over Lysaker Bay, bearing me on the first stage of a journey on which life itself, if not more, was staked.
For the next month Nansen, Otto Sverdrup, and the eleven-man crew sailed through Norwegian waters, turned east at Vardø, and then sailed through the Barents Sea and along the northern Siberian coast.
Before Nansen set sail, he contacted his friend Baron Edward von Toll, an Arctic explorer from St. Petersburg, Russia, to help him find dogs in Siberia for the expedition. Baron von Toll was organizing his own second scientific expedition to Siberia and the New Siberian Islands. Through contacts, the baron arranged for Alexander Ivanovitch Trontheim to find thirty East Siberian dogs, which were considered the best draft animals for the expedition, and the baron advised Nansen to create some depots on the New Siberian Islands that would hold provisions in case something happened to the Fram and the crew needed to return the way they had come. When the baron left on his own expedition to the New Siberian Islands, he put in three additional depots for Nansen.
On July 29 Nansen reached Khabarova, the village where he had prearranged with Trontheim to take on the sled dogs that they would use if something happened to the Fram and they needed to find their way home by way of the ice. A boat approached the Fram from shore. In German, Nansen asked one of the men, who had a kind face and a red beard, if he was Trontheim. He was, and along with him on the boat was a group of fine-looking Russian traders and pleasant-featured Samoyeds. Nansen’s second question to Trontheim was about the ice in the Kara Sea. Trontheim said he thought it would be favorable, and some of the Samoyeds who had been seal hunting in the entrance to the Yugor Strait a day or two before thought it would be okay.
Trontheim took Nansen to the dog camp to collect the dogs for the expedition. Nansen wrote:
As we approached it the howling and barking kept getting worse and worse. When a short distance off we were surprised to see a Norwegian flag on the top of a pole. Trontheim’s face beamed with joy as our eyes fell on it. It was, he said, under the same flag as our expedition that his had been undertaken.
There stood the dogs tied up, making a deafening clamor. Many of them appeared to be well-bred animals—long-haired, snow-white, with up-standing ears and pointed muzzles. With their gentle, good-natured looking faces they at once ingratiated themselves in our affections.
After working with the dogs for a few days, they brought them aboard and put them on the forward deck. Captain Sverdrup noted the southern wind had been blowing for several days, and he was certain that they would be able to sail open waters all the way to the New Siberian Islands. On August 3, they set off and continued sailing east for three months, deeper into the darkness of November. Nansen worked side by side with his crew, but the days dragged by, and he was filled with self-questioning and self-doubt. He wrote:
Here I sit in the still winter night on the drifting ice-floe, and see only stars above me. Far off I see the threads of life twisting them into the intricate web which stretches unbroken from life’s sweet morning dawn to the eternal death-stillness of the ice. Thought follows thought—you pick the whole to pieces, and it seems so small—but high above all towers one form.… Why did you take this voyage? Could I do otherwise? Can the river arrest its course and run up hill. My plan has come to nothing. That palace of theory which I reared, in pride and self-confidence, high above all silly objections has fallen like a house of cards at the first breath of the wind. Build up the most ingenious theories and you may be sure of one thing—that fact will defy them all. Was I so very sure? Yes, at times, but that was self-deception, intoxication. A secret doubt lurked behind all reasoning. It seemed as though the longer I defended my theory, the nearer I came to doubting it. But no, there is no getting over the evidence of the Siberian driftwood. But if, after all, we are on the wrong track, what then? Only disappointed human hopes, nothing more. And if we perish, what will it matter in the endless cycles of eternity? (Farthest North, 124–25)
