Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  They soon found the sledges were still too heavy for the dogs to haul smoothly or well and were forced to unload some of the provisions, including two of the edible chocks. After covering only four miles after leaving the Fram, they stopped early and set up camp for the night, all seven men together in one big tent. The next morning late, they all continued together until the send-off party, giving their good-byes and good lucks, turned back in order to reach the Fram by evening.

  Nansen and Johansen headed north, struggling over increasingly difficult ice. They stopped early again and assessed their situation. The sledges were still too heavy and the going too slow. With the loads and in this cold, it would be too hard on the dogs. They could make better time later in the month when the days were lighter and the ice smoother. Nansen decided to turn back, once again. Back again, they set to redesigning and repacking the sledges one more time and had another reviewing and rethinking of what they should do.

  On March 14, almost a month after Nansen originally planned to start, they stood on the ice and made ready to leave. In the low light of the new Arctic day, they prepared to set out again, with three sledges lightened to 440 pounds each of pared-down supplies and food for men for one hundred days and only thirty for the dogs. After yet another indulgence of celebration the night before, they made their farewells again, though good-natured joker Theodor Jacobsen refused because, he said, they kept coming back after each good-bye. Cannons saw them off again, and seven others skied along as company. One by one they dropped back and returned to the ship, Sverdrup first, then Mogstad, and then, after a night together in the big tent, the remaining five. After breakfast, as Nansen relates in Farthest North, “we shook hands with our companions and, without many words being uttered on either side, started out into solitude. Peder [Hendriksen, who had wanted to go] shook his head sorrowfully as we went off. I turned around when we had gone some little way, and saw his figure on top of the hummock; he was still looking after us. His thoughts were probably sad; perhaps he believed that he had spoken to us for the last time.”

  ››› Scott-Hansen, Bernhard Nordahl, and Hendriksen watched them “until they looked like little black dots far, far away on the boundless plain of ice” and then turned to ski back to the Fram, now under the sole command of Sverdrup.12 He had inherited a tough job. The crew had been ambivalent in their feelings about Nansen, ranging from admiration of his drive and ambition to disgust with his overweening micromanagement, and from enjoyment of his company when he was convivial to avoidance when dark and gloomy. With his strong, willful personality, he had served as a big magnet for the men to vent (usually in private or with each other) frustrations, criticisms, and anger. Yet they knew deep down they owed him a lot. His genius had conceived the whole enterprise in the first place. Everyone aboard had wanted to be part of it, for their various reasons, and he was the one who hired them. Largely through his obsessions—in-depth research to learn from predecessors and history, and exhaustive planning and preparation—he had brought them safely and comfortably to where no other ship had ever been. As a charismatic personality often can, he could fill a room, or a ship, with his charm or suck it empty with his gloom. When he left for good, he took with him his big presence, for better or worse, and left a big hole behind.

  Most of the crew, even Sverdrup, expressed privately that they were glad to see Nansen gone, that the mood aboard had improved markedly in his absence. But Scott-Hansen, though young, was wise in the ways of ships and sailors, and knew what could happen. “Now that they don’t have Nansen to blame, they’ll take it out on the captain [Sverdrup] and me [now second-in-command].”13 It would take an experienced, knowing leader to prevent that from happening, especially as the grind of time and high-Arctic confinement took their toll on spirits. Sverdrup was, by temperament and training, just that person. He knew about ships and how they worked, about the dynamics of crews running them. He was quiet and methodical, not flashy and compulsive, and never asked anyone to do what he himself could not. He did not try to ingratiate himself with the others, nor felt the need to gain their approval, but kept a dignity and remove of authority while still remaining approachable. He knew when to leave alone and when to jump in. He watched and weighed everything closely. He gained trust and allegiance, not by demanding, but by earning.

  Sverdrup kept them working. They rearranged living quarters (he moved into Nansen’s cabin, Jacobsen into his, thus giving the others more elbow room) and tidied up from the messes left behind after the hectic work to get Nansen and Johansen on their way. Most importantly, they attacked the “Great Hummock,” the pressure ridge that since the end of January had lain ominously against the ship’s port side and was still a threat to bulldoze it. They spent the next ten days hacking away at the twenty-two-foot-high mound, reducing its height in half while carving a thirteen-foot-wide open lane alongside the ship, loading sledges with the ice debris, and carting it away, all the while in temperatures around -40 degrees. They then built a long, low-angled gangway to bridge the gap and provide easier access to the ice.

  Sverdrup, even with his increasing confidence in the Fram’s ability to handle whatever the Arctic threw at it, left nothing to chance and continued to prepare for the worst. Over the next few weeks the men made new sledges, kayaks, skis, and snowshoes (which Sverdrup felt were better than skis for hauling heavy sledges over tough terrain). They apportioned and set aside emergency rations. Sverdrup ordered them to take part in daily two-hour runs on skis, partly for exercise and partly to keep their skills honed for real emergencies.

  With the warming and loosening up of spring, such as it was, the ice began its anticipated shifting, rearranging, and rifting, subjecting the Fram to renewed buffeting and banging. As in the previous spring, a lead opened up near the ship, a tantalizing avenue north to possible open water. Sverdrup knew it would be worthless to try to work the ship into and up the lead, however temping it was, since it was still stuck fast in the ice. So the passive drift continued its agonizingly slow, uncertain way. For a month they had almost been at a standstill, gaining only a few miles of latitude and longitude. Each day in these “Arctic doldrums,” though perhaps pleasant to the body, was a torment to emotions. The mood aboard rose with the speed and direction of propitious drift and fell with the calm and the Fram’s lethargic loitering. Like watching a clock to urge the time to go faster, they anxiously checked the plumb line lowered in the ocean, willing it to angle the right way in the currents. They almost envied Nansen and Johansen in their escape from the interminable sameness.

  FIGURE 40

  Blacksmithing on board. From left, Hendriksen, Pettersen, Sverdrup, and Bentsen (with hammer) making or fixing the many iron items used on the ship or for the expedition, everything from nails to sledge runners, chains, and anchors. The forge was moved to the more stable ice in winter for safety reasons. Photograph by Fridtjof Nansen.

  The passive voyage, even with the occasional jolts from ice and even with the tensions inherent in the sheer scope of what was being attempted, began to wear on them. Time marched more slowly now that they were into the second year with still no end in sight. Another oppressive winter loomed. Traits and habits of individuals, as in families, could grow irksome and annoying in such close quarters for so long and led to more frequent arguments and fights. Add alcohol, available in quantity though closely controlled, to a brew of interpersonal conflicts, lonely men a long way and a long time from home, and unrelieved cramped quarters, and you can almost guarantee an explosive release of tension at some point.

  Mogstad, Nordahl, and Adolf Juell, in particular, seemed prone to offense and choosing this way of solving problems. Celebrations often turned more somber than they had been before, as the contrast to what they were missing back home seemed magnified. Constitution Day, Norway’s national observance, on May 17, went on as before, with a parade of men and dogs, gun salutes, music, and a sumptuous feast in the evening, but the spirit was subdued, according to some of their diaries. Later th
ey were lifted, or perhaps buried, by various kinds of alcohol—beer, aqua vitae, and punch—brought out for the occasion. In his candid way, Scott-Hansen noted in his diary, “We all became well and truly drunk . . . the whole of the 18th we went round with hangovers, every one of us . . . and now there is goodwill all around . . . the worst of our bad spirits are over.”14

  Around this time, too, it became clear to the others that the doctor, Blessing, was acting oddly, afflicted by some mysterious illness perhaps. But, of his own admission in his private diary, he had begun visiting his own medicine chest and given himself daily injections of morphine, supposedly as an experiment to study the effects of certain medicines on withdrawal. In reality, the drug temporarily relieved the psychological weight he was bearing, but in the process he had become addicted. He suffered the wrenching consequences, as did the others who lived with him.

  Writing in his section of Farthest North, Sverdrup, like Nansen in his, painted a much cleaner, more uplifting picture of life aboard, toning down or omitting the more lurid or contentious parts. That National Day celebration, for example, was by his account nothing but merriment, good cheer, and fine fellowship. He did not mention Blessing’s abuse of the drug, but his diaries show he certainly knew about it and tried to curtail it. As with Nansen, Sverdrup told the story uncluttered with or undistracted by any human drama not directly related to the historic, heroic effort underway.

  ››› The more benign spring weather brought work different from the old routines, mostly cleaning in and about the ship. The melting snow and ice had to be removed from the decks and from under the awning, to avoid flooding the interior. The living spaces inside, “ceilings, walls, and all the furniture and fittings,” were scrubbed clean of a long winter’s worth of “soot, grease, smoke, dust, and other ingredients.”15 Just as with residents of a medieval castle, the men had tossed rubbish and waste, theirs and the dogs’, from the Fram, where it lay frozen next to the ship until the melting ice exposed it in a slushy, sludgy moat; this had to be removed before it began to stink or disperse disease. The depots of emergency food and supplies were brought on board for fear of being lost to leads opening under them, or to rain. Water had poured into the engine room through ice-forced cracks between the planks, so had to be pumped and bailed out till the planking swelled into place again. One of the ship’s boats was lowered to the ice, fully equipped and ready for sailing.

  FIGURE 41

  Johansen and his dog Suggen stand near the Fram’s extensive refuse dump: a winter’s worth of food scraps, unusable animal remains, human and dog excrement, and other waste. It had to be dispersed in the spring when it began to stink and risk spreading disease. It also attracted bears and foxes. Note the bearskins spread out to dry against the ship’s sides. Photograph by Fridtjof Nansen.

  They dismantled some big equipment that worked no longer and salvaged it for other necessary things. The windmill, which had given them so much comfort from the light it generated and despite Anton Amundsen’s heroic efforts to keep it going, finally wore out, its gears and other metal parts succumbing to the Arctic cold. They were perhaps happier to take apart the “petroleum launch,” the cantankerous, undependable motor boat that had been a thorn in their side from the beginning, by conking out in tight spots, causing burns by bursting into flame, or being torn from its davits by a pressure ridge. With wood always precious, it went into new snowshoes, sledges, and other implements. They needed more skis, too, but lacked long boards. With the only suitably sized lumber a spare oak beam and without a ripsaw big enough to handle it, they got creative. Amundsen fashioned a saw from a large ice saw, filing its teeth to do the job, while Bentsen made the handles. Then Hendriksen and Mogstad did the laborious sawing and eventually produced enough planks for six pairs of skis.

  FIGURE 42

  Bear trap. Blacksmith Lars Pettersen with a big trap he devised and made to catch polar bears paying marauding visits to the ship. The bears managed to avoid it repeatedly.

  The men also had looked forward to spring hunting as the year before, to put longed-for fresh meat on the table, resupply their caches for the winter, and simply enjoy a welcome break from monotony. There was precious little game in this more northerly realm, no polar bears at all, a few narwhals in the open lanes but too wary to be captured, and the infrequent birds and seals they were able to shoot were soon devoured.

  Since Nansen’s and Johansen’s departure in mid-March, the ship’s progress had been fairly steady to the west while angling north, with only a brief reversal the last week of May. Now at the end of July it lay only 35 miles from latitude 85°, and 380 from the pole. At longitude 74° east, it was practically seven hundred miles north of where it had sailed the opposite direction two summers previously, past the Yamal Peninsula and the unknown island Sverdrup had seen. The pack, in its summer melting and tumultuous reconfiguring, rocked the Fram repeatedly during this period, while lanes and channels opened up all around, forcing the men to bring the emergency depots back on board for safety’s sake.

  ››› In mid-August, Sverdrup was anxious to get the Fram out of a small, troublesome floe in which it was still locked and into a more stable, settled position for the coming freeze-up next winter. So he decided to try blasting it loose with dynamite. Scott-Hansen and Lars Pettersen went out in the pram, placed the load under the floe, and were rowing back to the ship with the fuse line. Suddenly, the floe broke on its own, with great chunks of ice boiling up from below, and the Fram “gave a great heave with her stern, started forward and began to roll heavily, and then plunged with a great splash out into the water.” The subsequent “maelstrom of waves and pieces of ice” engulfed the tiny pram, almost capsizing it, and Sverdrup, with rarely displayed jocularity, noted how “their faces, especially Pettersen’s, were worth seeing while the boat was dancing about with them in the caldron.”16

  In the Arctic autumn of August and September, they kept busy preparing for winter. As they did, their thoughts must have turned quite often to Nansen and Johansen who, they would tell themselves, no doubt had already made it to the pole, then south to the edge of the ice and open water, and then somehow to home where they would be waiting. Still, the men on the Fram must have wondered.

  7 ›HOME FREE

  Much of the activity aboard the Fram in late summer and early fall of 1895 revolved around a single-minded purpose: to prepare to abandon ship, should it be necessary, and make it to where there was at least the possibility of rescue. The puppies had grown to adulthood and would now be able to haul sledges. New and repaired sledges and kayaks were ready and positioned. Stocks of emergency food were weighed out and boxed, enough for eleven men in two different scenarios: first, seventy days of sledging (presumably south to the fringe of the pack ice) and, second, six months on the ice (if stranded, for whatever reason). The resulting rations were kept on board in separate piles, to be transferred to the ice later, when more firm and stable.

  With Bernhard Nordahl having taken Hjalmar Johansen’s place as Sigurd Scott-Hansen’s assistant, and Henrik Blessing doing the best he could given his morphine addiction and with only algae available for botanical collecting, the scientific work went on, including soundings of sea depth, a laborious undertaking as it took over two hours to lower the line to consistently amazing depths, often twelve thousand feet or more (nearly two and a half miles).

  As the year wore on, the ice pressures were more in earnest (those in summer were less alarming than in winter, as the ice was more plastic and pliable, and thus its blows against the ship relatively softer). Otto Sverdrup artfully described in his section of Farthest North when, on August 17, “the Fram was lifted 22 inches by the stern, and fourteen inches by the bow. In stately fashion, with no noise, and without healing over in the least, the heavy vessel was swiftly and lightly raised, as if she had been a feather—a spectacle at once impressive and reassuring.”

  While open water was still around or near the Fram, and before winter set in for real and began
to lock things up, Sverdrup wanted to get it in the best possible position, namely, on an even keel in relatively flat topography, without massive pressure ridges lurking nearby. This they did in the first week in September, taking advantage of ephemeral leads, cutting paths through icy obstructions between them, and using blocks, tackles, and ice anchors to haul the ship to where it could be “moored in the winter harbor we all hoped might prove her last.”

  September 22, 1895, marked their second anniversary in the ice, another excuse for a party. But, as Sverdrup pointed out, they had real cause to celebrate. The drift had picked up speed, on the desired course; they had traveled almost twice as far in the second year as in the first. On November 15, they experienced another big milestone: the Fram reached what would be its farthest north of the whole drift, 85°57’, coming within 280 miles of the pole (ironically, only twenty-two miles short of Nansen’s and Johansen’s northern limit on their trip). From there, the drift continued westward, dropping slowly south. Over the next three months they would pass more than forty degrees of longitude, at that latitude the equivalent of about two hundred miles, with increasing optimism for release from the ice the next fall.

  But over the next three months, the sun disappeared and the cold bore its teeth, the minimum temperature dropping from 10 degrees Fahrenheit to −60 degrees. Birds and sea mammals, already few, were gone entirely. The dog kennels were made and the boxes of emergency food and supplies moved onto the ice. The third winter in the Arctic prison had descended. It would be long and dark (no electric lights without the windmill), replete with familiar tedium and oppressiveness. It had one bright element the others did not: a prospect that it would be their last.