Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  Eventually, on June 12, after several days of sailing or hauling the sledges across the ice, they reached open water again to the south and, because the wind was fair, lashed the kayaks together and set off. After a swift but tiring day in the kayaks, they stopped at the edge of the ice to take a break, moored the rig to the ice with a sail halyard, and went to a high point on the floe to reconnoiter. Just then, the worst that could be imagined happened, as described in Nansen’s own recollection in Farthest North:

  As we stood there, Johansen suddenly cried: “I say! [It was probably more like, ‘Holy shit!’] The kayaks are adrift!” We ran down as hard as we could. They were already a little way out, and were drifting quickly off; the painter had given way. “Here, take my watch!” I said to Johansen, giving it to him; and as quickly as I could I threw off some clothing, so as to be able to swim more easily: I did not care to take everything off, as I might so easily get cramp. I sprang into the water, but the wind was off the ice, and the light kayaks, with their high rigging, gave it a good hold. They were already well out, and were drifting rapidly. The water was icy cold, it was hard work swimming with clothes on, and the kayaks drifted farther and farther, often quicker than I could swim. It seemed more and more doubtful whether I could manage it. But all our hope was drifting there; all we possessed was on board; we had not even a knife with us; and whether I got cramp and sank here, or turned back without the kayaks, it would come to pretty much the same thing; so I exerted myself to the utmost. When I got tired I turned over, and swam on my back . . . when I turned over again, and saw that I was nearer the kayaks, my courage rose, and I redoubled my exertions. I felt, however, that my limbs were gradually stiffening and losing all feeling, and I knew that in a short time I should not be able to move them . . . the strokes became more and more feeble, but the distance shorter and shorter. . . . At last I was able to stretch out my hand to the snowshoe [ski], which lay across the sterns; I grasped it, pulled myself up, but the whole of my body was so stiff with cold, that this was an impossibility. For a moment I thought that after all it was too late: I was to get so far, but not be able to get in. After a little while, however, I managed to swing one leg up on to the edge of the sledge which lay on the deck, and in this way managed to tumble in.

  He was so cold that he had trouble paddling the awkward rig, yet somehow worked it slowly back, and even had the strength and will to take out a gun and shoot two auks ahead of the boats, pick them up, and get to the edge of ice where Johansen was waiting. Johansen jumped in the other kayak, and helped paddle back to where the saga began, after which he removed the wet clothes of the shaking, exhausted, and probably quite blue Nansen; put on what dry ones he could find; tucked him into the sleeping bag; and laid the sail over all to keep out the cold. While Nansen slowly warmed up, and slept, Johansen prepared a hot meal of soup and two auks, one for each.

  On their way again, paddling southwest, they stopped to shoot a baby walrus and its mother, along with many auks, to resupply their depleted food stores. The next day, however, as if in retribution, a big walrus exploded out of the water next to Nansen’s kayak, landed partially on it, and thrust its tusks through its frail covering. Nansen, unable to reach his gun, hit the creature over the head with his paddle and, miraculously, it slid beneath the surface. Nansen paddled to the nearby edge of the ice where, just as he got out, the kayak filled with water. He was lucky, once again.

  In the afternoon of June 17, while encamped on the ice near the south shore of a big island they had been skirting, Nansen was preparing a meal while Johansen slept. They had been in mist, so could not see the lay of the land, but it lifted enough for Nansen to go outside the tent and inspect the surroundings. The air was full of cries of thousands of dovekies and kittiwakes nesting in the cliffs behind him. Then, amid the clamor, out of the hanging mist, “a sound suddenly reached my ears, so like the barking of a dog, that I started. It was only a couple of barks, but it could be nothing else.”30 No, his rational mind thought dismissively, it could not be; it must be the birds. Then Nansen heard the barking again. He remembered hearing the previous day what sounded like shots but had convinced himself it was ice cracking.

  FIGURE 47

  “Dr. Nansen, I presume?” A reenactment six days after the actual event of the chance meeting of Nansen and Frederick Jackson, British explorer, on one of the Franz Josef Land islands. Their encounter and Nansen’s subsequent return to Norway are described in chapter 9. June 17, 1896.

  He yelled to the sleeping Johansen, who emerged groggy from the tent to listen. No, he said, it’s just birds. Nansen put on his skis and took off to investigate, Johansen staying behind to keep an eye on the kayaks. Nansen soon came across tracks he knew as canine, too big for a fox and too small for a wolf. The further on he went, the more he heard dogs barking—yes, for sure, dogs! Then there was quiet again, and he wondered anew. Were they indeed, as he thought, on the southern edge of Franz Josef Land, near Northbrook Island where Benjamin Leigh Smith had been?

  This was the proof. “Suddenly, I thought I heard a shout from a human voice, a strange voice, the first for three years. How my heart beat, and the blood rushed to my brain, as I ran up to a hummock” for a better look and shouted out.31 He heard someone shout back. In the distance he saw something moving far off, a dog and then a man. “We approached one another quickly; I waved my hat: he did the same. I heard him speak to the dog, and I listened. It was English, and as I drew nearer I thought I recognized Mr. Jackson, whom I remembered once to have seen.”

  In an Arctic version of the understated “Stanley-meets-Livingston” encounter, Nansen and Jackson came together in a simple greeting of hello and shaking hands, gestures that seemed almost out of place in this setting, for the event it was. Given the cultural attributes of the men of that time—a Norwegian reluctance for demonstrative displays and an English adherence to proper formal manners—it was understandable and strangely appropriate.

  ››› This extraordinary meeting of two explorers who had no idea of the other’s near presence was also an extraordinary coincidence. In 1892, Jackson had heard Nansen’s presentation in London about the upcoming Fram expedition, had been inspired, and applied to be a member. Nansen had turned him down because of his wish for an all-Norwegian crew. So Jackson found sponsors and assembled his own expedition and then set out in 1894, a year after Nansen, to find a way to the North Pole via the mysterious and largely unmapped Franz Josef Land. It was possible, too, though he never admitted so publicly, that he hoped to beat Nansen to the big prize. He and six other men had spent the last two years at Cape Flora on the western tip of Northbrook Island, comfortably base camped in heated wooden houses they built, named “Elmwood,” while sallying forth in small sledging parties to survey what they could. Nansen, just before he left on the Fram expedition, had heard rumors about Jackson’s plan but knew nothing more than that.

  ››› Now, on this misty June day, the contrast in the two men facing each other was striking: one clean, well groomed, and attired in nice clothes; the other filthy with soot and grease, bearded, long, snarled hair, and wearing torn and dirty rags. At first Jackson did not recognize this wild beast, but as they talked it dawned on him who it might be. He asked, “Aren’t you Nansen?” When Nansen affirmed his identity, Jackson threw off his British formality for just a while and gave him the warm welcome he deserved. Afterward, Nansen asked his first questions of Jackson. Was there any news of his wife Eva and daughter Liv? Were Norway and Sweden at war?

  After firing off shots to signal Johansen, they made their way back to Jackson’s Elmwood. In his book A Thousand Days in the Arctic, Jackson wrote that Nansen at this time “was going gamely, but looks pale and anemic and is very fat.” (Nansen had gained twenty-two pounds since leaving the Fram; Johansen, thirteen—testimonials to a meat-and-blubber diet and lack of exercise, which we might well understand today.) Later, several men went to help Johansen bring the kayaks, supplies, and equipment. What feelings Nansen and Jo
hansen must have had, after fifteen months on the ice, to be in these surroundings with other men; take hot baths (one was not enough to remove all the grease and soot); have their matted, tangled hair cut; get into soft, clean clothes; smoke and read books; and eat long-forgotten foods from china plates, cooked by someone else.

  The supply ship Windward was due any day, Jackson said, coming from England after a stop-off in Vardø, so could take them back to Norway after unloading. The weeks passed, and there was still no sight of the Windward. In their increasing impatience to get home, Nansen and Johansen flirted with the idea of setting off for Svalbard on their own, from which they could hitch a ride home on a whaler or sealer.

  But finally, on July 26, five weeks after they had come to Elmwood, the Windward arrived, with no news of the Fram. Twelve days later, with the ship unloaded and Nansen, Johansen, and departing scientists aboard, the Windward weighed anchor, and “under full sail and steam we set out . . . with a fair wind, over the undulating surface of the ocean, toward the south.”32 Nansen was leaving the Arctic behind and, along with it, a new discovery that Franz Josef Land was actually Franz Josef Islands, one of which, where he and Johansen had overwintered, he named for Jackson (it is still that today, phonetically in Russian “Ostrov [Island] Dzheksona”).

  Aboard the Windward in the evening of August 12, Nansen and Johansen saw a dark line on the horizon, Norway’s coast, their first sight of it in three years. The next day, under the guidance of a pilot who came on board, the Windward slid into Vardø harbor and dropped anchor. By then Nansen and Johansen were already on their way in a rowboat to the telegraph office. “We put in at the quay,” Nansen described later in Farthest North, “but no one recognized us; they scarcely looked at us, and the only being that took any notice of the returned wanderers was an intelligent cow, which stopped in the middle of a narrow street, and stared at us in astonishment. . . . I felt inclined to go up and pat her; I felt now that I really was in Norway.”

  In the telegraph office, Nansen plunked down a heavy bundle of telegrams, almost one hundred of them. The clerk frowned at what had been put before him, until he read the name of the sender, and then burst into smiles and congratulations and bustled around getting ready to send out the news to the world. First to go was one to his wife Eva, then one each to the king of Norway and the Norwegian government. All the rest took several people several days to process, but the word was already out and on its way around the country.

  In Vardø at that very moment was Professor Henrik Mohn, the very man whose controversial theory of Arctic currents Nansen had studied, trusted, and employed in conceiving of his expedition. Nansen heard that Mohn was staying in the hotel, so rushed there and burst unannounced through the door to his room, where he found him smoking and reading on the sofa. After the initial shock of seeing a man come flying into his room so suddenly, Mohn stared and stared, and then began crying as he recognized him and fell into his arms. They spent the afternoon in nonstop conversation, over cigars and champagne, recounting what had happened over the years. By evening it seemed everyone in town knew about the already-famous pair who had arrived, and a crowd gathered outside the hotel. When Nansen and Johansen finally emerged from their time with Mohn, to go into town to get new clothes, they had to make their way through throngs of eager souls everywhere they went.

  There was still no word about the Fram, but Nansen did not worry unduly as he had calculated and recalculated when it should emerge from the ice and felt confident that it would show up soon. In the meantime there was much to do, just dealing with the adoration raining down on them. In Vardø, Nansen also met another friend and colleague, the Englishman George Baden-Powell, who had just returned from a scientific expedition on Novaya Zemlya. Nansen gladly took up Baden-Powell’s offer to take him and Johansen on his yacht Otaria to Hammerfest, further west along the coast, where his wife would be waiting, having come all the way from Christiania.

  In Hammerfest, Fridtjof and Eva came together again, as husband and wife, in joyous if somewhat bashful reunion aboard the Otaria. Typically private in these matters, Nansen said of this reunion only that “the days now glided past so smoothly that we scarcely noticed the lapse of time.”33 This was in sharp distinction from his other state of mind while away from her. He had expended many, many more words in Farthest North in describing his longing and yearning for her over the miles and the years.

  Early in the morning of August 20, Baden-Powell knocked on Nansen’s cabin door, announcing that there was a man on board who had come with urgent news. Nansen quickly dressed and went to the saloon, where a man stood, holding a telegram. He offered it to Nansen. “With trembling hands I tore open the telegram.”34 It was from Otto Sverdrup, saying the Fram had arrived safely, all were well on board, and they were heading for Tromsø. Nansen and Johansen had been back on Norwegian soil for six days.

  FIGURE 48

  Part of the huge crowd in Christiania, September 1896, out to welcome the polar explorers home. Sitting beneath the big picture of the Fram is the crew, and speaking at the podium is famed writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who would win the 1903 Nobel Prize for Literature.

  ››› The Fram, as if in honor of brave work done and to relieve it of finding its own way, was towed at first down the coast, and then steamed on its own, into one town or city after another, the object of ever-clamorous celebrations, until the final glorious trip up Oslo fjord and into the harbor. As it made its final approach to the city up the fjord, fishing vessels, passenger and naval ships, and literally hundreds of small boats lined the way. It came in escorted by naval ships and boats, “the whole fjord one multitudinous welcome” of waving flags, cheering voices of thousands, and thunderous, echoing salutes from the cannons on the warships and at old Fort Akershus overlooking the entrance.35 In Christiania itself a crowd of tens of thousands, the biggest ever to assemble there, crammed the streets and piers, and clustered on rooftops, waiting for their heroes to arrive. It was September 9, 1896, when the men finally came ashore, 1,172 days after they had left this same place.

  That evening, after the welcome had died away and before other festivities began, Nansen stood at the pier overlooking the harbor, with the Fram not far away. He had a few moments to reflect. He wrote in Farthest North, “I could not but recall that rainy morning in June when I last set foot on this strand. More than three years had passed; we had toiled and we had sown, and now the harvest had come. In my heart I sobbed and wept for joy and thankfulness. . . . The ice and the long moonlit polar nights . . . seemed like a far-off dream from another world—a dream that had come and passed away. But what would life be worth without its dreams?”

  10 ›HOMECOMING

  It was a glory to remember. Fridtjof Nansen and his crew were ceremoniously rowed ashore from the anchored Fram and then stepped onto the pier amid throngs of spectators. The king of Norway/Sweden and other dignitaries gave speeches of praise and pride, while wealthy patrons who had taken such risks for the expedition smiled in satisfaction. Then a procession through the city, from an archway framed with two hundred white-uniformed gymnasts, past the endless waving flags, gleeful noise, and gawking of awestruck admirers. Later, they enjoyed champagne and elegant dinners, with endless toasts to what had been done in the name of science, exploration, and Norway. Yet all the while, the Fram sat quietly at anchor throughout the day and into the night, as if oblivious to all the fuss ashore; it was almost like an old draft horse in its stall quietly munching oats after yet another long, hard day of work, the only kind it ever knows. Neither is a hero, only doing what is supposed to be done.

  The nonstop attention and formal festivities were sometimes overwhelming to the men, who by their very nature, evident in the occupations they chose, were uncomfortable in such situations, and who had lived for years in a near-total social vacuum, without any human attention or interaction other than their own. At one point as he watched the crowds pressing in, Peder Hendriksen commented sourly to Nansen that he was bett
er off in the Arctic wastes than among such fawning. Even Nansen, as the demands on his time increased, expressed weariness and longing for the peace and simplicity, hard as they might have been in some ways, of his former life in the ice.

  After a month or so of such relentless adoration in the public eye, things naturally began to calm down for most of the men, and life began to return to normal. They went home to family and friends and familiar surroundings, and then moved on to other jobs or ones they had left behind. However, many struggled with reentry into lives so starkly different than the ones they had led the past three years. They, as many deepwater sailors throughout history, found life at sea easier than at home, escaping what they had trouble coping with on land: incessant bills, hounding creditors, onerous work or lack of work entirely, and emotional demands of marriage and children. The ship was another kind of home for them, a make-believe one in many ways, yet protective, autonomous, and without the bothersome strictures of terrestrial life, but with simpler rules of its own that they more easily understood and followed. This no doubt was especially so for those on the Fram, removed as they were so far, so long, and so completely from their former lives.

  FIGURE 49

  The Lucky Thirteen, reunited and returned. Christiania, September 1896. In front, from left: Jacobsen, Nordahl, Johansen, Sverdrup, Amundsen, Blessing, and Pettersen. Behind, from left: Mogstad, Scott-Hansen, Juell, Nansen, Hendriksen, and Bentsen.