Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  An army military man by profession and agile gymnast by avocation, Gunerius “Gunnar” Isachsen had extensive training as a cartographer and took on the main responsibility for mapping on the expedition, a big undertaking as it turned out. The geologist was young Per Schei (second youngest on the ship), bespectacled and energetic, who had graduated from the University of Christiania in 1898, just prior to the Fram’s departure. The botanist, Herman Georg Simmons, was one of the two non-Norwegians on the trip, a Swede who had graduated from the University of Lund and been on a botanical expedition to the Faroe Islands three years earlier. The other was the zoologist Edvard Bay, born and raised in Denmark, with a degree from the University of Copenhagen and experience on an 1891 expedition to the east coast of Greenland, studying Arctic zoology. Bay was a kindly and jolly man, eager to please, but often klutzy in physical work. He became a favorite sledging companion of Sverdrup’s, but he also tended to obesity and, as the expedition progressed, others noted how he “spent more time on the sofa and by the dinner table than outside.”1

  The final member was the doctor, Bergen-born Johan Svendsen. He would have seemed to be an ideal person for the job, with pertinent medical experience in crisis situations (in Bergen during a smallpox epidemic), on ships, and in treating residents of the remote Lofoten islands. During all these he had gained much respect, but of all the crew, and probably because of his position, he alone had not undergone a medical or psychological examination prior to signing on. No one, not even Sverdrup, knew of another, darker side of him that would eventually reveal itself.

  ››› On drizzly, overcast-gray June 24, 1898, the day of summer solstice (St. Hans Day in Norway), the Fram left Christiania. It was five years to the day since it had departed the city for the first expedition, under similar dreary conditions, with the men weighed down with the same forlorn feelings at leaving home. As had become commonplace whenever the Fram made an appearance, before or after its exploits, spectators crowded the shore or clogged the waterways with a flotilla of boats and ships. Two days later it stopped briefly at Christiansand, at the southern tip of Norway, to pick up last supplies, and then headed west into the North Sea, making for Greenland.

  Breeze soon turned to gale, and the crew found that the Fram behaved as badly in heavy weather as it had before renovation. Sverdrup recollected this moment in his book New Land, a plodding and often overly detailed account of the expedition but revealing now and then sensitive feelings, insightful thoughts, and as in this instance, wry humor: “They trooped to the doctor and complained of various symptoms; some had headache, some shivering fits, and some pains in the stomach, which they had contracted they knew not how; but none of them mentioned the malady by its right name. The doctor, however, came to the conclusion that the complaint with the many different aspects had a single and fairly simple name, to wit, sea-sickness; and for it there was but one and an equally simple remedy, dry land. Unhappily, we had forgotten to bring any with us in our otherwise so well-equipped expedition.”

  On July 17, they caught sight of luminous, golden “ice-blink” in the western sky, where the great glacial ice of Greenland itself reflected from the clouds. Soon they were in the loose pack ice borne south down Greenland’s eastern coast, in those stiff currents so well known to Sverdrup from earlier years there with Nansen. They battled around Greenland’s southern tip and then northward along the west coast, for the first time seeing seals on the floes, both harbor seals (“snadd” to Norwegian seafarers) and the larger bladdernose (or hooded). From the ship they shot a few for food, but at first both men and dogs turned up their noses at the unfamiliar bladdernose meat. The dogs, through hunger, soon lost their fussy appetites, and the men, beneficiaries of Lindstrøm’s culinary genius, began to favor his bladdernose steaks.

  By July 29 they were off Godthaab, where Sverdrup and the other members of the Greenland crossing had spent the winter of 1888–89, and first learned from the Inuit about living in these environments. A few hundred miles away, the wayward relics of the Jeannette had been found, with those mangled, minute clues to what the vast Arctic might be like that provided an improbable happenstance leading to the creation of this ship now passing by.

  12 ›THE DEVIL’S WAY

  Prevented by ice from paying a nostalgic visit to Godthaab, Otto Sverdrup proceeded up the coast to the settlement of Egedesminde, nestled in an open harbor, where they were to pick up thirty-one sledge dogs. They were greeted by a raft of kayaking Inuit and received by the Danish superintendent, the air around ripe with the cloying smell of blubber being rendered at the nearby whaling station.

  (In New Land, Sverdrup took the opportunity to give a couple of mild jabs at Western ways superimposed on the Inuit in Egedesminde. He wrote, “The school, a gabled building . . . was also used as a mortuary chapel and a ball-room. It had never occurred to anybody to feel shocked at this extraordinary rotation of utility; the one condition was inevitable, and, as for the other, poor humanity must have its amusements.” Also, “It is, therefore, not unusual that, with ‘married couples’ in outlying parts of the settlement, the wedding ceremony is long deferred; and it has even happened that one or both of the parties have been dead before the pastor came on his round and could marry them.”)

  The next day they anchored in the harbor of Godhavn (now Qeqertarsuaq), the settlement on the west side of Disko Island, Greenland’s largest, where they took on coal, water, and thirty-five more dogs (making a total of sixty-six). They continued north along the coast, past Upernivik (Upernavik) and into the treacherous, infamous waters of Melville Bay, where so many ships had come to grief, whether ground in the pack ice, battered by icebergs calved off from Greenland’s glaciers, or pummeled by wind and waves sweeping westerly across wide Baffin Bay. Here the Fram came to a halt for six days, restrained by the forming pack, while the crew waited out miserable weather of cold fog, rain, and snow.

  At last the ice relented and they were able to push on, around Cape York, where Sverdrup had intended to erect a monument to Norwegian explorer Eivind Astrup, who had gained fame as the companion of American Robert Peary on two crossings of northern Greenland, in 1892 and 1894, but died in 1895 by suspected suicide. Yet the narrowing windows of time and opportunity make him pass it by, to take advantage of good conditions and make haste for Foulke (now Foulk) Fjord, where the northern end of Baffin Bay narrows into Smith Sound. The forty-mile-wide channel that was Smith Sound lay between Greenland and Ellesmere Land (as it was known then) to the west and was a poorly explored, mysterious region of unknown extent.

  Previous explorers had found Foulke Fjord to be rich in game, in particular walruses, caribou (reindeer), and birds. So Sverdrup pulled in to try his luck, for it was always smart to stock up on fresh meat when the opportunity came. Peder Hendriksen, master hunter and keen wildlife spotter, went to the crow’s nest to scan the area through the telescope. Yes indeed, he reported excitedly, a big herd of caribou on the northern shore. The Fram wiggled its way through leads into the fjord and anchored, and the men set out in boats, going their separate ways: Sverdrup and Ivar Fosheim after caribou on land; and Victor Baumann, Hendriksen, Gunnar Isachsen, and Edvard Bay on the ice for walruses. What bounty lay in store!

  FIGURE 53

  Peder Hendriksen, tough, hardy veteran of two Fram expeditions, survived seven Arctic winters, an attack by a polar bear, and many difficult encounters with the ice.

  All night Sverdrup and Fosheim searched but in vain, and they reluctantly concluded that Hendriksen’s herd of caribou was actually a herd of Arctic hares. The other party saw no sign of walruses either. Hendriksen had also spotted “big white birds,” swans he said, but they too turned out to be hares. These mistakes no doubt were an embarrassment to Hendriksen, but diplomatic Sverdrup held his tongue and said only that they all shot many hares, as they were “not to be despised” as food. He did not mention the “swans” again, at least not publicly. It would not be the last time the Arctic played such tricks of perception o
n them.

  It was not Hendriksen doing some wishful thinking either. Almost every visitor has on occasion misjudged distance, size, or scale in these environments, and misinterpreted what is seen. Perhaps it is because our frames of reference are so different: this is land at its most alien, skeletal, and raw, without trees to gauge it by or oceans with unfamiliar, unmeasured formations of floes and bergs. Perhaps, too, it is because the air is so clear that it seems not air, only space, between the seer and the seen, where estimated distances can be off by many miles and times by many hours. (A Baffin Island Inuk who had visited the forests of southern Canada once told me he could not estimate distances there because all the trees got in the way.)

  ››› The Fram continued to Littleton Island off the Greenland coast and then further north until thwarted by pack ice. They returned to near Littleton Island, then across Smith Sound toward Ellesmere Land, and then north again, hoping for another possible open route that way. The ice soon stopped them again, and they anchored in the lee of Pim Island just east of Ellesmere.

  This region was part of a funnel, wide at the southern end, narrowing as it goes north, and only bulging occasionally with a few bays (or “basins”). This funnel is where many explorers tried to make their way from ice-free lower latitudes, through the wind- and current-cleansing passageway between the landmasses, to the Arctic Sea and the prize it had fiercely guarded for so long, the North Pole itself. In the funnel’s first constriction, barely thirty-five miles apart across Smith Sound, Littleton and Pim Islands had already earned a dark distinction in Arctic exploration as places where some of the most legendary episodes, and great tragedies, had occurred just a few decades earlier.

  Sverdrup was not insensible to all this, as the Fram probed and poked its way between Greenland and Ellesmere, looking for an opening north. In New Land, he mentioned key places and people, at first briefly in one paragraph and later (for one, at least) in more detail, as the ship landed or passed close by landmarks of this dubious history.

  ››› In 1871, veteran American Arctic sojourner Charles Francis Hall led a small, multinational, and as it turned out, dysfunctional crew of twenty-five, with eight additional Inuit (two men, their wives, and five children). Aboard the retrofitted ship Polaris, they sailed north through Kane Basin and Kennedy Channel to the Arctic’s Lincoln Sea, where they hoped to reach, as mythology promised, open water. Instead, they found an impenetrable wall of ice and were forced to set up on the Greenland coast for the winter, in the evocatively named Thank God Harbor (now Hall Bay). The uplifting name did not convey its blessing long. The unhappy crew was bitterly divided into cliques: many wanted to cash it all in and go home; some hated Hall and openly defied him.

  Then Hall mysteriously died, in early November soon after returning in good health from a scouting sledge trip. The doctor pronounced “apoplexy” (stroke) as the cause of death. A century later, Hall’s body, preserved and mummified in the dry Arctic cold, was exhumed for forensic analysis. The results showed lethal levels of arsenic (used for treating a variety of illnesses), perhaps from an overdose administered intentionally by the doctor, one of Hall’s chief critics.

  The Polaris remained in the clutches of the ice until the following August. The ship, still frozen into an island-sized floe berg (one mile wide, five long), was carried by currents south, back the way it had come and, its unruly, recalcitrant crew hoped, to freedom. During the night of October 15, in Kane Basin north of Pim Island, a fierce snowstorm and roiling ice battered the Polaris and threatened to sink it. As the crew rushed to abandon ship, they grabbed whatever food and supplies they could and tossed them, helter-skelter, to the ice island and dragged two lifeboats away to safety. Suddenly, the ship broke free and drifted away into the night, stranding nineteen still on the ice.

  When daylight came, with the storm over and the seas calm, the ice party could see the ship a few miles away, making way under steam and sail. Though clearly visible to the remaining crew on board, the ice party watched in bewildered horror as the Polaris headed not toward them but away and disappeared behind Littleton Island. Marooned on the ice were the pitched-off jumble of food and supplies, two boats, several dogs, and the nineteen people, one of which was an Inuit baby born on board the Polaris. George Tyson, the ship’s navigator, was now de facto leader of this unfortunate band.

  For six and a half months, from October 15, 1871, to April 30, 1872, the castaways drifted with the ice island down Baffin Bay, amid the fractured, unstable, shifting pack while unable to use the boats to get away. Through fall, through the long, dark winter, and into spring, they went crowding into an ever-diminishing area as the island broke apart and melted. Temperatures fell frequently to −40 degrees Fahrenheit. Clothing was inadequate, and food was scarce or absent much of the time. Storm-driven waves often washed over their shrinking base camp, as the white members of the crew withdrew in apathy and lassitude. The baby and children cried and cried in fear and hunger.

  After more than half a year on a journey of 1,800 miles down Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, they were rescued by an American sealing ship off the east coast of Newfoundland. That ship’s crew of one hundred men first cheered then stared at the ragged group when they came aboard. “I was at once surrounded by a curious lot of people,” Tyson later wrote about this surreal moment. “I told them who I was and where we were from. But when they asked me ‘how long have you been on the ice?’ and I answered ‘since the fifteenth of last October’ they were so astonished that they looked fairly blank with wonder. One of the party, looking at me with open-eyed surprise, exclaimed, ‘And was you on it night and day?’”2

  That all of them had survived was nothing short of miraculous. As Tyson himself all but declared in his account of the entire saga, written painstakingly on scraps of paper, it was a miracle not of luck or chance but of the Inuit’s making. They built snow-and-ice shelters against the brutal cold. They kept everyone from starvation by being able to kill, by their traditional hunting methods, the occasional seal and even rarer polar bear. Their steady manner and selfless acts in the face of continual privation and constant threat kept the group, the white men in particular, from descending into total despondency and eventual self-destruction.

  The Polaris with its remaining crew of fourteen had made it past Littleton Island and to Greenland’s Lifeboat Cove (passed by the Fram), where Captain Budington, formerly the second-in-command, intentionally ran it aground. Why he deserted the others was never fully explained, but ironically and maybe in a case of morbid “just deserts,” the men were marooned on land just as surely as had their mates been on ice. As with the ice-island party, too, had it not been for an Inuk from nearby Etah helping them through the winter, they certainly would have perished. As it was, they were able to build two boats from the Polaris’s wreckage, make their way south in the summer, and were taken aboard a Scottish whaling ship in Melville Bay.

  The conclusions of the official inquiry into the Polaris affair, a year later, were unequivocal and predictably in favor of the establishment. The Polaris had achieved a new record for farthest north for a ship. Hall had died of apoplexy. Budington and his reduced crew were praised for their bravery and quick action to save the ship. Tyson’s story and suspicions were discounted. The case was closed.

  The Inuit, who kept everyone alive, both on the floe and on land, barely got a mention, much less official recognition, for the real heroism and honor they so clearly displayed.

  ››› Sverdrup had gone ashore on Littleton Island for two reasons: to deposit a record of the Fram’s visit and find the cairn Allen Young had erected there in 1876. Young had been in command of the vessel Pandora, carrying provisions to resupply the British Arctic Expedition, led by seasoned Sir George Nares, who had earned his Arctic laurels in a search for the lost Franklin expedition of 1845. Despite ample demonstrations of the shortcomings and failures of his approach, and with equally ample evidence of success in adapting Inuit ways, Nares’s highly nationalistic quest
for the pole was to be the old-fashioned British kind. It was man against a ruthless enemy, brute force against brute force, and a test of the limits of human will. His expeditionary force was big, 120 men to haul heavily loaded sledges and unwieldy boats by themselves, without the aid of dogs. Their clothing would be mostly English woolens instead of furs and animal hides. They had no skis or snowshoes. They would rely on the familiar food they had brought with them, rather than the alien meat harvested from land and sea.

  In May 1875, Nares left England with two ships, the Discovery and the Alert, and headed north via the passageway between Greenland and Ellesmere, as Hall had done, but because of the more open water there, Nares stuck more to the Ellesmere side once reaching Baffin Bay. By August they had sailed, steamed, pushed, poked, and rammed their way to Lady Franklin Bay, three-quarters of the way up Ellesmere, where Nares decided the Discovery should spend the winter and he would take the sturdier Alert up the remaining distance of the strait to the polar sea, some seventy miles away. Weeks later a battered Alert arrived at the northeastern extremity of Ellesmere, and Nares came face-to-face with the same formidable scene that had stopped Hall. He anchored in Floeberg Beach, an eponymous name he dubbed for the jumble (of floes and bergs) that comprised the predominant view. Here they would stay the winter, so his plan went, and begin their assault on the pole the following spring, while other sledging parties from both ships would explore the unmapped northern coasts of Ellesmere and Greenland.

  By some measures the expedition was a success. Though it got no further than Floeberg Beach, Alert achieved a new “farthest north” for a ship (82°27’ north), beating that of the Polaris five years earlier. One of the sledging party got to 83°20’ north, a record for people. They mapped a goodly portion of Ellesmere’s heretofore unknown northern coast. Both ships returned to England. Nares confirmed Hall’s finding that the polar sea was not open but ice covered. But to those who had trumpeted the gaining of the pole as another of Britain’s rightful glories, it was a failure and, to those back home waiting for loved ones to come back, an outright tragedy.