Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  Peary did not stop, either, to wait out the winter with his ship, lest the Fram somehow catch up. In December, he and six others struck out by dog sledge across the ice to Fort Conger, over two hundred miles away, to lay claim to this important staging point. For all his efforts, Peary would be thwarted in this attempt on the pole, not by Sverdrup but by the ice. He would try again a few years later, and fail once more, which only seemed to heighten his fevered ambition. Eventually, he and a legitimate challenger, Frederick Cook, both laid claim to the prize, but it was laden with controversy then and has continued to this day, over one hundred years later. We still do not know if he, or Cook, was the first to reach the pole, or if one or both were lying. We will probably never know for sure, but we can just imagine what Sverdrup thought about all this.

  FIGURE 58

  Nødtvedt (left) and Hendriksen blacksmithing. The forge was all important, as it was their means to fix and fabricate the many essential iron items for ship, men, dogs, and sledges. It also provided hot water for bathing, as well as warmth to the men working it.

  ››› Through October and November, they continued to shuttle to and from the Fram, transporting meat and surveying the fjords and lands between. After the sun disappeared for the year in the middle of October, and the dark and cold steadily grew, their trips grew shorter and less frequent. They turned their attention to getting the ship ready for winter: placing tarps over the skylights to prevent draughts; piling blocks of snow as insulation on deck above the cabins; putting the forge out on the ice; and building and placing nighttime kennels for the dogs next to the ship. The scientific work and daily measurements went on.

  In an amusing vignette, Sverdrup recounted how Johan Svendsen and Peder Hendriksen, responsible for taking water temperatures, had to bore a hole through the thick ice to lower the thermometer into the water, a laborious and frustrating job as the hole would freeze over. One day they noticed that a seal had discovered the hole, used it for breathing, and thus kept it open. Quick to seize a golden opportunity, the men left a dried fish in the hole as an inducement for the seal to stay, a gift for a gift. By the next day the fish was gone and the hole was still open. The offerings were repeated, the reward returned, and interspecies mutual cooperation continued for some time.

  As in the first expedition, the Fram was transformed into a workshop as well as a home: fixing, fabricating, making the new, and repairing the old and worn. They also began to prepare for the spring sledging trips that Sverdrup intended to make around the coast of northern Greenland, his main objective of the voyage. This involved repairing the sledges after the rough fall trips, fitting wooden “overrunners” to the metal ones for certain ice conditions, revamping the single kayaks into double ones, and making up food rations for men and dogs. As before, too, the drudgery and oppression of winter were broken by observances of holidays and birthdays, which provided an opportunity for cleaning up, dressing up, and eating and drinking up.

  With the returning sunlight of February and March, despite an especially bitter cold stretch, they resumed the exploratory and hunting trips, reestablished Fort Juliana, and set out depots for later trips. On one of these the young geologist Schei froze his feet due to improper footgear and the doctor amputated three of his toes.

  They had unexpected visitors as well. An Inuit man driving a team of dogs showed up from the south, as he traveled to tell his comrades on board the Windward the sad news that several of their relatives had drowned while hunting walruses. The Inuk’s name was Kolotengva, a fellow of some renown as a guide and hunter for the young Norwegian explorer Eivind Astrup, when he surveyed Melville Bay in 1895. Kolotengva stayed on the Fram that night, enthralling the crew with his exotic drumming and dancing, sharing stories despite the barrier of their different languages. When he left the next day to continue north, two from the Fram accompanied him: Victor Baumann, who had been eager to pay Peary a visit and see what he was up to, and Sverre Hassel.

  On the two-day excursion north, Baumann found out from Kolotengva, through broken conversation, sign language, and pantomime, that earlier in the year Peary had sent some of the Inuit from the Windward south to Greenland, to get new dogs to replace thirty-seven that had died of some disease during the winter. He also learned that during this time, when the Windward recorded a low of −67 degrees Fahrenheit, Peary had lost eight toes to frostbite, probably during the same unusually cold period when Schei lost three of his. (Peary’s mostly toeless feet and badly broken leg from a previous accident left him with a distinctive, pronounced limp that stayed with him for the rest of his life).

  FIGURE 59

  Visitors! Inuit from Inglefield Fjord, northwest Greenland, pay the Fram one of their several visits in spring 1899. They made themselves at home on the ship, trading, eating, and even sleeping where they could.

  When the three arrived at the Windward, Baumann was taken to Peary’s cabin, where he found the leader in bed, recovering from the operation on his feet. Peary, though polite, spent very little time with him, sending him off to have dinner with his officers and failing to call him for a promised postprandial chat. The next day, the three left to return to the Fram, with Peary giving only a short send-off and a box of cigars for Sverdrup.

  When Kolotengva left the Fram the second time and headed back to his people in Smith Sound, “he was simply loaded with presents, for, being the first stranger we had seen for a long time, all the reserve good-will which we had been laying by for so many months was expended on him.”3 The word soon got out. Other Inuit visitors arrived in droves, by dogs and sledges, hoping to share in the largess. They streamed aboard, comfortable with the old Norwegian custom of hospitality, as expressed in the saying “where there is heart room, there is house room.” In a statement that today would seem prejudicial if not racist, Sverdrup wrote in New Land when they finally went home, “Happily this was the last Eskimo visit on board, for, truth to tell, we began to be heartily sick of them all. They spread all over the vessel a peculiar, rank odor of blubber and train-oil [whale oil], with indefinable additions. We tumbled over them wherever we went, both in the cabins and in the ’tween decks; while their shock heads of hair looked as if they might accommodate a legion of animals, of which we stood in far greater fear than of either the polar ox or the bear.” Evidently, both house room and heart room had become a bit too crowded.

  14 ›DEATH ON ELLESMERE

  During the winter they began on Otto Sverdrup’s big plan, building a small shelter that would be put ashore on the northernmost shore of Greenland after the Fram plowed through to the Lincoln Sea (southern Arctic Ocean) the following summer. From there he and a small party would take sledging trips around Greenland’s coast as far east as they could go; stay in the shelter for the winter; and then continue exploring in the spring. The Fram, with the remaining crew, would retreat to a safe harbor and the following summer would pick up them up on the other side and go home.

  It was still early spring, far too early for the Fram to be freed from the ice, let alone head north into clogged Kane Basin, so his plan would have to wait a few more months. In the meantime, he would try to make it to the unknown west side of Ellesmere Land, following one of the fjords inland as far as possible, and then overland the rest of the way. In mid-April, Sverdrup and Edvard Bay headed west, with two teams of dogs, up Flagler Fjord from Fort Juliana.

  The going was arduous, and circuitous at times because of dead ends and insurmountable obstacles. When they reached a point on land where it was impossible for the sledges to go further, they unhitched the dogs, allowed them to proceed unburdened, and left the sledges behind. The men continued, lugging enough supplies on their own backs to make it though a few days. They counted on finding and killing bears or musk oxen to feed the dogs, and then make sleds of the hides, so the dogs could haul once more.

  For three days they traveled over rough terrain, climbing into the mountains, when suddenly “just beneath us lay the fjord, broad and shining, without so much as a
flake of snow on it, only ice, nothing but ice, crystal clear, like a huge fairy mirror. And the other side of the fjord was a great chain of mountains, several thousand feet in height, with snow-filled clefts and black abysses, jagged peaks, and wild precipices. Just so must the wild western fjords of Norway look on a winter’s day!”4

  FIGURE 60

  Ready to head out. Under spectacular fjord cliffs, a team prepares to take boxed-up supplies out, probably to set up a depot as support for later, longer trips.

  Sverdrup had guessed right. They indeed had made it to the west coast of Ellesmere, though they still could not know its full extent. Sverdrup christened it “Bay Fjord,” still its name today. As they found no food in this barren, gameless expanse to feed the dogs, they did not descend to explore but returned to the Fram.

  Through spring and into summer, by twos and threes they would go out on sledging trips of days or weeks. The mapmakers were to survey the coast; the scientists were to collect samples of emerging plants, rocks, and animals; and others of the crew were to investigate new territory, while all would hunt musk oxen and newly appearing seals and polar bears. They would return to the ship with their goods, whether meat, maps, or specimens; drop them off; and then rest and get ready for the next excursions. A skeleton crew remained on board—the cook, engineers, and essential sailors—to look after the ship in all contingencies, continue preparations for the Greenland expeditions, salt away and store the meat coming aboard, and fix equipment of the returning sledgers.

  Sverdrup was especially keen to continue forays into western Ellesmere. Fort Juliana once again was an important intermediate staging area, from which the teams fanned out north and west, to find new pathways through valleys and over mountains to what lay beyond. One of the first teams out was to have been Rudolf Stolz and Per Schei, but Stolz had been laid low with snow blindness, so the doctor, Johan Svendsen, never having been on a sledging trip, readily volunteered to substitute.

  They departed on June 2, along with another team of Sverdrup and botanist Herman Georg Simmons. Both teams traveled together for two days up Hayes Sound, where they separated, Schei and Svendsen continuing west up the sound toward Beitstad Fjord and Sverdrup and Simmons to Fort Juliana, thence further north.

  But after encountering open water, rotting ice, and impassable cliffs, Sverdrup and Simmons retreated to Fort Juliana, driving all night and arriving in the morning of June 6. As they were getting ready to sleep, from inside the tent, they were surprised to hear a man’s voice outside, asking to come in. It was Svendsen, who had been stricken with snow blindness and chest pains, and had to be led back by Schei.

  He quickly began to recover, with hot food and the attention of his friends, and refused Sverdrup’s offer to take him back to the ship. In a few days he was well enough to remain by himself to look after things at Fort Juliana while the others resumed the aborted trip up Beitstad Fjord. Four days later, loaded with bear and ox meat, they hastened back to Fort Juliana and Svendsen. What they saw when they got there was shocking.

  In his retelling of the episode in New Land, Sverdrup gave a tidy, simple statement that they found Svendsen dead. In his private diary, however, he told another story, the horrific truth: speeding back on the sledges and approaching Fort Juliana, they saw Svendsen pacing by the tent. Then he put a rifle to his head, and though the distance and the wind swallowed the sound, they saw him slump to the ground.

  In Svendsen’s diary they later discovered what he had been able to conceal from everyone, that he had struggled with deep depression on the trip and had become addicted to morphine, taken from his medical supply, to alleviate psychological pain. Again, in New Land Sverdrup whitewashed this, writing that the doctor had merely “overrated his strength.”

  Svendsen’s suicide left the men grieving and bewildered, for he had been well liked and no one, apparently, suspected the dark undercurrent running through him. It seems odd that Sverdrup, such a keen observer and astute judge of men, did not see or feel something wrong with him, or notice the dwindling supply of morphine, especially as he had had a similar experience, albeit without the shocking finale, with Dr. Henrik Blessing on the Fram’s first expedition. Privately, in his diary, Sverdrup expressed anger at the dead man for his weakness and for deserting them in such a way. In New Land, he only expressed sorrow and a caution to others: on an Arctic expedition, select your doctor with great care and scrutiny, as so much depends on him and no one else can do his job.

  They wrapped his body in sailcloth and carried it on a sledge from Fort Juliana to the Fram. On June 16, they lowered him through the ice in Rice Strait. Sverdrup wrote in his diary and later in New Land, “The flag is flying at half-mast from the peak today. It is the first time it has been in this position on the Fram, and let us hope it will be the last.” Unfortunately, it would not be.

  FIGURE 61

  Captain Robert Peary’s ship Windward, August 1899. Peary was on his way to explore northern Greenland, and perhaps make an attempt on the North Pole, when the Windward and Fram crossed paths in Smith Sound. Peary worried that Sverdrup would beat him to the pole, but Sverdrup had no intention of going.

  ››› On July 24, with Fram’s Haven almost cleared of ice and the Fram afloat for the first time that year, Sverdrup decided to make a run for it up Kane Basin, the first leg of the passage to northern Greenland. The dogs had been brought aboard, the boilers fired, and the Fram weighed anchor, leaving the tiny sanctuary. The winds blowing down Kane Basin had brought its ice and stuffed the channel closed. They tried going south, around Pim Island, but that way too was blocked. Sverdrup hiked up the height of Pim to survey the situation and saw nothing but the hard-pressed pack in all directions, Smith Sound to Kane Basin. After their getaway voyage, lasting only two days and covering no miles, they humbly retreated to Fram’s Haven.

  Ten days later they tried again, mostly out of impatience, since the ice had not relaxed all that much. They made it a few miles north but were forced to turn east and batter and lurch toward Greenland. In their slow, stuttering advance they saw a ship off Pim Island, heading northeast, one of Robert Peary’s resupply ships they surmised and probably, they eagerly hoped, carrying letters for the Fram. When they were about five miles apart, the other ship lay to and signaled, yes, they did have letters. That was as close as they could get, for the ice then intervened and shut off any access they had to one another. The other ship turned south, to where the way was more open, and steamed away with the precious news from home.

  The next few days the Fram drifted hither and thither at the mercy of the winds and moving pack. A three-day gale drove it north halfway up Kane Basin, and when the storm died and the winds shifted, it went south again, back into Smith Sound. In the slackening ice they were able to pick their way across to Greenland and into protection of familiar Foulke Fjord.

  They found the Windward there, too, with Peary and the crew busy preparing to stay for the winter, stocking up on game from the area and, presumably, planning the resumption of their quest for the pole in the spring. Curiously again, Peary did not meet with Sverdrup and only met briefly with Victor Baumann. Peary, still guarded and suspicious, did offer to deliver letters, via his next supply ship, but only on condition that no mention was made of the Windward or its whereabouts.

  For almost a week stiff north winds kept the Fram confined to harbor, but on August 12 it left. Pack ice still persisted in Kane Basin, and even Pim Island was out of reach, as they were repeatedly nipped, then carried south, and then freed to steam north and do it all over again. Sverdrup reluctantly gave up on the whole idea of proceeding north. He knew the reality of what he faced. He knew the risks and, Sverdrup being Sverdrup, intended to avoid them.

  By the Arctic calendar it was getting late in the year, and they needed all the time still available to find safe harbor for the winter and, being low on fresh meat, find and harvest it. Wide Kane Basin was not the place to be caught out, without protection of the land or availability of game. Nor
th was not the way to go now, regardless of the intended goal of circumnavigating Greenland’s northern boundary and of the prestige and voices raised in congratulation back home. On August 22, “with heavy hearts [we] steered southward. We had hoped it would be by another way that we should leave Smith Sound forever.”5 Sverdrup would do what was necessary to keep them all alive. He would find other goals to pursue.

  15 ›UNMAPPED LANDS & UNCHARTED WATERS

  From the air, Ellesmere Island (native name Umingmak Nuna, or “Musk-ox Land”) and its near neighbor, Axel Heiberg Island, look together like a human brain in profile. The eastern side is the brain’s flatter base, the semicircular northern, western, and southern arc its big lobes. The countless fjords, bays, glacial valleys, and mountain ranges are the bumpy cortex of its great surface.

  It is a big brain. Ellesmere itself is almost seventy-six thousand square miles (Axel Heiberg adds another seventeen thousand), making it the tenth-largest island in the world, only slightly smaller than all of Great Britain. It is five hundred miles long and three hundred wide. Yet until Sverdrup came, explorers had seen or mapped only half of its coastline, and only on the eastern and northern sides. No one knew how far west it went or what most of the interior looked like. No one knew that Axel Heiberg Island, or any of the others farther out, even existed. Now Sverdrup was going there, with those others goals in mind.

  ››› On the way south they continued the slaughter of walruses begun in Smith Sound. They were able to shoot and harpoon twenty-two lying on floes, adding to the eleven they already had and making a store enough for the winter. It was a grisly business, and the Fram must have looked like a whaling ship after a catch, with the men busy stripping the carcasses of flesh and blubber, and the decks awash with gore and blood. To add to the chaos, a storm brewed up, and Sverdrup described the ensuing grimly comical scene in New Land: