Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  Bay had succeeded in looking after Bear Fort but not without close calls and near misses. A polar bear had come at night, drawn to the meat, and Bay—not seeing well, not an expert marksman, and probably highly nervous—shot wildly at the shadowy approaching form. He thought he hit it but, in his anxiety, blazed away at what he thought was its head. When it did not move, he approached cautiously. He wrote later, “On closer examination it proved to be the other end of the bear I had bombarded; but as a zoologist I, of course, knew that the head in Ursus maritimus is, as a rule, exactly at the opposite extremity to the after-end of the animal, and at last really succeeded in giving it some lead in the right place. The bear had, no doubt, been dead for some time, but discretion is the better part of valor. I then realized that I had killed my first bear.”8

  Another time Bay had slipped and fallen into the frigid water while trying to drag a seal he had killed from a floe to land, in the process losing the seal, his comfort, and his composure, once again supporting Sverdrup’s contention, writing in New Land, that “there was something amphibious about Bay.”

  Bay, wearying of his three-month solitary stint and anxious to get back to scientific work, went back to the Fram with Sverdrup, as Fosheim took over his duties at Bear Fort. They arrived on June 3, soon to hear how, in their absence, the Fram had almost been lost, not to ice but to heat and flames.

  ››› Isachsen and Hassel had gone around the south end of Axel Heiberg Land and then east to explore the convoluted coastline of Ellesmere. Due to slow going and lateness of the season, they had turned around and gone south to Hell Gate and then by Baumann’s route overland to Goose Fjord. Sverdrup had sent out a search party for them on June 5, which was at that moment going in the opposite direction along a different valley. Nonetheless, they all made it back to the Fram without incident, Isachsen and Hassel on June 19 and the search party the very next day.

  By then, spring, as it comes to the Arctic, was suddenly upon them: the meltwater coursing down the hills; the flowers and insects awakening from long dormancy; and the grip of ice in the bays and fjords loosening and shifting. Seals appeared on the floes, and birds returned to the cliffs and patches of open water. The dogs, now kept by the river, were lying with puppies.

  The men of the Fram were busy with new activity, too: wandering the land to gather specimens of emerging flora and fauna; boating and dredging to sample life in the depths; hunting seals; making new spars and sails to replace those lost in the fire; and, as always, preparing for the next, always-looming winter. The blacksmith shop, now on land by the river, served double duty, its forge heating iron for new fittings and heating water for washing and bathing.

  It was, as Sverdrup noted, a delightful time. The men experienced renewed liveliness, as demonstrated in this little story that Sverdrup tells in New Land of one of the favorites on the ship: “The steward [Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm] at this time also ‘took to science,’ as he termed it, and went ashore every evening collecting plants and insects. One evening, when he had been on his trip ashore and was returning on board, he saw a codfish swimming towards the boat. Certain skeptics thought it highly improbable that it was a cod, but Lindstrøm stuck to his opinion, despite these malicious souls who told him that he must have seen his own reflection in the water; he only laughed, and I have never seen a cod do that.”

  On June 19, the waning ice released the Fram, and it settled on water for the first time since the previous fall. Now time was approaching when it would leave its protected anchorage—but for where? Off and on through winter Sverdrup had toyed with the idea of trying again to carry out the original plan of reaching northern Greenland, through Smith Sound, Kane Basin, and Nares Strait. Now, with the Fram almost ready to sail out, and with his usual levelheadedness, he thought better of it. There was no reason to believe that ice conditions in Kane Basin would be any more favorable this year than in the last two. Also, he was probably a bit leery of Robert Peary, with his expedition still there. Finally, and perhaps most compelling to Sverdrup, their mapping of the boundaries of Ellesmere Land was not finished.

  FIGURE 68

  Isachsen (left) and Hassel after a sledging trip to explore and map western Ellesmere. The trips were arduous and sometimes took several weeks. The cold and wind, spring sun, and exposure took their toll: weather beaten and looking old, Isachsen is about thirty-two and Hassel only twenty-four.

  He decided to go the other way, west through the last half (one hundred miles or so) of Jones Sound and into Norwegian Bay, putting the Fram closer to the center of upcoming activity. He conjectured that after one more winter somewhere there, with good conditions to finish their fieldwork, they could sail around North Devon Island, down Penny Strait and Wellington Channel, and on to Victoria Island where they would spend a final winter, their fourth, before heading home. His proposed route out would follow that of the 1845–46 Franklin expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, and certainly he was aware of it but at all costs would not repeat its tragic end.

  Sverdrup daily hiked up a nearby mountain slope to check on ice conditions outside the fjord and judge when the Fram might exit. On August 8, the situation looked good. Jones Sound was clear except for a belt of ice beyond the fjord, and the weather was fair. They would leave the following day. The boiler fire was lit, the blacksmith shop was retrieved, and fifty-four dogs and twenty puppies were brought on board in a deafening symphony of howls, barks, and whines. Midday on August 9, the Fram weighed anchor and steamed out of Harbor Fjord, after more than eleven months of confinement there.

  After a day of plowing and ramming through the ice belt, they reached glass-smooth open water and set course to the end of Jones Sound, arriving two days later at a bay south of an east-jutting peninsula of North Devon (later named Colin Archer Peninsula). From there Sverdrup intended to take the ship around the peninsula and northwest through Cardigan Strait, the channel between North Kent and North Devon Islands (previously discovered by Edward Belcher), and into the Norwegian Sea. They had not proceeded very far before encountering “violent cross-currents” in the ten-mile-wide passageway between Ellesmere and North Devon, where Hell Gate and Cardigan Strait converged. Then things got interesting.

  Under full steam, with its crew struggling to control it as it swung wildly and sometimes beam-to in the currents, the Fram battled its way north, up the full length of Cardigan Strait, only to be suddenly engulfed by fog. Then pack ice appeared out of nowhere. As the Fram sat trapped, the tide changed and the currents started to rip northward, pushing it further out with the pack. The fog lifted enough for them to see water sky in the northwest, the open water of Norwegian Bay, where they wanted to be. Getting there was another matter.

  They forced their way through the ice, keeping as close as they could to the North Devon coast and passing the cleft of Arthur Strait. The fog returned, the ice thickened. Then a northwest wind came up, driving them, with the floes, back to where they had come from. For ten days they drifted until, on August 24, they were again at the northern entrance of Cardigan Strait, where the currents swept them south through the narrows. Up and down they went, at the mercy of wind, currents, tides, and ice, sometimes working in concert and sometimes at odds. Then it got cold, much colder. The ice gathered and solidified around them.

  By now it was September, and regardless of where they were, even out in a frozen sea, they had to start getting ready for winter. They extinguished the boiler fire, emptied the tank, and shut down the engine. They unshipped the rudder to protect it. They moved the forge to the ice and laid up an ice-block wall around it and over that a wooden roof. They also took the dogs out on the ice and began building kennels for them. On board they even began preparing the sledges and gear for the fall trips.

  It was not a pleasant prospect, though, having to spend the winter somewhere in Belcher Channel, exposed and away from land; caught in crumpled, pressure-lifted ice that was impossible for sledges; and wondering if it would suddenly shift and carry them off. As
the fresh meat supply had dwindled to almost nothing, they urgently needed to find game, and plenty of it, to get through the winter. But where would they find it? With the Fram fairly close to shore and stuck fast in the ice, Baumann and Raanes suggested to Sverdrup that they take a short, few-day sledging trip through the area around Arthur Strait to check the hunting possibilities. Sverdrup, perhaps due to concern about the food supply, for once put aside his apprehensions and let them go. It was almost a fatal lapse of judgment.

  Three days after Baumann and Raanes left with two sledges and teams of dogs, a long north-south lead opened just west of the ship, but it stayed put, and all seemed normal. But Sverdrup described what followed in New Land:

  Peder [Hendriksen] and Isachsen had just begun on a series of temperatures, and nothing denoted that anything extraordinary might be expected, but suddenly it was remarked up on deck that the ice was beginning to move, and every now and then a gentle lapping about the bows told us that the ice had parted round the Fram. Everything passed so noiselessly and insidiously, that before we realized what had happened, we were lying as free as if we had never been nipped in the ice . . . the ice fell into rubble, and of the large continuous mass there was soon left nothing but small detached fragments. It was now a matter of saving whatever could be saved, and we had to put our backs into it if anything of the kind was to be done.

  The crew dashed to get the forge and other precious equipment on deck. Then the ice where the dogs were tied broke off and began drifting away. The men hastily secured the slab with anchors and lines while they brought the panicked dogs back on board. All day a northeaster took them toward land, but in the evening it shifted southwest and rose to a gale, and with it, in blinding snow, went the hapless Fram, minus the two still on land. By daybreak the weather cleared, and they found themselves off Graham Island, fifty miles from where Baumann and Raanes had been dropped off and well beyond sight, across a confused patchwork of ice and water that neither boat nor sledge could cross.

  Just as everything looked hopeless, it changed. Toward the south, near where the men had been dropped off, the sea ice began to open. Sverdrup quickly took advantage, ordering the engineers to put the engine back on line and to fill the boiler, and the deckhands to ship the rudder. First struggling through the fragmented pack, the Fram finally reached open water and steamed toward land but only got so far since it was barricaded by solid ice. Sverdrup hoped that Baumann and Raanes would see them coming and work their way to the ice edge where they could be picked up. So far, there was no sign of them.

  Looking through the telescope from the crow’s nest, Hendriksen finally spied the pair moving along the shore, and then out on the ice, apparently having intuited Sverdrup’s intentions. They got to the ice edge, as the crew stood ready at the gunwales, with lines in hand. The Fram came alongside the ice edge, and without a hitch, men, dogs, sledges, and all were plucked up as the current-driven ice moved along at a clip. The ship veered off and headed toward Cardigan Strait, once again.

  Baumann and Raanes had had miserable weather the whole time on land. They had killed no game and seen almost no sign of it. They had taken only enough food for a week, so when they saw that the Fram was gone, they began to ration what they had, not knowing when and where, or even if, it would reappear. What relief they must have felt when they saw the smoke on the horizon and watched it come closer.

  18 ›A THIRD WINTER

  Now the crew was back to looking for winter harbor. Otto Sverdrup tried to reach the Norwegian Sea by a different route: his old nemesis, Hell Gate. The passage south through Cardigan Strait was fairly open now and easy. As soon as he swung the Fram around North Kent Island and into Hell Gate, he came face-to-face with dense-packed ice. He was done. He had no choice but to turn east into Jones Sound and then head to Goose Fjord. It was at least a place they knew, with sheltering topography, secure anchorage, and proximity to game.

  On September 18, after eight hours of steaming up the fjord and nearly at its head, they dropped anchor in ninety feet of water. After the trials and uncertainties of the past three weeks, Sverdrup was relieved: “A better winter harbor we could not wish for and everything in Gaasefjord [Goose Fjord] seemed beautiful to our eyes. The storm which was raging outside had not reached in here. The fjord was free of ice, the land bare, the air mild . . . It seemed as if we had come to an Eden!”9

  The very next day they were hard at it, getting the dogs into new quarters on land, the scientists going out by boat to sample and collect, and the hunters scouting the environs for game. Now that it was prime time to replenish depleted stores, they also set off on longer sledging trips for more promising rewards. On the first outing, in an area north of Goose Fjord and ten miles from the sea, they found their quarry, and the annual “autumn kill” began. Sverdrup and Oluf Raanes killed a polar bear while Ivar Fosheim put down an entire herd of eleven musk oxen. Later, they found and shot another herd of eleven oxen and, in an unfortunate accident, one of Sverdrup’s favorite dogs.

  After the butchering and stockpiling of this second great trove of flesh, Sverdrup stayed to guard it while the others went back to retrieve the first. “But, hanging around the tent alone and with nothing whatsoever to do, I was bored to death,” he wrote in New Land. So he went out wandering. What followed was for him a period of calm after the storm of slaughter, a time for observation and reflection. The first excerpt relates to an encounter with Arctic hares, whose tracks he had been following, a literal highway of tracks:

  FIGURE 69

  The Fram spent two winters in Goose Fjord, 1901 and 1902. From there, sledging parties went out to explore and map western and northern Ellesmere. From left, botanist Herman Simmons, zoologist Edvard Bay (with cane; he had probably been injured in one of his many falls), and sledger/sailor Sverre Hassel.

  While I was standing wondering at this curious sight I suddenly saw a number of white specks on some flat ground a little way off. At first I could not in the least make out what they were[;] they looked more like white stones scattered about the barren land than anything else and therefore took the telescope to my aid. I was highly astonished when I discovered that each distant speck represented a hare! . . .

  Walking towards the spot I was soon able to count thirty-one animals. The thirty sat motionless the whole time, looking as if they were asleep, but the thirty-first was plainly a sentinel. She hopped about in and out among them in never-ceasing vigilance. Every now and then she sat up and listened for a time, but not hearing anything to arouse her suspicions, continued her rounds among the sleepers again.

  I made my way towards them with all the stealth I was capable of, but it was not many minutes before the sentinel noticed me and became disquieted. Every time she showed signs of alarm I stood still for a while, and when her fears were allayed took another step or two forward. But no sooner did I begin to move than she scrutinized me as sharply as before, and again grew frightened.

  I had plenty of time, however, and took things quietly, so that in the end I really came within quite a short distance of the hares, but at the last moment the sentinel apparently thought me a little too pressing, and suddenly starting up ran frantically round her flock, striking the ground with her hind legs till it quite resounded. Then she set off up the slopes with all the others after her in a long straight line, looking as if a white cord had been stretched up the hillside and over the ridge at the top. I remained looking after them for a while after they had disappeared from sight over the crest of the hill. The whole thing was so strange that I wanted to think it out.

  Not far from me still sat two hares by themselves; evidently they did not belong to the other lot. I thought it would be interesting to go across to them if possible, and see what they were about, but realized that I must make use of other tactics if I would approach near to them.

  Earlier in the expedition I had once pretended to be a bear. . . . This, I thought, was a fitting moment to impersonate a reindeer, or some other kind of big game, and I
made a valiant attempt to simulate their grazing movements backwards and forwards on the sward. Meantime I kept a sharp lookout on the hares, and always took care to approach a little nearer to them.

  The hares soon noticed the ever-advancing figure. They stood up on their hind legs and gazed at me for a long while. I immediately stopped, remained quite still, and gazed back at them. When they were quite reassured I began to move about the grass again, and at last they grew so accustomed to my presence that they did not take the slightest notice of me. My tactics were so successful that, in the end, I was not much more than two or three yards away from them. It was quite touching to see these great, innocent, Arctic hares sitting only a few paces off, quietly gnawing roots. The only notice they vouchsafed me was an occasional sniff in my direction.

  As I stood watching them one of the hares came quietly up towards me. So near did it come that I stretched out my hand to stroke it, but this it did not quite like, started a couple of paces aside, and then began quietly to eat again. I stayed long fraternizing with the hares down on the grass, and at last we did not mind each other in the very least. They went on with their occupations quite unconcernedly; I with mine. I felt something like Adam in Paradise before Eve came, and all that about the serpent happened.

  The next excerpt from Sverdrup’s New Land is about a lone duck he came across unexpectedly on a river, which became a metaphor of his own existence:

  After a time I took my way downwards towards the river, where we had met the open water the day before. A single eider was now on it, diving. Why had it remained there? All its companions were long since gone. It was probably a young bird, unable to follow the others in their flight towards the south, and so it had settled down here by itself in the channel. Poor bird! One day it would find the water covered with ice, and there would be an end of it. The bright eyes would close, the lonely cry of need cease to be uttered. One should never give in in this world! No. Better fly; fly till the wings break, and one drops dead on the spot.