Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  With new life and purpose, Nansen traveled the world and worked tirelessly, almost manically at times, for his new causes. While Norway remained neutral during the war, he went from city to town, from meeting to meeting, to urge caution against complacency and for his country to strengthen itself against invasion and prepare for shortages.

  What he feared came true: under pressure from Germany, Norway ran low on food and fuel and became dependent on the United States for shipments to fill the gap. However, after the United States entered the war in 1917, it banned all exports, and Norway ran perilously low on essential supplies for its citizens. Nansen went to Washington and, after months of haggling and negotiation, secured, on his own authority when officials back home dragged their feet, an agreement allowing shipments of food to begin. While in the United States, he came to Roald Amundsen’s assistance once more. He forged an agreement with the U.S. government for supplies and equipment (recall those two boxed-up planes) to be sent cross-country for the Maud when it arrived on the west coast.

  After the war, Nansen’s humanitarianism branched out and widened beyond Norway’s borders and self-interest. He became his country’s first representative to the newly formed League of Nations, the intergovernmental body created to maintain world peace through arbitration of disputes and just treatment of all peoples, regardless of nationality. In that role, for ten years until he died, he would be the driving force for providing relief to millions of the displaced and unfortunate, the sick and starving, and the persecuted. Out of a moral compunction, in taking on such herculean tasks he overrode his own expressed desire to get back to what he knew and did best, science.

  FIGURE 102

  Nansen became an influential diplomat and statesman in his later years, a tireless fighter for the persecuted, dispossessed, and less privileged, no matter the nationality. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922. Here he eats with Armenian orphans near Alexandropol, 1925 (see text).

  Named the league’s “High Commissioner for Prisoners of War,” he was responsible for getting half a million prisoners back to their homes between 1920 and 1922, across twenty-six different countries. The war, and the concomitant Russian Revolution, had also left millions of displaced, homeless, and often starving refugees scattered throughout Europe, the Soviet Union, and Asia. As the league’s “High Commissioner for Refugees,” he created and instituted the “Nansen Passport,” a document recognized by over fifty countries, which allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees free movement across borders, resettlement, and rehabilitation into new lives.

  Millions more were dying and suffering during the Russian famine of 1921–22, brought on by drought but also by war-induced land ravages and transportation disruptions. Nansen put on another mantle, “High Commissioner for Relief to Russia” and, overcoming resistance of many Western nations to helping an emerging communist one, arranged for food to be distributed to starving Russians, a mammoth logistical and political undertaking that saved as many as twenty-two million lives.

  He did yet more. After Turkey defeated the Greek army in 1922, Greeks living in Asia Minor became sudden and frantic refugees, wanting to get back home. Nansen brokered a peaceful exchange and repatriation of a million and a half Greek refugees for half a million Turks in Greece. In 1924–25, he worked on behalf of nearly two million Armenians, stranded in Turkey and the Soviet Union, enabling them to escape their hopelessness and find new homes in other lands.

  In 1922, Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He donated all the prize money, and an equal amount given by an admiring donor, to ongoing relief efforts. After his death in 1930, and in recognition of his work, the League of Nations established the Nansen International Office for Refugees to continue his legacy. Eight years later, it too would win the Nobel Peace Prize.

  FIGURE 103

  Fridtjof Nansen at about age sixty-eight, a year before he died in 1930. There is much to read in his face, both of experiences and personality. Photograph by Anders Beer Wilse.

  ››› What was it that turned this man into the great public figure, reluctant but ultimately heroic, he became later in life? How was he able to get through the tortured periods of his own life when he could barely function and move so brilliantly on to such accomplishments for all humankind?

  His daughter Liv believed that this new, overwhelming passion grew out of his own time of greatest spiritual darkness and cold, after he watched helplessly as those he loved so dearly died and while he was away tending to himself. In him the cool ember of compassion, always there and smoldering, burst into heat and flame, never to be extinguished.

  Could there have been something else at play in this transformation, this devotion so complete and selfless to others in anguish? Was he trying to erase, as best he could, the regret he often felt and expressed about being away from his own wife and children, for so long, when they needed him the most? Could it be from the guilt of falling to recurrent affairs with women, while professing undying love for his own wife? Was he trying, in some extraordinary way, to make up for what he had lost, let go, or pushed away?

  ››› A few years before the end of his life, Nansen gave a speech to assembled students at St. Andrews in Scotland, across the North Sea from Norway, on the occasion of receiving an honorary position in the university. “The first great thing is to find yourself,” he said, in English, “and for that you need solitude and contemplation, at least sometimes. I tell you deliverance will not come from the rushing, noisy centers of civilization. It will come from the lonely places.”1 His lonely places: the Arctic, inside himself.

  31 ›ALWAYS A SAILOR

  Otto Sverdrup, in keeping with the time-honored tradition of exploration, had claimed for Norway one hundred thousand square miles of land in the Canadian Arctic that he and his men discovered, surveyed, and named. Though these places still bear Norwegian names, it was Canada that ultimately took possession of them, not through war or sudden usurpation, but by wry political maneuvering, over a long time. It was a bitter pill for Sverdrup to swallow then, and one with enormous implications for the Arctic, today and in the not-so-distant, globally warmed future.

  After Sverdrup returned from his second Arctic expedition, and once the plaudits and tributes died down, Canada, or at least certain influential Canadians, began to challenge Norway’s claim to these new lands. Since time immemorial, the Arctic had been a kind of global no-man’s-land, with countries sallying forth there, claiming this and that as they encountered new islands and landmasses. For most of history, this traditional approach had not been a problem for any country, as those lands were deemed pretty much worthless anyway. Now, with another country suddenly perched on Canada’s doorstep, with others (particularly the United States) threatening to join the “invasion,” and with the realization that such lands might indeed be valuable in the future, Canada needed to protect its self-interest.

  The way to allow just that had been around for some time, mostly dormant, but now it was time to dust it off and put it into use. The so-called sector principle specified that any Arctic lands north of the Canadian continent, from Baffin Bay to the Beaufort Sea, in an ever-decreasing pie-shaped wedge (the “sector”) all the way to the pole, belonged to Canada. By this astute reckoning, Canada would establish dominion over lands discovered by others, or even yet to be discovered. By the same reasoning, Russia would be in possession of the huge wedge north of Siberia; the United States, the smaller one above Alaska; Norway, an even smaller one including Svalbard; and Denmark, all of Greenland. The North Pole itself no one could own, because it was just a landless point where the sectors converged.

  Canada thus would own, de facto, everything Sverdrup had found and claimed for Norway, even though no Canadian had ever set foot on any part of it. The country rushed to make up for this oversight and in 1903 sent an expedition north to establish its presence and patrol the region. In 1907, one of the sector theory’s staunchest proponents, veteran sailor French-Canadian Joseph Bernier, sailed to Ellesmere
and pronounced that it, and everything else Sverdrup discovered, was now Canada’s.

  Upon hearing of this attempted coup, an upset Sverdrup asked the Norwegian government to reassert its ownership of the “Sverdrup Islands,” even to send a police force to live there permanently and enforce compliance. However, his government chose not to act, and both countries, squeamish about opening this can of worms, more or less ignored the whole thing for twenty years.

  In 1922, however, Canada began to flex its muscles. In a symbolic display of proprietorship, Captain Bernier, now seventy, conducted the first summer patrol around the islands, a practice that has continued to this day. In 1925, the patrol dropped off Alexander Joy of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Ellesmere to establish a police presence there, exactly what Sverdrup had wanted Norway to do two decades earlier. Joy, using Sverdrup’s maps, sledged to Axel Heiberg Island that summer, becoming the first Canadian ever on the island and extending the show of Canadian authority. The next year, the Canadian government wrote to the Norwegian government, officially proclaiming ownership of the islands. It was the first written communication between the two countries on this issue, but Norway did not respond.

  Sverdrup, even while off at other work in other parts of the world, had never stopped trying to save his islands for his country. He asked once again for Norway to resist Canada’s push by pushing back. As if seeing the writing on the wall, however, he added a backup course of action: Canada, if given the islands, must reimburse Norway for all the expenses of his expedition.

  In 1929, the deed was done. Canada officially took over the Sverdrup Islands. All of Sverdrup’s maps, logbooks, and diaries went to Ottawa. In return, Norway got its money, and Sverdrup received a onetime payment of sixty-seven thousand dollars. With this and an annual stipend awarded two years earlier by the Norwegian government, Sverdrup was finally able to retire. But he did not enjoy his “golden years” for long. He died within a year.

  FIGURE 104

  Otto Sverdrup in 1928, two years before his death at age seventy-six. His beard, though now gray instead of the red of his earlier years, still had its windswept, distinctive shape. Photograph by Anders Beer Wilse.

  ››› Sverdrup, after coming back from the Arctic the second time, tried his hand at a flurry of business ventures far different, and far flung, from what he had been doing most of his adult life. In 1906, he bought a plantation in Cuba, with the idea of growing bananas, coffee, and other tropical products for export to Norway. Just as he began to cultivate the land, a severe drought and damaging storms turned the whole thing bust. Next, in 1911, he and others started a whaling enterprise in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, but he gave up on it and returned home. Two years later, he was back in Alaska to investigate the possibility of beginning a forestry operation there, but World War I put an end to it before it ever started.

  Sverdrup went back to what he knew and did best, being a sailor in northern, icy waters. It was a serendipitous reentry into his old profession, through old ties and to old familiar regions. In late summer 1913, Fridtjof Nansen contacted him from Russia to ask him, on behalf of the Russian government, if he would help in the search for two Russian ships engaged in exploration that were missing somewhere in the ice of the Kara Sea, north of the Siberian coast. Sverdrup, though now fifty-nine, immediately said yes. In charge of the Eclipse, one of two ships each provisioned for two years, he left the next summer on the search and rescue east along the Siberian coast, the way he had come with Nansen and the Fram twenty years before. Finding no trace of the missing explorers or their ships that summer, Sverdrup took the Eclipse into winter harbor on the Taimyr Peninsula.

  While there, they communicated with St. Petersburg by radio (ships and shore stations now had wireless radios). One of their transmissions was picked up by a Russian icebreaker, one of two in trouble in the ice fields off Severnaya Zemlya, two hundred miles northeast of where the Eclipse lay. One, the Taimyr, was about to be crushed, while its sister ship was frozen in the pack fifteen miles away, powerless to help. The captain of the Taimyr called to ask for help.

  Sverdrup managed to get in touch with the Taimyr, through communications that were relayed and rerouted hundreds of miles by new shore stations in Russia. After giving some of his men a crash course on sledging with dogs and skis, and after putting out depots, he set out. After two weeks’ trekking, they found the ship and escorted thirty-nine men, from both icebreakers and all slogging through deep snow, back to the Eclipse and safety. A month later, as arranged over the radio with St. Petersburg, a great cavalry of men and sledges, hauled by 650 reindeer, arrived and carried the men away west and back to civilization.

  In 1920, the ice of the Kara Sea took another hostage, a passenger ship with eighty-seven people aboard, including women and children. Russia, with a long and grateful memory, asked him again for help and again he agreed. Commanding the big Russian icebreaker Svyatogor, Sverdrup proceeded to the Kara Sea and then to the beset ship that, having been eighteen weeks in the ice, was now without fuel and nearly out of food. He freed the ship and transferred enough of what it needed to get it and all its passengers safely home.

  A year later, Sverdrup was back again, as captain of another Russian icebreaker, Lenin, leading a convoy of transport ships on the first ever passage of its kind through the Kara Sea, establishing what is now called the Northern Trade Route, which was of great, and still mounting, importance.

  Finally, it was Sverdrup who suggested using the Soviet icebreaker Krasin to reach Umberto Nobile after his airship Italia crashed in 1928 (and helped plan the whole operation). He of all people would have known what to do, for he had commanded the icebreaker when it was the Svyatogor (then Russian) and saved those eighty-seven lives on the passenger ship frozen in the Kara Sea.

  ››› Sverdrup had helped rescue many during his lifetime, including Russian ships caught in the ice, Italians from a downed airship, and his own countrymen in extremis. He had even tried to save what he considered his country’s lands from those who would take them away. He had one last rescue he wanted to make before he died, the Fram itself.

  Since coming back to Norway in 1916, the Fram had sat in Horten for ten years, an unattended, deteriorating shell open to the ravages of time and weather. It sat for all that span of time: during and after the Great War, those years when Roald Amundsen was flying in airplanes and airships, and when Nansen was working so relentlessly for the world’s downtrodden. As the Fram declined so did its creator, not far away. Colin Archer died in 1921, at age eighty-nine, never knowing if his ship would ever be saved. While many fretted over its condition, and even organized a committee for its rehabilitation, there were also many who thought it was costing too much just to keep it going and advocated putting it out of its misery by sinking or dismantling, a more dignified end to a venerable and deeply loved symbol of the country.

  In 1925, Sverdrup, who had been its captain longer than anyone else and who had brought it safely through so much ice and darkness, at age seventy came out of retirement, out of his beloved garden at home near Oslo, and to the rescue once more. “She deserved a better fate,” he had said of his old and beleaguered friend, “than to be hidden away in a corner, plucked bare of her engines and all her original equipment.”2 But his concern went beyond his own personal ties to it. He felt the Fram, by its notoriety and example, could help keep the craft of wooden shipbuilding alive, whose slow death he was witnessing (his concern was prescient, indeed, as steel, and then plastic, almost made wooden boats and ships extinct by the end of the century). Sverdrup headed up a reinvigorated committee and, in his composed and determined way, led a last-ditch charge to save the ship.

  The way to salvation was not easy or quick. In 1916, the Norwegian government had granted only enough money to have its punky and wormhole-ridden hull repaired, a stopgap measure just to keep it afloat. Now, with Sverdrup’s and the committee’s urging, the government gave again, for another round of emergency hull repairs and for the
building of a scale model, to guide restoration or, as cynics might have thought, to have something to remember it by when it was gone.

  Sverdrup and the committee kept at it, seeking money from private sources. By 1929, they had raised enough for a complete and thorough restoration. That fall, the Fram was towed to a shipyard in Sandefjord, not far from its birth town of Larvik, and the rebuilding began. Sverdrup, as he had during the construction of the Fram in Archer’s yard, supervised the work. He even managed to retrieve some of the original equipment, still in Horten, including boats and rudder, though the masts stayed on the Maud and were replaced with replicas from trees sent from Oregon in the United States. Perhaps as much in recognition of his devotion to the ship and his efforts in saving it as for practical reasons, the Fram would come out of the shipyard the next year looking not as it did when first launched but as it was under his command on the second expedition.

  ››› On May 13, 1930, Nansen died at home at age sixty-nine. On May 17, his funeral took place in Oslo, with Sverdrup there as honorary pallbearer. Two days later, the Fram left the shipyard in Sandefjord, a refurbished ship with a new lease on life. Sverdrup witnessed this coincidental crossing: the death of the one who had brought the Fram into being and the rebirth of his own creation.