Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (13 page)

The passive voyage, even with the occasional jolts from ice and even with the tensions inherent in the sheer scope of what was being attempted, began to wear on them. Time marched more slowly now that they were into the second year with still no end in sight. Another oppressive winter loomed. Traits and habits of
individuals, as in families, could grow irksome and annoying in such close quarters for so long and led to more frequent arguments and fights. Add alcohol, available in quantity though closely controlled, to a brew of interpersonal conflicts, lonely men a long way and a long time from home, and unrelieved cramped quarters, and you can almost guarantee an explosive release of tension at some point.

Mogstad, Nordahl, and Adolf Juell, in particular, seemed prone to offense and choosing this way of solving problems. Celebrations often turned more somber than they had been before, as the contrast to what they were missing back home seemed magnified. Constitution Day, Norway’s national observance, on May 17, went on as before, with a parade of men and dogs, gun salutes, music, and a sumptuous feast in the evening, but the spirit was subdued, according to some of their diaries. Later they were lifted, or perhaps buried, by various kinds of alcohol—beer, aqua vitae, and punch—brought out for the occasion. In his candid way, Scott-Hansen noted in his diary, “We all became well and truly drunk . . . the whole of the 18th we went round with hangovers, every one of us . . . and now there is goodwill all around . . . the worst of our bad spirits are over.”
¹⁴

Around this time, too, it became clear to the others that the doctor, Blessing, was acting oddly, afflicted by some mysterious illness perhaps. But, of his own admission in his private diary, he had begun visiting his own medicine chest and given himself daily injections of morphine, supposedly as an experiment to study the effects of certain medicines on withdrawal. In reality, the drug temporarily relieved the psychological weight he was bearing, but in the process he had become addicted. He suffered the wrenching consequences, as did the others who lived with him.

Writing in his section of
Farthest North
, Sverdrup, like Nansen in his, painted a much cleaner, more uplifting picture of life aboard, toning down or omitting the more lurid or contentious parts. That National Day celebration, for example, was by his account nothing but merriment, good cheer, and fine fellowship. He did not mention Blessing’s abuse of the drug, but his diaries show he certainly knew about it and tried to curtail it. As with Nansen, Sverdrup told the story uncluttered with or undistracted by any human drama not directly related to the historic, heroic effort underway.

›››
The more benign spring weather brought work different from the old routines, mostly cleaning in and about the ship. The melting snow and ice had to be removed from the decks and from under the awning, to avoid flooding the
interior. The living spaces inside, “ceilings, walls, and all the furniture and fittings,” were scrubbed clean of a long winter’s worth of “soot, grease, smoke, dust, and other ingredients.”
¹⁵
Just as with residents of a medieval castle, the men had tossed rubbish and waste, theirs and the dogs’, from the
Fram
, where it lay frozen next to the ship until the melting ice exposed it in a slushy, sludgy moat; this had to be removed before it began to stink or disperse disease. The depots of emergency food and supplies were brought on board for fear of being lost to leads opening under them, or to rain. Water had poured into the engine room through ice-forced cracks between the planks, so had to be pumped and bailed out till the planking swelled into place again. One of the ship’s boats was lowered to the ice, fully equipped and ready for sailing.

They dismantled some big equipment that worked no longer and salvaged it for other necessary things. The windmill, which had given them so much comfort from the light it generated and despite Anton Amundsen’s heroic efforts to keep it going, finally wore out, its gears and other metal parts succumbing to the Arctic cold. They were perhaps happier to take apart the “petroleum launch,” the cantankerous, undependable motor boat that had been a thorn in their side from the beginning, by conking out in tight spots, causing burns by bursting into flame, or being torn from its davits by a pressure ridge. With wood always precious, it went into new snowshoes, sledges, and other implements. They needed more skis, too,
but lacked long boards. With the only suitably sized lumber a spare oak beam and without a ripsaw big enough to handle it, they got creative. Amundsen fashioned a saw from a large ice saw, filing its teeth to do the job, while Bentsen made the handles. Then Hendriksen and Mogstad did the laborious sawing and eventually produced enough planks for six pairs of skis.

The men also had looked forward to spring hunting as the year before, to put longed-for fresh meat on the table, resupply their caches for the winter, and simply enjoy a welcome break from monotony. There was precious little game in this more northerly realm, no polar bears at all, a few narwhals in the open lanes but too wary to be captured, and the infrequent birds and seals they were able to shoot were soon devoured.

Since Nansen’s and Johansen’s departure in mid-March, the ship’s progress had been fairly steady to the west while angling north, with only a brief reversal the last week of May. Now at the end of July it lay only 35 miles from latitude 85°, and 380 from the pole. At longitude 74° east, it was practically seven hundred miles north of where it had sailed the opposite direction two summers previously, past the Yamal Peninsula and the unknown island Sverdrup had seen. The pack, in its summer melting and tumultuous reconfiguring, rocked the
Fram
repeatedly during this period, while lanes and channels opened up all around, forcing the men to bring the emergency depots back on board for safety’s sake.

›››
In mid-August, Sverdrup was anxious to get the
Fram
out of a small, troublesome floe in which it was still locked and into a more stable, settled position for the coming freeze-up next winter. So he decided to try blasting it loose with dynamite. Scott-Hansen and Lars Pettersen went out in the pram, placed the load under the floe, and were rowing back to the ship with the fuse line. Suddenly, the floe broke on its own, with great chunks of ice boiling up from below, and the
Fram
“gave a great heave with her stern, started forward and began to roll heavily, and then plunged with a great splash out into the water.” The subsequent “maelstrom of waves and pieces of ice” engulfed the tiny pram, almost capsizing it, and Sverdrup, with rarely displayed jocularity, noted how “their faces, especially Pettersen’s, were worth seeing while the boat was dancing about with them in the caldron.”
¹⁶

In the Arctic autumn of August and September, they kept busy preparing for winter. As they did, their thoughts must have turned quite often to Nansen and Johansen who, they would tell themselves, no doubt had already made it to the pole, then south to the edge of the ice and open water, and then somehow to home where they would be waiting. Still, the men on the
Fram
must have wondered.

7 ›
HOME FREE

M
uch of the activity aboard the
Fram
in late summer and early fall of 1895 revolved around a single-minded purpose: to prepare to abandon ship, should it be necessary, and make it to where there was at least the possibility of rescue. The puppies had grown to adulthood and would now be able to haul sledges. New and repaired sledges and kayaks were ready and positioned. Stocks of emergency food were weighed out and boxed, enough for eleven men in two different scenarios: first, seventy days of sledging (presumably south to the fringe of the pack ice) and, second, six months on the ice (if stranded, for whatever reason). The resulting rations were kept on board in separate piles, to be transferred to the ice later, when more firm and stable.

With Bernhard Nordahl having taken Hjalmar Johansen’s place as Sigurd Scott-Hansen’s assistant, and Henrik Blessing doing the best he could given his morphine addiction and with only algae available for botanical collecting, the scientific work went on, including soundings of sea depth, a laborious undertaking as it took over two hours to lower the line to consistently amazing depths, often twelve thousand feet or more (nearly two and a half miles).

As the year wore on, the ice pressures were more in earnest (those in summer were less alarming than in winter, as the ice was more plastic and pliable, and thus its blows against the ship relatively softer). Otto Sverdrup artfully described in his section of
Farthest North
when, on August 17, “the
Fram
was lifted 22 inches by the stern, and fourteen inches by the bow. In stately fashion, with no noise, and without healing over in the least, the heavy vessel was swiftly and lightly raised, as if she had been a feather—a spectacle at once impressive and reassuring.”

While open water was still around or near the
Fram
, and before winter set in for real and began to lock things up, Sverdrup wanted to get it in the best possible position, namely, on an even keel in relatively flat topography, without massive pressure ridges lurking nearby. This they did in the first week in September, taking
advantage of ephemeral leads, cutting paths through icy obstructions between them, and using blocks, tackles, and ice anchors to haul the ship to where it could be “moored in the winter harbor we all hoped might prove her last.”

September 22, 1895, marked their second anniversary in the ice, another excuse for a party. But, as Sverdrup pointed out, they had real cause to celebrate. The drift had picked up speed, on the desired course; they had traveled almost twice as far in the second year as in the first. On November 15, they experienced another big milestone: the
Fram
reached what would be its farthest north of the whole drift, 85°57’, coming within 280 miles of the pole (ironically, only twenty-two miles short of Nansen’s and Johansen’s northern limit on their trip). From there, the drift continued westward, dropping slowly south. Over the next three months they would pass more than forty degrees of longitude, at that latitude the equivalent of about two hundred miles, with increasing optimism for release from the ice the next fall.

But over the next three months, the sun disappeared and the cold bore its teeth, the minimum temperature dropping from 10 degrees Fahrenheit to −60 degrees. Birds and sea mammals, already few, were gone entirely. The dog kennels were made and the boxes of emergency food and supplies moved onto the ice. The third winter in the Arctic prison had descended. It would be long and dark (no electric lights without the windmill), replete with familiar tedium and oppressiveness. It had one bright element the others did not: a prospect that it would be their last.

The favorable drift continued in the New Year. By the middle of February they had gone another 270 miles in a westerly direction, hovering just below the eighty-fifth parallel, inching southerly. After a couple of weeks of reversals and false starts, it seemed as though the
Fram
, like a runner at the end of a long race summoning last reserves of strength, began its final move, slowly at first to the west, then faster, swinging southwest, and then south. On March 4 the sun reappeared, a celebration to be quickly followed by another ten days later, the first anniversary of Nansen and Johansen’s departure from the ship. With the return of the sun and spring (more emblematic than actual by our more temperate standards) and the
Fram
’s promising progress, the spirits of the crew rose, bolstered even more in April as they began to encounter game again. They also took pleasure in a little thing: a snow bunting, the “first harbinger of spring,” that alighted on one of the boats and remained there for several days, resting and taking food from the men.

Those Arctic opposites are fascinating, as with tiny, delicate flowers blooming or fragile insects hovering at them, in a landscape so huge as to seem infinite. They are, from a distance, at first, insignificant, invisible, and lost in such immensity, yet up close, alive and vital and, because of that, precious and important.

›››
In April and May, with the ice beginning to melt and open, Sverdrup had all the winter stockpiles on the ice brought back aboard. Then, almost exactly on National Day (May 17), as if it were the symbolic kickoff of the final sprint to the finish line, the
Fram
headed almost due south and kept resolutely on that path into summer. Though the ice began to fracture, with lanes opening and closing around them, the ship was still stuck fast in the ice. The crew worked eagerly in anticipation of what they hoped and prayed was coming, reassembling the engine, filling the boiler with fresh water, and reerecting the funnel on deck. They stoked and lit the coal-fired furnace to start the boiler for the first time in over two and a half years. With hoses, they directed hot water from the boiler down ice-blocked wells of the rudder and screw to unblock them, and freed the shaft to turn. The
Fram
was getting ready for life in water instead of ice.

From the crow’s nest, they could see far down open lanes when the wind blew the floes south, but they were still too icebound to reach them. To the south, too, was a horizon of dark “water” sky, indicating open sea, but getting there at this point was impossible. Freedom—a ripe, enticing fruit—hung before them but just out of reach. Being so close to their goal, after so much time, and with a fourth winter in the ice nipping at their heels, they redoubled their efforts to get out. At the urging of several crew members, on the last few days of May a skeptical Sverdrup decided to try blasting free from the ice that gripped them, a time-consuming, dangerous, and problematic effort. They gave up when the blasting did little more than wear them out and shake the ship, but on June 2 the ice on its own gave them another opportunity when an old lane opened up nearby, close enough for one more try with dynamite to set it loose into the water.

With one great explosion that knocked things from the walls, broke glassware, and sent shock waves through the ship, the
Fram
was almost blown free. More dynamite and manual chopping away with picks and axes did the rest. It at last came free and settled into the water, though it was still at the mercy of the surrounding ice. It was a ship again, albeit without a rudder or propeller yet, waiting for the chance of liberation by warping or under its own steam—if and when that time ever came.

Weeks of a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game between ice and ship followed. In early June, encroaching pressure ridges played with the ship, pushing it up in the stern, healing it over to the side. Then, a few days later, the ice slackened enough to entice them to try warping the ship, with the steam-powered winch, into a suddenly appearing lane. Before the steam had built, the lane opened up even more, allowing them to warp the ship forward by block and tackle. Then, with steam up, they went down the lane as far as they could go, until they could go no farther. Then they sat, fast in the ice, until June 14 when once again the ice slackened and rifts appeared, so the furnace was lit again for steam, and the rudder and screw shipped, as the
Fram
tried to force its way through the cracks to more open water. The serious game went on, pushing and pulling, starting then stopping, and rushing furiously then waiting.

Their one great respite from worry about their situation came with the birds and mammals that were now showing up in greater numbers and offered opportunities for good hunting and fresh food. Sverdrup figured they killed as many as seventeen polar bears during this period in the summer ice as well as innumerable birds.

On July 3 the ice relinquished its hold somewhat, and they tried yet again. With the full power of its compound engine gobbling up great quantities of coal, the
Fram
muscled its way three miles down a lane. A few days later, they tried once more, this time for a gain of only a mile, when the south wind gathered the floes and pushed them north, packing the lanes tight shut.

A month of precious summer had gone by. Progress came only with great effort and amounted to little. In fact, in mid-July they determined they had actually gone backward many miles. The dreaded thought began to enter their heads: perhaps the day of release might
not
come. The struggle continued. The ice would relent; they would get up steam and push and batter their way ahead; and the ice would return and shut them down. Sometimes a collision with a giant underwater floe or capsizing hummock would jolt them to the core. The
Fram
lurched, clawed, and bulldozed its way south, yard by yard, on a good day mile by mile: dynamite then steam; dynamite then steam. On it went, through July and into August. The specter of winter grew closer.

But when the fog lifted a bit on August 12, after a hard battling the day before, they could see “several large channels running in a southerly direction both east and west of our position. Besides, we noticed an increase in the number of birds and small seals, and we also saw an occasional bearded seal, all evidences that we
could not be very far from the open water.”
¹⁷
As they went, the ice grew thinner and easier to push aside. From early evening to midnight they charged ahead sixteen miles. Then, at three in the morning, they saw “a dark expanse of water to the SSE, and at 3:45 we steered through the last ice-floes out into open water.” Finally, the release, both of the ship and their emotions, after three years in the ice. “
We Were Free!
”

At first it was like a dream, sailing clear in open, blue water, the ice disappearing behind them. Could it have been an illusion? Was it just an enormous pool within the ice, with more ice further on? “No, it was real! The free, unbounded sea was around us on every side; and we felt, with a sense of rapture, how the
Fram
gently pitched with the first feeble swell.” They fired a cannon salute to the receding ice, as if to a defeated worthy foe or perhaps also a tribute to themselves.

In dense fog they set a compass course for the largest of the islands in the Svalbard archipelago, six hundred miles due north of mainland Norway. Early the next morning they saw a sail through the thinning fog and headed to intercept the ship, whatever it was. After hailing the ship with cannon shots and coming alongside what they found was the whaling ship
Søstrene
(Sisters) from their native land, and after the joyous cheers between countrymen of both ships, the one most pressing question was yelled across the span separating them: “Have Nansen and Johansen arrived?” There was a momentary silence, an expectancy of held breaths, for the answer to come back. “It was short and sad, ‘No.’”

The
Søstrene
’s captain and some of the crew came aboard the
Fram
, whose information-starved sailors pumped them for news of what had happened in the world since they had been gone. They heard, among all the rest, that a Swedish explorer, Salomon Andrée, was then on Danes Island (Danskøya), off the northwest coast of big Spitsbergen Island in the archipelago, preparing to take a hydrogen-filled balloon to the North Pole. Sverdrup immediately changed course to Danes Island to pay him a visit and find out if he had heard any news of the missing men. By midnight’s light of that season, they spotted dead ahead the northern tip of Spitsbergen, the first land they had seen in almost three years. They continued slowly west through fog, following the coast toward Danes Island. They arrived as the fog lifted and were able to see Andrée’s expedition ship
Virgo
at anchor and, ashore, the big building sheltering his balloon,
Örnen
(Eagle). Soon, Andrée and the
Virgo
’s captain, having spied the famous but unexpected visitor, came out to greet them.

They brought no news of Nansen and Johansen but said that a British expedition
under the command of Frederick George Jackson was on Northbrook Island in Franz Josef Land, exploring and mapping this largely unknown region. Sverdrup rested somewhat easier hearing of Jackson’s presence there, as he knew Nansen’s proposed exit route took him toward that general vicinity and thought it possible he may have encountered him. However, he also knew it would be premature to put too much stock in that hope, as the region was vast and the full extent and character of Franz Josef Land was a mystery. In truth, it included almost two hundred rugged islands, many indented with convoluted, concealing coastlines, and six thousand square miles of land spread across 250 miles of sea. Even if Nansen and Johansen had made it that far,
if
they somehow had survived an unanticipated winter on the ice, and
if
they knew of Jackson’s presence there, the chances of such a fortuitous encounter were extremely slim, at best.