Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (22 page)

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UNMAPPED LANDS & UNCHARTED WATERS

F
rom 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.

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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
:

On August 22, still coping with nasty weather, they passed by thirty-mile-long Cobourg Island, turned west in Lady Ann Strait, and sailed into Jones Sound. To the north lay the steep, fjord-riven coast of Ellesmere, stretching west beyond vision and knowledge. To the south lay huge North Devon Island, forty to fifty miles from Ellesmere and paralleling its coast, which likewise disappeared into the distance. Fighting rough seas, dodging icebergs, and winding through patches of pack ice, they made their way toward Ellesmere for wintering-over possibilities; it was the more difficult but more inviting approach than exposed, barren Cobourg or the snow-and-ice clad mountains of North Devon, dropping into the sea unrelieved by protective coves. Rounding the big headland of Ellesmere, they found an ice-free refuge in a narrow fjord they named “Fram Fjord,” where they anchored, caught their collective breath, and went ashore to check the surroundings. It was relatively lush, by Ellesmere standards, with a valley to the west “wide and smiling” and “one of the most verdant places” they had seen.
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Everything is relative.

But, despite the attractive environs, especially to botanist Simmons who reveled in collecting specimens, Fram Fjord was not a good bet to spend the winter. The big game they needed was oddly absent. They had entered the fjord easily at high tide, but when it went out, they saw large rocks guarding the entrance to the fjord, a threat when departure time came.

On August 28, the
Fram
left its peaceful anchorage and headed back into the still-miserable weather outside, varying from buffeting winds to dense fog, driving rain, and sleet. It struggled westerly, though helped by the winds and currents. Three days after leaving Fram Fjord, they rounded a cape and, with their way obscured by fog, steamed slowly and carefully through a mile-and-a-half-wide passage due north. As they crept along they heard, through the fog, “such a crashing and rumbling, that we thought the mountains were coming down on us, while at the same time the din was increased by the echoes which were thundered
back from the steep crags on the other side.”
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Alarmed but undeterred, they continued, around a hook of land to the east and into a small, protected bay. With deep water right up to shore, they ventured in as close as they dared, picked their spot, dropped anchor at thirty fathoms (180 feet), and secured the stern to the rocky shore.

Sverdrup was not entirely comfortable with this location either, as it was exposed to the west and a stiff current ran by. A boat trip up the fjord the next morning revealed no better place, though they did find the fjord well stocked with seals for their winter food supply. They also saw that the land on the west side of the fjord entrance was actually an island and that the source of the tremendous noise they had heard coming in was actually great boulders careening down the steep cliffs. They named the island Skreia, Norwegian for something like “Landslide Island.”

The
Fram
would stay put where it lay for the second winter. Jacob Nødtvedt drilled into the rocks and drove in a big iron bolt, to which a cable was attached, securing the
Fram
stern to the shore (the rusted bolt is still there, visible to the rare visitor who might know where to look). They doused the boiler fire, drained the tank, and committed the
Fram
for the next nine months, or however long it took to get free again, to this place they called Havnefjord, “Harbor Fjord.” It was the first of September.

Some of the men became ill soon after setting up in Harbor Fjord, worn down by either the travails from Pim Island to Harbor Fjord, from a disease caught from Peary’s men earlier, or something else. Peder Hendriksen, though one of the strongest on board, was hardest hit, with severe chest pains, coughed-up blood, and swelling in his legs, and had to be confined to bed for an extended period. Their condition was especially worrisome as there was no doctor to tell them what was wrong or how to get better.

Nonetheless, work had to go on: the search near and far for life-saving game; collection of natural history samples of interesting finds; surveys to trace new lands onto new maps; and depots set out of dog food for sledge trips later in the fall, when they would go even further west into unknown territory. For this, a group of four (Sverdrup, cartographer Gunnar Isachsen, hunter Ivar Fosheim, and general assistant Stolz) sailed in one of the boats with a load of dog food and other supplies, for fifty miles west along the coast of ice-pocked Jones Sound, until they reached another big fjord (named later Boat Fjord) cutting into the land. As they tried to cross its mouth, they were driven back by incoming drift ice,
so they retreated to the east shore, pitched the tent, and established the dog food depot higher on the beach.

It was a risky time of year for traveling by boat, when the rapidly cooling surface water could quickly turn to ice, or when the already-existing pack ice, broken and dispersed, could suddenly appear as one great, impossible mass. Sverdrup and his small team were well aware of this, so they intended to scoot back to Harbor Fjord as soon as possible. They were too late, by just one day. The fjord surface became deep slush, impossible to row or sail through, and south winds brought the Jones Sound pack ice in to block their way. They were stuck.

With a patience demanded by the Arctic of any visitor, they waited for the winds to shift and sweep the way clear, long enough to get out. The winds did shift, several times, but the ice only gathered more, and more confusedly. They decided to wait until the inshore ice thickened and became strong enough to walk upon, all the way back. As nights now in mid-September were getting steadily colder, they moved from the tent into a shelter they made, Adolphus Greely style: dug partially into the ground, with walls of rock and the upturned boat a roof (hence the name, Boat Fjord). Here was their home away from home, where they slept and ate in relative comfort, and hunted by day mostly Arctic hares and ptarmigan. They made a sledge out of a boat seat, a harpoon shaft, tin from food containers, and other scavenged parts. Three weeks they waited until they thought the ice ready and then set out walking. Two days later, October 8, as they approached South Cape where they would turn north toward Skreia Island and the
Fram
just beyond, they saw two men on the ice, running toward them.

Baumann and Bay had come to look for the long-overdue group and hurried when they caught sight of them. But their meeting was not joyous. They were bringing bad news that another member of their close-knit family, good-natured Ove Braskerud, had died. He had fallen victim to that same malady that had struck Hendriksen, Nødtvedt, and others, but he had not pulled through.

As they had done for Svendsen at Fram’s Haven, in solemn ceremony they slipped his body through the ice into the sea and built a rock cairn memorial overlooking the place of his burial, atop it a wooden cross inscribed with his name. Svendsen was thirty-two when he died, Braskerud but twenty-seven.

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Now that the ice had formed sufficiently for dog-and-sledge travel, Sverdrup intended to make best use of what time they had before winter. One party (Isachsen and Sverre Hassel) was to survey the coast eastward, the land they had already passed but not yet mapped. Another (Sverdrup and Ivar Fosheim, with scientists Schei and Bay) was to set a depot as far west of Boat Fjord as possible, to support exploratory trips the following spring before the ice broke up and the
Fram
sailed out (they hoped) of Harbor Fjord. A third (Baumann and Stolz) would take supplies and equipment to and from Boat Fjord.

They all departed together on October 13. Remaining on the
Fram
were first mate Oluf Raanes, engineer Karl Olsen, botanist Simmons, the still-ailing Hendriksen and Nødtvedt, and cook Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm, whose food and cheery presence were surely welcome by those few as the long darkness and deep cold gathered outside.

The westward-heading group, accompanied by the support team, made it to Boat Fjord in two days, setting up comfortably in the “boat house.” Baumann and Stolz headed back a couple of days later, and the others struck out, in a snow storm. They crossed Boat Fjord and rounded a headland, beyond which spread the entrance of an even bigger fjord, perhaps ten or eleven miles wide. After crossing this they camped at the western headland, named “Cape Storm” for the fierce north winds they encountered there.

The next day they forged on to the western shore of a north-cutting bay, where they were stopped by open water right up against sheer cliffs at the sea edge. Here, they knew, was to be their depot. So they pitched the big Fort Juliana
tent and stocked it with supplies, supplemented with a stock of frozen meat from polar bears they had shot along the way. They had reached their western-most advance. They then began to explore the big fjord they had just passed and look for signs of game.

They were not to be disappointed. They soon came across musk-oxen tracks. Then they found the animals themselves, herds of them, and another slaughter began. In a heartrending passage in
New Land
, Sverdrup once again, wrestling with his conscience, describes his deep remorse over the carnage: