Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (25 page)
Read Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram Online
Authors: Charles W. Johnson
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
N
ow 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.
›››
After the winter meat was gathered and brought aboard, Sverdrup turned his thoughts to the spring exploratory trips. He had one main goal: determine the extent and character of Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg Lands, whose northern reaches they had only just begun to explore. He felt sure that both were separate islands and that the opening between the two was a through sound to Greely Fjord (and maybe beyond). His theory was that the mountainous, glaciated landscape he and Edvard Bay had seen to the far north the year before spawned the icebergs in Norwegian Bay, since there were no glaciers anywhere else they had been or seen. His secondary goal was to explore the new western lands across Norwegian Bay.
On October 18, Sverdrup departed on a ten-day trip to the big “fjord” that Gunnar Isachsen and Sverre Hassel had entered the previous year, hoping it would indeed turn out to be the opening of that sound. His companion was engineer Karl Olsen, who had never been on a sledging trip. Olsen looked forward to it, but there would be no beginner’s luck for him.
They proceeded from Goose Fjord north over to “Nordstrand,” the temporary outpost established at the north end of Simmons Peninsula, near the shore of Norwegian Bay, where harvested meat was cached for later transport back to the
Fram
. Victor Baumann and Oluf Raanes were there now to guard the meat, and Sverdrup and Olsen spent the night with them in their tent. Sverdrup and Olsen took off the next morning for Graham Island, across the sea ice.
No sooner had they started when a dark storm approached. Sverdrup did not like the look of it, so they retreated to the ice foot to be closer to shelter. Before long, high winds hit them, sending Olsen’s sledge and dogs careening across
the smooth-as-glass ice, and slammed them into a big rock. Olsen was thrown from the sledge and landed hard, dislocating his arm. With the full fury of the storm upon them, and with Olsen in great pain and his arm dangling, Sverdrup retreated with him to Nordstrand.
FIGURE 70
Isachsen butchering a polar bear. Though many bears, musk oxen, and other animals were killed, all went to food (men and dogs), clothing, bedding, equipment, or scientific collections. None were killed for “sport” alone, or wantonly, and nothing was wasted. The men often disliked having to slaughter so many to stockpile for the long winters, but the fresh meat kept all healthy and scurvy free throughout the four years.
For the next two days, the four holed up in the tent as the storm raged on, as bad as Sverdrup had experienced in all his years in the Arctic. When the worst was over, they had to tunnel out, since the snow had buried not only the tent but also the nine-foot-high pile of meat, the sledges (which had been planted upright), and all the dogs. It took them a whole day to dig everything out, discovering as they did that three dogs had died of suffocation, each curled up as if sleeping peacefully.
On a sledge turned into a stretcher, they brought the invalided Olsen back to the
Fram
, where Herman Georg Simmons and Fosheim volunteered to get the dislocated arm back into position, using the doctor’s books to guide them. First, Sverdrup sedated him, not with the risky and dangerous chloroform from the medicine chest, but with the tried-and-true anesthetic of old, alcohol. Out came the precious cognac, but even after downing half the bottle, Olsen did not seem affected, only perhaps happier and less aware of his pain. Simmons and Fosheim moved in. On the first try they succeeded, and when the ball popped back into the socket, suddenly and surprisingly Olsen became dead drunk.
Olsen’s accident and injury may have been a blessing in disguise. If he and Sverdrup had continued on the sea ice they would have likely been trapped out. It turned out that in early November the sea ice around Graham Island and in
that section of Norwegian Bay disappeared. So where would they be now, those two and their dogs? How far would they have made it before the ice disappeared? Would they have been able to find food, provisioned as they were for only ten days? How long would they have been stranded, if indeed they were that lucky?
›››
With the deepening cold and darkness in November and December, the
Fram
’s men took up their indoor work, most of it, except for making kennels for the dogs, the usual preparation for late-winter and spring sledging trips. Once again, the
Fram
buzzed with activity, in the shops and workrooms of the scientists, outside for the ongoing measurements, and in Jacob Nødtvedt’s blacksmith shop. They worked in relative warmth and comfort, except for Fosheim, tough as nails and uncomplaining, whose carpentry shop was in the unheated ’tween decks, where temperatures often fell to well below zero. Their sunless days marched on, interrupted only by watches and, according to their custom, observance of special holidays and birthdays of the crew—or by unexpected, exciting visits by wildlife.
This winter it was wolves, attracted to the garbage heap alongside the
Fram
. The men, whether from prejudicial lore or atavistic association, both revered and hated them. Even Sverdrup called them “evil.” So when they started showing up, the men jumped to action but quickly learned of their wariness. Bay managed to kill one early on, but after that the wolves got wise; they would steal in and retreat quickly into the darkness and beyond gunshot range when someone appeared. Never was another killed. The men tried baited snares, to no avail except loss of the bait. They tried baited hooks with a long line tied to the ship’s bell, so when a wolf pulled the bait, the bell would clang and alert the men below. This was a double failure: the wolves managed to eat the bait without getting hooked or pulling the line, and the puppies played with the line and rang false alarms, time and again.
