Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (26 page)

Finally, after more failures with various traps, they devised one that worked and managed to capture two alive. They put them in a cage on deck, to observe close up these phantom archenemies. Soon after they trapped an Arctic fox and placed it in the same cage, half expecting the wolves to turn on it immediately. Just the opposite happened. The little fox held its own, even became the boss; it would even sleep stretched out across their backs.

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The spring sledging trips, to the far reaches of their explorations, would be lengthy indeed, so they would first have to set depots at intermediate locations.
For the northern group it would be somewhere near the large fjord east of Bjørne (Bear) Peninsula, for the western one at either Cape Southwest on Axel Heiberg Land or North Cornwall Island. On March 12, two parties, eight men in all, took off together. The sun was shining, the air calm. It was fifty-six below zero, but it would get colder: springtime in the Arctic.

They traveled together for a while, camping one night not far from the sea’s edge near Nordstrand, and then split to go their separate ways. By the time they returned to the
Fram
—the northern party in thirteen days, the western a day later—they each had established good-sized depots, well over one hundred miles from the ship, one far up the isthmus of Bjørne Peninsula, another at Cape Southwest, and a small one on Graham Island.

With everyone back at the ship, final preparations for the big spring push began, including resting and fattening the dogs, as they were footsore and skinny from the hard depot trips. Now was the time, too, for Sverdrup to decide who would go, where, and when. The curtain was about to go up on the next act of the long, great drama whose ending was still unknown.

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THE PROMISED LAND

T
he Monday after Easter Sunday, 1901, four sledging parties departed the
Fram
. Each party included two men, with each man driving his own team of dogs. As before, they all traveled together as far as Nordstrand and then parted ways: Gunnar Isachsen and Sverre Hassel went west to the unknown lands; Otto Sverdrup and Per Schei and separately Ivar Fosheim and Oluf Raanes went north to whatever lay between Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg Lands, with Victor Baumann and Peder Hendriksen accompanying them as far as the depot with more supplies.

The northern group of six followed the trailblazing of the previous month, to begin their search for that open sound between Ellesmere and Heiberg. They first followed the wide iced-over waterway east and then north, where the big fjord (Baumann Fjord) they entered became progressively narrower, its mountainous walls more confining and ultimately impenetrable. After more than fifty miles in, they turned around and retreated, calling the place, aptly, Turn-Back (Vendom) Fjord.

Once back in Baumann Fjord, they went the other way, westward and then northward, passing several smaller fjords, which were obvious dead ends, until they reached a larger, more promising one leading due north. This, too, narrowed as it went. But just before turning around at the terminus, they found a gap in the cliffs, leading to a narrow pathway over the height of land, out of that fjord and down to an east-west one. “It was no pigmy,” Sverdrup wryly noted, not realizing then that they had come to what he and Edvard Bay had looked down upon from on high, two years earlier.
¹⁰
They had come to the place they had already named Bay Fjord.

They proceeded west to a small island in midchannel. From its height Sverdrup saw what appeared to be a wide, open passageway extending north, so they headed for it. The next day, from the vantage point of a headland, they looked out and saw, in Sverdrup’s excited words, “a beautiful large sound extending
northward as far as the eye could reach! . . . We were looking into the promised land . . . we were happy as children.”

The promised land was not land but water. It would almost certainly lead to Greely Fjord and its glaciers, the likely source of icebergs here and in the bay. It meant that Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg were indeed two islands, whose northern limits awaited their determination. Over a celebratory round of brandy for all, Fosheim suggested a name, capturing the spirit of the moment: Eureka (Heureka) Sound, by which it is still known today.

They went on, north up the sound, avoiding as best they could its current-driven pressure ridges; naming key landmarks after something memorable about them; and hunting when they could. On May 1 they were at “May Point” on Axel Heiberg; the next day, at “Depot Point” further on, where they stashed food for the dogs. From there they proceeded to a prominent dark headland on the Ellesmere side, “Blue Man Cape,” beyond which the sound flared out and the two islands pulled away from each other. There, on May 4, the teams separated. Sverdrup-Schei took a track along the western edge of the sound (Axel Heiberg side), to go north as far as they could. Fosheim-Raanes went along the eastern edge (Ellesmere side), into Greely Fjord, whenever it showed itself, to look for a way from there to Bay Fjord and back to the
Fram
.

Sverdrup and Schei continued some forty or fifty miles until they reached a tip of land (Butter Porridge Point) at the confluence of major waterways: Eureka Sound, Greely Fjord to the east, and a wide opening northwest, which was possibly another sound to the sea (eventually called Nansen Sound). In every direction
the distant lands were carved with fjords, or what appeared to be fjords. Ahead of them, to the north, several imposing mountains dropped straight down, which they named for their predominant color: from east to west, Blue, Black, and, fading into the distance, White.

But they could not go much further as icebergs, enormous pressure ridges, deep snow, fog, and gales brought them to a halt. (To retrace their steps to the tent during a storm, they stuffed their mouths with chewing tobacco before they went out and then marked the white snow with splotches of brown, the juice spat out along the way.) They retreated to Butter Porridge Point. With time running out, they decided to head back rather than wearing themselves out pushing further north.

After being detained by a storm for a few days, in about thirty miles they reached another tip of land on Axel Heiberg where they came across extensive stone ruins of ancient native peoples. Their ages-old silence moved Sverdrup deeply. He wrote in
New Land
,

We can almost hear him thinking, At least we have the
Fram
to return to and, with it, eventually escape.

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On they went, down Eureka Sound, never long without encountering musk oxen, hares, the occasional caribou on the sound-side slopes, polar bears and seals on the ice, geese flying overhead, or wolves tracking them like phantoms. As they worked along and partway into Axel Heiberg, they named prominent places, usually after its most outstanding feature or inhabitant: Skaare Fjord for its flocks of glaucous gulls; Bear Strait between Wolf Island and Axel Heiberg; Wolf Fjord; and Glacier Fjord further out where Eureka yielded to Norwegian Bay.

On the way, under Schei’s enthusiastic direction, they collected fossils in great quantity, and the sledges became ever-more laden as they went. They had hammered and chiseled at great labor, often in foul weather, to get the fossils, and Schei treated them as if they were nuggets of gold. Sverdrup could not pass up a gentle jab at the devoted, or he might say obsessed, scientist. “Schei was busy packing them till far into the night. Everything we possessed, over-socks, clothes, wool, stockings and the like, was pressed into the cause as packing material. The fossils, I am sure, had not had such a soft warm bed to lie on for as long as they could remember.”
¹¹

On June 16, two days from the
Fram
, they were driving their fossil-heavy
sledges across the sea ice to where they could go overland to Goose Fjord. A blanket of new snow had fallen. Seals lay scattered about on the ice. As they drove on, Sverdrup noticed that the seals were not seals but eider ducks and that they were not on ice but floating on water. Then he felt there was something odd about the snow, as if water were beneath it, and suddenly he saw that “the ice was gone in many places, and that we were surrounded by slush bubbling up and down in the tearing current.” Picking their way over the rotten ice, they moved slowly and gingerly toward shore. They finally made it, managing to keep their rock-bound sledges and everything attached to them from plunging to the bottom.

The other parties were already back on the
Fram
by the time Sverdrup and Schei arrived. Fosheim and Raanes had traveled from Eureka Sound up Greely Fjord but had been unable to find a way overland to Bay Fjord, so reversed track and headed home through the game-rich country that amply supplied their and the dogs’ needs. They had logged almost one thousand miles. Isachsen and Hassel had circumnavigated the western “unknown lands,” finding them to be two big islands separated by a narrow north-south channel they assumed (correctly) to be a strait. Their discoveries would bear the names of the brothers who were major funders of the expedition, Ellef Ringnes Island and smaller sibling Amund Ringnes just to its east.

Here as elsewhere on the huge new territory of their explorations, they often named prominent features and surrounding waters with names of royalty back home. Cheek by jowl with them would be names of the rough, hardworking men of the
Fram
: Cape Isachsen, Hassel Sound, Baumann Fjord, Raanes Peninsula, and so forth. Surely that was a source of pride for these men, and who would blame them if they also felt a wee bit smug, in close company of such aristocracy and power?

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With the short-lived summer fast upon them, the sea ice melting and slackening would soon put an end to travel there and, they fervently hoped, release the
Fram
to go home. When it did, their jobs would quickly switch from sledgers to sailors, to get it down Goose Fjord and into Jones Sound before winter once again grabbed the ship in its clutches and made it a prisoner for almost another whole year.

As they waited, they all had much to do, finishing up what exploratory work they could manage, continuing with scientific collections, mapping, and as always, hunting for fresh food, especially from among the new arrivals: walruses,
seals, geese, and other migratory birds often numbering in the tens of thousands. When August came, it was prime time for the ice to break up and allow the
Fram
to move. But this year, when the cold hung in late, it remained stuck fast at the head of Goose Fjord. Nonetheless, on August 12 Sverdrup gave it a try.