Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (39 page)

Within two years of each other, all three
Fram
commanders were gone. Amundsen, the youngest, went first, in a plane crash in the Arctic. Sverdrup, the oldest, was last, dying of cancer. In between, Nansen died of heart failure, he who had yielded the
Fram
to both of them. All three had died while helping others, each in his own way.

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To preserve the
Fram
once and for all, Sverdrup had sought the closest thing to immortality for the ship, ironically putting it exactly where a wooden ship is
not designed to live: out of water, on blocks on dry land, and within a building that would keep the weather at bay. For five years previously, it was afloat but tied to different docks, as the committee continued Sverdrup’s cause and looked for such a place. Finally, in 1935, it came: Bygdøynes, on the Bygdøy Peninsula, just west of Oslo. There, near the water, facing both the city and the way south down the fjord to the sea, the foundation was laid for the tall, triangular-shaped building (modeled after a traditional Norwegian boathouse) to house the ship, masts and all.

Wisting continued to help in the
Fram
’s restoration inside the museum. Six months after the dedication, on December 4, 1936, other workers found Wisting dead in his old cabin, lying in his own bed.

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In 1920, Thorvald Nilsen emigrated to Buenos Aires with his wife. On his last return visit to his homeland, in May 1939, he stood proudly on the
Fram
, reminiscing to those around him. Within a year he died, at fifty-eight, in Buenos Aires, and his ashes were brought back to Norway.

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In the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, Olav Bjaaland lit the torch that was passed to the first of ninety-four skiers in a relay to the Olympic flame cauldron. The last of the torchbearers took off his skis, mounted the steps to the cauldron, and ignited the flame. His name was Eigil Nansen, grandson of Fridtjof.

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Not long after returning from Antarctica on the
Fram
, Jørgen Stubberud had tried what his friend Hjalmar Johansen had done, to take his own life. He lived, however, and went on to become the last surviving member of the original crews, dying in 1980 at the age of ninety-seven.

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The others picked up their old lives or moved on to new ones, whether lighthouse keeper, fisherman, scientist, carpenter, logger, businessman, naval officer, or another. Some made a mark; others disappeared without much of a trace. But they all took with them the memories of those years, stories to color the imaginations of those who might hear. As all do, they went on to the eternal passing in their own time and way.

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The
Fram
, in its active life of twenty-five years and eighty-four thousand miles, with equal temperament and without prejudice or favor, had followed the direction of men of very different personality and purpose. It did its job the same for each, no matter what it was, or to what end. Each man saw the ship differently. For Nansen, it was the embodiment of an idea, an instrument of science, and a ship launched from the depths of mind. For Amundsen, it was more a dependable
workhorse or vehicle, a way to get to a destination safely and on time, without fuss or furor. For Sverdrup, it was the heart and soul of exploration, part of who he was.

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No one is at the helm to steer the
Fram
now, no one to climb to the crow’s nest to look for ice. It sails itself, though history and passed-on memory, into the lives of all who come to witness and imagine.

EPILOGUE

T
he
Fram
has outlived them all, those other wooden polar ships with whom it was connected somehow, somewhere, during its lifetime. The
Windward
, which brought Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen from Franz Josef Land back to Norway in 1896, and which Otto Sverdrup’s men visited in 1898 in Smith Sound as it took Robert Peary north, sank in the Davis Strait in 1907. Roald Amundsen’s
Maud
, built of the
Fram
’s design and of many of its actual parts, lies a partially submerged wreck off the northern coast of Canada. Douglas Mawson’s
Aurora
disappeared in the Pacific in 1917, a likely victim of German submarine torpedoes during the world war. Robert Falcon Scott’s
Terra Nova
caught fire and went down off the southwest tip of Greenland, by coincidence not far from where those pieces from the
Jeannette
floated in.

The
Fram
lives on, doing different jobs in its retirement. It is now, more than seventy-five years after the opening of the Fram Museum to the public, Oslo’s most-visited site. Tourists come by hundreds of thousands each year to walk its decks, peer into the cabins of the sailors, and gawk at the massive timbers of its construction, trying to get a feel for what it was like way back when. Researchers, maritime historians, and old-ship lovers immerse themselves in its history, described and pictured in displays around or in the many books for sale in the museum store. It becomes a special theater for speakers to tell their tales to those assembled on deck.

But the
Fram
is more than a repository of artifacts and information. It is a symbol, multifold. As Sverdrup had instinctually known in trying to save the ship, its very presence would help keep alive the craft of wooden ship building, even as it was dying, and it became an icon in its resurgence later in the century. For descendants of the original crews, it remains a vital, tangible link to their pasts, as meaningful as any ancestral home or landscape. It is Norway’s monument to an ancient, enduring relationship with the sea and the ice and the metaphor of
strength and perseverance in overcoming obstacles and hardships, always forward to freedom. It is the embodiment of a bygone era in polar exploration: grand in its broad call to nations and extraordinary people; terrible in the suffering and privation it entailed for so many; and wondrous in the legends created for others to tell, many times over, around the world.

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On Bygdøy, the
Fram
, though by itself in its own museum, is not alone. Nearby, in another museum, is the raft
Kon-Tiki
that carried Thor Heyerdahl from South America to Polynesia, showing that migration of native peoples could go that way. Nearby, too, is the
Gjøa
, the small ship first through the Northwest Passage, now housed in a similarly shaped extension to the Fram Museum. Further up the road are the longboats of a kind that took Vikings west across unknown seas to unknown lands. All these ships carried seekers who found what they were looking for, whether new land, new routes, or new theories.

I like to imagine them talking quietly at night, when the doors are locked and the lights are out, magically through the walls of their museums and across the distances between them, telling stories to each other of what they saw and did, about the men who made them and the ones who took them on their voyages so very far away. What would they be saying now about what was happening to the world outside?

POSTSCRIPT

T
he
Fram
’s very being reflects the most basic premise of those who conceived of it at the time: that it was not possible to “conquer” the Arctic by sheer strength or willpower, no matter how mighty or determined. Just to have a chance at survival, one must bow to
its
strength, not opposing it but using it to advantage. This ultimate joining of forces was known for eons by the Inuit and other natives of extreme environments but new to far-ranging, acquisitive white interlopers of different sensibility and tradition. It was the right lesson learned for the era. The
Fram
, intact after all of its voyages, was proof.

They knew then, of course, that things had changed over great spans of time. The fossils of tropical plants and animals they saw and chiseled out of the rocks told them that the Arctic and Antarctic had indeed been much warmer hundreds of millions of years ago. But, without the benefit of modern science to help explain why, they accepted it all on faith; it was the way it was. Fossils that old might as well have been aliens from a different planet. There was no reason for them to think that the Arctic or Antarctic would be any different in the future than they were then. Both were, literally, frozen in time.

How were they to know that within a short one hundred years humans would be well on their way to doing the impossible, bending the unbendable to their will and into submission? They would not do it the old-fashioned way, by direct assaults, piece by piece. They would do it by changing the rules of the game and in one fell swoop start to turn the “Arctic” and “Antarctic” into different kinds of polar places, ones with disappearing ice. Strangely, it is a war that no one planned or even wanted, with the tragic irony that eventual victory will really be ultimate defeat.

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The year 2013 marked the first year in human history, and the first time in millions of years, that carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere reached four
hundred parts per million. At that level of this most potent of greenhouse gases, the already-climbing global temperatures might well accelerate and, sooner than later, reach the “tipping point” of no return. Author Keith Gessen, in his article “Polar Express,” lays bare what is happening:

Better yet, a kayak. It would still be quite a challenge, canoe or kayak, considering the nearest land would be 430 miles away (and uninhabited), the water still frigid, and wind and waves still unpredictable and overpowering at times. And watch out for the freighters, oil tankers, and ocean-going tugs and barges steaming through full throttle with their loads. Forget the Northeast and Northwest Passages; over the pole is the shortest way between Old and New Worlds, and thus the cheapest, quickest way to ship all those goods we need or think we need. Keep an eye out for oil and gas rigs, too. But do not worry about polar bears, for they will not be around to bother you. The Open Polar Sea: myth has become reality.

Though the picture is more complicated in Antarctica, the ice is leaving there, too, in great chunks the size of small nations calving off before their time and floating out to sea. The ice that remains atop the continent is thinning as well.

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Otto Sverdrup likely had no inkling of the future implications of what he tried to do in his twenty-year losing battle to keep those “worthless” Arctic islands he discovered in Norway’s hands. Possession now goes well beyond mere prideful nationalism. It has potentially huge economic dividends to the possessors. With an Arctic opening up for transportation and exploitation of its natural resources,
its lands and waterways are becoming ever-more valuable, and adjacent countries ever-more protective of what they consider theirs, or more covetous of what they think
should
be theirs. Who controls the Arctic Ocean itself and what is under it is a growing battle. Pretty forward looking they seem to have been, those who dreamed up the sector principle early on.

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In this new Arctic, the
Fram
would not be needed. It would become rather like a fossil in a rock or a petrified tree in the desert, an anachronistic, preserved curiosity of what once was, and a leftover vestige of an entire but disappeared environment.