Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  The triple exterior planking nearly encased the keel below, leaving only three or four inches exposed, and that which was exposed was rounded off. This would prevent the ice from grabbing onto it and flipping the ship on its side. Archer knew full well the sacrifice this meant for sailing, as a conventional ship this size would have a deep, heavy keel for stability and control: the Fram would roll, yaw, and wallow significantly in heavy, following seas and have a tough time making headway into the wind. He also knew that, though causing extra bouts of mal de mer for the crew, and becoming difficult to steer at times, it would be a most seaworthy vessel and would ride the waves safely no matter how ominous they got. Crews of all three Fram expeditions would confirm that Archer knew what he was talking about, sometimes by their awful sickness on the tilting, pitching decks, but mostly with gratitude when things got nasty on the open ocean.

  If the cross-section U-shape and toughness of the hull were the outward, first-line defenses against the ice, equally important was the internal structure and support that would keep that hull from collapsing from side pressures. For this, according to Nansen, “the inside was shored up in every possible way, so that the hold looks like a cobweb of balks [beams], stanchions, and braces.”5

  A cobweb, in its gauzy delicacy, does not seem the right analogy. In the dimness of the main hold, it appears as something other than a web or veil in those intersecting, crossing members; it projects more a seemingly eternal solidity and permanence, as if it were the interior of some great cathedral built of wood and iron instead of stone, where knees and networks of beams took on the role of vaults and buttresses. Each projected its solemn power in a different direction, to where the sacredness lay, for worship, struggle, or propitiation: the cathedral up toward the heavens and the Fram out toward the ice.

  Massive oak beams stretched across the ship, bracing it from side to side while supporting the decks above: the main deck of four-inch Norwegian pine and the lower (’tween) deck of three inch. The beams were attached to the ship’s side with large knees or brackets, 450 in all, of Norwegian pine hewn from the section of the tree between the lower trunk and upper roots, where the grain runs in a natural 90-degree curve. Wooden knees were used more than iron ones, as they were super strong with their swirling, interlocking grain yet also somewhat flexible, so when under great strain they would neither break nor pull away from the sides.

  While the knees tied the hull and decks together, other structures further braced the interior in other ways. Great “breasthooks,” triangular wedges of solid wood and iron, bound the stem and stern to the sides. Vertical iron stanchions ran from the upper deck beams to the lower, and from the lower to the keelson (timbers on either side of and attached to the keel), to support the beams in their athwartship span. Diagonal wooden “stays” extended like arms from the beams to the hull, with their hands pressing out to keep the shape intact. As in Archer’s pilot and rescue boats, the below-deck space was divided into three compartments, separated by two watertight bulkheads, so that if one or even two were flooded the ship could still stay afloat.

  FIGURE 4

  Fram’s “Achilles’ heel.” The exposed rudder and screw could be hauled up on deck through the well (see chain attached to rudder) to avoid being damaged by ice. In less critical situations, the two-bladed screw could be aligned vertically to “hide” behind the rudder and rudderpost.

  Archer called it its “Achilles’ heel,” where both the rudder and the propeller protruded from the hull. These could provide an ideal place for ice to wreak havoc, not only by knocking out the steering and a vital means of propulsion, but also by opening a way for it to gain access to the ship’s interior. To counter this, Archer took a page from the sealers’ book, whose ships were built such that a damaged rudder or propeller could be taken off (unshipped) and a new one put on (shipped), though doing so for the rudder was very time consuming and laborious. Archer improved on this idea, so that a few men could unship both screw and rudder easily and quickly, should a situation arise suddenly, winching them up by chains through ironclad wells onto deck. The rudder, too, trussed by large U-shaped iron straps, was positioned near the bottom of the hull so that, when the ship was underway, it would always be well down in the water, beneath the floes, additionally shielded by the overhanging stern. The screw was protected aft by a double sternpost (and, aft of that, the rudder itself) and below by a massive skeg, all reinforced by iron straps bolted through and through. Unlike most screws, with three blades, the Fram’s had only two. When need be, the blades could be set in a vertical position and thus protected by the sternpost against passing ice.

  As a hybrid of engine and sails, the Fram was technically “an auxiliary screw steamer rigged as a three-masted fore-and-aft schooner.”6 Its fore- and mizzenmasts were the same height and shorter than the mainmast, each carrying a gaff-rigged fore-and-aft sail. The pine masts were big and stout, to carry a lot of canvas (720 square yards, or 6,480 square feet) needed to propel such a heavy, bulky ship. The mainmast was 22 inches in diameter at the partners (main deck level) and, with topmast, 130 feet tall. The foremast also had a square-rigged foresail and topsail that could be raised and lowered by lines leading to the deck. This design was chosen over the more customary, tradition-bound square rigs used in Arctic sailing, mostly on the strong advice of Otto Sverdrup. He knew it would be much easier for the small crew, as everything could be handled from the main deck, requiring no climbing of masts, or extra hands, for furling or unfurling. Perched on the topmast, over one hundred feet above the water, the crow’s nest was “as high as possible so as to have a more extended view when it came to picking our way through the ice.”7

  The three-cylinder, 220-horsepower engine was driven by steam from a huge boiler (as were the winches) and fired by coal, kerosene, or both. It was not just any ordinary engine: it could run on all three cylinders when full power was needed, say, for getting through a tough patch of ice, but in more benign times any one or two of them could be shut off to save fuel. The ship lugged over 250 tons of coal when it set off on its first expedition, estimated to be enough for four months of nonstop running (which, of course, it would never do, being either under sail when at all possible or locked in the ice the rest of the time). At full speed under power, in fair weather, it could lumber along at six or seven miles per hour.

  FIGURE 5

  Fram’s engine room. The original engine was steam driven, off a boiler. Here, in 1910 with the third expedition on the way to Antarctica, it has been replaced by a new diesel engine. Note the massive wooden knees for bracing the ship’s sides and the engineers in the confined spaces.

  The coal (and sixteen tons of petroleum) would also serve other critical purposes: to cook the food and heat the living quarters. One coal-burning stove was in the common space (saloon) and one, a cookstove, in the galley; both radiated warmth not only in those spaces but also to the cabins, or sleeping quarters, which surrounded the saloon and galley. There were six cabins, four private for those “in command” of the expedition or its scientific activities and two four-man cabins for the remaining nine (originally, the crew was to be eight, but a ninth was taken on after the Fram left Christiania).

  Besides the arrangement of rooms that allowed for efficient thermal pooling and distribution, interior construction was a marvel. The living spaces were, in effect, a collective box wrapped overhead (ceiling), bulkhead (wall), and floor in layer upon layer of materials that could, individually or together, do their best to ward off intruding cold, preserve what precious heat there was, and properly deal with a devil—moisture—that often became a problem if not a curse on many an Arctic sojourn. The most interior wall paneling was lined inside with a linoleum (invented in England forty years earlier) that served as a barrier to the warm, moist air, which otherwise would condense to frost and ice as it encountered cold air coming through the hull. Then, moving toward the outside, there were successive layers of, in order, wool felt, softwood paneling, cork, and finally, ne
xt to the ship’s inside planking, a thick layer of tarred wool felt. The ceilings, where most of the heat would be lost, had additional layers, including two of just air and one of reindeer hair, for a total of fifteen inches of insulating material.

  FIGURE 6

  The saloon where the men ate and socialized in heated, well-insulated comfort. The skylight allowed natural light to come in from above.

  Attention to detail meant everything when it came to the comfort, or misery, of the crew. The floor consisted of half-foot-thick cork padding on top of the deck planks, then a wood floor, and then linoleum. All interior doors leading to the outside were small and extra thick, with several layers of wood and the spaces between packed with reindeer hair. Door thresholds were fifteen inches high, to act as dikes against the low-lying flood of cold air just beyond. The skylight into the saloon, allowing blessed natural light to come into the interior of the ship, was a place where a great deal of heat could be lost, so it was triple paned and air sealed. Even the heads of through-bolts were covered with felt pads, to keep the moist warmth from being conducted out and turning to ice as it hit the colder zones.

  For the crew there were other amenities, for example, the heated saloon with a well-stocked library and a player organ, and a dynamo (generator) for electric lights, to brighten the seemingly eternal winter’s dark, powered either by a wide-bladed windmill on the main deck or a human-driven treadmill below.

  If everything failed in one crushing, final catastrophe somewhere in the great oceans or in the great ice, there was yet one more contingency that Archer had not overlooked. The Fram carried eight boats on deck, ready at the davits for lowering. Two were to serve as lifeboats in case of the ultimate emergency, whether plunked down on the ice or sailing an ice-strewn sea. They were big enough (twenty-nine feet long, nine feet wide) for the entire crew to live in, were covered with a deck, and held supplies for several months. If somehow the boats, too, were lost, the men could take to sledges across the ice, carrying kayaks for if and when they came to water.

  FIGURE 7

  Launch of the Fram at Colin Archer’s shipyard, Larvik, Norway, October 26, 1892.

  ››› Hundreds of people, including shipbuilders, sailors of the northern seas, workmen, family members, and friends, attended the launching at Archer’s yard on October 26, 1892. Nansen’s wife, Eva, christened the ship by breaking a bottle of champagne against the stem and speaking out its name officially for the first time: “Fram skal den hede” (“Fram shall she be called”). Then, as related by James Archer in his biography of his great-grandfather Colin, “one of the carpenters hoisted a red pennant with white letters on the waiting flagstaff on board and foreman Ambjørnsen cut the last hawser. Tradition says that because of her weight Fram slipped down the ways a little early. She created a wave that took some spectators that stood too near, but no one was injured. A little boy, who had seen the whole ceremony, shouted enthusiastically, ‘Once more!’”

  ››› In the years to come, the Fram would carry its new flags—the Norwegian and its own—into the farthest, most unexplored reaches of the world.

  I ›››THE FIRST EXPEDITION

  1893–1896

  THE ARCTIC OCEAN ‹‹‹

  FIGURE 8

  The Fram’s route in Nansen’s and Sverdrup’s expedition between 1893 and 1896, including Nansen’s and Johansen’s fifteen-month sledge and kayak trip in 1895–96. Also shown are Sverdrup’s routes to and from Ellesmere Island region, 1898–1902 (see also figure 50). For scale, a direct line over the North Pole from southern Norway to northern Alaska is about 4,000 miles; Greenland is 1,650 miles in north-south length.

  2 ›TRIP TO NOWHERE

  To reach the starting point of the icebound journey across the pole, Fridtjof Nansen intended to take the Fram near to where the Jeannette had been frozen in, off Herald Island in the Chukchi Sea, some two hundred miles north of the Siberian coast. Originally, he had planned to get there just as the Jeannette had, through the Bering Strait, a months-long trip the length of the Atlantic Ocean, around Cape Horn, and up the Pacific, with a last, brief stopover in Alaska to select sledge dogs. Instead, he decided on the shorter, though more unknown and undoubtedly more dangerous, route from the Norwegian Sea around Scandinavia and then east through the Barents, Kara, Laptev, and East Siberian Seas, tracking along the convoluted, and often ice-choked, north coast of Russia. This route is the Northeast Passage, which was cleared successfully for the first time only fourteen years earlier by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld in the Vega. Nansen would arrange to pick up dogs in Siberia, early in the trip. So north instead of south they would go.

  On June 24, 1893, the Fram weighed anchor and slowly made its way out of the harbor of Christiania. The rainy, gray day did nothing to alleviate the melancholy that always pervades crews and loved ones left behind at the departure of ships on long voyages, more so for one of such unknown duration, with so uncertain an outcome. On Nansen, prone to periodic black moods anyway, it lay especially heavily. In Farthest North, he said,

  Behind me lay all I held dear in life. And what before me? How many years would pass ere I should see it all again? What would I not have given at that moment to be able to turn back; but up at the window little Liv [nine-month old daughter, his first child] was sitting clapping her hands. Happy child, little do you know what life is—how strangely mingled and how full of change . . . and now a last farewell to home. Yonder it lies on the point: the fjord sparkling in front, pine and fir woods around, a little smiling meadow-land and long wood-clad ridges behind. Through the glass one could descry a summer-clad figure by the bench under the fir-tree. . . . It was the darkest hour of the whole journey.

  FIGURE 9

  Fridtjof Nansen, in his cabin aboard the Fram, February 15, 1895.

  He is thirty-three years old here, the expedition leader, with a PhD in zoology and fame from his Greenland crossing. Behind him is a picture of his first child, daughter Liv, held by his wife Eva.

  Leaving Christiania, Nansen’s excitement and determination about the upcoming journey were high but clouded by doubts, regrets, and melancholy that shadowed his writing in Farthest North. He was not alone in all the conflicted feelings at such a time, as some of the diaries of the crew revealed.

  The Fram made its way south and into Larvik Bay the next day, tying up at Colin Archer’s shipyard where it had been launched. Ostensibly, it had come to pick up the lifeboats and other last-minute provisions, but there was likely another reason for this last visit to the place of its birth, a more sentimental or symbolic one. Archer was there. When the Fram departed a couple of days later, Archer was at the wheel and guided it out. Finally, he disembarked into a small boat that also carried Nansen’s brothers and watched the Fram leave.

  “It was sad and strange,” Nansen wrote in Farthest North, “to see this last relic of home in that little skiff on the wide blue surface . . . I almost think a tear glittered on that fine old face as he stood erect in the boat and shouted a farewell to us and the Fram. Do you think he does not love the vessel? . . . Full speed ahead, and in the calm, bright summer weather, while the setting sun shed his beams over the land, the Fram stood out towards the blue sea, to get its first roll in the long heaving swell. They stood up in the boat and watched us for long.”

  After departing Larvik, the Fram rounded the southern end of Norway and headed into the North Sea, where it soon revealed its open-water character in the building swells. It “rolled like a log, the seas broke in over the rails on both sides. . . . Seasick I stood on the bridge, occupying myself in alternately making libations to Neptune and trembling for the safety of the boats and the men.”1

  Aboard were expedition leader Nansen and ten of the eleven-man crew. Otto Sverdrup, already appointed captain, was to be picked up later near Trondheim, halfway up the coast, nearer his home (a twelfth member would be hired in Tromsø). Nansen had selected the rest of the crew from the applications that had deluged him from around the world once news of the
expedition had gone public. Even with so many to choose from, it was not easy to pick the select few who would go, for each man had to be a complete package of appropriate skills, physical strength, seamanship, skiing ability, and mental acuity. Nansen, out of national pride (especially as Norway at the time was struggling for independence from Sweden) and the desire for cohesiveness, had also wanted an all-Norwegian crew. Moreover, each would have to possess a personality blending patience, forbearance, resiliency, and sufferance of privation, both social and material, qualities impossible to gauge from a written application. Only when all were on board, living and working in such close quarters, in such conditions, would these come to the fore, and be tested. He had wanted scientists, too, but none had applied for such a long and dangerous expedition.

  Whalers and other long-distance merchant mariners of those times were accustomed to extended trips away from home, sometimes, like the Fram’s projection, for two or three or more unbroken years. For them there was at least assurance of relief by a change of scenery or of climate, through meeting other ships, or by landfall on a new and foreign shore to pick fruit, gather bird eggs, or engage in some kind of diversion. The men of the Fram would be stuck with each other on a solitary, isolated ship in an unremitting, lifeless expanse of ice, enduring months of sunless winters and unspeakable cold, day after day, month after month, year after year, until they broke free and went home, if and when that might be. Yes, it would take a special breed of person, more than just a smart, tough, skiing sailor, to make it through to the end and without going crazy in the process.