The next day, a fuming Nansen assembled the men on deck for a tongue-lashing and a warning against such behavior. (Nansen apparently saw his pleasure ashore in a different light than theirs: “one last civilized feast of purification, before entering on a life of savagery,”4 he reflected almost self-righteously, as he lay in a hot-steam sauna, while young Finnish women whipped his naked body with birch twigs.) The reprimand took the men aback, as they had been indulging in what was an ages-old, almost customary if sometimes distasteful way of seafarers in port on long voyages. It was also a telling moment in what it revealed to the crew about Nansen’s character and attitude so early in the trip. From then on, the men would regard their leader with a more wary, indeed more critical, eye.
FIGURE 21
A fully loaded Fram leaves Vardø, Norway, heading away from civilization, into the Barents Sea and along the Northeast Passage, July 19, 1893. The crew’s behavior on liberty in Vardø upset Nansen.
As with other uncomfortable episodes, particularly those dealing with discord among the men or his own foibles, Nansen made no reference of this incident in Farthest North (but several of the crew certainly did in their own personal, private diaries and later accounts). It was not the custom of the time to reveal human flaws and discord in such publications, as we do today. Also, Nansen was no doubt reluctant to air dirty laundry publicly, given his role and how he (or his editors) wished readers to experience secondhand this extraordinary saga. Perhaps, too, he did not wish to trample on anyone’s feelings so openly in print. What seemed to matter most were the mission and the story of adventure, not the preoccupations, mundane interactions, and petty squabbles of the crew, which were no one’s business but their own.
But ship and crew have an inseparable identity. As one’s personal space and freedom necessarily are diminished on a ship, one’s identity and character correspondingly come more quickly and sharply into focus, almost as if in self-protection against confinement. There is virtually no privacy externally, so one finds it internally, in one’s carefully guarded thoughts and feelings. “Office” and “home” are the same place, and shipmates become both “colleagues” and “family.” Since one cannot just leave to get away from something or someone, and thus avoid them, problems quickly come to a head and must be worked out in situ, ideally through negotiation but sometimes, regrettably, with force.
Yet at the same time, in these transformations, something magical happens. The ship becomes almost a being, with the power of the feminine, watching over all within, feeding, sheltering, giving warmth, and offering the rest of sleep. Though they might hate being there at times, all aboard feel like its children, will do anything for it, and will go where it goes, toward the goal they gain together. This feeling does not come from a ship’s design, or with structure and function, but from this intricate, interwoven relationship between vessel and crew, built of time and intimate association. That is why a ship—even one made of steel, even with guns, and even with a male name—is a “she” to those who live with it. A ship and its crew become one under any circumstances but especially so when heading off on an unknown ocean to be imprisoned in the ice, for so long a time, totally alone, and far away from anything familiar.
3 ›NORTHEAST PASSAGE
From Vardø, the Fram sailed east for several days through the Barents Sea, all the while in dense, dripping fog until the sun shone briefly to reveal Novaya Zemlya ahead, the six-hundred-mile-long Russian archipelago known to Norwegian whalers and sealers that separates the Barents and Kara Seas. They continued on in thick fog in a southeasterly direction, toward Yugor (now Yugorsky) Strait, the narrow passage between the mainland and Vaygach Island just to the north. They had expected clear sailing in these usually open waters so were surprised to encounter pack ice, at first a “mere strip,” but then “the ice lay extended everywhere, as far as the eye could reach through the fog . . . there was nothing for it but to be true to our watchword and ‘gå fram’—push onwards.”5 The Fram was to get its first test against the ice.
››› From an airplane thousands of feet up, the pack ice can look as though an enormous plate of glass had been shattered into a million little shards, each a different size and shape, massed together in a seemingly infinite filigreed mosaic. It all appears delicate, as if the pieces were of finest crystal and the leads between but silken threads. But on a boat or ship among it, it is quite another matter, a different image. The tiny pieces become a mass, an expanse of chunks and mounds that forms a barrier spreading out all around, with the power to stop, trap, damage, or sink an unwary or unprepared vessel. A way through often requires endless weaving, turning, and reversing to reach the leads, while dodging floe after floe in a halting, dizzying progression through a maze of danger.
The pack moves in mysterious ways, too. One moment, the ocean can be clear, not a speck of ice upon it, all the way to the horizon. The next, it can be ice covered and hard against the shore, with blocks and bricks of white stacked into a fractured, heaved-up pavement and no open water to be seen anywhere. Then, just as suddenly, there can be nothing but water again. It appears and disappears as if by stealth and magic.
››› The Fram performed beautifully as it picked and shoved its way through the pack, though the helmsman had a time of it. Fridtjof Nansen observed in Farthest North, “She twisted and turned ‘like a ball on a platter.’ And the ship swings round, and wriggles her way forward among the floes without touching, if there is only just an opening wide enough for her to slip through; and where there is none she drives full tilt at the ice, with her heavy plunge, runs her sloping bows up on it, treads it under her and bursts the floes asunder. And how strong she is too! Even when she goes full speed at a floe, not a creak, not a sound is to be heard in her; if she gives a little shake it is all she does.”
A few days later, they made Yugor Strait, and headed toward the small mainland settlement of Khabarova, which was nothing more than a few ramshackle buildings and tents on the tundra where Russian traders would come to barter with native, reindeer-herding Samoyedic people of the region. Here, they were to rendezvous with the Norwegian vessel Urania, for the Fram to fill its bunkers with coal one last time. Here also, by prior arrangement with his Russian friend, fellow explorer, and geologist Baron Eduard von Toll, Nansen was to pick up extra Siberian sledge dogs, as there had been insufficient time to deliver them to Christiania before the Fram sailed. When the Fram dropped anchor outside Khabarova on July 29, there was no sign of the Urania, but the dogs were there, thirty-five of them.
The dogs had made a lengthy journey of their own to get there, a six-month odyssey across the West Siberian Plain, through vast swamps and forests, over the Ural Mountains, and across the treeless barrens to this place. Their driver delivered them in good shape (only five had died), and he also helped train Nansen and his men in the handling of dogs and sledges, as they were still fairly new at that game, all too evident in the spills, snarls, and frustrations they experienced in learning.
It was now August 4, the Urania had still not appeared, and Nansen was anxious to get going, with the Arctic winter fast approaching. He decided not to wait any longer, assessing that he had enough coal anyway, and had the dogs (now thirty-four, as another had died) loaded onto the ship. That night the Fram left, heading east into the “dreaded Kara Sea,” leaving Christofersen behind to wait for the Urania. Bentsen, for whatever reasons, remained on the ship. Three days later, the Urania finally showed up but turned around and went back the way it came, with the undelivered coal and homebound Christofersen. Among the letters he carried back was a note from Nansen to Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, almost a thank you to the famous pioneer for showing him the way along the Northeast Passage.
FIGURE 22
Walrus hunting in the Kara Sea, north of Siberia, as the Fram worked its way through the Northeast Passage to where it would be frozen in for three years, September 12, 1893. Photograph by Fridtjof Nansen.
They set their course for Cape Chelyuskin o
n Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula, over one thousand miles away and the northernmost point of any mainland in the world (850 miles from the North Pole). It promised to be a tough and treacherous stretch, as Nansen, writing in Farthest North, was aware: “I had always said that if we could get safely across the Kara Sea and past Cape Chelyuskin, the worst would be over.” Using the charts and maps Nordenskiöld had drawn on his Northeast Passage voyage, supplemented by others from earlier Russian explorers, and battling persistent fog and headwinds, they worked their way northeast, slowly and indirectly, generally following the coast as closely as they could to avoid the pack ice and rogue icebergs bearing down from the north.
When the pack was not so pressing or the sea mostly clear of ice, they would head north, to gain as much latitude as they could. On one of these forays, they came across an island that did not appear on Nordenskiöld’s (or any other) map, which they named “Sverdrup Island” in honor of the man who first spotted it, the name it still bears today. As they proceeded, they were on alert for game to stock the larders with fresh meat for dogs and men. When amidst the loose floes, they hunted walruses and seals, and when closer to land, earlier on, they sometimes anchored and rowed ashore in search of the more elusive reindeer (caribou); either place might bring the appearance of a prized polar bear.
After Yugor Strait, they approached the western side of the Yamal Peninsula, jutting as a four-hundred-mile-long arthritic finger into the Kara Sea. The peninsula is bounded on the east by the Gulf of Ob, into which flows Siberia’s great Ob River, one of the longest rivers in the world. They turned northward in what for the moment were ice-free waters and traveled along the coast of Yamal and then curved eastward and on toward Cape Chelyuskin. It was August 12 when they finally passed over the top of Yamal and the big island, Beli, north of it, three weeks out of Vardø, and they were not yet halfway to Cape Chelyuskin. There were still many days and nights ahead confronting the ice, self-questioning where they really were, and having trepidation about what lay in store before reaching the distant, misty, almost mythical place.
In the early morning of September 10, almost six weeks after leaving Vardø and two and a half months since Christiania, the Fram finally stood off Cape Chelyuskin. It had completed the first long, perilous leg of the journey and had “escaped the danger of a winter’s imprisonment on this coast.”6 It was a time for celebration: a cannon salute to a desolate shore, ceremonial flags raised to no one but themselves, and a party in the specially decorated saloon, with music, cigars, and even an alcoholic punch, though it was early morning. With the attainment of this milestone, Nansen obviously was feeling euphoric and charitable, and perhaps even somewhat forgiving, after the disquieting Vardø episode.
If the plan were followed, the Fram would round Cape Chelyuskin and the eastern side of the Taimyr Peninsula and head south to the mouth of the Olenek (today’s Olenyok) River at the foot of the peninsula. There, again as arranged by Toll, additional dogs would be waiting to be picked up. Nansen, it being later than he expected with the ice so unpredictable and coastal shallows a constant worry for grounding, decided not to risk delay and getting trapped far from his strategic first winter destination, thereby losing a year or possibly never getting out at all. Instead, he turned northeast, into open water, aiming toward the New Siberian Islands as directly and quickly as possible. The dogs and their driver waited for a ship that never showed.
By September 16, they knew they were off the Lena River, though it was more than one hundred miles away, from the water that was considerably warmer (a torrid 35 degrees Fahrenheit), less saline, and brown from the mud and silt the Lena carried into it (its delta fans out 250 miles across in the coastal shelf of the Laptev Sea). They proceeded on this course for a few days, always against a current and mostly in open water, and dodging south only when encountering floes. As they came closer to the New Siberian Islands, Nansen wanted, indeed needed, to get as far north as possible. “Now it is to be proved,” he wrote in Farthest North, “if my theory, on which the whole expedition is based, is correct—if we are to find a little north from here a north-flowing current.” It was a critical time, a pivotal decision. To the north they turned, hoping the sea would continue to stay open and praying to find the theoretical current that would sweep them into the ice and on their frozen way to the pole.
Two days later, still blessed with an open passage, they figured that they were directly off the westernmost of the New Siberian Islands, though they could not be absolutely sure. Nansen toyed with the idea of going in to see and to find depots of food and supplies that Baron von Toll, ever the loyal friend and supporter of the expedition, had cached, just in case the Fram ran into trouble there. Caution prevailed. Northward they continued, setting their sights on so-called Sannikoff Land above the New Siberians, a place no human had ever been but that earlier explorers of this region, Toll included, swore to have seen from a distance (it was indeed illusory). From there, they would push north and east as far as they could before the ice clamped down on them for the first long winter.
The gods remained remarkably benign, even hospitable. The weather was unusually warm for that time of year, there were no storms to impede their progress, the seas ran open, and they went “as fast as steam and sail can take us.” It almost lulled them into believing it might go on this way right up to the pole. Otto Sverdrup “even talks seriously of the open Polar Sea, which he once read about; he always come back upon it, in spite of my laughing at him,” wrote Nansen in Farthest North. But then the heavy doubts creep in: “How long will this last? The eye always turns to the northward as one paces the bridge. . . . Now we are almost in 77° north latitude. How long is it to go on?”
It did not go on for long. In the morning of September 20, as they were nearing latitude 78° north, with Nansen in the chartroom studying the maps, “there was a sudden luff, and I rushed out. Ahead of us lay the edge of the ice, long and compact, shining through the fog.” He felt they still needed to go further east to find the current, but the ice arced south there and blocked their way. So they cruised northwest as the ice allowed, away from their desired course, to gain more latitude. After two more days, the ice lay before them, a wall from east to west. The sky, when they saw it in between bouts of fog, was “whitish-blue everywhere on the horizon”—“ice-blink” reflected from the ice (if open water, the sky would be dark). They had reached the limit of open water and had gone as far as they would go. Nansen, still ruminating over a desire to go east toward “Sannikoff Land,” or even Bennett Island yet farther east, quickly put those thoughts aside. “It was the drift I wanted to get into, and what I feared most was being blocked by land” and possibly being caught in a “gyre,” an endless loop of current from which there would be no escape. So instead they moored the Fram to a large floe and waited, beginning to prepare for what would be.
FIGURE 23
Lars Pettersen and Bernhard Nordahl taking a break from bird hunting (note hanging quarry). All the men had both rifles and shotguns, and plenty of ammunition, for any eventuality that came up, from polar bears to little auks. Photograph by Sigurd Scott-Hansen.
Just as they came face-to-face with freeze-up in the Arctic winter, they also had to confront the torment of little things. Lice had infested the ship, probably from their Siberian guests earlier. So, just as the ice was about to take them in as one of its own, they spent the whole day cleaning bedding, steaming clothes, and washing and disinfecting both men and dogs. Surely Nansen, even in this critical time, despite worry and aggravation, would have taken note of a somewhat humorous irony: the simultaneously external battle against the ice and internal one against the lice.
Nansen’s diary entries, and passages later in Farthest North, from this period of the voyage are revealing. Pages and pages are devoted to hunting big prey, perhaps indicating how important it was to the future of the mission, or maybe also because recounting the stalking and the killing made for good stories. He also references new discoveries and correction
s or revisions to those made earlier. The many detailed descriptions of, and his speculations about, the physical environment they pass through show his love of simple observation and pure science. Yet he is also the poet, expressing, often lyrically, awe or reverie at transcendent, unearthly wonders, or even just of little, ordinary things (“Oh! How the snow refreshes one’s soul, and drives away all the gloom and sadness from this sullen land of fogs! Look at it scattered so delicately, as if by a loving hand, over the stones and the grass flats on shore!”). He offers glimpses into private quandaries and worries masked by his uncompromising outward stance as leader (“Sverdrup thought it would be safer to stay where we were. . . . I gave orders to set sail”). Sometimes, too, the melancholy steals in, a familiar but haunting shadow that is to come and go for the rest of his life.
››› There was an eerie, tragic coincidence in this region where the Fram lay next to the ice. Bennett Island, where Nansen had wished to go, had been discovered in 1881 by George De Long on the Jeannette and named by him for the owner of the ship and sponsor of the expedition. After the Jeannette had been crushed and lost, De Long and his crew made their way to Bennett Island on foot, hauling boats filled with supplies and trying to get to the New Siberian Islands and then to the Lena River.
Twenty years later, Baron Eduard von Toll, Nansen’s old friend and first-expedition angel, participated in a Russian venture on the vessel Zarya to find “Sannikoff Land.” It was forced to overwinter twice in the New Siberian Islands. Toll and his party continued their search on sledges and in kayaks, and ended up on Bennett Island. The Zarya attempted to pick them up there later but was stopped by the ice. Toll and the others apparently left the island in November 1902, heading for the mainland, but were never seen again.
Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram Page 6