Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  On they went westward, skirting the island, up against its glacier, until they rounded a headland and saw spread before them open water, with more land extending southwest. Were these islands perhaps? Now Nansen became more positive about their general location; he thought it was the western side of Franz Josef Land, looking toward Svalbard beyond sight, over the horizon. Yet still he had that nagging doubt, that wearing uncertainty.

  ››› How different it is now, with the means we have to know precisely where we are at any second, keep track of where we are going or where we have been, and let others know our whereabouts and condition. We have at our disposal the latest charts and fine instruments to navigate, determine depths, and hear and talk to others. Now there are GPS devices, chart plotters, and other electronic ways to pinpoint positions within feet and do calculations to within many decimal points. We have flashing lighthouses, beacons, and blinking and gonging buoys to guide us at night or in the fog. Yet we still have that atavistic uncertainty and mounting apprehension, sometimes approaching terror, when things get tight or go wrong at sea, and in our panic we think we know more than all the expensive instruments or all the best advice and head off in the wrong direction or do the wrong thing.

  Think, then, of these two men and where they were. They could only rely on themselves: their wits; their wisdom and knowledge gained by living every second for years in this environment; their instincts and will to survive; and their ever-urgent hope of leaving it all behind.

  › POLAR DAYS AND SEASONS

  Otto Sverdrup, on the second Fram expedition in Ellesmere, wrote ominously about it in New Land: “For yet a few days we were able to see a faint light on the highest mountains at noon, a suspicion of dawn in the south which told us that there was still life to be found somewhere in the world. Then, even that was gone; we had entered on the great night.”

  It was not the cold and ice that polar explorers of that era dreaded most but the long, uninterrupted dark of winter. The cold they could deal with through proper clothing, exercise, and the heat from stoves within a ship or tent. The ice they could try to avoid, endure, fight, or use to advantage for travel and shelter. But once the sun disappeared below the horizon, they could not bring it back, sometimes for several months, depending on where they were. The feeling was near universal among those who watched it go, a kind of dying in the soul.

  The Arctic (or Antarctic) turns “days” and “seasons” on their heads, for those who know them from lower latitudes. A “day” there is still the twenty-four-hour period of one full rotation of the earth on its axis. But a day of sunlight—the time between sunrise and sunset, of the sun crossing from east to west, and always rising and setting—is another matter. It changes so dramatically from season to season that day and night take on whole new meanings.

  Exactly at the North Pole (where no one had been for certain until 1926), “summer” is a day about six months long, and winter an equally long night. When the sun first rises in mid-March, it does so in the south, not east, and shows for only a few seconds (though twilight has been long and strong). A few twenty-four-hour days later, around the equinox (March 21), it is in the sky full time though very low, circling lazily, and dipping to the horizon (thus the “midnight sun”). It continues to rise until the summer solstice on June 21, when it begins to drop. It stays above the horizon for six straight months.

  Move south 1,600 miles to the Arctic Circle and it is not so extreme. The sun never completely disappears all year—and for thirty days in summer it is up continuously but at winter solstice (December 21) for only about two hours. Halfway between the pole and Arctic Circle—where most of the highest Arctic exploration of the times took place—the sun is fully up about four months, fully down the same.

  All this topsy-turvy is thanks to the partnership of earth and the sun, how they relate to one another in time and space. Earth sits in its place in the solar system, spinning on its axis, in its annual orbit around our life-giving star. The axis is not up and down with the plane of the orbit but tilted 23.5 degrees. Regardless of where this tilted earth is in its orbit, the axis stays in the same orientation relative to the sun, like a square dancer stepping a “do-si-do” around a partner, always facing in the same direction. When the North Pole angles most directly toward the sun (23.5 degrees off the perpendicular), it is summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. When it angles most directly away from the sun six months later, it is winter solstice (just the reverse of all this, of course, occurs in the southern hemisphere). When pointing neither toward nor away, when the sun shines equally on both hemispheres, we have the equinoxes: about March 21 and September 21 (spring and fall in the north hemisphere, reversed in the southern). Then, day and night are about the same duration everywhere on earth—except at the poles where, briefly at these two times of the year, both are in continuous day. One soon descends into a six-month night as the other goes into a six-month day, at the end of which they switch again.

  Earth’s spin gives us the twenty-four-hour day, but it is the orbit and the tilt that give the seasons. Polar seasons, like their days, are very different from their lower-latitude cousins. Winter is long, summer short, and spring and fall are so fleeting as to be more like transition phases of the two dominant seasons. In A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic, well-known Arctic scientist and naturalist E. C. Pielou calls the Arctic spring “warm-up,” and the fall, “freeze-up.”

  Curiously, each pole receives about the same amount of sunlight annually as the tropics but only for part of the year, instead of spread over the whole. When it comes in spring, however, it is low and weak, and much is reflected back by still-ice-covered landscapes and seascapes. Later in summer, when the sun is higher and stronger, a lot of its energy goes into melting ice and warming the sea and soils (speaking here of the Arctic, mostly). By fall (late July and August), the sun is weak again, and freeze-up is not far off. Everything happens fast in the in-betweens. Arctic sea captains knew that by September they had to be in a safe place to spend the winter, before being trapped out in the ice, and knew too they would likely not be freed until the following August. Arctic plants “know” they must flower very quickly after winter, or even before it is over, if they are to have time to set fruit before the killing frost just around the corner. The dark and cold soon take over, reclaiming much of what the sun had given.

  ››› At the end of August, their advance south blocked by a near-solid ice pack gathered by contrary winds, and having no heart to subject their fragile kayaks to more risk, Nansen and Johansen retreated to an island they had just passed. There they stayed to see if the ice would clear and weathered out a storm, but it turned out to be a most favorable place to camp and hunt, especially polar bear, whose flesh and fur they favored above all. Nansen pondered what to do next, weighing the odds. If they were on the west coast of Franz Josef Land, as he thought they were, they were still almost 150 miles from where the English explorer Leigh Smith had build a hut on Northbrook Island at the archipelago’s southern periphery, where they could stay for the winter. Even if the hut were still standing, they would likely arrive too late to find sufficient game to get them though. He made up his mind: they would stay on this island where they were, build a hut of their own, stockpile as much food as they could, and prepare for a winter’s stay. Winter meant more than just a hard, dark time to get through. It meant that home would have to wait another whole year.

  9 ›WHAT WOULD LIFE BE?

  Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen set to work immediately, getting ready for the winter that was never far away, though it was only early in September. First, they erected a temporary hut for shelter, with walls of stacked-up rocks and a ceiling of their tent, barely big enough for them to move around inside without bumping into each other. Then, before the plentiful game disappeared, they began hunting, laying up as much as possible to get them through many months before the animals would return the following spring. (“Hunting” was sometimes a generous term for it, at leas
t as it applied to bears, as most of those they killed had come close to them, attracted to the scent of all the piled-up meat and blubber.)

  So began weeks of a terrible slaughter, mostly of walruses and polar bears, an often-abhorred carnage necessary to get through their own protracted ordeal, as the provisions they had brought with them from the Fram were almost gone. When not hunting, flensing, and butchering the carcasses, and storing the meat and blubber, they also began construction of a bigger, more permanent, and more comfortable winter quarters. They fabricated tools: a shovel from a walrus shoulder blade tied to a ski pole; a probing rod from a ski pole tipped with an iron ferrule; a pick from the cut-off runner of one of the sledges; and a mattock from a walrus tusk lashed to another piece of sledge. With them, and with bare hands, they dug down three feet into the frozen, stony soil and then built up walls an equal height with rocks again gathered from the base of a nearby cliff. They chinked the walls with moss and peaty soil (from what little there was of it), placed a drift log (the only one they found) across the top as a ridgepole, and then laid walrus hides over it as the roof, stretched tight by large stones attached by walrus-hide strips to their edges and hanging down along the outside walls. In one corner they cut a low door and curtained it off with a bearskin sewn to the roof, leading via an excavated underground passageway to the outside. The passageway was roofed over, igloo style, with blocks of ice, and the outside opening was covered with another bearskin. Of rocks they made raised benches for lying down, their hardness softened only a little by new bearskin pads and bags. To allow the smoke from the cooking oil lamp to escape, they cut a hole in the roof and packed up ice and snow into a chimney (one that would require regular replenishment from the rising heat inside).

  FIGURE 46

  Nansen’s and Johansen’s hut on Franz Josef Land. Here they spent eight months, holed up from fall 1895 to spring 1896 and sleeping in one sleeping bag for warmth. Entrance in foreground; in background is a mound where meat, supplies, sledges, and skis were stored. Nansen named the island “Jackson Island” in honor of the explorer he met by accident later. The site was rediscovered in 1990 (and revisited in 1996) by polar historian Susan Barr. The drift log carrying beam and remnants of stone wall were still there. Photo taken by Nansen in the light of full moon, New Year’s Eve, 1895.

  A month after setting foot on the island, September 28, they moved into their new home, a luxurious ten feet by six feet; at six feet high, there was plenty of space for Johansen to stand up straight, but Nansen, at six feet two, still had to stoop. Compared to what they had been used to since leaving the Fram, this was a mansion and one they found out later the heat from the oil lamp and their own bodies would warm to a toasty 32 degrees, though it was much colder nearer the drafty walls.

  On October 15, the sun set, not to appear again for several months. They killed the last bear a week later, and the walruses had already vanished from the ice-covered sea. It was already well below zero outside. The long winter, the third away from home, had begun. So too began a sedentary, monotonous life for the two inside the hut, broken only by the activities of preparing meals (almost exclusively of polar bear), eating them, sleeping, and when the weather permitted, going out for some exercise. Nansen said that they could sleep up to twenty hours in any twenty-four-hour period, a kind of hibernation to obviate the many hours of boredom. Long periods would pass, too, when they made no entries in their diaries, simply because “there was nothing to write about. . . . The very emptiness of the journal really gives the best representation of our life during the nine months we lived there.”28 Besides, when they did write, the thick grease and soot on their hands and clothes, and in the air, would smear the pages, thus turning the journals into literal, illegible “black books.”

  The monotony and pining for spring notwithstanding, they were well off otherwise: warm enough, although staying most of the time indoors as their clothes were too greasy and worn to be suitable for winter, and well fed, if with the same meat-and-blubber fare at each meal. They avoided serious arguments (or so they both claimed), though Johansen found Nansen’s extended moody silences hard to take when they came on. Nansen’s choice of traveling companion was the right one, it seemed. The two men, so different in many ways, were compatible over the long haul, in the toughest times. Their bond would tie them together, for better or worse, for the rest of their lives.

  Christmas and New Year’s came, with memories of what would be going on at home, and an end-of-the-year cleansing of sorts: a bird bath “in a quarter of a cup of warm water”;29 putting on a “clean” pair of underpants and washing the old ones; and turning their shirts inside out so they would not stick so much to their bodies. Then they had special dinners on the eves of each important day, with a few “civilized” items from the few remaining brought from the Fram (they were trying to keep them for the trip south in spring). At year’s end, Nansen surprised Johansen by suggesting that they refer to each other in the familiar, friendly du (akin to the Quaker thou or thine) instead of what they had been saying, the more formal and distant De (you or yours). It was a long overdue revision, one would think, for two people who had been in each other’s sole company for almost a year, whose lives depended on each other every moment, and who shared the same sleeping bag night after night. (Curiously, Nansen went back to the more formal manner with Johansen once they reached civilization.)

  In his journal, transcribed in Farthest North, Nansen wrote his own symbolic closing for the year: “And this year too is vanishing. It has been strange, but after all it has perhaps not been too bad. They are ringing out the old year now at home. Our church-bell is the icy wind howling over glacier and snowfield.” Johansen, however, as recorded in his book With Nansen in the North, recited privately a favorite poem that revealed a different image, perhaps apropos of what lay in store: “Sleep, uneasy heart, sleep! / Forget the world’s joys and sorrows; / No hope thy peace disturb, / No dreams thy rest.” He added his own surmise, a sentiment of touching simplicity: “It is a good thing that time never stands still.”

  ››› The winter crawled on until, in late February, in the new dawning light, they heard and saw the first birds of the year, a small flock of little auks (dovekies). These birds were a cheering harbinger, soon followed by the appearance of the first bear in early March, just in time to restock their meat locker and the blubber fuel that had dropped so low that they had cut back to cooking only once a day and extinguishing the lamp when not in use. Then, as March progressed and the days grew lighter, they could see expansive water sky to the southwest and ocean birds—ivory gulls, fulmars, and skuas—flying overhead, all signs of open seas nearby. In anticipation of moving out soon, they began making new clothes, footgear, and a lightweight sleeping bag for the trip from the supply of bearskins and hides.

  May 19 was the day of departure. Nansen took photographs, inside and outside the hut, and then wrote a note describing briefly what had come to pass that brought them here and giving their intentions to make it overland, and then over water, to Svalbard. The note was sealed in a brass canister from the primus stove they no longer used and hung from the driftwood log ridgepole. Then, in the evening, their long-interrupted journey commenced again, traveling short distances and stopping early, to rest bodies unaccustomed to strenuous exercise. In two days overland, they reached a mountain promontory from which they saw, beyond an island to the west, open water. Held up two days by foul weather, they spent time in readying the kayaks, caulking the last troublesome seams, and shifting the loads inside to make room for the paddlers. When the weather cleared they moved down to the icebound shore and, with sails set to capture the east wind, guided their sledges across the ice toward the island.

  Before they reached the island, however, an unexpected storm from the west forced them to furl sails and trudge on against the stiff wind. Nansen, while Johansen was busy stowing gear, skied ahead to scout out possible camping places on the island. As he crossed the rotten spring ice, sinking as he
went, he suddenly plunged feet first into the water, a lead concealed by snow. With a quick thrust of his ski pole across the ice as he was going down, he was able to keep his shoulders above the water, but with skis bound on and harnessed to the heavy sledge, he could not extricate himself. So he had no choice but to remain suspended in the frigid waters until Johansen, lagging behind, finally heard his cries for help and hurried to the rescue. It would not be his last plunge into the deathly waters. The next one would be as close as he, or anyone, anytime, on the entire expedition, came to disappearing forever into the Arctic.

  They traveled on, sledging southwest from island to island across worrisome sea ice packed in by winds, sometimes holing up for days due to bad weather. Finally, after killing a walrus to build back their stock of meat and blubber, they reached a place where before them stretched open water. They strapped their sledges to the kayaks and launched for the first time in 1896, paddling south, off the glacier-covered island to the east. Soon, however, they encountered packed ice to the south, while to the west was still open water. They now faced another momentous decision: should they head west across the sea toward where they hoped Svalbard might lie, or should they keep going south across the ice, in the company of these islands, whatever they were and wherever they led? They chose south, the ice, and the land—a wise choice, probably, as Svalbard lay two hundred miles of treacherous sea away.