Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  ››› After the winter meat was gathered and brought aboard, Sverdrup turned his thoughts to the spring exploratory trips. He had one main goal: determine the extent and character of Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg Lands, whose northern reaches they had only just begun to explore. He felt sure that both were separate islands and that the opening between the two was a through sound to Greely Fjord (and maybe beyond). His theory was that the mountainous, glaciated landscape he and Edvard Bay had seen to the far north the year before spawned the icebergs in Norwegian Bay, since there were no glaciers anywhere else they had been or seen. His secondary goal was to explore the new western lands across Norwegian Bay.

  On October 18, Sverdrup departed on a ten-day trip to the big “fjord” that Gunnar Isachsen and Sverre Hassel had entered the previous year, hoping it would indeed turn out to be the opening of that sound. His companion was engineer Karl Olsen, who had never been on a sledging trip. Olsen looked forward to it, but there would be no beginner’s luck for him.

  They proceeded from Goose Fjord north over to “Nordstrand,” the temporary outpost established at the north end of Simmons Peninsula, near the shore of Norwegian Bay, where harvested meat was cached for later transport back to the Fram. Victor Baumann and Oluf Raanes were there now to guard the meat, and Sverdrup and Olsen spent the night with them in their tent. Sverdrup and Olsen took off the next morning for Graham Island, across the sea ice.

  No sooner had they started when a dark storm approached. Sverdrup did not like the look of it, so they retreated to the ice foot to be closer to shelter. Before long, high winds hit them, sending Olsen’s sledge and dogs careening across the smooth-as-glass ice, and slammed them into a big rock. Olsen was thrown from the sledge and landed hard, dislocating his arm. With the full fury of the storm upon them, and with Olsen in great pain and his arm dangling, Sverdrup retreated with him to Nordstrand.

  FIGURE 70

  Isachsen butchering a polar bear. Though many bears, musk oxen, and other animals were killed, all went to food (men and dogs), clothing, bedding, equipment, or scientific collections. None were killed for “sport” alone, or wantonly, and nothing was wasted. The men often disliked having to slaughter so many to stockpile for the long winters, but the fresh meat kept all healthy and scurvy free throughout the four years.

  For the next two days, the four holed up in the tent as the storm raged on, as bad as Sverdrup had experienced in all his years in the Arctic. When the worst was over, they had to tunnel out, since the snow had buried not only the tent but also the nine-foot-high pile of meat, the sledges (which had been planted upright), and all the dogs. It took them a whole day to dig everything out, discovering as they did that three dogs had died of suffocation, each curled up as if sleeping peacefully.

  On a sledge turned into a stretcher, they brought the invalided Olsen back to the Fram, where Herman Georg Simmons and Fosheim volunteered to get the dislocated arm back into position, using the doctor’s books to guide them. First, Sverdrup sedated him, not with the risky and dangerous chloroform from the medicine chest, but with the tried-and-true anesthetic of old, alcohol. Out came the precious cognac, but even after downing half the bottle, Olsen did not seem affected, only perhaps happier and less aware of his pain. Simmons and Fosheim moved in. On the first try they succeeded, and when the ball popped back into the socket, suddenly and surprisingly Olsen became dead drunk.

  Olsen’s accident and injury may have been a blessing in disguise. If he and Sverdrup had continued on the sea ice they would have likely been trapped out. It turned out that in early November the sea ice around Graham Island and in that section of Norwegian Bay disappeared. So where would they be now, those two and their dogs? How far would they have made it before the ice disappeared? Would they have been able to find food, provisioned as they were for only ten days? How long would they have been stranded, if indeed they were that lucky?

  ››› With the deepening cold and darkness in November and December, the Fram’s men took up their indoor work, most of it, except for making kennels for the dogs, the usual preparation for late-winter and spring sledging trips. Once again, the Fram buzzed with activity, in the shops and workrooms of the scientists, outside for the ongoing measurements, and in Jacob Nødtvedt’s blacksmith shop. They worked in relative warmth and comfort, except for Fosheim, tough as nails and uncomplaining, whose carpentry shop was in the unheated ’tween decks, where temperatures often fell to well below zero. Their sunless days marched on, interrupted only by watches and, according to their custom, observance of special holidays and birthdays of the crew—or by unexpected, exciting visits by wildlife.

  This winter it was wolves, attracted to the garbage heap alongside the Fram. The men, whether from prejudicial lore or atavistic association, both revered and hated them. Even Sverdrup called them “evil.” So when they started showing up, the men jumped to action but quickly learned of their wariness. Bay managed to kill one early on, but after that the wolves got wise; they would steal in and retreat quickly into the darkness and beyond gunshot range when someone appeared. Never was another killed. The men tried baited snares, to no avail except loss of the bait. They tried baited hooks with a long line tied to the ship’s bell, so when a wolf pulled the bait, the bell would clang and alert the men below. This was a double failure: the wolves managed to eat the bait without getting hooked or pulling the line, and the puppies played with the line and rang false alarms, time and again.

  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.

  ››› 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.

  19 ›THE PROMISED LAND

  The 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.”

  FIGURE 71

  On the trail. Hendriksen enjoys a pipe and coffee in the tent before a long day of sledging. The primus stove (greatly improved by Nansen on the first expedition) provided heat for food and warmth; and its hissing, a welcome, comforting sound to tired, hungry men.

  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.

  FIGURE 72

  Remnants of a long-abandoned Inuit winter house on eastern Axel Heiberg Island. Evidence of the antiquity of permanent human presence in such extreme environments deeply moved Sverdrup.

  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,

  It is curious what great distances these people have spread themselves over in these inhospitable countries, where the night is of several months’ duration, and the climatic conditions such that one would think all life must cease. What has become of them? Have they migrated southward to milder regions? Or did they fight out a hopeless struggle against the cold and the crushing darkness of the winter night, until they all succumbed to the great enemy who knows no mercy?

  It is a strange feeling of forlornness and barrenness which seizes upon one as one looks at all these ruins, ruins which tell of the human beings who lived here, and had their joys and sorrows like ourselves. Out here on the spits of land the air of the still, clear, summer evenings echoed to the careless laughter of these children of nature, and to the happy shouts of childhood. When autumn came, and the darkness was upon them, they mayhap withdrew with their well-husbanded summer catches to some sheltered spot, where were their winter houses, and there most likely lived out a languishing existence. In their miserable huts they waited patiently for the sun again to shed its light on the lofty peaks. Then they re-awoke to life and action in the gladness of summer though, who can tell, in many a hut, perhaps, where the winter store fell short, every human voice was dumb!

  Week after week, month after month, we drove about up here, and never met with a single living thing, except wild animals. But any one traveling here in former times might have found people who lived and had their homes for always in this wilderness. It seemed to us almost incredible.

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

  ››› 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 broth
ers 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?

  ››› 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.