With this lacy patterning of myth, Nansen had sailed north.
Walking up to the deck I passed through an exhibition of stuffed birds and animals, set against an Arctic stage set—a painted backdrop of craggy Arctic rocks, dotted with pink tundra flowers. A thick sheet of polystyrene represented ice, where a bleached Arctic fox was standing, gazing into space. There was the obligatory polar bear sniffing a path towards a ringed seal. They all stood posed in a parody of motion: paws raised, legs extended. On a fake mountain, balanced on rock ledges, there were fat-bellied kittiwakes, a pair of puffins, an assortment of Brünnich’s guillemots, and a scattered collection of little auks. Against another backdrop stood a colony of lost penguins, wings outstretched, standing on a painted plank.
I passed more glass cases, crammed with the flotsam and jetsam of polar exploration—the penknives, matchboxes, violins, dogs’ bells, compasses in wooden boxes, the pictures of dour polar explorers staring pensively towards the camera, their features blurred. There were notes scribbled from explorer to explorer, pages torn from diaries, mundane objects rendered interesting by the person who had used them—‘Roald Amundsen’s teapot,’ ‘Fridtjof Nansen’s cufflinks,’ no object too small, no function too insignificant for the glass cases. This museum had its freaks and particular sights: a lock of Nansen’s hair ‘cut by Mr. J. F. Child at Cape Flora June 1896,’ stuck to a piece of card. It seemed to betray a mindset lost to history, the curious world of Mr. Child who, stationed in a frozen Arctic camp, confronted by a renowned explorer, chose to commemorate the meeting by slicing a piece of hair from his visitor and neatly mounting it. There were menus from dinners at 84° N, feastings of cloudberry pie and reindeer steak with coffee and cigarettes to follow. Only lacking were the hypnotic tape recordings of aged explorers, which I had sometimes heard in other Arctic exhibitions, voices repeating themselves on looped tapes: ‘Ice, the cold floes, we walked for hours. The ice around us, a strong driving wind. We walked for hours. Ice, the cold floes. . . .’ In the Fram museum the exhibition was confined to objects, but these were redolent enough—the tattered bits of cloth and leather, the belt buckles, sledges, pipes, tobacco tins, hardened biscuits and skis—like a white-elephant stall selling curios from the tundra.
Hesitantly, I approached the ship. A gangplank led onto the deck, a piece of dark polished wood. There were masts without sails, their booms neatly tied lengthways down the ship, the rigging stretched out to each side. Ropes hung in coils at the base of the masts. A lantern dangled from the front boom. There was a compass in an ornate brass case, mounted on the deck. I stood by the wheel, a wooden piratical object, with ‘Fram—Polarskipet’—‘Fram—The Polar Ship’—engraved on it. Everything had been immaculately restored and polished; the ropes hung in meticulous rows, the brass shone brightly. But there was something wretched about the ship. It was made for a purpose never fulfilled: to reach the North Pole. It had done better in the south when Roald Amundsen sailed it down to Antarctica for his successful attempt on the South Pole, in 1911. Now it sat, neatly trimmed and cleaned, awaiting a re-launch that would never happen, its wide wooden belly long deprived of the soothing lick of the ocean. Instead, the shaved planes of its decks supplied a playground for a couple of children, running free of their parents to fumble with its ropes.
And when the children had been scooped up and taken away, I walked down the steps to the cabins. The solitary entrance gave me a bout of the shakes, which might have been caused by the atmospheric sub-zero temperature of the museum, or perhaps the clear vision of the past, the props without the people, arrayed before me. There was a dusty old piano ahead, in a communal room, with seats and tables arranged beside it. And all around were the cabins of the long-dead crew, with names engraved above their doors. Names once spoken by awed admirers, now part of polar history: Hassel, Sverdrup, Wisting, Juell, Nordahl. Some of them went with Nansen when he tried to reach the North Pole; some of them went with Roald Amundsen when he sailed Fram south. I imagined the creaking of the boards under their feet, as they moved heavily through the boat—stocky, weather-hardened men, born into Arctic darkness, bred in thick snow and long winters.
Cabin One, on the starboard side, was Nansen’s. As I peered through the glass door, I could see a cramped cell, barely large enough for a bunk and a chest of drawers. The walls were anachronistically decorated with commemorative plates (‘The North Pole Expedition 1893-6’) and tacky souvenir portraits of Nansen and his crew. A few pieces of woollen clothing had been strewn on the sofa; two guns leaned against the wall. There was a thermometer, a map, and a large bronze bust of Nansen perched on the bunk. A microscope stood on the chest of drawers. Other than that, little remained of the diverse obsessions of the former occupant.
Nansen was a biologist by career, but he dabbled in many of the Arctic arts, and developed a personal theory of oceanography. As early as autumn 1884, at the age of twenty-three, Nansen read an article in the Norwegian newspaper Morgenblad which referred to various pieces of wreckage found on the south-west coast of Greenland. The wreckage was thought to have come from the Jeannette , a ship that set out in 1879 under the command of George Washington De Long of the American Navy. De Long thought that if he ran the ship up the Bering Strait he would profit from a warm current along the east coast of Wrangel Land, which might help him towards the North Pole. Whalers had recorded that their ships generally drifted northwards whenever they were set in the ice; De Long set off with this in mind. His ship was trapped in the ice at 71°35’ N and 175°6’ E. The Jeannette drifted in the ice from Wrangel Land to the New Siberian Islands until it was crushed in June 1881, north of the New Siberian Islands, at 77°15’ N and 154°59’ E.
A few years later, wreckage from the ship had been found off the southern coast of Greenland at Julianehaab; a battered collection of objects including a pair of oilskin breeches belonging to one of the crew and a list of provisions signed by De Long. There were many at the time who thought it was quite impossible that these pieces of explorers’ debris should have ended up in Greenland; doubts were raised about the genuineness of the items, accusations of forgery were levelled at the locals. Yet there were others who thought the pieces must have been taken on an ice floe across the Arctic Ocean. Nansen was firmly in this second camp, and, moreover, he thought this ice floe must have passed across the North Pole. Nansen jumped to an optimistic conclusion—if wreckage could drift from the New Siberian Islands to Greenland, then so could a boat.
In February 1890, Nansen stood in front of the Christiania Geographical Society, and proposed that he and his audience might solve the problem of Arctic transport by paying strict attention ‘to the actually existent forces of nature and seeking to work with them and not against them.’ De Long had been right, even though his ship had been smashed by the ice.
‘The distance from the New Siberian Islands to the eightieth degree of latitude on the coast of Greenland,’ Nansen began, ‘is 1,360 miles, and the distance from the last-named place to Julianehaab was 1,540 miles, which together makes a distance of 2,900 miles. The floe traversed this distance in 1,100 days.’
He started with numbers, seeking to stress the scientific process, the careful mathematical calculations he had applied to the question.
‘It may be assumed then,’ Nansen continued, ‘that the ice floe travelled at a rate of 2.6 miles per 24 hours. Knowing as we do the speed of the current along the east coast of Greenland, the speed of the wreckage drifting along this coast can be calculated with a certain amount of precision—it would have taken 400 days at least to traverse this distance. So 700 days remain, as the longest time the drifting articles can have taken to travel from the New Siberian Islands to the eightieth degree of latitude. Supposing that the pieces of wreckage on their ice floe or floes went the shortest and most direct route, via the Pole, they would have averaged a speed of 2 miles every 24 hours. But if the floe had taken a less direct route, say, it went, for example, south of Franz Josef Land, and south of Spitsbergen,
then the floes must have drifted at a faster rate.’
Spitsbergen—now called Svalbard—is an archipelago of islands, lying in the Barents Sea. If the current flowed south of Spitsbergen, then Nansen would never reach the Pole. It was vitally important that Nansen could establish that those ice floes had drifted north of Spitsbergen. Nansen had a further suggestion. The wreckage was not the only proof. There were the throwing sticks. The Inuit had found throwing sticks on the western coast of Greenland, which must have come from the Alaskan coast. And, added Nansen, there were the trees. The trees clinched the argument. Dead trees that drifted from Norway and Siberia to Greenland. Anomalous trees, Picea obovata, Nansen added, flaunting his credentials, the Siberian species of alder and poplar, were frequently found on beaches in Greenland, and used to make boats. There were no such trees in Greenland. It was impossible, Nansen thought, that this driftwood floated south of Franz Josef Land and Spitsbergen. Siberian driftwood was regularly found north of Spitsbergen. All this wood, drifting around in the polar ice, proved categorically that the implacable whiteness of the polar ice was being dragged in turn by its own imperative—the force of a sea current. A current flows from the Siberian Arctic Sea to the east coast of Greenland, Nansen concluded. It flows north of Spitsbergen. It flows, he sincerely hoped, via the North Pole.
It is here that the polished flanks of Fram take their part in the story, returned to their original function, not to stand memorialized in a boathouse, surrounded by an assortment of indignant stuffed animals, but to push away the ice, to rise above its clutching tightness. Nansen proposed to build a ship, as small and strong as possible, just big enough to carry coal supplies and provisions for twelve men for five years. The boat would need sloping rounded sides, strong enough to withstand the violent force of the ice. When the ice came to crush the boat, drawing it down under the mounting pressure of frozen water, Fram’s curved bathtub of a body would push the ice down, and the ship would rise upwards. Nansen intended to sail up through the Bering Strait and along the north coast of Siberia towards the New Siberian Islands as early in the summer as possible. Then he would head into the ice and moor among the floes. He would let the ice take the ship, and, trapped in the ice, he would drift towards the North Pole.
While formerly the ice had prohibited, now it would facilitate. Nansen’s idea was to work with, not against, nature. In defiance of the humanist raging of the likes of John Stuart Mill, the rallying cries against the insensible force and random cruelty of nature, Nansen saw nature as a perfect system. Instead of making significance and order of chaos and emptiness, Nansen accepted the internal rules of the space around the Pole. Imagining the Pole as a sort of compelling whirlpool, drawing everything towards it, Nansen intended to sit in his boat, and wait to arrive. It was exploration through compulsory inertia. Nansen would not set himself apart from the limitless expanse before him, he would seek to become inherent to it—the sea and sky would envelop a small, tub-shaped boat.
The critics bayed, in print and in the learned clubs of international polar exploration. General Adolphus Washington Greely, Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, Sir Allen Young, all distinguished in their fields, were united in their fears that Nansen would perish. They predicted various deaths for the Norwegian: his ship would run aground on lands hidden in the ice around the Pole; he would cut off his escape route and lose his ship to the force of the ice. They conceded that his plan was audacious, it might just work, but the risks were too great. The finest of Victorian exploration briefed against the young Norwegian—as if the nineteenth-century figures in the National Portrait Gallery descended from their frames, to mutter condemnations.
The rotund hull of Fram signalled a new approach, which drifted where the Arctic current ran, making a strategy of impotence. It was a broad-hipped boat, with frame timbers made of choice Italian oak. The outside planking, now so scrubbed and sanctified, was an intricate barrier of three layers, the inner one made of oak three inches thick. Outside this, there was another oak layer, four inches thick, and outside this there was the ‘ice-skin of greenheart,’ wrote Nansen. The aim was to ensure that the ice could claw away all of the ice sheathing, and yet leave the hull untouched. The ‘Achilles’ heel’ of an ice ship, the rudder, was to be built so low down as to be invisible below the waterline, so if a floe collided forcefully with the stern it would shatter against the strong stern part and not hit the rudder itself. Fram was fitted out with everything they might need: a well-stocked library—protection against the boredom of the Arctic night—a self-registering aneroid barometer, a self-registering thermometer, a large theodolite, a spectroscope especially adapted for the Northern Lights, an electroscope for measuring the electricity in the air. Sledge dogs from Siberia whined below-decks.
Fram could carry coal for four months’ steaming at full speed, but Nansen imagined there would be little cause for steaming. It was the perfect ship to sit and wait in. With this precision, this attention to every detail he could find, Nansen proposed to travel into the unknown regions around the North Pole.
After roaming Fram for hours, I began to imagine that I had sailed in it, that I had felt the smash of the ice against its bow, had been thrown from my bunk by the pressure of the bergs. I came to a halt in the communal area, standing by the piano, imagining the festive occasions, the moments of release from the cold business of exploration, with someone pounding the piano while the crew sang. But, there was a small child tugging at the companion ladder, calling for her father, and my head was reeling from the dank below-decks air. Shaking the past from my heels, I clambered up to the deck and crossed the gangplank back to the present.
Fram had drifted perfectly, resisting the force of the ice, but she drifted insufficiently. The moving ice moved too far south, and at 84° N Nansen decided to leave the ship, and head for the Pole by ski and sledge. In mid-March 1895, Nansen set off with another member of his crew, Frederik Hjalmar Johansen, a lieutenant who had been so keen to come on Nansen’s ice expedition that he dropped into the only position available—the stoker. Fram, trapped in the ice, but defending herself against its clutches, was left in the care of Commander Otto Sverdrup, who had followed Nansen before on the ski-trip across Greenland. Now Sverdrup was left with the crew, looking nervously at the ice stacked around the ship. The first refractions of the sun against the ice were visible as Nansen set off; it would soon return to lurk low in the sky. Nansen and Johansen had sledges and dogs; they wore woollen clothes, camel-hair coats, socks made from sheep’s wool and human hair, knickerbockers, ‘what is called on board ship an anorak,’ wolf-skin gloves, snowshoes and felt hats. They carried a reindeer-skin double sleeping bag, little knowing they would be sleeping in it together for a year, a strong tent made of undressed silk, and a recent innovation in Arctic camping, a Primus stove from Sweden. They each took two double-barrelled guns.
Swift on their skis and extremely fit, Nansen and Johansen were forced to turn back, after only three weeks of struggling through the ice. ‘The ice grew worse and worse,’ Nansen wrote, ‘and we got no way. Ridge after ridge, and nothing but rubble to travel over. We made a start at two o’clock or so this morning, and kept at it as long as we could, lifting the sledges all the time; but it grew too bad at last. I went on a good way ahead on snowshoes, but saw no reasonable prospect of advance, and from the highest hummocks only the same kind of ice was to be seen. It was a veritable chaos of ice-blocks, stretching as far as the horizon. There is not much sense in keeping on longer; we are sacrificing valuable time and doing little.’ On 8 April 1895, Nansen decided to give up, and turned southwards. The ice, the barrier he had hoped to surmount by the careful construction of the perfectly passive ship, had defeated his active attempts to move across it. They turned away from the Pole, and moved painfully over the uneven ridges of ice, towards land. They got lost; they spent a winter holed up in a frozen hut, shooting bears to survive. They were bored, frightened at times, when they almost lost their guns in the water, or when a bear crash
ed towards the hut. After days and nights together, deprived of other company, they ran out of things to say, so they fantasized together about soft clothes, a Turkish bath, cakes, chocolate, bread and potatoes. By July 1896, Nansen was camped on an expanse of permafrosted land—he was not sure where he was. The clouds of mist that had obscured the land the previous day were beginning to lift, when Nansen heard the distant sound of dogs barking. ‘It seemed incredible, and yet—out of the shadowland of doubt, certainty was at last beginning to dawn,’ he wrote.
Certainty came in the embodied form of a Mr. Frederick Jackson, an Englishman, who was wandering around on Franz Josef Land, an island north-east of Svalbard. This was, Nansen discovered, where he had camped. The two men met. Jackson was a well-dressed Englishman in a checked suit and high rubber water boots, smelling strongly of soap, raising his hat to say ‘How do you do?’ Nansen was a man dyed black with oil and soot, with a long, shaggy beard, wearing foul-smelling rags and something roughly akin to a hat, but he extended a dirty hand, shaking Jackson’s recently scrubbed and perfumed one, soft to the touch. Their conversation was brief, confused at first by Jackson’s failure to recognize Nansen. Nansen recorded it in his notes:
Seizing the soot-encrusted hand again and shaking it still more vigorously, Jackson said, ‘I am very glad to see you!’
‘I’m immensely glad to see you,’ said Jackson.
‘Thank you, I also,’ replied Nansen.
‘Have you a ship here?’ asked Jackson.
‘No, my ship is not here,’ replied Nansen.
‘How many are there of you?’ asked Jackson.
‘I have one companion at the ice edge,’ replied Nansen.
The Ice Museum Page 3