Read Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram Online
Authors: Charles W. Johnson
Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (3 page)
There was other evidence he knew about as well, brought by the ice and the driftwood to Greenland.
On the island’s west coast, an Inuit throwing stick (used to launch arrows or short spears at birds) had been found that was unlike those used by Greenland natives. It had “Chinese glass beads, exactly similar to those which the Alaskan Eskimo obtain by barter from Asiatic tribes, and use for the decoration of their ‘throwing sticks.’ ”
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Nansen knew that Greenland had no real trees of its own and that the coastal-dwelling Inuit used, indeed depended on, great quantities of tree-sized driftwood brought regularly and predictably on the currents running south along the island’s east side, around the terminus and then north along the west. Nansen also knew, from his own observations as well as those of others, that much of it was from trees or shrubs of Siberian origin—larch, fir, alder, poplar, and others endemic to that area. (He even speculated, too, that the ice in the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland may well have come from Siberia, containing as it did mud similar to there, though he conceded that it could have come from glacial rivers in North America or elsewhere.)
He pointed to another fact, long known to botanists, that Greenland’s coastal flora included many species native to Siberia that, he postulated, came to Greenland as seeds, preserved in and carried by the ice to those distant shores.
Finally, he made a case for the polar current based on the sheer volumes of water involved and how they moved. It was known that vast quantities exited the north and coursed south in the deep, wide basin between Greenland and the Svalbard Islands (formerly Spitsbergen Islands), the so-called East Greenland Current. Such huge quantities, continually replenished, could only have come from a polar sea of considerable size, a reservoir of sorts, especially since it was thought to be so shallow (in this last assumption he erred, as we shall see later). Correspondingly, a comparable amount of water was
entering
the polar region from the south on the other side of the world, from north-flowing Pacific Ocean currents and major rivers along North America, Northern Europe, and Siberia dumping their fresh water into the sea. To these, he factored in meteorological influences (winds, rainfall, etc.) and known effects of the earth’s rotation on currents, and then stated flatly, “We cannot escape the conclusion that a current passes across or very near to the Pole into the sea between Greenland and Spitzbergen.”
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Armed with this information, he put forth his radical idea: to have a special ship built that could be frozen into the ice pack and not be crushed by it, which he and a small crew would take into the ice north of Siberia near where the
Jeannette
had come to grief, intentionally letting it be locked in and carried by the same currents that carried the
Jeannette
’s remains over the pole. The ship, if he figured everything right and if it were properly constructed, would ride with the ice over a two- or three-year period, and eventually pop out into open water northeast of Greenland, where it could be sailed back to Norway under its own power. It was to be a ship that would become driftwood, of an extraordinary kind.
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ABOUT THE ICE
To polar travelers—whether on sledges, skis, foot, or ships, whether on land or at sea—ice can be the greatest friend, or worst enemy. For them especially, ice is a complex personality whose many faces, moods, and expressions they must comprehend if they are to survive. In the years before steel-hulled icebreakers and electronic navigation systems, an
ice pilot
was a critically important member of a polar ship’s crew, valued for his knowledge of the ice and its behavior, hard won from years of experience. So much depended on what the ice pilot saw and knew, and what he recommended to his captain.
As an ice pilot knew all too well, ice is not just ice.
Land ice
and
sea ice
are fundamentally different. The two types, in all their variety, offer different advantages to travelers and pose different dangers.
Land ice is frozen, fused precipitation, mostly from snow; sea ice develops within the sea itself. Land ice, if the climate is cold enough, for long enough, can build into
glaciers
hundreds of feet thick, which then may coalesce into landscape-covering
ice caps
or even larger
ice sheets
(e.g., covering most of Antarctica and Greenland).
Glacial ice, under its own great weight, is not brittle but somewhat plastic, so that a glacier “flows” like a slow-motion river or conveyor belt from its source (a
snowfield
) to its downhill edge. If that edge makes it to the sea, great chunks can break off and plunge in (
calve
), and then drift off as
icebergs
. Seafarers are justifiably wary of them, as some are immense, the size of islands, but even small ones can open up a ship passing too close (most of the iceberg is underwater and unseen). Ice sheets that make it to the sea, however, can flow out as huge, intact floating
ice shelves
, dense expanses where the ice traveler can often make good time. Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf (formerly the Great Ice Barrier), which Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott crossed on different routes on their way to the South Pole, is the world’s largest, at five hundred miles across and up to two thousand feet thick (though only a small portion shows above water).
New sea ice can spread horizontally but rise at most a few yards, floating as it does on a warmer, moving, fluid reservoir. Offshore sea ice, called
drift ice
, is composed of
floes
(big floating
pans
), which can gather into huge
packs
. If a pack is a year old or less (called
young ice
), the floes may be thin and scattered enough for a ship to push through safely, but such ice is too unformed, unstable, or loose for sledgers and skiers. Multiyear (
old ice
) is thicker and denser, and can stop a ship in its tracks, trap it, and crush it. The biggest threats come from
pressure ridges
, old floes colliding and pushing up as great frozen waves and jagged hills, sometimes twenty-five feet or higher; these juggernauts can overwhelm anything in their path. Yet firm old ice can be suitable, if not always easy, for those making their way by sledge and ski.
Pack ice attached to land is
fast
(fastened)
ice
, and fast ice adhering to the high-tide zone is an
ice foot
, often the best, or only, place for sledgers and skiers to make safe passage when the sea ice may be too treacherous and the land too steep or its ice unmanageable.
With the warmer, high-sun seasons come other opportunities and other challenges. Cracks or lanes (
leads
) may suddenly appear in the pack, sometimes extending great distances, but sometimes closing quickly. These can become fortuitous avenues for transiting ships, means of escape for trapped ones, or just the opposite—lures for getting into deeper trouble. Also, leads can be serious impediments to the surface traveler, forcing detours, retreats, or laborious switches of loads from sledge to kayak and back again. In these warmer periods, land or sea ice can also become
rotten
(melting to the point of not being able to bear weight, though it may appear firm)—a lurking risk to those coursing atop it.
But ice is more than just a medium for polar travel. It is the raw material for critical temporary shelters (
igloos
). It is a vital source of drinking water, as polar regions are generally deserts, with very low annual precipitation. Since land ice is frozen fresh water, winter land travelers usually have a ready source (a favorite demonstration for the uninitiated is showing how pieces of glacial ice will fizz when dropped in a glass of water or other drink; this is the sound of old, trapped, compressed air being released as the ice melts). For those on pack ice, however, it may be hard to come by, as young sea ice is too briny, not having had enough time for the salt to leach out; even old ice may be slightly so, though it is usually potable. Pools in melting old pack are the best bet for those out on it.
In this specially built ship, with a crew of only ten or twelve men most suited to the task, provisioned with enough food, clothing, and supplies for five years in the ice, if necessary, they would sail from Norway, following in the
Jeannette
’s dark wake into waters north of Siberia and then into the ice where the epic would begin.
Such confidence did he have in his plan and abilities, however brash other more experienced explorers might think him, that he would put his own life and the lives of others on the line aboard the ship. He would commit himself and his crew to a highly dangerous “voyage” with no retreat possible if things went wrong. He had taken this very approach on his Greenland expedition a few years earlier, beginning on the sparsely inhabited east coast; leaving his boats behind to be claimed by storms, ice, or sea; and traveling westward toward the only human settlements, from which he finally could get back home. As it was then, the only way this time would be forward, or onward,
fram
in the Norwegian.
Fram
was his watchword then, and it would be so again but this time in a bigger arena, with much bigger stakes, in a ship bearing this name.
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Nansen postponed his dream to work on other pressing matters, particularly his doctoral degree in zoology and the trek across Greenland. Only when all this was behind him, and fame with him, could he move on to his new venture. In 1889, back in Norway from Greenland and a national hero, Nansen had the celebrity, authority, and legitimacy he needed to unveil his grand plan publicly and subject it to the scrutiny of peers with years of Arctic experience under their belts.
While some experts thought his plan a good one, well supported by the evidence, the general reception by the most renowned of the day was less than warm and his support far from wholehearted. In Nansen’s own words in
Farthest North
, “It met with opposition in the main, especially from abroad, while most of the polar travelers and Arctic authorities declared, more or less openly, that it was sheer madness. . . . [It] plainly showed how greatly I was at variance with the generally accepted opinions as to the conditions in the interior of the Polar Sea, the principles of ice navigation, and the methods that a polar expedition ought to pursue.”
Interesting that this opposition should have come from men, famous as they were, who had failed in or, even worse, bungled their attempts to reach deeper into the mysterious region called the Arctic.
Some of the big, old guns of polar exploration took aim and fired, at different
spots of vulnerability in the audacious young man’s plan. From Britain came a salvo from august Irishman Francis Leopold M’Clintock, knighted admiral in the Royal Navy. M’Clintock had been in command of the 1857 expedition in search of Sir John Franklin and his crew of over one hundred men, who were last seen in 1845 as they attempted to find the Northwest Passage and were never seen again. In the process, M’Clintock had acquired expertise in the ways of travel and survival on the ice, having covered a record 1,300-plus miles in 100-plus days in man-hauled sledges and overwintering twice. He felt that Nansen had underestimated the power of the great, shifting masses of winter ice and overestimated the ability of any ship, no matter how well fortified externally and internally, to withstand it.
A couple of booming shots came from Sir George Nares, another venerable British naval officer. Nares had led a different expedition in search of Franklin, and later, in the British Arctic Expedition of 1875–76, he aimed for the North Pole via the sometimes-open, two-hundred-mile passageway between Greenland and Ellesmere Land (as it was called then, for no one had yet discovered it was an island), which now carries his name, Nares Strait. This later expedition, though achieving “farthest north” for a ship up to that point, and another “farthest north” for men on ice, was a virtual disaster, due in no small part to poor preparation, inadequate provisioning, and downright hubris of its leader (see chapter 12).
Nares’s objection to Nansen’s plan was mostly about giving up control of the ship, and thus its fate, to unknown, all-powerful elements and proceeding without avenues of retreat. This sounded more like hidebound theory for a naval battle against an enemy than a theory for engaging the Arctic on its own terms, a bit perplexing coming from one who had been there and seen its invincibility for himself. Perhaps we can hear an undertone of his own failure in the advice to the younger man, who in his eagerness and naïveté would try what Nares could no longer do. Nares did concede a common ground with Nansen, though, in that both felt “the principle aim of all such voyages is to explore the unknown polar regions, not to reach exactly that mathematical point in which the axis of our globe has its northern termination.”
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Whether or not they were being forthright in this—Nares in retrospect, Nansen looking ahead—is certainly a matter of debate.
Some in their criticism persisted in sticking to timeworn, unproven canards. Sir Allen Young, who in 1876 had been thwarted in his attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage in his privately owned ship
Pandora
, warned that there was land everywhere at the pole, not sea, on which the
Fram
, even if it made it that far,
would eventually come to grief. (In one of those bizarre train of events in history, Young had sold the
Pandora
to a New York newspaper owner, James Gordon Bennett, who renamed it
Jeannette
, the same of our story’s beginning, and had sent it off, manned by its U.S. Navy crew, to find that very land. Young went so far as to state the possibility that the
Jeannette
’s wreckage reemerged in Greenland after making it through channels in the land, something a ship even such as the
Fram
surely could not do intact.)
From the United States came perhaps the most caustic, condescending, and for Nansen surely exasperating blast of all. Adolphus W. Greely, by then a general in the U.S. Army, did not mince words as he denigrated Nansen’s qualifications, dismissed the evidence upon which Nansen based his plan, and condemned virtually every facet of it. He said, as quoted by Nansen in
Farthest North
,