Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram by Charles W. Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

north-south length.

2 › TRIP TO NOWHERE
    T o reach the starting point of the icebound journey across the pole, Fridtjof Nansen intended to take the Fram near to where the Jeannette had been frozen in, off Herald Island in the Chukchi Sea, some two hundred miles north of the Siberian coast. Originally, he had planned to get there just as the Jeannette had, through the Bering Strait, a months-long trip the length of the Atlantic Ocean, around Cape Horn, and up the Pacific, with a last, brief stopover in Alaska to select sledge dogs. Instead, he decided on the shorter, though more unknown and undoubtedly more dangerous, route from the Norwegian Sea around Scandinavia and then east through the Barents, Kara, Laptev, and East Siberian Seas, tracking along the convoluted, and often ice-choked, north coast of Russia. This route is the Northeast Passage, which was cleared successfully for the first time only fourteen years earlier by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld in the Vega . Nansen would arrange to pick up dogs in Siberia, early in the trip. So north instead of south they would go.
    On June 24, 1893, the Fram weighed anchor and slowly made its way out of the harbor of Christiania. The rainy, gray day did nothing to alleviate the melancholy that always pervades crews and loved ones left behind at the departure of ships on long voyages, more so for one of such unknown duration, with so uncertain an outcome. On Nansen, prone to periodic black moods anyway, it lay especially heavily. In Farthest North , he said,
    Behind me lay all I held dear in life. And what before me? How many years would pass ere I should see it all again? What would I not have given at that moment to be able to turn back; but up at the window little Liv [nine-month old daughter, his first child] was sitting clapping her hands. Happy child, little do you know what life is—how strangely mingled and how full of change . . . and now a last farewell to home. Yonder it lies on the point: the fjord sparkling in front, pine and fir woods around, a little smiling meadow-landand long wood-clad ridges behind. Through the glass one could descry a summer-clad figure by the bench under the fir-tree. . . . It was the darkest hour of the whole journey.
    FIGURE 9
    Fridtjof Nansen, in his cabin aboard the Fram , February 15, 1895.
He is thirty-three years old here, the expedition leader, with a PhD in zoology and fame from his Greenland crossing. Behind him is a picture of his first child, daughter Liv, held by his wife Eva.

    Leaving Christiania, Nansen’s excitement and determination about the upcoming journey were high but clouded by doubts, regrets, and melancholy that shadowed his writing in Farthest North . He was not alone in all the conflicted feelings at such a time, as some of the diaries of the crew revealed.
    The Fram made its way south and into Larvik Bay the next day, tying up at Colin Archer’s shipyard where it had been launched. Ostensibly, it had come to pick up the lifeboats and other last-minute provisions, but there was likely another reason for this last visit to the place of its birth, a more sentimental or symbolic one. Archer was there. When the Fram departed a couple of days later, Archer was at the wheel and guided it out. Finally, he disembarked into a small boat that also carried Nansen’s brothers and watched the Fram leave.
    “It was sad and strange,” Nansen wrote in Farthest North , “to see this last relic of home in that little skiff on the wide blue surface . . . I almost think a tear glittered on that fine old face as he stood erect in the boat and shouted a farewell to us and the Fram . Do you think he does not love the vessel? . . . Full speed ahead, and in the calm, bright summer weather, while the setting sun shed his beams over the land, the Fram stood out towards the blue sea, to get its first roll in the long heaving swell. They stood up in the boat and watched us for long.”
    After departing Larvik, the Fram rounded the southern