Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (15 page)
Read Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram Online
Authors: Charles W. Johnson
Even though they were energized by their first sight of land in two years, their slog and grind continued. They had estimated reaching the land in a day or two, but the eastward drift of the ice took them away from their goal instead of toward it, and the land receded rather than drawing nearer. Chilling rain came in ceaseless torrents, forcing them to stop and camp, as now they had no change of clothes
to keep warm. Nansen was laid low for several days by debilitating, severe lower back pain, leaving Johansen to do all the work.
July yielded to August, with the same miserable conditions, their hard-won gains still being mostly offset by discouraging losses. On August 5, they had another close call. After hard sledging over heaved-up blocks, in dense fog, they came to a lane they had to cross in their kayaks. With Johansen waiting, Nansen began to place his sledge across the doubled-up kayaks but heard a “scuffle” behind him and then Johansen yelling, “Get the gun!” Nansen whirled around to see Johansen on his back, a huge polar bear atop him. He rushed to the kayak where his rifle lay in its case on deck, but just then the kayak slipped into the water, away from him. As he struggled to pull the heavy kayak back on the ice, he again heard Johansen’s voice behind him, this time a quiet exhortation: “Look sharp, if you want to be in time.”
The bear had sneaked up on them from behind and, as Nansen was busy loading the sledge, had given Johansen a swipe on the head with its mighty paw (a big bear’s front paw can weigh as much as forty pounds), sending him sprawling, and then pounced on him. With one free hand and all his strength, Johansen grabbed the bear by the throat and held him off as best he could, while the bear snapped at his head. It was at that very moment that Johansen, somehow calmly, urged Nansen to “look sharp.” Then, just as suddenly, the bear pulled back from Johansen as it turned to face the dogs attacking it. Nansen by then had freed his gun and, just as Johansen wiggled away, killed the bear with one shot. “The only harm done,” Nansen wrote later with a bit of gallows humor, “was that the bear had scraped some grime off Johansen’s right cheek, so that he has a white stripe on it, and had given him a slight wound in one hand.”
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Finally, a day later, they reached the edge of the ice; ahead, there was open water and across it the land they had been aiming for the past two weeks. They cheered, then had a piece of chocolate to celebrate. It was also a sad occasion, a parting of ways. The remaining two faithful, durable dogs, Nansen’s Kaifas and Johansen’s Suggen, would not be accompanying them any further. The other dogs had been killed by knife to save precious bullets, but these last two would be an exception. To spare yet more anguish, each shot the other’s dog, out of sight.
Off they went side by side in their strapped-together kayaks, first paddling then rigging a sail to take advantage of a following wind, with delight in the unaccustomed swiftness and sensations of movement across water instead of ice. Soon they reached the long-sought land, actually to the sheer face of a fifty-foot-high
glacier wall off its shore. They skirted the glacier westward a good distance, looking for a break where they could camp on land but, finding none, resorted to the old familiar, an ice floe. For the next two days they worked their way west and south along the glacier, sometimes dragging their kayak-bearing sledges over floes the winds packed together whimsically, but mostly paddling or sailing their sledge-bearing kayaks in open water.
They did not know if the land they passed, with its involutions and indentations receding into mist and fog much of the time, was an island, a group of islands, or a part of something bigger. In his diary and
Farthest North
, Nansen confessed that “this land grows more of a problem, and I am more than ever at a loss to know where we are.” He thought it might be the west coast of Franz Josef Land, trending south; Nansen put his knowledge as a biologist to use, because they had been seeing a great number of the rare Ross’s gull, a species not known to occur in nearby Svalbard.
FIGURE 45
When Nansen and Johansen reached the edge of the pack ice, only Johansen’s favorite dog Suggen (shown here) and Nansen’s Kaifas were left. Before the men got into their kayaks to paddle on, they had to kill the dogs. To be merciful, each shot the other’s, out of sight of the owner. Photograph by Fridtjof Nansen.
As they hauled and paddled their feeling way along, they encountered walruses and seals in great numbers, and with the multitude of bear tracks they saw, they knew at least they would not want for food. Walruses in the water they feared for their aggressiveness, especially against thin-skinned kayaks. Several times the big beasts shocked them by bumping the boats violently from below, threatening to capsize or hole them with their tusks. But on the ice, walruses were defenseless and provided plenty of easy food, in one huge package, though it was not the men’s favorite.
It was by now the middle of August, and the time was fast approaching when they would have to make a decision: keep going blindly on, in hopes of reaching Svalbard before winter, or find a place to spend the winter, set up camp, and begin gathering food. The first choice, if they were wrong, would likely end in suffering and tragedy; the second, another long winter holed up but more likely with survival. In either case, they needed to move on more quickly than they had. To speed up their progress by water, they separated the kayaks so each man could paddle independently (though while sailing they stayed bound together). At the same time they had to cut the big sledges down proportionately, so that each kayak could carry a lighter, stubbier sledge.
On August 14, after more days of their halting, amphibious travel, they reached the ice-free shore of an island and “for the first time in two years had bare land under foot.”
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Like children released from school, they reveled in newfound, or rediscovered, freedom, hopping on boulders, feeling and hearing the gravel underfoot, and seeing tiny Arctic flowers in bloom in their refuges between the rocks. After a couple of days there, they pressed on, arriving at another island that Nansen described almost innocently as “one of the most lovely spots on the face of the earth.” It must have seemed so, compared to what they had lived with for so long. The island had an extensive, flat, shell-covered beach; sea urchins and snails in the clear shallows; birds of many kinds, flying and crying on the cliffs and along the shore; and bearded seals popping up offshore. There was life all around, in brilliant sunshine!
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.
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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.
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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.
