Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (16 page)

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At the end of August, their advance south blocked by a near-solid ice pack gathered by contrary winds, and having no heart to subject their fragile kayaks to more risk, Nansen and Johansen retreated to an island they had just passed. There they stayed to see if the ice would clear and weathered out a storm, but it turned out to be a most favorable place to camp and hunt, especially polar bear, whose flesh and fur they favored above all. Nansen pondered what to do next, weighing the odds. If they were on the west coast of Franz Josef Land, as he thought they were, they were still almost 150 miles from where the English explorer Leigh Smith had build a hut on Northbrook Island at the archipelago’s southern periphery, where they could stay for the winter. Even if the hut were still standing, they would likely arrive too late to find sufficient game to get them though. He made up his mind: they would stay on this island where they were, build a hut of their own, stockpile as much food as they could, and prepare for a winter’s stay. Winter meant more than just a hard, dark time to get through. It meant that home would have to wait another whole year.

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WHAT WOULD LIFE BE?

F
ridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen set to work immediately, getting ready for the winter that was never far away, though it was only early in September. First, they erected a temporary hut for shelter, with walls of stacked-up rocks and a ceiling of their tent, barely big enough for them to move around inside without bumping into each other. Then, before the plentiful game disappeared, they began hunting, laying up as much as possible to get them through many months before the animals would return the following spring. (“Hunting” was sometimes a generous term for it, at least as it applied to bears, as most of those they killed had come close to them, attracted to the scent of all the piled-up meat and blubber.)

So began weeks of a terrible slaughter, mostly of walruses and polar bears, an often-abhorred carnage necessary to get through their own protracted ordeal, as the provisions they had brought with them from the
Fram
were almost gone. When not hunting, flensing, and butchering the carcasses, and storing the meat and blubber, they also began construction of a bigger, more permanent, and more comfortable winter quarters. They fabricated tools: a shovel from a walrus shoulder blade tied to a ski pole; a probing rod from a ski pole tipped with an iron ferrule; a pick from the cut-off runner of one of the sledges; and a mattock from a walrus tusk lashed to another piece of sledge. With them, and with bare hands, they dug down three feet into the frozen, stony soil and then built up walls an equal height with rocks again gathered from the base of a nearby cliff. They chinked the walls with moss and peaty soil (from what little there was of it), placed a drift log (the only one they found) across the top as a ridgepole, and then laid walrus hides over it as the roof, stretched tight by large stones attached by walrus-hide strips to their edges and hanging down along the outside walls. In one corner they cut a low door and curtained it off with a bearskin sewn to the roof, leading via an excavated underground passageway to the outside. The passageway was roofed over, igloo style, with blocks of ice, and the outside opening was covered
with another bearskin. Of rocks they made raised benches for lying down, their hardness softened only a little by new bearskin pads and bags. To allow the smoke from the cooking oil lamp to escape, they cut a hole in the roof and packed up ice and snow into a chimney (one that would require regular replenishment from the rising heat inside).

A month after setting foot on the island, September 28, they moved into their new home, a luxurious ten feet by six feet; at six feet high, there was plenty of space for Johansen to stand up straight, but Nansen, at six feet two, still had to stoop. Compared to what they had been used to since leaving the
Fram
, this was a mansion and one they found out later the heat from the oil lamp and their own bodies would warm to a toasty 32 degrees, though it was much colder nearer the drafty walls.

On October 15, the sun set, not to appear again for several months. They killed the last bear a week later, and the walruses had already vanished from the ice-covered sea. It was already well below zero outside. The long winter, the third away from home, had begun. So too began a sedentary, monotonous life for the
two inside the hut, broken only by the activities of preparing meals (almost exclusively of polar bear), eating them, sleeping, and when the weather permitted, going out for some exercise. Nansen said that they could sleep up to twenty hours in any twenty-four-hour period, a kind of hibernation to obviate the many hours of boredom. Long periods would pass, too, when they made no entries in their diaries, simply because “there was nothing to write about. . . . The very emptiness of the journal really gives the best representation of our life during the nine months we lived there.”
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Besides, when they did write, the thick grease and soot on their hands and clothes, and in the air, would smear the pages, thus turning the journals into literal, illegible “black books.”

The monotony and pining for spring notwithstanding, they were well off otherwise: warm enough, although staying most of the time indoors as their clothes were too greasy and worn to be suitable for winter, and well fed, if with the same meat-and-blubber fare at each meal. They avoided serious arguments (or so they both claimed), though Johansen found Nansen’s extended moody silences hard to take when they came on. Nansen’s choice of traveling companion was the right one, it seemed. The two men, so different in many ways, were compatible over the long haul, in the toughest times. Their bond would tie them together, for better or worse, for the rest of their lives.

Christmas and New Year’s came, with memories of what would be going on at home, and an end-of-the-year cleansing of sorts: a bird bath “in a quarter of a cup of warm water”;
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putting on a “clean” pair of underpants and washing the old ones; and turning their shirts inside out so they would not stick so much to their bodies. Then they had special dinners on the eves of each important day, with a few “civilized” items from the few remaining brought from the
Fram
(they were trying to keep them for the trip south in spring). At year’s end, Nansen surprised Johansen by suggesting that they refer to each other in the familiar, friendly
du
(akin to the Quaker
thou
or
thine
) instead of what they had been saying, the more formal and distant
De
(
you
or
yours
). It was a long overdue revision, one would think, for two people who had been in each other’s sole company for almost a year, whose lives depended on each other every moment, and who shared the same sleeping bag night after night. (Curiously, Nansen went back to the more formal manner with Johansen once they reached civilization.)

In his journal, transcribed in
Farthest North
, Nansen wrote his own symbolic closing for the year: “And this year too is vanishing. It has been strange, but after all it has perhaps not been too bad. They are ringing out the old year now at home.
Our
church-bell is the icy wind howling over glacier and snowfield.” Johansen, however, as recorded in his book
With Nansen in the North
, recited privately a favorite poem that revealed a different image, perhaps apropos of what lay in store: “Sleep, uneasy heart, sleep! / Forget the world’s joys and sorrows; / No hope thy peace disturb, / No dreams thy rest.” He added his own surmise, a sentiment of touching simplicity: “It is a good thing that time never stands still.”

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The winter crawled on until, in late February, in the new dawning light, they heard and saw the first birds of the year, a small flock of little auks (dovekies). These birds were a cheering harbinger, soon followed by the appearance of the first bear in early March, just in time to restock their meat locker and the blubber fuel that had dropped so low that they had cut back to cooking only once a day and extinguishing the lamp when not in use. Then, as March progressed and the days grew lighter, they could see expansive water sky to the southwest and ocean birds—ivory gulls, fulmars, and skuas—flying overhead, all signs of open seas nearby. In anticipation of moving out soon, they began making new clothes, footgear, and a lightweight sleeping bag for the trip from the supply of bearskins and hides.

May 19 was the day of departure. Nansen took photographs, inside and outside the hut, and then wrote a note describing briefly what had come to pass that brought them here and giving their intentions to make it overland, and then over water, to Svalbard. The note was sealed in a brass canister from the primus stove they no longer used and hung from the driftwood log ridgepole. Then, in the evening, their long-interrupted journey commenced again, traveling short distances and stopping early, to rest bodies unaccustomed to strenuous exercise. In two days overland, they reached a mountain promontory from which they saw, beyond an island to the west, open water. Held up two days by foul weather, they spent time in readying the kayaks, caulking the last troublesome seams, and shifting the loads inside to make room for the paddlers. When the weather cleared they moved down to the icebound shore and, with sails set to capture the east wind, guided their sledges across the ice toward the island.

Before they reached the island, however, an unexpected storm from the west forced them to furl sails and trudge on against the stiff wind. Nansen, while Johansen was busy stowing gear, skied ahead to scout out possible camping places on the island. As he crossed the rotten spring ice, sinking as he went, he suddenly plunged feet first into the water, a lead concealed by snow. With a quick thrust of
his ski pole across the ice as he was going down, he was able to keep his shoulders above the water, but with skis bound on and harnessed to the heavy sledge, he could not extricate himself. So he had no choice but to remain suspended in the frigid waters until Johansen, lagging behind, finally heard his cries for help and hurried to the rescue. It would not be his last plunge into the deathly waters. The next one would be as close as he, or anyone, anytime, on the entire expedition, came to disappearing forever into the Arctic.

They traveled on, sledging southwest from island to island across worrisome sea ice packed in by winds, sometimes holing up for days due to bad weather. Finally, after killing a walrus to build back their stock of meat and blubber, they reached a place where before them stretched open water. They strapped their sledges to the kayaks and launched for the first time in 1896, paddling south, off the glacier-covered island to the east. Soon, however, they encountered packed ice to the south, while to the west was still open water. They now faced another momentous decision: should they head west across the sea toward where they
hoped
Svalbard might lie, or should they keep going south across the ice, in the company of these islands, whatever they were and wherever they led? They chose south, the ice, and the land—a wise choice, probably, as Svalbard lay two hundred miles of treacherous sea away.

Eventually, on June 12, after several days of sailing or hauling the sledges across the ice, they reached open water again to the south and, because the wind was fair, lashed the kayaks together and set off. After a swift but tiring day in the kayaks, they stopped at the edge of the ice to take a break, moored the rig to the ice with a sail halyard, and went to a high point on the floe to reconnoiter. Just then, the worst that could be imagined happened, as described in Nansen’s own recollection in
Farthest North
:

He was so cold that he had trouble paddling the awkward rig, yet somehow worked it slowly back, and even had the strength and will to take out a gun and shoot two auks ahead of the boats, pick them up, and get to the edge of ice where Johansen was waiting. Johansen jumped in the other kayak, and helped paddle back to where the saga began, after which he removed the wet clothes of the shaking, exhausted, and probably quite blue Nansen; put on what dry ones he could find; tucked him into the sleeping bag; and laid the sail over all to keep out the cold. While Nansen slowly warmed up, and slept, Johansen prepared a hot meal of soup and two auks, one for each.