Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (17 page)

On their way again, paddling southwest, they stopped to shoot a baby walrus and its mother, along with many auks, to resupply their depleted food stores. The next day, however, as if in retribution, a big walrus exploded out of the water next to Nansen’s kayak, landed partially on it, and thrust its tusks through its frail covering. Nansen, unable to reach his gun, hit the creature over the head with his paddle and, miraculously, it slid beneath the surface. Nansen paddled to the nearby edge of the ice where, just as he got out, the kayak filled with water. He was lucky, once again.

In the afternoon of June 17, while encamped on the ice near the south shore
of a big island they had been skirting, Nansen was preparing a meal while Johansen slept. They had been in mist, so could not see the lay of the land, but it lifted enough for Nansen to go outside the tent and inspect the surroundings. The air was full of cries of thousands of dovekies and kittiwakes nesting in the cliffs behind him. Then, amid the clamor, out of the hanging mist, “a sound suddenly reached my ears, so like the barking of a dog, that I started. It was only a couple of barks, but it could be nothing else.”
³⁰
No, his rational mind thought dismissively, it could not be; it must be the birds. Then Nansen heard the barking again. He remembered hearing the previous day what sounded like shots but had convinced himself it was ice cracking.

He yelled to the sleeping Johansen, who emerged groggy from the tent to listen. No, he said, it’s just birds. Nansen put on his skis and took off to investigate, Johansen staying behind to keep an eye on the kayaks. Nansen soon came across tracks he knew as canine, too big for a fox and too small for a wolf. The further on he went, the more he heard dogs barking—yes, for sure, dogs! Then there was quiet again, and he wondered anew. Were they indeed, as he thought, on the southern edge of Franz Josef Land, near Northbrook Island where Benjamin Leigh Smith had been?

This was the proof. “Suddenly, I thought I heard a shout from a human voice, a strange voice, the first for three years. How my heart beat, and the blood rushed
to my brain, as I ran up to a hummock” for a better look and shouted out.
³¹
He heard someone shout back. In the distance he saw something moving far off, a dog and then a man. “We approached one another quickly; I waved my hat: he did the same. I heard him speak to the dog, and I listened. It was English, and as I drew nearer I thought I recognized Mr. Jackson, whom I remembered once to have seen.”

In an Arctic version of the understated “Stanley-meets-Livingston” encounter, Nansen and Jackson came together in a simple greeting of hello and shaking hands, gestures that seemed almost out of place in this setting, for the event it was. Given the cultural attributes of the men of that time—a Norwegian reluctance for demonstrative displays and an English adherence to proper formal manners—it was understandable and strangely appropriate.

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This extraordinary meeting of two explorers who had no idea of the other’s near presence was also an extraordinary coincidence. In 1892, Jackson had heard Nansen’s presentation in London about the upcoming
Fram
expedition, had been inspired, and applied to be a member. Nansen had turned him down because of his wish for an all-Norwegian crew. So Jackson found sponsors and assembled his own expedition and then set out in 1894, a year after Nansen, to find a way to the North Pole via the mysterious and largely unmapped Franz Josef Land. It was possible, too, though he never admitted so publicly, that he hoped to beat Nansen to the big prize. He and six other men had spent the last two years at Cape Flora on the western tip of Northbrook Island, comfortably base camped in heated wooden houses they built, named “Elmwood,” while sallying forth in small sledging parties to survey what they could. Nansen, just before he left on the
Fram
expedition, had heard rumors about Jackson’s plan but knew nothing more than that.

›››
Now, on this misty June day, the contrast in the two men facing each other was striking: one clean, well groomed, and attired in nice clothes; the other filthy with soot and grease, bearded, long, snarled hair, and wearing torn and dirty rags. At first Jackson did not recognize this wild beast, but as they talked it dawned on him who it might be. He asked, “Aren’t you Nansen?” When Nansen affirmed his identity, Jackson threw off his British formality for just a while and gave him the warm welcome he deserved. Afterward, Nansen asked his first questions of Jackson. Was there any news of his wife Eva and daughter Liv? Were Norway and Sweden at war?

After firing off shots to signal Johansen, they made their way back to Jackson’s Elmwood. In his book
A Thousand Days in the Arctic
, Jackson wrote that Nansen at this time “was going gamely, but looks pale and anemic and is very fat.” (Nansen had gained twenty-two pounds since leaving the
Fram
; Johansen, thirteen—testimonials to a meat-and-blubber diet and lack of exercise, which we might well understand today.) Later, several men went to help Johansen bring the kayaks, supplies, and equipment. What feelings Nansen and Johansen must have had, after fifteen months on the ice, to be in these surroundings with other men; take hot baths (one was not enough to remove all the grease and soot); have their matted, tangled hair cut; get into soft, clean clothes; smoke and read books; and eat long-forgotten foods from china plates, cooked by someone else.

The supply ship
Windward
was due any day, Jackson said, coming from England after a stop-off in Vardø, so could take them back to Norway after unloading. The weeks passed, and there was still no sight of the
Windward
. In their increasing impatience to get home, Nansen and Johansen flirted with the idea of setting off for Svalbard on their own, from which they could hitch a ride home on a whaler or sealer.

But finally, on July 26, five weeks after they had come to Elmwood, the
Windward
arrived, with no news of the
Fram
. Twelve days later, with the ship unloaded and Nansen, Johansen, and departing scientists aboard, the
Windward
weighed anchor, and “under full sail and steam we set out . . . with a fair wind, over the undulating surface of the ocean, toward the south.”
³²
Nansen was leaving the Arctic behind and, along with it, a new discovery that Franz Josef Land was actually Franz Josef
Islands
, one of which, where he and Johansen had overwintered, he named for Jackson (it is still that today, phonetically in Russian “Ostrov [Island] Dzheksona”).

Aboard the
Windward
in the evening of August 12, Nansen and Johansen saw a dark line on the horizon, Norway’s coast, their first sight of it in three years. The next day, under the guidance of a pilot who came on board, the
Windward
slid into Vardø harbor and dropped anchor. By then Nansen and Johansen were already on their way in a rowboat to the telegraph office. “We put in at the quay,” Nansen described later in
Farthest North
, “but no one recognized us; they scarcely looked at us, and the only being that took any notice of the returned wanderers was an intelligent cow, which stopped in the middle of a narrow street, and stared at us in astonishment. . . . I felt inclined to go up and pat her; I felt now that I really was in Norway.”

In the telegraph office, Nansen plunked down a heavy bundle of telegrams, almost one hundred of them. The clerk frowned at what had been put before him, until he read the name of the sender, and then burst into smiles and congratulations and bustled around getting ready to send out the news to the world. First to go was one to his wife Eva, then one each to the king of Norway and the Norwegian government. All the rest took several people several days to process, but the word was already out and on its way around the country.

In Vardø at that very moment was Professor Henrik Mohn, the very man whose controversial theory of Arctic currents Nansen had studied, trusted, and employed in conceiving of his expedition. Nansen heard that Mohn was staying in the hotel, so rushed there and burst unannounced through the door to his room, where he found him smoking and reading on the sofa. After the initial shock of seeing a man come flying into his room so suddenly, Mohn stared and stared, and then began crying as he recognized him and fell into his arms. They spent the afternoon in nonstop conversation, over cigars and champagne, recounting what had happened over the years. By evening it seemed everyone in town knew about the already-famous pair who had arrived, and a crowd gathered outside the hotel. When Nansen and Johansen finally emerged from their time with Mohn, to go into town to get new clothes, they had to make their way through throngs of eager souls everywhere they went.

There was still no word about the
Fram
, but Nansen did not worry unduly as he had calculated and recalculated when it should emerge from the ice and felt confident that it would show up soon. In the meantime there was much to do, just dealing with the adoration raining down on them. In Vardø, Nansen also met another friend and colleague, the Englishman George Baden-Powell, who had just returned from a scientific expedition on Novaya Zemlya. Nansen gladly took up Baden-Powell’s offer to take him and Johansen on his yacht
Otaria
to Hammerfest, further west along the coast, where his wife would be waiting, having come all the way from Christiania.

In Hammerfest, Fridtjof and Eva came together again, as husband and wife, in joyous if somewhat bashful reunion aboard the
Otaria
. Typically private in these matters, Nansen said of this reunion only that “the days now glided past so smoothly that we scarcely noticed the lapse of time.”
³³
This was in sharp distinction from his other state of mind while away from her. He had expended many, many more words in
Farthest North
in describing his longing and yearning for her over the miles and the years.

Early in the morning of August 20, Baden-Powell knocked on Nansen’s cabin door, announcing that there was a man on board who had come with urgent news. Nansen quickly dressed and went to the saloon, where a man stood, holding a telegram. He offered it to Nansen. “With trembling hands I tore open the telegram.”
³⁴
It was from Otto Sverdrup, saying the
Fram
had arrived safely, all were well on board, and they were heading for Tromsø. Nansen and Johansen had been back on Norwegian soil for six days.

›››
The
Fram
, as if in honor of brave work done and to relieve it of finding its own way, was towed at first down the coast, and then steamed on its own, into one town or city after another, the object of ever-clamorous celebrations, until the final glorious trip up Oslo fjord and into the harbor. As it made its final approach to the city up the fjord, fishing vessels, passenger and naval ships, and literally hundreds of small boats lined the way. It came in escorted by naval ships and boats, “the whole fjord one multitudinous welcome” of waving flags, cheering voices of thousands, and thunderous, echoing salutes from the cannons on the warships and at old Fort Akershus overlooking the entrance.
³⁵
In Christiania itself a crowd of tens of thousands, the biggest ever to assemble there, crammed the
streets and piers, and clustered on rooftops, waiting for their heroes to arrive. It was September 9, 1896, when the men finally came ashore, 1,172 days after they had left this same place.

That evening, after the welcome had died away and before other festivities began, Nansen stood at the pier overlooking the harbor, with the
Fram
not far away. He had a few moments to reflect. He wrote in
Farthest North
, “I could not but recall that rainy morning in June when I last set foot on this strand. More than three years had passed; we had toiled and we had sown, and now the harvest had come. In my heart I sobbed and wept for joy and thankfulness. . . . The ice and the long moonlit polar nights . . . seemed like a far-off dream from another world—a dream that had come and passed away. But what would life be worth without its dreams?”