Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (2 page)

PROLOGUE

POLAR FEVER, MYTH, & MYSTERY

O
n June 18, 1884, three Inuit from Julianehaab (now Qaqortoq), a small settlement on Greenland’s southwest coast, spotted something unusual on a slab of floe ice where they were seal hunting. They went closer and found twisted planks of wood, and among them various papers, articles of clothing, and other items with writing they could not read. Interested yet puzzled, they gave the finds to the colonial manager of the town (Greenland then was a colony of Denmark), Carl Lytzen, who was excited by the discovery and documented it in an article in a Danish journal.

What to some might have seemed a passing account of a curious event in an obscure part of the world was actually big news, leading ultimately to one of the great polar expeditions of all time and revolutionizing scientific understanding of the vast, mysterious, and largely unknown Arctic.

Lytzen’s article mentioned several items that were of particular interest because of the names they bore, among them the apparent bill of lading for a ship called the
Jeannette
, signed by its commander George De Long; a list of the
Jeannette
’s boats; clothing with names, evidently belonging to some of the crew; and even a torn checkbook of the Bank of California. The news soon reached readers, far and wide, who knew all too well about the star-crossed ship with its elegant, almost delicate, name.

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It was the height of “polar fever,” a relatively brief period in the late 1800s and early 1900s when countries were vying with each other to be the first to reach the North Pole (and somewhat later the South Pole), ostensibly for the advancement of knowledge and science, but in reality mostly for fame, prestige, and national pride. It was not unlike a later time when nations raced to be the first into space, then to reach the moon, for the very same reasons. Like the moon, the North Pole seemed a worthy goal since no one had ever been there and it presented so many challenges. But to many, then as now, there was no point in
going to such godforsaken places whose only value was to color dreams and fuel ambitions.

Nonetheless, the Arctic had long captured imaginations and attracted exploration, but mostly for finding trading routes between Europe and eastern North America to China and the Far East, routes that would greatly shorten the arduous, time-consuming, and often prohibitively expensive journeys around Cape Horn or Cape of Good Hope, to and from those bountiful, exotic lands. What, though, exactly lay to the north remained a mystery. This did not stop people from having their theories, even unshakable certainties, about what was there.

Basing opinions on dubious evidence, none of it direct since no one had ever been there, some professed that the Arctic, that vast unknown northern polar region, was a shallow, open, ice-free sea that could be navigated freely once the great barrier of ice was breeched. This ocean supposedly was fed, and kept open, by warm currents, “rivers” they were called, flowing up the west coast of Norway and east coast of Japan, through the ice barrier and into that open polar sea. Others claimed it was just the opposite, not an ocean but an ice-covered continent whose known extremities were believed to be Greenland and “Wrangel Land” north of Siberia (later discovered to be an island). Still others supposed it was neither open ocean nor frozen land but a sea permanently covered with a shield of ice that would fracture and disperse in a crazy quilt of floes at its southern edges. No one knew for sure.

Early explorers believing in the open-ocean theory sought passage to the Orient by going north to reach the open ocean but were inevitably forced back by the ice. Stymied, they tried alternative routes through ice-free waters, in opposite directions: one eastward around Scandinavia and then hugging the northern coast of Russia; the other westward from the east coast of North America through a confusing myriad of big islands in the eastern Canadian Arctic and then along the northern coast of Canada and Alaska (then belonging to Russia). Known to history as the Northeast and Northwest Passages, respectively, these routes for centuries were a hope instead of a reality, as the impregnable ice battered ill-suited ships into submission, near disaster, or oblivion, and the dark brutal winters took a heavy toll on the men who dared venture in. It was not until 1879 that the Northeast Passage was actually found, when Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, after one winter frozen in above Siberia, punched through into the North Pacific. Roald Amundsen, the famous Norwegian explorer and later discoverer of the South Pole, was similarly frozen in for two planned winters at
King William Island off northern Canada, and then made it to the Pacific Ocean in 1906, the first successful ship transit of the Northwest Passage.

Though Nordenskiöld, and later Amundsen, proved the passages could indeed be made, the difficulties and risks encountered on the way, including long winter layovers in the ice, caused a cooling of interest in pursuing this way to the Orient. Governments and private sponsors, often jointly, began to turn their attention to the more symbolic achievement of attaining the North Pole, by sending ships north into the ice, some with visions of finding the “rivers” leading to a wave-washed sea, others of reaching a promised, if barren and frigid, land. One of these was the
Jeannette
, a privately owned American ship with a crew of thirty-three seasoned Arctic sailors “on loan” from the U.S. Navy, including its commander, Lieutenant George De Long.

Under orders from the U.S. government, the
Jeannette
set sail in June of 1879 from San Francisco, heading to the Bering Strait, and on to the Chukchi Sea. It was to proceed from there to Wrangel Land, then believed by some to be a southern extension of an “Arctic Continent.” Once landfall was made, they were to track the coast north as far as they could go by water and then make a run for the North Pole on sledges pulled by dogs. The prize of first at the pole would be theirs and their sponsor’s: fame, resounding international acclaim, and possible fortune.

It did not go as planned. By the fall of that year, the
Jeannette
was inexorably bound in the ice northwest of Wrangel Land (which, before the ship was beset, De Long had discovered was an island, not a part of a far northern continent), and for the next eighteen months, including two winters, the ship drifted, locked in the ice, in a generally northwesterly direction. Then, two years after it had left San Francisco, it was finally crushed, and its pulverized remains disappeared into the grinding ice, one thousand miles west of where the ship had first been caught. The crew, in a harrowing tale renowned in Arctic exploration, hauled three of its lifeboats on sledges for weeks until they reached open water near the New Siberian Islands, and then tried to sail together to the Siberian mainland and possible rescue by natives near the Lena River delta. A storm separated the boats; one was lost forever, but the other two, one under the command of De Long and the other under his engineer George Melville, made it to the mainland but were separated far from each other. Each party pushed on, starving and exhausted, trying to find salvation in that unknown, uncharted land. In the end, De Long perished along with nineteen others. His body, the bodies of his party, logbooks, and other items were later found where he died in Siberia and were brought back to the United States.

Two years later, the items from the smashed-up
Jeannette
appeared on the ice off Julianehaab, Greenland, and Lytzen’s article announced it to an enthralled if somewhat skeptical audience. People wondered how the items had got there, nearly three thousand miles from the ship’s last known position (as recorded in De Long’s recovered log), in a completely different hemisphere, perhaps even directly over the pole. Were the items fake? If not, had someone planted them there as a kind of joke? If so, why did they go to so much trouble?

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One reader of Lytzen’s article was Henrik Mohn, a noted professor of meteorology at the Royal Frederick University (now University of Oslo) who had himself been on voyages of research in the far north. Based on his considerable knowledge of ocean currents in the region, Mohn felt certain that the items could only have come across a polar sea, riding with the drifting ice. He proposed this theory in a November 1884 newspaper article in Norway. His article, in turn, caught the immediate attention of a bright, twenty-three-year-old Norwegian working as a curator at Bergen’s Museum. His name was Fridtjof Nansen, who would become one of the greatest Arctic explorers, a renowned scientist even to this day, and, in his latter years and for other reasons, a Nobel Prize laureate.

Nansen had come into adulthood just in time to catch “polar fever.” Born in 1861 in Christiania (now Oslo, since 1925) and growing up in the country, with the forests on one side and a fjord on the other, he learned at an early age to hunt, fish, swim in the cold lakes and ocean, and especially during the long winters, ski cross-country, often by himself, all skills that would prove important, even essential, in his life to come. As a young man, Nansen was tall, strong, Nordic fair, handsome, rugged, and brooding. He was said to have unflinching, piercing eyes of blue. Though his mind was quick and soaked up facts and figures easily, and though he did well in school while being indifferent to it, he reserved his greatest devotion to his passion: the natural world and its untamed ways.

While a young curator of zoology at Bergen’s Museum and studying for his PhD, Nansen spent part of 1882 aboard the sealing ship
Viking
as it worked the ice pack east of Greenland and Iceland. He was along officially as a scientist, to collect specimens of fish and invertebrates for the museum’s collections, but he soon took on another role more valuable to the ship and crew, a sharpshooter who could kill seals with the best of them (he claimed to have once bagged over two hundred in a single day).

At some point on the trip, Nansen watched with fascination as the ship came close to Greenland, and he found himself longing to go ashore and explore this strange and unknown land. Though the ship did not make landfall then, he said it was from this first close encounter that he resolved to go back one day and attempt to do what no other humans had ever done, cross Greenland from coast to coast.

While aboard the
Viking
, he had another distant view that stirred his growing desire for polar exploration. East of Greenland the
Viking
happened to sail where had Nordenskiöld’s now legendary ship, the
Vega
, on the last leg of its round-the-world return to Sweden following the first successful crossing of the Northeast Passage.

In the fall of 1888, on leave of absence from the museum, after months of meticulous planning and preparation, he and five men he had chosen for their backgrounds in northern environments and skills in skiing crossed Greenland
from east to west, on skis and hauling sledges, up and onto the plateau, across crevasses in the glaciers, in temperatures that sometimes plunged to –50 degrees Fahrenheit. They were the first men ever to do so, covering 350 miles in 49 days, discovering as they did that the interior of the island was covered with thick glacial ice, not open and vegetated as some believed at the time. During the winter layover in the village of Godthaab, Nansen learned and became drawn to Inuit ways of subsistence in the high Arctic, information that would prove invaluable in his later expedition. The party returned to Norway in 1889 to large and adoring crowds, enormous celebrations, and fame for their leader.

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With dreams and ideas swirling in his head, Nansen solidified his novel, even radical, plan to reach the North Pole when he read Mohn’s article. Many others had tried by smashing their way through the ice on ships that were never designed for such purpose, only retrofitted to try, or by dragging smaller boats and sledges over the forbidding, constantly shifting pack. Inevitably they failed, often tragically. Nansen, on the other hand, would take his cue from the Inuit who had survived eons living in the far north: to treat the ice not as an enemy in inevitable losing battles but as an ally with which to join forces and let its power work to one’s advantage. It was an “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude toward the natural world.

The articles from the
Jeannette
and Mohn’s theory about them were not all that convinced him to try what he had in mind. He was far too meticulous and scientific to let one piece of evidence, however compelling, seduce him into undertaking such an adventure into so treacherous an unknown.

First, he confirmed that the articles could have come as far as they did in the given time, from knowing the distance covered, the speed of the well-known currents south along the east coast of Greenland (East Greenland Current), and De Long’s calculations of how fast the
Jeannette
had drifted in the two years it was locked in the ice, before it had to be abandoned.