Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram (38 page)

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ALWAYS A SAILOR

O
tto Sverdrup, in keeping with the time-honored tradition of exploration, had claimed for Norway one hundred thousand square miles of land in the Canadian Arctic that he and his men discovered, surveyed, and named. Though these places still bear Norwegian names, it was Canada that ultimately took possession of them, not through war or sudden usurpation, but by wry political maneuvering, over a long time. It was a bitter pill for Sverdrup to swallow then, and one with enormous implications for the Arctic, today and in the not-so-distant, globally warmed future.

After Sverdrup returned from his second Arctic expedition, and once the plaudits and tributes died down, Canada, or at least certain influential Canadians, began to challenge Norway’s claim to these new lands. Since time immemorial, the Arctic had been a kind of global no-man’s-land, with countries sallying forth there, claiming this and that as they encountered new islands and landmasses. For most of history, this traditional approach had not been a problem for any country, as those lands were deemed pretty much worthless anyway. Now, with another country suddenly perched on Canada’s doorstep, with others (particularly the United States) threatening to join the “invasion,” and with the realization that such lands might indeed be valuable in the future, Canada needed to protect its self-interest.

The way to allow just that had been around for some time, mostly dormant, but now it was time to dust it off and put it into use. The so-called sector principle specified that any Arctic lands north of the Canadian continent, from Baffin Bay to the Beaufort Sea, in an ever-decreasing pie-shaped wedge (the “sector”) all the way to the pole, belonged to Canada. By this astute reckoning, Canada would establish dominion over lands discovered by others, or even yet to be discovered. By the same reasoning, Russia would be in possession of the huge wedge north of Siberia; the United States, the smaller one above Alaska; Norway, an even smaller
one including Svalbard; and Denmark, all of Greenland. The North Pole itself no one could own, because it was just a landless point where the sectors converged.

Canada thus would own, de facto, everything Sverdrup had found and claimed for Norway, even though no Canadian had ever set foot on any part of it. The country rushed to make up for this oversight and in 1903 sent an expedition north to establish its presence and patrol the region. In 1907, one of the sector theory’s staunchest proponents, veteran sailor French-Canadian Joseph Bernier, sailed to Ellesmere and pronounced that it, and everything else Sverdrup discovered, was now Canada’s.

Upon hearing of this attempted coup, an upset Sverdrup asked the Norwegian government to reassert its ownership of the “Sverdrup Islands,” even to send a police force to live there permanently and enforce compliance. However, his government chose not to act, and both countries, squeamish about opening this can of worms, more or less ignored the whole thing for twenty years.

In 1922, however, Canada began to flex its muscles. In a symbolic display of proprietorship, Captain Bernier, now seventy, conducted the first summer patrol around the islands, a practice that has continued to this day. In 1925, the patrol dropped off Alexander Joy of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Ellesmere to establish a police presence there, exactly what Sverdrup had wanted Norway to do two decades earlier. Joy, using Sverdrup’s maps, sledged to Axel Heiberg Island that summer, becoming the first Canadian ever on the island and extending the show of Canadian authority. The next year, the Canadian government wrote to the Norwegian government, officially proclaiming ownership of the islands. It was the first written communication between the two countries on this issue, but Norway did not respond.

Sverdrup, even while off at other work in other parts of the world, had never stopped trying to save his islands for his country. He asked once again for Norway to resist Canada’s push by pushing back. As if seeing the writing on the wall, however, he added a backup course of action: Canada, if given the islands, must reimburse Norway for all the expenses of his expedition.

In 1929, the deed was done. Canada officially took over the Sverdrup Islands. All of Sverdrup’s maps, logbooks, and diaries went to Ottawa. In return, Norway got its money, and Sverdrup received a onetime payment of sixty-seven thousand dollars. With this and an annual stipend awarded two years earlier by the Norwegian government, Sverdrup was finally able to retire. But he did not enjoy his “golden years” for long. He died within a year.

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Sverdrup, after coming back from the Arctic the second time, tried his hand at a flurry of business ventures far different, and far flung, from what he had been doing most of his adult life. In 1906, he bought a plantation in Cuba, with the idea of growing bananas, coffee, and other tropical products for export to Norway. Just as he began to cultivate the land, a severe drought and damaging storms turned the whole thing bust. Next, in 1911, he and others started a whaling enterprise in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, but he gave up on it and returned home. Two years later, he was back in Alaska to investigate the possibility of beginning a forestry operation there, but World War I put an end to it before it ever started.

Sverdrup went back to what he knew and did best, being a sailor in northern, icy waters. It was a serendipitous reentry into his old profession, through old ties and to old familiar regions. In late summer 1913, Fridtjof Nansen contacted him
from Russia to ask him, on behalf of the Russian government, if he would help in the search for two Russian ships engaged in exploration that were missing somewhere in the ice of the Kara Sea, north of the Siberian coast. Sverdrup, though now fifty-nine, immediately said yes. In charge of the
Eclipse
, one of two ships each provisioned for two years, he left the next summer on the search and rescue east along the Siberian coast, the way he had come with Nansen and the
Fram
twenty years before. Finding no trace of the missing explorers or their ships that summer, Sverdrup took the
Eclipse
into winter harbor on the Taimyr Peninsula.

While there, they communicated with St. Petersburg by radio (ships and shore stations now had wireless radios). One of their transmissions was picked up by a Russian icebreaker, one of two in trouble in the ice fields off Severnaya Zemlya, two hundred miles northeast of where the
Eclipse
lay. One, the
Taimyr
, was about to be crushed, while its sister ship was frozen in the pack fifteen miles away, powerless to help. The captain of the
Taimyr
called to ask for help.

Sverdrup managed to get in touch with the
Taimyr
, through communications that were relayed and rerouted hundreds of miles by new shore stations in Russia. After giving some of his men a crash course on sledging with dogs and skis, and after putting out depots, he set out. After two weeks’ trekking, they found the ship and escorted thirty-nine men, from both icebreakers and all slogging through deep snow, back to the
Eclipse
and safety. A month later, as arranged over the radio with St. Petersburg, a great cavalry of men and sledges, hauled by 650 reindeer, arrived and carried the men away west and back to civilization.

In 1920, the ice of the Kara Sea took another hostage, a passenger ship with eighty-seven people aboard, including women and children. Russia, with a long and grateful memory, asked him again for help and again he agreed. Commanding the big Russian icebreaker
Svyatogor
, Sverdrup proceeded to the Kara Sea and then to the beset ship that, having been eighteen weeks in the ice, was now without fuel and nearly out of food. He freed the ship and transferred enough of what it needed to get it and all its passengers safely home.

A year later, Sverdrup was back again, as captain of another Russian icebreaker,
Lenin
, leading a convoy of transport ships on the first ever passage of its kind through the Kara Sea, establishing what is now called the Northern Trade Route, which was of great, and still mounting, importance.

Finally, it was Sverdrup who suggested using the Soviet icebreaker
Krasin
to reach Umberto Nobile after his airship
Italia
crashed in 1928 (and helped plan the whole operation). He of all people would have known what to do, for he had
commanded the icebreaker when it was the
Svyatogor
(then Russian) and saved those eighty-seven lives on the passenger ship frozen in the Kara Sea.

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Sverdrup had helped rescue many during his lifetime, including Russian ships caught in the ice, Italians from a downed airship, and his own countrymen in extremis. He had even tried to save what he considered his country’s lands from those who would take them away. He had one last rescue he wanted to make before he died, the
Fram
itself.

Since coming back to Norway in 1916, the
Fram
had sat in Horten for ten years, an unattended, deteriorating shell open to the ravages of time and weather. It sat for all that span of time: during and after the Great War, those years when Roald Amundsen was flying in airplanes and airships, and when Nansen was working so relentlessly for the world’s downtrodden. As the
Fram
declined so did its creator, not far away. Colin Archer died in 1921, at age eighty-nine, never knowing if his ship would ever be saved. While many fretted over its condition, and even organized a committee for its rehabilitation, there were also many who thought it was costing too much just to keep it going and advocated putting it out of its misery by sinking or dismantling, a more dignified end to a venerable and deeply loved symbol of the country.

In 1925, Sverdrup, who had been its captain longer than anyone else and who had brought it safely through so much ice and darkness, at age seventy came out of retirement, out of his beloved garden at home near Oslo, and to the rescue once more. “She deserved a better fate,” he had said of his old and beleaguered friend, “than to be hidden away in a corner, plucked bare of her engines and all her original equipment.”
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But his concern went beyond his own personal ties to it. He felt the
Fram
, by its notoriety and example, could help keep the craft of wooden shipbuilding alive, whose slow death he was witnessing (his concern was prescient, indeed, as steel, and then plastic, almost made wooden boats and ships extinct by the end of the century). Sverdrup headed up a reinvigorated committee and, in his composed and determined way, led a last-ditch charge to save the ship.

The way to salvation was not easy or quick. In 1916, the Norwegian government had granted only enough money to have its punky and wormhole-ridden hull repaired, a stopgap measure just to keep it afloat. Now, with Sverdrup’s and the committee’s urging, the government gave again, for another round of emergency hull repairs and for the building of a scale model, to guide restoration or, as cynics might have thought, to have something to remember it by when it was gone.

Sverdrup and the committee kept at it, seeking money from private sources. By 1929, they had raised enough for a complete and thorough restoration. That fall, the
Fram
was towed to a shipyard in Sandefjord, not far from its birth town of Larvik, and the rebuilding began. Sverdrup, as he had during the construction of the
Fram
in Archer’s yard, supervised the work. He even managed to retrieve some of the original equipment, still in Horten, including boats and rudder, though the masts stayed on the
Maud
and were replaced with replicas from trees sent from Oregon in the United States. Perhaps as much in recognition of his devotion to the ship and his efforts in saving it as for practical reasons, the
Fram
would come out of the shipyard the next year looking not as it did when first launched but as it was under his command on the second expedition.

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On May 13, 1930, Nansen died at home at age sixty-nine. On May 17, his funeral took place in Oslo, with Sverdrup there as honorary pallbearer. Two days later, the
Fram
left the shipyard in Sandefjord, a refurbished ship with a new lease on life. Sverdrup witnessed this coincidental crossing: the death of the one who had brought the
Fram
into being and the rebirth of his own creation.

Later that summer the
Fram
would set off up the coast, retracing some of its old steps and making its way not under its own power or sails but towed as befitting the elder it was, while another elder, Sverdrup himself, watched it leave. It went first to Trondheim for a festival and then to other towns on its way back to Oslo. It was now a floating museum, collecting money from those stepping aboard to see it, but as yet without a permanent home for its retirement.

Six months later, on November 26, Sverdrup died, at age seventy-six. Among those at his funeral were Norway’s prime minister, Nansen’s brother Alexander, a companion of his on the Greenland crossing, and fellow members of the
Fram
: Victor Baumann, Oluf Raanes, Karl Olsen, and the ever-present Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm.