Read Online Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram by Charles W. Johnson - Free Book Online Page A

Arctic sailing experience, Nansen hired him on the spot. “It was 8:30 when he came on board to speak to me,” Nansen wrote in Farthest North , “and at 10 o’clock the Fram set sail.” His assignment was supposed to be relatively short, however, accompanying the ship to a place in Siberia where the Fram was to pick up coal and take on board Siberian sledge dogs. There, too, Nansen’s secretary Ola Christofersen, who had come on board with Sverdrup in Trondheim, was to disembark and return home.
    The Fram proceeded to Vardø at the northeastern-most tip of Norway, facing on the Barents Sea and the future way, for one last celebratory national send-off and, less gloriously but with more necessity for what lay ahead, a scraping of its bottom (since launching, it had been fifteen months in the water and already traveled over 1,600 miles). Many of the crew took the opportunity to get drunk and debauched in town, as they had in Tromsø a few days previously, and Bergen before that, and came back late and unruly, unable to fulfill their duties properly and delaying departure. An upset Nansen directed the Fram out of port nonetheless, with only himself, Sverdrup, and Scott-Hansen (though he, too, was hungover) to do the work, while most of the crew slept it off below.
    The next day, a fuming Nansen assembled the men on deck for a tongue-lashing and a warning against such behavior. (Nansen apparently saw his pleasure ashore in a different light than theirs: “one last civilized feast of purification, before entering on a life of savagery,” 4 he reflected almost self-righteously, as he lay in a hot-steam sauna, while young Finnish women whipped his naked body with birch twigs.) The reprimand took the men aback, as they had been indulging inwhat was an ages-old, almost customary if sometimes distasteful way of seafarers in port on long voyages. It was also a telling moment in what it revealed to the crew about Nansen’s character and attitude so early in the trip. From then on, the men would regard their leader with a more wary, indeed more critical, eye.
    FIGURE 21
    A fully loaded Fram leaves Vardø, Norway, heading away from civilization, into the Barents Sea and along the Northeast Passage, July 19, 1893. The crew’s behavior on liberty in Vardø upset Nansen.
    As with other uncomfortable episodes, particularly those dealing with discord among the men or his own foibles, Nansen made no reference of this incident in Farthest North (but several of the crew certainly did in their own personal, private diaries and later accounts). It was not the custom of the time to reveal human flaws and discord in such publications, as we do today. Also, Nansen was no doubt reluctant to air dirty laundry publicly, given his role and how he (or his editors) wished readers to experience secondhand this extraordinary saga. Perhaps, too, he did not wish to trample on anyone’s feelings so openly in print. What seemedto matter most were the mission and the story of adventure, not the preoccupations, mundane interactions, and petty squabbles of the crew, which were no one’s business but their own.
    But ship and crew have an inseparable identity. As one’s personal space and freedom necessarily are diminished on a ship, one’s identity and character correspondingly come more quickly and sharply into focus, almost as if in self-protection against confinement. There is virtually no privacy externally, so one finds it internally, in one’s carefully guarded thoughts and feelings. “Office” and “home” are the same place, and shipmates become both “colleagues” and “family.” Since one cannot just leave to get away from something or someone, and thus avoid them, problems quickly come to a head and must be worked out in situ, ideally through negotiation but sometimes, regrettably, with force.
    Yet at the same time, in these transformations, something magical happens. The ship becomes almost a being, with the power of the feminine,