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

watching over all within, feeding, sheltering, giving warmth, and offering the rest of sleep. Though they might hate being there at times, all aboard feel like its children, will do anything for it, and will go where it goes, toward the goal they gain together. This feeling does not come from a ship’s design, or with structure and function, but from this intricate, interwoven relationship between vessel and crew, built of time and intimate association. That is why a ship—even one made of steel, even with guns, and even with a male name—is a “she” to those who live with it. A ship and its crew become one under any circumstances but especially so when heading off on an unknown ocean to be imprisoned in the ice, for so long a time, totally alone, and far away from anything familiar.

3 › NORTHEAST PASSAGE
    F rom Vardø, the Fram sailed east for several days through the Barents Sea, all the while in dense, dripping fog until the sun shone briefly to reveal Novaya Zemlya ahead, the six-hundred-mile-long Russian archipelago known to Norwegian whalers and sealers that separates the Barents and Kara Seas. They continued on in thick fog in a southeasterly direction, toward Yugor (now Yugorsky) Strait, the narrow passage between the mainland and Vaygach Island just to the north. They had expected clear sailing in these usually open waters so were surprised to encounter pack ice, at first a “mere strip,” but then “the ice lay extended everywhere, as far as the eye could reach through the fog . . . there was nothing for it but to be true to our watchword and ‘gå fram’—push onwards.” 5 The Fram was to get its first test against the ice.

    ››› From an airplane thousands of feet up, the pack ice can look as though an enormous plate of glass had been shattered into a million little shards, each a different size and shape, massed together in a seemingly infinite filigreed mosaic. It all appears delicate, as if the pieces were of finest crystal and the leads between but silken threads. But on a boat or ship among it, it is quite another matter, a different image. The tiny pieces become a mass, an expanse of chunks and mounds that forms a barrier spreading out all around, with the power to stop, trap, damage, or sink an unwary or unprepared vessel. A way through often requires endless weaving, turning, and reversing to reach the leads, while dodging floe after floe in a halting, dizzying progression through a maze of danger.
    The pack moves in mysterious ways, too. One moment, the ocean can be clear, not a speck of ice upon it, all the way to the horizon. The next, it can be ice covered and hard against the shore, with blocks and bricks of white stacked into a fractured, heaved-up pavement and no open water to be seen anywhere. Then, just as suddenly, there can be nothing but water again. It appears and disappears as if by stealth and magic.
    ››› The Fram performed beautifully as it picked and shoved its way through the pack, though the helmsman had a time of it. Fridtjof Nansen observed in Farthest North , “She twisted and turned ‘like a ball on a platter.’ And the ship swings round, and wriggles her way forward among the floes without touching, if there is only just an opening wide enough for her to slip through; and where there is none she drives full tilt at the ice, with her heavy plunge, runs her sloping bows up on it, treads it under her and bursts the floes asunder. And how strong she is too! Even when she goes full speed at a floe, not a creak, not a sound is to be heard in her; if she gives a little shake it is all she does.”
    A few days later, they made Yugor Strait, and headed toward the small mainland settlement of Khabarova, which was nothing more than a few ramshackle buildings and tents on the tundra where Russian traders would come to barter with native, reindeer-herding Samoyedic people of the region. Here, they were to rendezvous with the Norwegian vessel Urania , for the Fram to