Topsail schooner (1f/3m)
L/B/D:
127.8 × 34 × 15 (39m × 11m × 4.8m). Tons:
402 grt; 307 net. Hull:
wood. Comp.:
16. Mach.:
triple expansion, 220 ihp, 1 screw; 7 kts. Des.:
Colin Archer. Built:
Colin Archer, Larvik, Norway; 1892.
In 1879, George DeLong's attempt to reach the North Pole ended in failure when his ship,
Jeannette, became lodged in the ice for seventeen months. However, the ship's 600-mile drift in the ice from Wrangel Island almost to the New Siberian Islands suggested to the Norwegian zoologist and explorer Fridtjof Nansen "that a current passes across or very near the Pole into the sea between Greenland and Spitzbergen." Nansen determined to use the current to bring him as far north as possible before setting out across the ice to reach the North Pole. To do this, he wrote,
I propose to have a ship built as small and as strong as possible—just big enough to contain supplies of coal and provisions for twelve men for five years.... The main point in this vessel is that it be built on such principles as to enable it to withstand the pressure of the ice. The sides must slope sufficiently to prevent the ice, when it presses together, from getting firm hold of the hull, as was the case with the Jeannette and other vessels. Instead of nipping the ship, the ice must raise it up out of the water.
Nansen turned to the naval architect Colin Archer, who designed a ship that differed "essentially from any other previously known vessel." Fram ("Forward") was a massively built, smooth-sided, double-ended vessel shaped like a pilot boat but without a keel or sharp garboard strakes—"able to slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice." The stem had an aggregate thickness of 4 feet, the frames were 21 inches wide, and the hull planking—of 30-year-old oak—had a maximum thickness of 13 inches. The beams were reinforced with balks, stanchions, braces, and stays. Rigged as a three-masted schooner and fitted with an auxiliary engine, Fram carried enough coal for four months' steaming.
Fram sailed from the northern port of Vardö on July 21, 1893. Heading east across the Barents Sea, she passed south of Novaya Zemlya into the Kara Sea and hugged the Eurasian coast until about 135°E, when she turned north. On September 22, 1893, Fram lodged in the ice in about 78°43N. As predicted, the ship was carried to the northwest until November 1895, when her course shifted to the southwest. All the while, her crew took extensive magnetic, astronomical, hydrographic, and meteorological observations from which they determined, among other things, that the Arctic was covered not with a solid, immobile mass of ice but a continually breaking and shifting expanse of drift-ice. Fram finally emerged from the ice on August 13, 1896, off the northwest coast of Spitzbergen, just as Nansen had predicted.
In the meantime, Nansen and Frederik Johansen had left Fram on March 14, 1895, when the ship lay in about 84°4N, 102°27E, in an effort to reach the North Pole with sleds and kayaks. By April 9 they had reached as far as 86°13N, 95°E before their way was blocked by uneven ice and they turned south for Franz Jozef Land. Here they wintered in a cave on Frederick Jackson Island (81°30N, 55°E) from August 1895 until May 19, 1896. On June 17, they arrived at an English camp at Cape Flora, Northbrook Island, from which they returned to Vardö in the supply schooner Windward. Several weeks later, the two men reunited with Fram and her crew at Tromsö. Despite the lack of fresh food, the extensive periods of perpetual light and dark, and the unrelenting cold—the highest monthly average temperature was about 32°F, and the lowest 35°F—the crew of the Norwegian Polar Expedition remained in excellent physical and mental health. Nansen cheerfully reported how upon his arrival at Cape Flora he discovered that he had gained 22 pounds, and Johansen 13 pounds, since leaving Fram.
In 1898, Otto Sverdrup, who commanded the ship after Nansen left for the North Pole, took Fram on a three-year expedition in northwest Greenland. After exploring the west coast of Ellesmere Island and other islands, he returned to Norway with a large collection of natural history specimens.
In 1910, Fram was brought out of retirement by Roald Amundsen who wanted to emulate Nansen's attempt to reach the Pole by putting his ship in the ice in the Bering Sea. When he learned that Robert Peary (based aboard the
Roosevelt) had beaten him to the Pole, Amundsen secretly decided to make for the South Pole, a plan he revealed to his crew only when the ship was at Madeira. Fram arrived in the Ross Sea in January 1911, reaching 78°38S, 163°37W, about 870 miles from the Pole. Averaging 17 to 23 miles per day, Amundsen, Oscar Wisting, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Olav Bjaaland set out across the Ross Ice Shelf with four sledges and forty-two dogs. Crossing the Queen Maud Mountains, the Norwegians became the first people to reach the South Pole on December 16, 1911—thirty-one days before Robert Scott's ill-fated expedition from
Discovery. They returned to Framheim, their base camp, on January 25, 1912, and sailed for home five days later.
The intrepid Fram was later acquired by the Norsk Sjøfartsmuseum in Oslo where she is on public display.
Amundsen, South Pole. Nansen, Farthest North. Sverdrup, New Land.
