“Fram” Means “Forward”, or “Ahead”
The ship which survived three polar expeditions. A look inside "Fram Polar Exploration Museum” in Bygdøy, Oslo, Norway
Hello, my patient readers,
In the previous post I pondered on a rapidly retreating glacier, in stark contrast with deep geological time behind the shape of Norwegian mountains. Today, I would like to share an insight into human bravery, perseverance and endurance in the exploration of the inhabitable Arctic.
In the course of our recent round trip to south-western Norway, we stopped off at Fram Polar Exploration Museum in Bygdøy, at the outskirts of Oslo.
The museum building, in the form of a wedge with sharp gables, does not appear that big from outside. Only on entering, you stop in awe, at what the modest premises contain:
Here she is, not so big by the standards of today’s floating vessels, but quite impressive, when you stand at the level of her keel. Fram, a wooden ship, which has crossed the Arctic, cramped in, yet not crushed by, the ice. Not a replica, not a model, but the very ship herself, although restored from the state of deterioration she fell into in the years of the First World War.
George Washington De Long’s expedition on Jeanette, 1879-1881
In the second half of the 19th century, it was believed that a sea current of warm water could keep a passage from the Bering Strait to the North pole accessible for sailing, a theory promoted by German cartographer August Petermann. American expedition of George W. De Long, Charles Chipp, George Melville and 30 crew members, departed in 1879 on a ship Jeanette to check the possibility of the route. The vessel got stuck in thick ice, and after a two-year drift, sunk, her hull damaged and crushed. The crew walked and sailed in small boats towards the land at the delta of the Lena river. The chief engineer Melville and 12 men survived. 20 men, including De Long and Chipp, perished.
Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Sverdrup, and Hjalmar Johansen on Fram, 1893-1896
The Ship
In 1894, three years after Jeanette had sunk, debris from the ship were found near the coast of Greenland. There must have been a current across the Arctic, but not a warm one. The permanent ice must have been drifting constantly, carrying everything what got stuck frozen in it.
This idea inspired Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) to build a ship strong enough so that the ice floes would not crush the hull, but rather carry the vessel along.
The process of designing a ship was quite different from how it goes today. To gain the practical knowledge, Nansen invited Otto Sverdrup, a sailor, polar explorer and his companion from earlier crossing of Greenland. For the engineering part, they consulted Colin Archer: naval architect and shipbuilder working in the shipyard of Larvik.
“Nansen, Otto Sverdrup and Colin Archer had close consultations throughout the building process. Archer made three models and four drawings before the construction started, and adjustments and changes were made constantly during the construction.” 1
Four drawings before the construction started! Nowadays, when a (virtual) model is made, hundreds of drawings are issued to the manufacturer before the production starts. But much fewer changes are agreed during the building process.
Apart from a scale ruler in the middle of the sheet (picture above), Colin Archer’s drawing shows no dimensions. In the dark scenery of the museum, I tried to take a photo of a dimension chart behind a glass pane in a display case:
Note the thickness of the wooden shell: 70 to 80 cm! This is truly a thick ship’s side. The diagonal braces (marked “6” in the above picture), unique for this ice-resistant design, relieve the side frames from bearing the external pressure alone. Relatively small length compared to the beam (breadth), and well rounded sides were intended to make the vessel pop up upon the cramping ice. External sheathing, which looks on the drawings like shingle (wooden tiles to cover roofs), was made of hard greenwood, and fastened to the core of the hull in such a way that under extreme friction from ice floes, the shingles would be torn off and slipped away without damage to the deeper layers of the ship’s side.
The Expedition
Loaded with provisions enough to feed 12 men for four years, Fram set off on 24th of June 1893, sailed along the Siberian coast, and not long after passing the delta of Lena river, swerved northward, sailed by the New Siberian Islands and in September (1893) got frozen in permanent ice. The oval shape of the hull outwitted the irresistible ice pressure. Similarly to a slippery plum stone which would rather slip away than crack, when you squeeze it between your fingers, the hull floated onto the floes, thus escaping the most dangerous forces which otherwise would crush the sides, no matter how strong they were.
The vessel drifted in fits and starts, often retracting the way it had progressed. Everyday scientific investigation, and meticulous recording of all the measurements kept the crew busy, but did not improve the unsatisfactory progress towards the North Pole, if the direction was propitious at all.
In February of 1895, after a year and half of drifting in ice with little progress, Nansen decided to try to walk to the North Pole on ski. He left the command of the ship to Otto Sverdrup, and with a second braveheart, Hjalmar Johansen, they left the ship, equipped with sledges of provisions, to be self-reliant during the long journey. Two weeks later they returned, to repack and make their loads lighter. In the half of March (1895) they set off again, with two kayaks lashed to a sledge, hunting equipment alongside smaller provisions, and a pack of dogs to help them pull the load.
There were no satellite phones these days. Everyone was aware that the walkers and their comrades aboard could not see each other ever again.
Nansen and Johansen were forced to give up on the North Pole, but they walked as far north as no one ever had before. On the 7th of April 1895 they decided to turn towards the land.
“Should have liked it if we could have got further. It is our consolation that we have done what we could and that we have even lifted a little more of the veil which conceals this part of our planet” - Johansen noted in his diary.
A worth reading story of their dramatic journey, concise yet rich in facts, is available on the Museum’s website.
To stir the imagination, it should suffice to say that they survived a bear attack, swam in the freezing water to catch a kayak which had slipped away, spent winter in a stone-and-moss hut, and sailed in kayaks towards Spitsbergen, when they no longer could walk on ice. On the 17th of June 1896, as if by a miracle, they met Frederick Jackson from a British expedition deployed on the Franz Josef Land (see the second map above). After the perils of crossing a swath of the Arctic, they were alive and safe. The toil was over. They sailed safely back to Norway on Windward, the British expedition’s ship.
What about Fram and its crew? They drifted with the ice, reaching more or less as far north as Nansen and Johansen had walked, and then southward, until they met the open sea at the shores of Svalbard island. The ice drift which had brought the remains of Jeannete to Greenland, this time delivered an undamaged ship and a healthy crew. After three years, Sverdrup sailed Fram back to the Norwegian coast only a couple of days after Nansen and Johansen had returned.
The further fate of Fram
Fram sailed in two subsequent major polar expeditions. In the years 1898-1902 Otto Sverdrup led it to the northwest of Greenland, with the goal of mapping and scientific observation. Preparing for the trip, the captain ordered several improvements to the construction, which the crew had envisaged during the first long drift.
Roald Amundsen used Fram for his Antarctic expedition in the years 1910-1912, amid some frantic race between him, Robert Peary and Robert Falcon Scott, to reach the two Earth’s poles.
During the First World War, the ship remained idle in the harbour of Horten. The materials which had been used to build the hull proved to be robust in the polar conditions, but turned out to be prone to damage during the long sails south and north, through the tropical waters. Worms started eating the wood. Amundsen was not interested in restoring Fram for his next polar expedition, and had a new ship, Maud built for him. Fram became derelict, and would have been wrecked, were it not the efforts of its captain, Otto Sverdrup, and financial support of Lars Christensen, a ship owner and a whaling magnate, to save the legend of Norwegian polar exploration.
Since 1929 through early 1930’s, the ship was restored to the state of her prime, it is as she looked during the second expedition, the one under Sverdrup’s command to Greenland.
The ship-monument was hauled and winched ashore at Bygdøy near Oslo, and then, the construction of a building to house her, started. “The Fram House”, today’s Museum, was opened at a gala event on 20th of May 1936.
The downside of an organised route trip is its nonnegotiable itinerary. I could stay in the museum for half a day, yet we had to go further. In a gift shop, an obligatory part of an exit route, I grabbed a book ([1], see “sources of pictures” below.) It inspired me to share with you what I learned in the museum and from the readings that followed.
Sources of pictures:
[1] “The Fram Museum’s Guide To The Exploration Of The Arctic”, published by The Fram Museum, Oslo, Norway, 2018
[2] Fram enginnering drawing, by naval architect and shipbuilder Colin Archer.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fram_1893-1896_engineering_drawing.jpg Attribution: Dr. Mirko Junge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
[3] The Museum’s Library: photos, multimedia files
https://frammuseum.no/media-library/
[4] The Fram Museum, Expeditions, The First Fram Expedition (1893-1896)
https://frammuseum.no/polar-history/expeditions/the-first-fram-expedition-1893-1896/
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The Polar Exploration Museum website / Vessels / The Polar Ship Fram
https://frammuseum.no/polar-history/vessels/the-polar-ship-fram/
My husband is into polar exploration stories. Thank you for this detailed and fascinating post!