The entry says that the men who knew the Arctic best told Nansen his plan was madness, and that one of them wrote afterwards to say he had been wrong. This piece gives the evening in full. Nansen read his paper, “How can the North Polar Region be Crossed?”, to the Royal Geographical Society in London on 14 November 1892, three weeks after the Fram was launched; the paper and the discussion were printed in the first number of The Geographical Journal in January 1893, and Nansen reprinted the sharpest objections, with General Greely’s, in the first chapter of Farthest North in 1897.
The ship, in Nansen’s words
The paper was in large part a description of a hull, because the hull was the answer to the objection everybody made first. “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,” he had said in Christiania in 1890. “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.” In London he told the Society that this was nothing new. The small Norwegian sealers that worked the sea round Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya were often built of nothing but pine, “but yet they are lifted on to the ice; the captains think this a cheap way to get a dry dock and make use of the time to paint their ships, &c., until the floes separate again and the ship sinks into the water, so that they can continue their voyage. Though the Jeannette had a shape which in this respect was very bad, and though she was an old and not very strong ship, she managed to withstand the ice pressure for nearly two years, twenty-one months. It will consequently be understood that a very slight alteration of shape will give us a very strong ship, and one which can scarcely be crushed by the floe-ice if it is properly handled.”
Then the ship. “As great length is a weakness during the pressure and twisting of the pack-ice, the ship ought also to be as short as her necessary bearing capacity will allow. The result of this in connection with the very sloping sides is, that our ship is disproportionately broad compared with her length. Her breadth is about one-third of the latter. Flat sides are avoided as much as possible near the places which will be most exposed to the attack of the ice, and the hull has plump and rounded forms. There are no sharp, projecting corners; every edge is broken and rounded. Even the keel does not project very much; it is almost covered by the plankings, and only 3 inches are visible outside the ice-skin, and the sharp edges are quite rounded. On the whole the ship will, I hope, leave no place for the ice to catch hold of. Round and slippery like an eel, she will escape its cold and strong grasp.”
The screw could be raised into a well, and so could the rudder, “a fortunate and ingenious idea of the shipbuilder, Mr. Colin Archer”. The stem was three oak baulks one inside another, fifty inches of solid oak. The frames were Italian oak bought for the Norwegian navy thirty years before, in pairs almost touching, and over them went three skins of planking, the outer one an “ice sheathing” of greenheart. “The whole thickness of sides of the ship is thus 28 to 32 inches — a solid mass of pitch-pine, oak, and greenheart, with a little pitch in between.” Inside, stays and stanchions stood as near perpendicular to the sides as they could be placed, so that the whole “is like one coherent mass, and the ship may almost be considered as if built of solid wood.” Length of keel 101 feet, at the waterline 113, over all 128; beam 36 feet; displacement with a full load about 800 tons, of which 300 could be coal. “The vessel was launched at Laurvik on the 26th of October, and was named Fram, which means ‘forward.’ I hope she will accomplish what this name promises. Fram will certainly be the strongest vessel ever used in the Arctic regions.”
“There is a possibility that we may be stopped by unknown lands near the Pole, or that we may strike an eddy or a side current, but we hardly run any great risk in any of these cases.” If the ship was crushed after all, the crew would move on to the ice with two decked boats twenty-nine feet long, “and we shall have to move all our provisions, coal, boats, &c., to an ice-floe, and camp there.” And he said what the plan was and was not: “The only new feature in my plan will be, that I wish to be drifted, while these previous expeditions drifted against their will.”
McClintock
Admiral Sir Leopold McClintock had sailed in four of the Franklin searches and had found, in the Fox in 1859, the only written record of what became of Franklin. He opened the discussion. “I think I may say this is the most adventurous programme ever brought under the notice of the Royal Geographical Society.” He allowed that the facts spoke for Nansen’s theory of the currents, but he doubted the ship. One could build a vessel strong enough to resist the ice in summer; but under pressure in the winter months, “when the ice resembled a mountain frozen fast to the ship’s side”, the chance of her being forced up on to the surface seemed to him “very remote”. He believed, as most of the others did, that the Fram would not be seen again once she had given herself to the pack, and he ended: “I wish the doctor full and speedy success. But it will be a great relief to his many friends in England when he returns, and more particularly to those who have had experience of the dangers at all times inseparable from ice navigation, even in regions not quite so far north.”
Nares
Admiral Sir George Nares had commanded the British expedition of 1875 and 1876 that took the Alert to the top of Smith Sound and sent Markham’s sledges to 83° 20’, the record until Greely’s. He put the orthodox case.
“The adopted Arctic axioms for successfully navigating an icy region are that it is absolutely necessary to keep close to a coast line, and that the farther we advance from civilization, the more desirable it is to insure a reasonably safe line of retreat. Totally disregarding these, the ruling principle of the voyage is that the vessel — on which, if the voyage is in any way successful, the sole future hope of the party will depend, is to be pushed deliberately into the pack-ice. Thus, her commander — in lieu of retaining any power over her future movements — will be forced to submit to be drifted helplessly about in agreement with the natural movements of the ice in which he is imprisoned.”
On the hull: “To guard against this the vessel is said to be unusually strong, and of a special form to enable her to rise when the ice presses against her sides. This idea is no novelty whatever; but when once frozen into the polar pack the form of the vessel goes for nothing. She is hermetically sealed to and forms a part of the ice block surrounding her. The form of the ship is for all practical purposes the form of the block of ice in which she is frozen. This is a matter of the first importance, for there is no record of a vessel frozen into the polar pack having been disconnected from the ice, and so rendered capable of rising under pressure as a separate body detached from the ice block, even in the height of summer.”
On the boats on the ice: “This is well in theory, but extremely difficult to arrange for in practice. Preparation to abandon the vessel, is the one thing that gives us the most anxiety. To place boats, &c., on the ice packed ready for use involves the danger of being separated from them by a movement of the ice, or of losing them altogether, should a sudden opening occur. If we merely have everything handy for heaving over the side, the emergency may be so sudden that we have not time to save anything.”
And on the drift itself, he thought the wind, not the water, would decide, and the wind would take her west: “I know of no natural forces that will carry the vessel in any reasonable time much farther from the Siberian coast than the Jeannette was carried, and during the whole of this time, unless protected by newly discovered lands, she will be to all intents and purposes immovably sealed up in the pack, and exposed to its well-known dangers. There is no doubt that there is an ocean connection across the area proposed to be explored.” On one thing he agreed with Nansen: that the aim of such a voyage was “to explore the unknown polar regions, not to reach exactly that mathematical point in which the axis of our globe has its northern termination.”
Young, Richards, Hooker
Sir Allen Young, who had sailed with McClintock in the Fox and had owned the Pandora before she was the Jeannette, thought the danger was land, not water. “Dr. Nansen assumes the blank space around the axis of the earth to be a pool of water or ice; I think the great danger to contend with will be the land in nearly every direction near the Pole. Most previous navigators seem to have continued seeing land again and again further and further north. These Jeannette relics may have drifted through narrow channels, and thus finally arrived at their destination, and, I think, it would be an extremely dangerous thing for the ship to drift through them, where she might impinge upon the land, and be kept for years.” Of the hull: “If there is no swell the ice must go through her, whatever material she is made of.”
Admiral Sir George Richards, a former Hydrographer of the Navy, wrote rather than spoke. “I regret to have to speak discouragingly of this project, but I think that any one who can speak with authority ought to speak plainly where so much may be at stake.” He believed in “a constant outflow (I prefer this word to current) from the north”, on all sides of the polar basin, caused by the weight of an ice cap over the Pole, and could find no reason “for believing that a current sets north over the Pole from the New Siberian Islands which Dr. Nansen hopes for and believes in.” Within “the inner circle, say about 78° of latitude”, he thought, “there is little current of any kind that would influence a ship in the close ice that must be expected”; the ice there “becomes older and heavier every year, and in all probability completely blocks the navigation of ships entirely.” Of the relics he thought what the entry and the other companion piece record: they might have drifted down from Smith Sound.
Sir Joseph Hooker, the botanist, who had been with James Clark Ross in the Antarctic for three seasons, also wrote. “Dr. Nansen’s project is a wide departure from any hitherto put in practice for the purpose of polar discovery, and it demands the closest scrutiny both on this account, and because it is one involving the greatest peril.” He did not think any ship could long resist the pack. “One built as strongly as the Fram would no doubt resist great pressures in the open pack, but not any pressure or repeated pressures, and still less the thrust of the pack if driven with or by it against land. The lines of the Fram might be of service so long as she was on an even keel or in ice of no great height above the water-line; but amongst floes and bergs or when thrown on her beam-ends, they would avail her nothing.” He asked whether the effect on the crew of “many months of darkness, extreme cold, inaction, ennui, constant peril, and the haunting uncertainty as to the future” had been taken into account, and concluded: “I do not consider the attainment of Dr. Nansen’s object by the means at his disposal to be impossible; but I do consider that the success of such an enterprise would not justify the exposure of valuable lives for its attainment.”
Two men at the meeting spoke for the plan, Sir Edward Inglefield and Captain Wharton, the Hydrographer; and in Germany Professor Supan, the editor of Petermann’s old journal, had supported it in 1891 with a theory of an Arctic “wind-shed” whose winds would favour the drift. “Our experience,” Nansen wrote in 1897, “bore out Professor Supan’s theory in a remarkable degree.”
Greely
General Adolphus Greely had not been in London. He had written in The Forum in August 1891, when the plan was public and the ship not yet begun, and Nansen printed the article’s main points without softening them.
“It strikes me as almost incredible that the plan here advanced by Dr. Nansen should receive encouragement or support. It seems to me to be based on fallacious ideas as to physical conditions within the polar regions, and to foreshadow, if attempted, barren results, apart from the suffering and death among its members. Dr. Nansen, so far as I know, has had no Arctic service; his crossing of Greenland, however difficult, is no more polar work than the scaling of Mount St. Elias. It is doubtful if any hydrographer would treat seriously his theory of polar currents, or if any Arctic traveller would indorse the whole scheme.” He named the dozen men whose support would entitle the plan to consideration, Melville among them, and went on: “I have no hesitation in asserting that no two of these believe in the possibility of Nansen’s first proposition — to build a vessel capable of living or navigating in a heavy Arctic pack, into which it is proposed to put his ship. The second proposition is even more hazardous, involving as it does a drift of more than 2,000 miles in a straight line through an unknown region”.
He did not believe in the relics, and he did not believe in the sea. “We know almost as well as if we had seen it, that there is in the unknown regions an extensive land which is the birthplace of the flat-topped icebergs or the palaeocrystic ice”, a glacier-covered land more than 300 miles across, with the Pole in it. On the ship he quoted Melville, “that even if built solid a vessel could not withstand the ice-pressure of the heavy polar pack”, and against Nansen’s seven to ten feet of Siberian ice he quoted Melville again on ice “50 feet high”. Nansen’s note on that: “something we did not discover, by the way, during the whole of our voyage.” Greely’s last sentence was the one that stuck: “Arctic exploration is sufficiently credited with rashness and danger in its legitimate and sanctioned methods, without bearing the burden of Dr. Nansen’s illogical scheme of self-destruction.”
What the prophets said afterwards
The Fram answered the hull question on the afternoon of 9 October 1893, when the first pressure lifted her, and the drift question over the thousand days that followed. On 13 October, with the ice piling walls as high as her rigging, Nansen wrote: “Now we are in the very midst of what the prophets would have had us dread so much. The ice is pressing and packing round us with a noise like thunder. It is piling itself up into long walls, and heaps high enough to reach a good way up the Fram’s rigging; in fact, it is trying its very utmost to grind the Fram into powder. But here we sit quite tranquil, not even going up to look at all the hurly-burly, but just chatting and laughing, as usual.”
When she came home in 1896 Nares wrote to him. Nansen’s record of the letter is a footnote: “After our return home, Admiral Nares, in the most chivalrous fashion, sent me a letter of congratulation, in which he said that the Fram’s remarkable voyage over the Polar Sea proved that my theory was correct, and his scepticism unfounded.”
Greely wrote again, in Harper’s Weekly for 19 September 1896. He now took the relics to have been genuine, allowed that the scheme had been carried out “in spite of what he had said”, and found the fault elsewhere. “In contrasting the expeditions of De Long and Nansen, it is necessary to allude to the single blemish that mars the otherwise magnificent career of Nansen, who deliberately quitted his comrades on the ice-beset ship hundreds of miles from any known land, with the intention of not returning, but, in his own reported words, ‘to go to Spitzbergen where he felt certain to find a ship 600 miles away.’ De Long and Ambler had such a sense of honour that they sacrificed their lives rather than separate themselves from a dying man whom their presence could not save. It passes comprehension how Nansen could have thus deviated from the most sacred duty devolving on the commander of a naval expedition. The safe return of brave Captain Sverdrup with the Fram does not excuse Nansen.”
Nansen printed that too, without comment, next to the rest.