Farthest North Volume II Part 17

there were only a few of the most trifling nature, such as a frozen big toe, a little skin-chafing here and there, a sore eye or two; that was all. However, we led a very regular life, with the twenty-four hours suitably distributed between work, exercise, and rest. We slept well and fed well, and so we were very little concerned at the fact that when being weighed on May 7th we were found to have lost flesh. However, the falling off was not great; the aggregate weight of the whole party was barely 8 pounds less than the month before.

There was, however, one complaint that we suffered from--a contagious one, though not of a dangerous nature. It became a fashion, or, if you like, a fashionable complaint, on board the Fram, to shave one's head. It was said that an infallible method of producing a more luxuriant growth of hair was to shave away the little hair that still adorned the head of the patient. Juell first started it, and then a regular mania set in, the others following his example one by one, with the exception of myself and one or two more. Like a cautious general, I first waited a while to see whether the expected harvest sprouted on my comrades' shaven polls; and as the hair did not seem to grow any stronger than before, I preferred a recipe ordered by the doctor--viz., to wash the head daily with soft soap and subsequently rub in an ointment. To make this treatment more effectual, however, and let the ointment get at the scalp, I followed the example of the others and shaved my head several times. Personally I do not believe that the process did any good, but Pettersen was of a different opinion. "The deuce take me," said he, one day afterwards when cutting my hair, "if the captain hasn't got some jolly strong bristles on his crown after that treatment."

The Seventeenth of May brought the finest weather that could be imagined. A clear, bright sky, dazzling sunshine, 10 to 12 of cold, and an almost perfect calm. The sun, which at this time of the year never sets throughout the twenty-four hours, was already high in the heavens, when at 8 A.M. we were awakened by the firing of a gun, and by joyous strains of the organ. We jumped into our clothes more speedily than usual, swallowed our breakfast, and with the liveliest expectation prepared for what was in store; for the "Festival Committee" had been very busy the previous day. Punctually at 11 o'clock the various corporations a.s.sembled under their flags and insignia, and were a.s.signed their position in the grand procession. I marched at the head with the Norwegian flag. Next came Scott-Hansen with the Fram's pennant, and then followed Mogstad with the banner of the Meteorological Department, richly bedecked with "cyclonic centres"

and "prospects of fair weather." He was seated on a box covered with bearskin placed on a sledge drawn by seven dogs, the banner waving behind him on a pole rigged as a mast. Amundsen was No. 4, bearing a demonstration banner in favor of "the Pure Flag," and he was followed by his esquire, Nordahl, on snow-shoes with a spear in his hand and a rifle slung on his back. The flag showed on the red ground a picture of an old Norwegian warrior breaking his spear over his knee, with the inscription "Onward! Onward! [Fram! Fram!], ye Norseman! Your own flag in your own land. What we do we do for Norway." Fifth in the procession came the mate, with the Norwegian arms on a red background, and sixth was Pettersen with the flag of the Mechanical Department. Last came the "Band," represented by Bentzen with an accordion. The procession was followed by the public dressed in their best--viz., the doctor, Juell, and Henriksen in picturesque confusion.

To the waving of banners and strains of music the procession wended its way past the corner of the University (viz., the Fram), down "Karl Johan's Street" and "Church Street" (a road laid out by Scott-Hansen for the occasion across the rift in front and the pressure-ridge), past Engebret's (the depot on the ice), and then wheeled round to the "Fortification Parade" [88] (viz., the top of the great hummock), where it stopped and faced round with flags erect.

There I called for cheers in honor of the festive occasion, in response to which there rose a ninefold hurrah from the densely packed mult.i.tude.

At exactly 12 o'clock the official salute of the Seventeenth May was fired from our big bow guns. Then came a splendid banquet; the doctor had contributed a bottle of aqua vitae, and every man had a bottle of genuine Crown Malt Extract, from the "Royal Brewery" in Copenhagen.

When the roast was served Scott-Hansen proposed the health of our dear ones at home and of our two absent comrades, who he hoped might achieve the task they had set themselves and return home safely. This toast was accompanied by a salute of two guns.

At 4 P.M. a great popular festival was held on the ice. The place was prettily decorated with flags and other emblems, and the programme offered a rich variety of entertainments. There was rope-dancing, gymnastics, shooting at running hares, and many other items. The public were in a highly festive mood throughout, and vigorously applauded the artists in all their performances. After a supper which was not far behind the dinner in excellence we gathered at night in the saloon around a steaming bowl of punch. The doctor, amid loud applause, proposed the health of the organizing committee, and I proposed the Fram. After this we kept it up in the merriest and most cordial spirit until far into the night.

CHAPTER II

JUNE 22 TO AUGUST 15, 1895

As spring advanced the disturbance in the ice increased, and new lanes and pools were formed in every direction. At the same time there was a daily increase in the number of aquatic animals and birds around us.

On the night of June 22d I was awakened by the watch, who told me that there were whales in the lane on the starboard side. Every one hurried on deck, and we now saw that some seven or eight female narwhals were gambolling in the channel close upon us. We fired some shots at them, but these did not seem to affect them. Later in the day I went after them in the sealing-boat, but without getting within range. In order to be able to give effectual chase, should they, as we hoped, pay us a visit in the future, we made ready two harpoon-bladders and an oak anchor, which we attached to the end of the harpoon line. Should the whale, when harpooned, prove too strong for us, we would let go the anchor and the bladders, and if the fates were not against us, we might be successful.

We were quite anxious to try the new apparatus, and therefore kept a sharp lookout for the whales. One or two were seen occasionally in the channel, but they disappeared again so quickly that we had no time to pursue them. On the evening of July 2d we had the prospect of a good hunt. The lane swarmed with whales, and we quickly started out with the boat in pursuit. But this time, too, they were so shy that we could not get at them. One of them remained some time in a small channel, which was so narrow that we could throw across it. We attempted to steal on him along the edge, but as soon as we had got within a short distance of him he took alarm, and swam out into the large channel, where he remained rolling about, turning over on his back for some four or five minutes at a time with his head above water, puffing away, and positively jeering at us. When at length we had wearily worked our way back again to the large channel, intending to a.s.sist him a little in his performances--pop, away he went.

Some days later we again received a visit from a troupe of these comedians in another channel newly formed in close proximity to the vessel. Three of them had long, heavy tusks, which they showed high above the water, and then used to scratch their female friends on the back with. We immediately prepared ourselves with rifles and harpoons, and ran towards the channel as fast as our legs would carry us. But before we got there the beasts had fled. It was of no use trying to get within range of these shy creatures, so, after that, as a rule, we allowed them to remain unmolested.

Once, however, during the spring of 1896, we were near catching a narwhal. I had been out fowling, and was just busily taking out of the boat the birds I had shot, when suddenly a narwhal appeared in the channel close to our usual landing-place, where the harpoon with the line attached lay ready for immediate use. I quickly seized the harpoon, but the coil of line was too short, and when I had got this right the whale dived below the water, just as I was ready to harpoon him.

An occasional large seal (Phoca barbata) also appeared at this time; we chased them sometimes, but without success; they were too shy.

With the fowling our luck was better, and so early as June 7th we shot so many black guillemots, gulls, fulmars, and little auks that we partook on that day of our first meal of fresh meat during the year. The flesh of these birds is not, as a rule, valued very much, but we ate it with ravenous appet.i.tes, and found that it had an excellent flavor--better than the tenderest young ptarmigan.

One day three gulls appeared, and settled down at some distance from the vessel. Pettersen fired twice at them and missed, they meanwhile resting calmly on the snow, and regarding him with intense admiration. Finally they flew away, accompanied by sundry blessings from the hunter, who was exasperated at his "mishap," as he called it. The eye-witnesses of the bombardment had another idea of the "mishap," and many were the jokes that rained down upon the fellow when he returned empty-handed.

However, Pettersen soon became an ardent sportsman, and declared that one of the first things he would do when he returned home would be to buy a fowling-piece. He appeared to have some talent as a marksman, though he had hardly ever fired a shot before he came on board the Fram. Like all beginners, he had to put up with a good many misses before he got so far as to hit his mark. But practice makes perfect; and one fine day he began to win our respect as a marksman, for he actually hit a bird on the wing. But then came a succession of "mishaps" for some time, and he lost faith in his power of killing his game on the wing, and sought less ambitious outlets for his skill. Long afterwards the real cause of his many bad shots came to light. A wag, who thought that Pettersen was doing too much execution among the game, had quietly reloaded his cartridges, so that Pettersen had all the time been shooting with salt instead of lead, and that, of course, would make a little difference.

Besides the animals named, it appears that Greenland sharks are also found in these lat.i.tudes. One day Henriksen went to remove the blubber from some bearskins, which he had had hanging out in the channel for a week or so; he found that the two smallest skins had been nearly devoured, so that only a few shreds were left. It could hardly have been any other animal than the Greenland shark which had played us this trick. We put out a big hook with a piece of blubber on it, to try if we could catch one of the thieves, but it was of no use.

One day in the beginning of August the mate and Mogstad were out upon the ice trying to find the keel of the petroleum launch, which had been forgotten. They said that they had seen fresh tracks of a bear, which had been trotting about the great hummock. It was now almost a year since we last had a bear in our neighborhood, and we felt, therefore, much elated at the prospect of a welcome change in our bill of fare. For a long time, however, we had nothing but the prospect. True, Mogstad saw a bear at the great hummock, but, as it was far off to begin with, and going rapidly farther, it was not pursued. Almost half a year elapsed before another bear paid us a visit--it was not till February 28, 1896.

As I said before, the Fram had, ever since the first week in May, been fast embedded in a large floe of ice, which daily diminished in extent. Cracks were constantly formed in all directions, and new lanes were opened, often only to close up again in a few hours. When the edges of the ice crashed against each other with their tremendous force, all the projecting points were broken off, forming smaller floes, and pushed over and under each other, or piled up into large or small hummocks, which would collapse again when the pressure ceased, and break off large floes in their fall. In consequence of these repeated disturbances the cracks in our floe constantly increased, particularly after a very violent pressure on July 14th, when rifts and channels were formed right through the old pressure-ridge to port, and close up to the side of the vessel, so that it appeared for a time as if the Fram would soon slip down into the water. For the time being, however, she remained in her old berth, but frequently veered round to different points of the compa.s.s during all these disturbances in the ice. The great hummock, which constantly increased its distance from the vessel, also drifted very irregularly, so that it was at one time abeam, at another right ahead.

On July 27th there was a disturbance in the ice such as we had not experienced since we got fast. Wide lanes were formed in every direction, and the floe upon which the smith's forge was placed danced round in an incessant whirl, making us fear we might lose the whole apparatus at any moment. Scott-Hansen and Bentzen, who were just about to have a sail in the fresh breeze, undertook to transport the forge and all its belongings to the floe on which we were lying. They took two men to help them, and succeeded, with great difficulty, in saving the things. At the same time there was a violent disturbance in the water around the vessel. She turned round with the floe, so that she rapidly came to head W. 1/2 S., instead of N.E. All hands were busy getting back into the ship all the things which had been placed upon the floes, and this was successfully accomplished, although it was no trifling labor, and not without danger to the boats, owing to the strong breeze and the violent working of the floes and blocks of ice. The floe with the ruins of the forge was slowly bearing away in the same direction as the great hummock, and served for some time as a kind of beacon for us. Indeed, in the distance it looked like one, crowned as it was on its summit with a dark skull-cap, a huge iron kettle, which lay there bottom upward. The kettle was originally bought by Trontheim, and came on board at Khabarova, together with the dogs. He had used it on the trip through Siberia for cooking the food for the dogs. We used to keep blubber and other dogs' food in it. In the course of its long service the rust had eaten holes in the bottom, and it was therefore cashiered, and thrown away upon the pressure-ridge close to the smithy. It now served, as I have said, as a beacon, and is perhaps to-day drifting about in the Polar Sea in that capacity--unless it has been found and taken possession of by some Eskimo housewife on the east coast of Greenland.

As the sun and mild weather brought their influence to bear upon the surface of the ice and the snow, the vessel rose daily higher and higher above the ice, so that by July 23d we had three and a half planks of the greenheart ice-hide clear on the port side and ten planks to starboard. In the evening of August 8th our floe cracked on the port, and the Fram altered her list from 7 to port to 1.5 starboard side, with respectively four and two planks of the ice-hide clear, and eleven bow-irons clear forward.

I feared that the small floe in which we were now embedded might drift off down the channel if the ice slackened any more, and I therefore ordered the mate to moor the vessel to the main flow, where many of our things were stored. The order, however, was not quickly enough executed, and when I came on deck half an hour later the Fram was already drifting down through the channel. All hands were called up immediately, and with our united strength we succeeded in hauling the vessel up to the floe again and mooring her securely.

As we were desirous of getting the Fram quite clear of the ice-bed in which she had been lying so long, I determined to try blasting her loose. The next day, therefore, August 9th, at 7.30 P.M., we fired a mine of about 7 pounds of gunpowder, placed under the floe 6 feet from the stern of the vessel. There was a violent shock in the vessel when the mine exploded, but the ice was apparently unbroken. A lively discussion arose touching the question of blasting. The majority believed that the mine was not powerful enough; one even maintained that the quant.i.ty of gunpowder used should have been 40 or 50 pounds. But just as we were in the heat of the debate the floe suddenly burst. Big lumps of ice from below the ship came driving up through the openings: the Fram gave a great heave with her stern, started forward and began to roll heavily, as if to shake off the fetters of ice, and then plunged with a great splash out into the water. The way on her was so strong that one of the bow hawsers parted, but otherwise the launch went so smoothly that no ship-builder could have wished it better. We moored the stern to the solid edge of ice by means of ice-anchors, which we had recently forged for this purpose.

Scott-Hansen and Pettersen, however, were very near getting a cold bath. Having laid the mine under the floe, they placed themselves abaft with the "pram," [89] in order to haul in the string of the fuse. When the floe burst, and the Fram plunged, and the remainder of the floe capsized as soon as it became free of its 600 tons' burden, the two men in the boat were in no pleasant predicament right in the midst of the dangerous maelstrom of waves and pieces of ice; their faces, especially Pettersen's, were worth seeing while the boat was dancing about with them in the caldron.

The vessel now had a slight list to starboard (0.75), and floated considerably lighter upon the water than before, as three oak planks were clear to starboard, and somewhat more to port, with nine bow-irons clear forward. So far as we could see, her hull had suffered no damage whatever, either from the many and occasionally violent pressures to which she had been subjected, or from the recent launching.

The only fault about the vessel was that she still leaked a little, rendering it necessary to use the pumps frequently. For a short time, indeed, she was nearly tight, which made us inclined to believe that the leakage must be above the water-line, but we soon found we were in error about this, when she began to make more water than ever.

For the rest, she was lying very well now, with the port side along an even and rather low edge of ice, and with an open channel to starboard; the channel soon closed up, but still left a small opening, about 200 yards long and 120 yards wide. I only wished that winter would soon come, so that we might freeze securely into this favorable position. But it was too early in the year, and there was too much disturbance in the ice to allow of that. We had still many a tussle to get through before the Fram settled in her last winter haven.

Our drift westward in the latter half of June and the greater part of July was, on the whole, satisfactory. I give the following observations:

Date Lat.i.tude Longitude Direction ' ' of Wind

June 22d 84 32 80 58 N.

June 27th 84 44 79 35 N. by E.

June 29th 84 33 79 50 E.N.E.

July 5th 84 48 75 3 S.E.

July 7th 84 48 74 7 W.S.W.

July 12th 84 41 76 20 W.S.W.

July 22d 84 36 72 56 N.N.W.

July 27th 84 29 73 49 S.W. by S.

July 31st 84 27 76 10 S.W.

August 8th 84 38 77 36 N.W.

August 22d 84 9 78 47 S.W.

August 25th 84 17 79 2 E. by N.

September 2d 84 47 77 17 S.E.

September 6th 84 43 79 52 S.W.

As will be seen from the above, there were comparatively small deviations towards the south and the north in the line of the drift, whereas the deviations to east and west were much greater.

From June 22d to the 29th it bore rapidly westward, then back some distance in the beginning of July; again for a couple of days quickly towards the west, and then a rapid return till July 12th. From this day until the 22d we again drifted well to the west, to 72 56', but from that time the backward drift predominated, placing us at 79 52'

on September 6th, or about the same longitude as we started from on June 29th.

During this period the weather was, on the whole, fair and mild. Occasionally we had some bad weather, with drift-snow and sleet, compelling us to stay indoors. However, the bad weather did not worry us much; on the contrary, we looked rather eagerly for changes in the weather, especially if they revived our hopes of a good drift westward, with a prospect of soon getting out of our prison. It must not be understood that we dreaded another winter in the ice before getting home. We had provisions enough, and everything else needful to get over some two or three polar winters, if necessary, and we had a ship in which we all placed the fullest confidence, in view of the many tests she had been put to. We were all sound and healthy, and had learned to stick ever closer to one another for better and for worse.

With regard to Nansen and Johansen, hardly any of us entertained serious fears; however dangerous their trip was, we were not afraid that they would succ.u.mb to their hardships on the way, and be prevented from reaching Franz Josef Land, and thence getting back to Norway before the year was out. On the contrary, we rejoiced at the thought that they would soon be home, telling our friends that we were getting on all right, and that there was every prospect of our return in the autumn of 1896. It is no wonder, however, that we were impatient, and that both body and soul suffered when the drift was slow, or when a protracted contrary wind and back-drift seemed to make it highly improbable that we should be able to reach home by the time we were expected.

Furthermore, the most important part of our mission was in a way accomplished. There was hardly any prospect that the drift would carry us much farther northward than we were now, and whatever could be done to explore the regions to the north would be done by Nansen and Johansen. It was our object, therefore, in compliance with the instructions from Dr. Nansen, to make for open water and home by the shortest way and in the safest manner, doing, however, everything within our power to carry home with us the best possible scientific results. These results, to judge from our experience up to this point, were almost a foregone conclusion--to wit, that the Polar Sea retained its character almost unchanged as we drifted westward, showing the same depths, the same conditions of ice and currents, and the same temperatures. No islands, rocks, shoals, and, still less, no mainland, appeared in the neighborhood of our frequently irregular course; wherever we looked there was the same monotonous and desolate plain of more or less rugged ice, holding us firmly, and carrying us w.i.l.l.y-nilly along with it. Our scientific observations were continued uninterruptedly, as regularly and accurately as possible, and comprised, besides the usual meteorological observations, soundings, measurement of the thickness of the ice, longitude and lat.i.tude, taking the temperature of the sea at various depths, determining its salinity, collecting specimens of the fauna of the sea, magnetic and electrical observations, and so forth.