Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

By Charles W. Johnson

In the golden age of polar exploration (from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s), many an expedition set out to answer the big question—was the Arctic a continent, an open ocean beyond a barrier of ice, or an ocean covered with ice? No one knew, for the ice had kept its secret well; ships trying to penetrate it all failed, often catastrophically. Norway’s charismatic scientist-explorer Fridtjof Nansen, convinced that it was a frozen ocean, intended to prove it in a novel if risky way: by building a ship capable of withstanding the ice, joining others on an expedition, then drifting wherever it took them, on a relentless one-way journey into discovery and fame . . . or oblivion. Ice Ship is the story of that extraordinary ship, the Fram, from conception to construction, through twenty years of three epic expeditions, to its final resting place as a museum. It is also the story of the extraordinary men who steered the Fram over the course of 84,000 miles: on a three-year, ice-bound drift, finding out what the Arctic really was; in a remarkable four-year exploration of unmapped lands in the vast Canadian Arctic; and on a two–year voyage to Antarctica, where another famous Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, claimed the South Pole. Ice Ship will appeal to all those fascinated with polar exploration, maritime adventure, and wooden ships, and will captivate readers of such books as The Endurance, In the Heart of the Sea, and The Last Place on Earth. With more than 100 original photographs, the book brings the Fram to life and light.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ForeEdge
• Release date: Oct 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781611686043

Book preview

PROLOGUE

POLAR FEVER, MYTH, & MYSTERY

On June 18, 1884, three Inuit from Julianehaab (now Qaqortoq), a small settlement on Greenland’s southwest coast, spotted something unusual on a slab of floe ice where they were seal hunting. They went closer and found twisted planks of wood, and among them various papers, articles of clothing, and other items with writing they could not read. Interested yet puzzled, they gave the finds to the colonial manager of the town (Greenland then was a colony of Denmark), Carl Lytzen, who was excited by the discovery and documented it in an article in a Danish journal.

What to some might have seemed a passing account of a curious event in an obscure part of the world was actually big news, leading ultimately to one of the great polar expeditions of all time and revolutionizing scientific understanding of the vast, mysterious, and largely unknown Arctic.

Lytzen’s article mentioned several items that were of particular interest because of the names they bore, among them the apparent bill of lading for a ship called the Jeannette, signed by its commander George De Long; a list of the Jeannette’s boats; clothing with names, evidently belonging to some of the crew; and even a torn checkbook of the Bank of California. The news soon reached readers, far and wide, who knew all too well about the star-crossed ship with its elegant, almost delicate, name.

››› It was the height of polar fever, a relatively brief period in the late 1800s and early 1900s when countries were vying with each other to be the first to reach the North Pole (and somewhat later the South Pole), ostensibly for the advancement of knowledge and science, but in reality mostly for fame, prestige, and national pride. It was not unlike a later time when nations raced to be the first into space, then to reach the moon, for the very same reasons. Like the moon, the North Pole seemed a worthy goal since no one had ever been there and it presented so many challenges. But to many, then as now, there was no point in going to such godforsaken places whose only value was to color dreams and fuel ambitions.

Nonetheless, the Arctic had long captured imaginations and attracted exploration, but mostly for finding trading routes between Europe and eastern North America to China and the Far East, routes that would greatly shorten the arduous, time-consuming, and often prohibitively expensive journeys around Cape Horn or Cape of Good Hope, to and from those bountiful, exotic lands. What, though, exactly lay to the north remained a mystery. This did not stop people from having their theories, even unshakable certainties, about what was there.

Basing opinions on dubious evidence, none of it direct since no one had ever been there, some professed that the Arctic, that vast unknown northern polar region, was a shallow, open, ice-free sea that could be navigated freely once the great barrier of ice was breeched. This ocean supposedly was fed, and kept open, by warm currents, rivers they were called, flowing up the west coast of Norway and east coast of Japan, through the ice barrier and into that open polar sea. Others claimed it was just the opposite, not an ocean but an ice-covered continent whose known extremities were believed to be Greenland and Wrangel Land north of Siberia (later discovered to be an island). Still others supposed it was neither open ocean nor frozen land but a sea permanently covered with a shield of ice that would fracture and disperse in a crazy quilt of floes at its southern edges. No one knew for sure.

Early explorers believing in the open-ocean theory sought passage to the Orient by going north to reach the open ocean but were inevitably forced back by the ice. Stymied, they tried alternative routes through ice-free waters, in opposite directions: one eastward around Scandinavia and then hugging the northern coast of Russia; the other westward from the east coast of North America through a confusing myriad of big islands in the eastern Canadian Arctic and then along the northern coast of Canada and Alaska (then belonging to Russia). Known to history as the Northeast and Northwest Passages, respectively, these routes for centuries were a hope instead of a reality, as the impregnable ice battered ill-suited ships into submission, near disaster, or oblivion, and the dark brutal winters took a heavy toll on the men who dared venture in. It was not until 1879 that the Northeast Passage was actually found, when Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, after one winter frozen in above Siberia, punched through into the North Pacific. Roald Amundsen, the famous Norwegian explorer and later discoverer of the South Pole, was similarly frozen in for two planned winters at King William Island off northern Canada, and then made it to the Pacific Ocean in 1906, the first successful ship transit of the Northwest Passage.

Though Nordenskiöld, and later Amundsen, proved the passages could indeed be made, the difficulties and risks encountered on the way, including long winter layovers in the ice, caused a cooling of interest in pursuing this way to the Orient. Governments and private sponsors, often jointly, began to turn their attention to the more symbolic achievement of attaining the North Pole, by sending ships north into the ice, some with visions of finding the rivers leading to a wave-washed sea, others of reaching a promised, if barren and frigid, land. One of these was the Jeannette, a privately owned American ship with a crew of thirty-three seasoned Arctic sailors on loan from the U.S. Navy, including its commander, Lieutenant George De Long.

Under orders from the U.S. government, the Jeannette set sail in June of 1879 from San Francisco, heading to the Bering Strait, and on to the Chukchi Sea. It was to proceed from there to Wrangel Land, then believed by some to be a southern extension of an Arctic Continent. Once landfall was made, they were to track the coast north as far as they could go by water and then make a run for the North Pole on sledges pulled by dogs. The prize of first at the pole would be theirs and their sponsor’s: fame, resounding international acclaim, and possible fortune.

It did not go as planned. By the fall of that year, the Jeannette was inexorably bound in the ice northwest of Wrangel Land (which, before the ship was beset, De Long had discovered was an island, not a part of a far northern continent), and for the next eighteen months, including two winters, the ship drifted, locked in the ice, in a generally northwesterly direction. Then, two years after it had left San Francisco, it was finally crushed, and its pulverized remains disappeared into the grinding ice, one thousand miles west of where the ship had first been caught. The crew, in a harrowing tale renowned in Arctic exploration, hauled three of its lifeboats on sledges for weeks until they reached open water near the New Siberian Islands, and then tried to sail together to the Siberian mainland and possible rescue by natives near the Lena River delta. A storm separated the boats; one was lost forever, but the other two, one under the command of De Long and the other under his engineer George Melville, made it to the mainland but were separated far from each other. Each party pushed on, starving and exhausted, trying to find salvation in that unknown, uncharted land. In the end, De Long perished along with nineteen others. His body, the bodies of his party, logbooks, and other items were later found where he died in Siberia and were brought back to the United States.

Two years later, the items from the smashed-up Jeannette appeared on the ice off Julianehaab, Greenland, and Lytzen’s article announced it to an enthralled if somewhat skeptical audience. People wondered how the items had got there, nearly three thousand miles from the ship’s last known position (as recorded in De Long’s recovered log), in a completely different hemisphere, perhaps even directly over the pole. Were the items fake? If not, had someone planted them there as a kind of joke? If so, why did they go to so much trouble?

››› One reader of Lytzen’s article was Henrik Mohn, a noted professor of meteorology at the Royal Frederick University (now University of Oslo) who had himself been on voyages of research in the far north. Based on his considerable knowledge of ocean currents in the region, Mohn felt certain that the items could only have come across a polar sea, riding with the drifting ice. He proposed this theory in a November 1884 newspaper article in Norway. His article, in turn, caught the immediate attention of a bright, twenty-three-year-old Norwegian working as a curator at Bergen’s Museum. His name was Fridtjof Nansen, who would become one of the greatest Arctic explorers, a renowned scientist even to this day, and, in his latter years and for other reasons, a Nobel Prize laureate.

Nansen had come into adulthood just in time to catch polar fever. Born in 1861 in Christiania (now Oslo, since 1925) and growing up in the country, with the forests on one side and a fjord on the other, he learned at an early age to hunt, fish, swim in the cold lakes and ocean, and especially during the long winters, ski cross-country, often by himself, all skills that would prove important, even essential, in his life to come. As a young man, Nansen was tall, strong, Nordic fair, handsome, rugged, and brooding. He was said to have unflinching, piercing eyes of blue. Though his mind was quick and soaked up facts and figures easily, and though he did well in school while being indifferent to it, he reserved his greatest devotion to his passion: the natural world and its untamed ways.

While a young curator of zoology at Bergen’s Museum and studying for his PhD, Nansen spent part of 1882 aboard the sealing ship Viking as it worked the ice pack east of Greenland and Iceland. He was along officially as a scientist, to collect specimens of fish and invertebrates for the museum’s collections, but he soon took on another role more valuable to the ship and crew, a sharpshooter who could kill seals with the best of them (he claimed to have once bagged over two hundred in a single day).

At some point on the trip, Nansen watched with fascination as the ship came close to Greenland, and he found himself longing to go ashore and explore this strange and unknown land. Though the ship did not make landfall then, he said it was from this first close encounter that he resolved to go back one day and attempt to do what no other humans had ever done, cross Greenland from coast to coast.

FIGURE 1

Nansen the scientist. Even before he became famous as an explorer, he had made a name for himself as a biological researcher, discovering that neurons send electrical impulses over minute gaps between cells rather than as one continuous stream, as was the prevailing thought. His work is still current today. Here he is about age twenty-two in his laboratory in Bergen’s Museum, ca. 1883. Photograph by Johan von der Fehr.

While aboard the Viking, he had another distant view that stirred his growing desire for polar exploration. East of Greenland the Viking happened to sail where had Nordenskiöld’s now legendary ship, the Vega, on the last leg of its round-the-world return to Sweden following the first successful crossing of the Northeast Passage.

In the fall of 1888, on leave of absence from the museum, after months of meticulous planning and preparation, he and five men he had chosen for their backgrounds in northern environments and skills in skiing crossed Greenland from east to west, on skis and hauling sledges, up and onto the plateau, across crevasses in the glaciers, in temperatures that sometimes plunged to –50 degrees Fahrenheit. They were the first men ever to do so, covering 350 miles in 49 days, discovering as they did that the interior of the island was covered with thick glacial ice, not open and vegetated as some believed at the time. During the winter layover in the village of Godthaab, Nansen learned and became drawn to Inuit ways of subsistence in the high Arctic, information that would prove invaluable in his later expedition. The party returned to Norway in 1889 to large and adoring crowds, enormous celebrations, and fame for their leader.

››› With dreams and ideas swirling in his head, Nansen solidified his novel, even radical, plan to reach the North Pole when he read Mohn’s article. Many others had tried by smashing their way through the ice on ships that were never designed for such purpose, only retrofitted to try, or by dragging smaller boats and sledges over the forbidding, constantly shifting pack. Inevitably they failed, often tragically. Nansen, on the other hand, would take his cue from the Inuit who had survived eons living in the far north: to treat the ice not as an enemy in inevitable losing battles but as an ally with which to join forces and let its power work to one’s advantage. It was an if you can’t beat them, join them attitude toward the natural world.

The articles from the Jeannette and Mohn’s theory about them were not all that convinced him to try what he had in mind. He was far too meticulous and scientific to let one piece of evidence, however compelling, seduce him into undertaking such an adventure into so treacherous an unknown.

First, he confirmed that the articles could have come as far as they did in the given time, from knowing the distance covered, the speed of the well-known currents south along the east coast of Greenland (East Greenland Current), and De Long’s calculations of how fast the Jeannette had drifted in the two years it was locked in the ice, before it had to be abandoned.

There was other evidence he knew about as well, brought by the ice and the driftwood to Greenland.

On the island’s west coast, an Inuit throwing stick (used to launch arrows or short spears at birds) had been found that was unlike those used by Greenland natives. It had Chinese glass beads, exactly similar to those which the Alaskan Eskimo obtain by barter from Asiatic tribes, and use for the decoration of their ‘throwing sticks.’ ¹

Nansen knew that Greenland had no real trees of its own and that the coastal-dwelling Inuit used, indeed depended on, great quantities of tree-sized driftwood brought regularly and predictably on the currents running south along the island’s east side, around the terminus and then north along the west. Nansen also knew, from his own observations as well as those of others, that much of it was from trees or shrubs of Siberian origin—larch, fir, alder, poplar, and others endemic to that area. (He even speculated, too, that the ice in the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland may well have come from Siberia, containing as it did mud similar to there, though he conceded that it could have come from glacial rivers in North America or elsewhere.)

He pointed to another fact, long known to botanists, that Greenland’s coastal flora included many species native to Siberia that, he postulated, came to Greenland as seeds, preserved in and carried by the ice to those distant shores.

Finally, he made a case for the polar current based on the sheer volumes of water involved and how they moved. It was known that vast quantities exited the north and coursed south in the deep, wide basin between Greenland and the Svalbard Islands (formerly Spitsbergen Islands), the so-called East Greenland Current. Such huge quantities, continually replenished, could only have come from a polar sea of considerable size, a reservoir of sorts, especially since it was thought to be so shallow (in this last assumption he erred, as we shall see later). Correspondingly, a comparable amount of water was entering the polar region from the south on the other side of the world, from north-flowing Pacific Ocean currents and major rivers along North America, Northern Europe, and Siberia dumping their fresh water into the sea. To these, he factored in meteorological influences (winds, rainfall, etc.) and known effects of the earth’s rotation on currents, and then stated flatly, We cannot escape the conclusion that a current passes across or very near to the Pole into the sea between Greenland and Spitzbergen.²

Armed with this information, he put forth his radical idea: to have a special ship built that could be frozen into the ice pack and not be crushed by it, which he and a small crew would take into the ice north of Siberia near where the Jeannette had come to grief, intentionally letting it be locked in and carried by the same currents that carried the Jeannette’s remains over the pole. The ship, if he figured everything right and if it were properly constructed, would ride with the ice over a two- or three-year period, and eventually pop out into open water northeast of Greenland, where it could be sailed back to Norway under its own power. It was to be a ship that would become driftwood, of an extraordinary kind.

› ABOUT THE ICE

To polar travelers—whether on sledges, skis, foot, or ships, whether on land or at sea—ice can be the greatest friend, or worst enemy. For them especially, ice is a complex personality whose many faces, moods, and expressions they must comprehend if they are to survive. In the years before steel-hulled icebreakers and electronic navigation systems, an ice pilot was a critically important member of a polar ship’s crew, valued for his knowledge of the ice and its behavior, hard won from years of experience. So much depended on what the ice pilot saw and knew, and what he recommended to his captain.

As an ice pilot knew all too well, ice is not just ice. Land ice and sea ice are fundamentally different. The two types, in all their variety, offer different advantages to travelers and pose different dangers.

Land ice is frozen, fused precipitation, mostly from snow; sea ice develops within the sea itself. Land ice, if the climate is cold enough, for long enough, can build into glaciers hundreds of feet thick, which then may coalesce into landscape-covering ice caps or even larger ice sheets (e.g., covering most of Antarctica and Greenland).

Glacial ice, under its own great weight, is not brittle but somewhat plastic, so that a glacier flows like a slow-motion river or conveyor belt from its source (a snowfield) to its downhill edge. If that edge makes it to the sea, great chunks can break off and plunge in (calve), and then drift off as icebergs. Seafarers are justifiably wary of them, as some are immense, the size of islands, but even small ones can open up a ship passing too close (most of the iceberg is underwater and unseen). Ice sheets that make it to the sea, however, can flow out as huge, intact floating ice shelves, dense expanses where the ice traveler can often make good time. Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf (formerly the Great Ice Barrier), which Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott crossed on different routes on their way to the South Pole, is the world’s largest, at five hundred miles across and up to two thousand feet thick (though only a small portion shows above water).

New sea ice can spread horizontally but rise at most a few yards, floating as it does on a warmer, moving, fluid reservoir. Offshore sea ice, called drift ice, is composed of floes (big floating pans), which can gather into huge packs. If a pack is a year old or less (called young ice), the floes may be thin and scattered enough for a ship to push through safely, but such ice is too unformed, unstable, or loose for sledgers and skiers. Multiyear (old ice) is thicker and denser, and can stop a ship in its tracks, trap it, and crush it. The biggest threats come from pressure ridges, old floes colliding and pushing up as great frozen waves and jagged hills, sometimes twenty-five feet or higher; these juggernauts can overwhelm anything in their path. Yet firm old ice can be suitable, if not always easy, for those making their way by sledge and ski.

Pack ice attached to land is fast (fastened) ice, and fast ice adhering to the high-tide zone is an ice foot, often the best, or only, place for sledgers and skiers to make safe passage when the sea ice may be too treacherous and the land too steep or its ice unmanageable.

With the warmer, high-sun seasons come other opportunities and other challenges. Cracks or lanes (leads) may suddenly appear in the pack, sometimes extending great distances, but sometimes closing quickly. These can become fortuitous avenues for transiting ships, means of escape for trapped ones, or just the opposite—lures for getting into deeper trouble. Also, leads can be serious impediments to the surface traveler, forcing detours, retreats, or laborious switches of loads from sledge to kayak and back again. In these warmer periods, land or sea ice can also become rotten (melting to the point of not being able to bear weight, though it may appear firm)—a lurking risk to those coursing atop it.

But ice is more than just a medium for polar travel. It is the raw material for critical temporary shelters (igloos). It is a vital source of drinking water, as polar regions are generally deserts, with very low annual precipitation. Since land ice is frozen fresh water, winter land travelers usually have a ready source (a favorite demonstration for the uninitiated is showing how pieces of glacial ice will fizz when dropped in a glass of water or other drink; this is the sound of old, trapped, compressed air being released as the ice melts). For those on pack ice, however, it may be hard to come by, as young sea ice is too briny, not having had enough time for the salt to leach out; even old ice may be slightly so, though it is usually potable. Pools in melting old pack are the best bet for those out on it.

In this specially built ship, with a crew of only ten or twelve men most suited to the task, provisioned with enough food, clothing, and supplies for five years in the ice, if necessary, they would sail from Norway, following in the Jeannette’s dark wake into waters north of Siberia and then into the ice where the epic would begin.

Such confidence did he have in his plan and abilities, however brash other more experienced explorers might think him, that he would put his own life and the lives of others on the line aboard the ship. He would commit himself and his crew to a highly dangerous voyage with no retreat possible if things went wrong. He had taken this very approach on his Greenland expedition a few years earlier, beginning on the sparsely inhabited east coast; leaving his boats behind to be claimed by storms, ice, or sea; and traveling westward toward the only human settlements, from which he finally could get back home. As it was then, the only way this time would be forward, or onward, fram in the Norwegian. Fram was his watchword then, and it would be so again but this time in a bigger arena, with much bigger stakes, in a ship bearing this name.

››› Nansen postponed his dream to work on other pressing matters, particularly his doctoral degree in zoology and the trek across Greenland. Only when all this was behind him, and fame with him, could he move on to his new venture. In 1889, back in Norway from Greenland and a national hero, Nansen had the celebrity, authority, and legitimacy he needed to unveil his grand plan publicly and subject it to the scrutiny of peers with years of Arctic experience under their belts.

While some experts thought his plan a good one, well supported by the evidence, the general reception by the most renowned of the day was less than warm and his support far from wholehearted. In Nansen’s own words in Farthest North, It met with opposition in the main, especially from abroad, while most of the polar travelers and Arctic authorities declared, more or less openly, that it was sheer madness. . . . [It] plainly showed how greatly I was at variance with the generally accepted opinions as to the conditions in the interior of the Polar Sea, the principles of ice navigation, and the methods that a polar expedition ought to pursue.

Interesting that this opposition should have come from men, famous as they were, who had failed in or, even worse, bungled their attempts to reach deeper into the mysterious region called the

Reviews for Ice Ship

[bcquinnsmom · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Of all possible fields of history from which to choose, polar exploration in its heyday is my favorite subject. When I was a kid I was fascinated with explorers and would spend hours upon hours reading about them. In the realm of polar expeditions, I got my start reading Roland Huntford's The Last Place on Earth, a true account of about the rush to the South Pole, and what turned out to be a race between Amundsen and Scott to plant their respective country's flag. It was in that book where I first heard about the Fram and about Fridtjov Nansen, and I remember being quite impressed that Nansen had such foresight in building the perfect ship. In this current book, author Charles W. Johnson provides not only a look at Amundsen's expedition in the Fram, but also at the two other epic expeditions of the ship, its creation, the men who called it home for years on end, and its eventual fate. Regular readers engaged in histories of polar exploration who are already familiar with Fram's voyages will still find plenty to like about this book. The author picks up on some things Nansen glossed over in his Farthest North, the record of his voyage on the Fram. There are a number of original photographs as well as maps that the reader can reference. Interestingly, it was an article about a few remnants of the USS Jeannette expedition (the subject of Hampton Sides' current book In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette and a great read, by the way) that somehow ended up in a place far, far away from where they should have been that got things going for Nansen. An article written about the finds prompted another article by a Norwegian scientist studying polar currents. His article in turn caught Nansen's eye and after much scientific study, Nansen decided to build a "special ship" that could weather being frozen into pack ice. The idea was that the ship and its crew would be "carried by the same currents that carried the Jeanette's remains over the pole." As the author notes, the ship was to be a sort of "driftwood, of an extraordinary kind." With much careful planning, the Fram was born -- and she was to see two more major expeditions in her lifetime. Not only does the author detail these expeditions and the people who were involved, he also examines what else was going on in the field of polar exploration, north and south, at the time. So the reader ends up with a kind of general but not overwhelming or overdetailed history, also making it perfect for anyone with even just an interest in the field of polar exploration during the period which the author calls "the height of polar fever." Granted, there are probably people who will take a look at this title and think that a book about a ship has just got to be duller than dishwater, but there's way more than just the ship under discussion here. It's a wonderful book, and by the way, the hardcover copy is beautiful and would make a great gift to someone who is interested in the subject.Thank you to the publisher, and thank you to Librarything's ER program! A definite match made in heaven for me with this book!

[jrbeach · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I give this book 5+ stars for content. Incredible detail, clearly presented, fabulous collection of photos. I have a moderately large collection of "polar books" and this is one of the best in terms of research and the volume of photos and illustrations. Where it lacks is in the quality of writing. Here's one sample sentence – "Having been chastened by the incident of the bear coming on board without their awareness, much less their permission, by their ill-preparedness for such a close call, and by what happened to Hendriksen, the men from then on carried their guns, affixed with bayonets, whenever they went outside venturing." How many commas was that? I had a hard time plowing thru the narrative, and that's why I knocked off a star from my review.

[amerynth · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the interest of full disclosure, I received a free copy of Charles W. Johnson's "Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram" from LT's Early Reviewers program.First off, this is a pretty nice coffee table style book with loads of great pictures of the Fram mired in the polar ice. Johnson had a good idea for this book too -- uniting all of voyages of the Fram, a boat that was used to launch both North and South Pole expeditions, in one book. The book gives a good overview of the Fram's three expeditions. I'm a bit of a nut about polar adventures.... I've read first-hand accounts by both Nansen and Amundsen so I was pretty familiar with their stories. Johnson has a few tidbits here and there that Nansen and Amundsen glossed over that add a little to their accounts. Occasionally, Johnson gets a little bit too detailed on inconsequential stuff, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment of the book. Overall, I'm glad to have read this book.

[pbirch01 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book covers a versatile ship that is a very important piece of Norwegian history and does an excellent job presenting the history and the people involved with the history of the ship. Johnson has clearly done his research and presents a compelling narrative about the ship in a very accessible manner. The book itself is very large which allows for frequent pictures and maps to be added into the text which greatly benefits the story as the reader can enjoy the photos without breaking the flow of the story. Truly a remarkable boat and I can only dream of how impressive it would be to see the ship in person.

[craigeri · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am very fortunate to have received a copy of "Ice Ship: Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram." by Charles W. Johnson. Even in his title Charles Johnson refers to the Fram as a "Polar Adventurer" almost making the vessel human. As I read through the book I developed an attachment to the ship and thus understand the author's reference in the title. I have found this book one of the best I have read on the subject of polar exploration in that era. It Ties all the explorations together, and gives a personal accounting of all those involved. The author shares information about the characters involved in the exploration. You come away with an understanding of who they were, and what drove them before, during and after the exploration. I would highly recommend this book to any one remotely interested in this era of history. Craigeri

[helenoel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I received Ice Ship through the Library Thing Early reviewers program in exchange for a promised review. I had an existing interest in polar exploration and the ship Fram in particular, and was not disappointed. Johnson tells the stories of Nansen, Sverdrup and Amundsen to Arctic and Antarctic adventures. Though his announced topic is the ship, the stories aldo of course involve the men (and there are only men on the voyages) who sailed on her. Polar exploration was the last great frontier of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the explorers were larger than life characters. Johnson does a good job of making them human without taking away the respect they deserve for their accomplishments. I found the narrative started slow, but picked up after the voyages began. This is an accessible, attractive, wel illustrated book - and would be interesting to both the seasoned follower of polar exploration and the novice . My single major criticism is that I wish there had been more detailed maps of the routes and places visited. The basics are laid out, but I could not follow the detailed travels with the maps provided.

[ursula_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I just realized (by looking over my wins from the Early Reviewer program) that I'd never posted my review of this book. Ice Ship is non-fiction, and I got it through Early Reviewers. I do love me some polar exploration, for some unknown reason. I can't swim, I have no interest in frozen tundra and many animals are always killed on these expeditions, so it seems less than obvious that it'd be a topic I keep returning to. But still, it is. This was a bound hardcover, which was nice because there are a lot of photographs. In fact, it looks more like a coffee-table book than a regular non-fiction read. That made it a little unwieldy for having so much text, but I still think it was the right choice. Anyway, the "hook" is that the book is centered around the ship rather than the crew or expedition leader of a specific journey, which means that we get to talk about Fritdjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen both, since they each took the Fram on different trips. It's a good premise, and there's a lot of interesting information along with the aforementioned photographs, but the writing is not stellar. Still definitely worth checking out if you're interested in the subject matter.

[oldman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ice Ship by Charles W Johnson is first of all a beautiful book, well bound and comfortable to read. The story of the ship Fram is just as compelling. The book begins with the need for such a ship and how it was designed and constructed to withstand the crushing power of the artic regions. The story of the trips of this ship are impressive in the courage of the men who traveled on her. They used materials considered up to date at the time, but by today's standard woefully inadequate. This book was worth the effort to get through it, as the narrative was difficult at times. Maps would have been useful to better picture where the ship was at any given time. I give this book 5 stars.

[tungsten_peerts · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What's that you say? You have a yen for tales of endurance set in the frozen polar wastes? Well, hunker down, armchair adventurers, have I got a book for you ...Charles W. Johnson's painstakingly-assembled history relates the late 19th and early 20th century voyages of the Norwegian "Ice Ship" Fram. This vessel, the main character of the book, was built for a very specific reason: moody young scientist and arctic expert Fridtjof Nansen had a crazy-sounding theory that currents existed in the northern polar ice cap which could carry a vessel, while locked into the ice, across the roof of the world -- *if* that vessel could be built sufficiently strong to withstand the incredible pressures.Fram was that vessel.As is typical with books like Ice Ship, the devil (or angel, as the case may be) is in the details, and the reader gets plenty of engaging detail here -- much of it about Fram herself, but also about the remarkable men who formed her crew and about the forbidding regions they explored. These details are relayed by words and by scores of evocative photographs, enough to make this a splendid "coffee-table" book as well as a book to hold in one's clenched hands, reading reading reading.Johnson does an admirable job with the 1st voyage, the one for which Fram was built: the multi-year journey through the ice of the north polar ocean. Admittedly it is an uphill battle in that it is a slow, passive journey, headed up by a rather gloomy explorer, Nansen. In Johnson's hands it becomes a spellbinding story of a journey almost too weird to be true (I admit that, fond as I am of polar exploration tales, I did not know this one at all).The 2nd and 3rd voyages of Fram take her first with eccentrically-bearded Otto Sverdrup to the islands of arctic Canada (making the longest polar journey ever in the process) and then with Roald Amundsen toward what would become the race for the South Pole (which Amundsen, of course, won handily).Ice Ship is adventure, history, shipbuilding miracle and great character tapestry all rolled into one extremely appealing book. The only caveat I might throw potential readers is that animals (wild and comparatively domestic) come in for some rough treatment here -- as is often the case in sagas of this type. Harsh environments beget such stuff, since -- for one thing -- more animals become food than would ordinarily be the case. Otherwise, though, get this book.If you can make it to Norway, incidentally, you can visit Fram in her very own museum.