A theory about the ice
In 1884, wreckage from the American steamer Jeannette, which had been crushed in the ice north of Siberia in 1881, was reported to have been found off the south-west coast of Greenland. Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian zoologist and later a diplomat, took the report seriously. If objects could travel from one side of the Arctic Ocean to the other, he reasoned, a ship might travel the same way, carried by a slow current within the ice.
The plan was daring. Instead of fighting the ice, the expedition would let a ship freeze in off the Siberian coast and drift with the pack across the polar basin. Many experienced polar people thought it was reckless, since earlier ships trapped in ice, such as the Jeannette, had been destroyed. The answer lay in the design of the ship.
Designing a ship to be lifted
Nansen commissioned the naval architect Colin Archer, who built wooden sailing vessels and rescue boats at Larvik in Norway. The ship, Fram, was launched in 1892. The name means “Forward”.
The key feature was her hull shape. Most ships have a fairly sharp underwater form, and when ice presses on the sides the force may drive the hull inward. Fram’s hull was rounded and sloping, almost like half an egg in cross-section. When the ice closed in, the pressure was meant to push the ship upward so she would sit on top of the pack rather than being nipped between floes. Her sides were also extremely thick, built up with several layers of timber and heavy internal bracing, and she was sheathed in tough wood.
Other design features helped. The rudder and propeller could be hoisted into wells in the hull to protect them from ice. She carried a steam engine, but she was rigged as a three-masted schooner so she could use sail when conditions allowed. Below decks, the cabins were fitted with insulation and an effort was made to keep the interior dry and warm, with a windmill for electric light, which was unusual at the time.
The drift, 1893 to 1896
Fram left Kristiania, now Oslo, in June 1893 with a crew of thirteen, led by Nansen with Otto Sverdrup as captain. She followed the Siberian coast and in September 1893 became frozen in, north of the New Siberian Islands. Then the long drift began.
For many months the ship moved slowly north and west, sometimes backward, sometimes sideways, with ice pressing and groaning around her. The hull rode up as intended. The men carried out scientific work, measuring depths, temperatures and the water’s properties, and they recorded weather and the movement of the ice. They found that the Arctic Ocean was deep, rather than shallow as some had assumed, a result that changed ideas about its geography. Daily routine, a library and music helped to pass the dark winter.
By early 1895 it was clear that the drift would not carry Fram as close to the pole as Nansen had hoped. In March 1895 Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen left the ship with dogs, sledges and kayaks, trying to reach the pole across the ice. They turned back at about 86 degrees 14 minutes north, the farthest north reached at that time, and then struggled south to Franz Josef Land, where they wintered and later met a British expedition, whose ship took them home.
Fram, under Sverdrup, continued to drift and eventually broke free of the ice near Spitsbergen in August 1896. She reached Norway soon after, only days after Nansen himself had returned. The whole crew had survived, and the ship was undamaged.
Why the design worked, and its limits
The drift demonstrated that a ship built for ice could survive a prolonged winter in the pack. It also provided the first real evidence of how ice and water moved across the Arctic Ocean. Later oceanographers used the data in studies of ocean circulation.
The round hull was not magic. Lifting depends on the angle of the sides and the way the ice presses, and not all pressure acts in the same way. Fram came through because the design, the strong construction and a degree of luck worked together. Other ships of the period relied on strength alone, and not all survived.
Her work contrasts with the later case of the Endurance expedition, where a strong ship was still crushed. A ship of Fram’s type is also quite different from the icebreaker ships that came to dominate polar work, which push through ice instead of waiting for it to carry them.
Later voyages
Fram was used again by Sverdrup for an expedition to the Canadian Arctic islands from 1898 to 1902. Then, in 1910 to 1912, Roald Amundsen took her to Antarctica, where he landed at the Bay of Whales and led the first party to reach the South Pole in December 1911. This was a surprise at the time, since Amundsen had publicly planned an Arctic drift of his own.
The ship was laid up in Norway after her last expedition and was eventually preserved. She is now displayed in a purpose-built museum in Oslo, the Fram Museum, where visitors can go aboard. The ship is regarded as one of the best-preserved wooden polar vessels in the world, and a lasting reminder that a hull can be designed to work with the ice.