Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram Read Online Free PDF Page A

reluctant to adopt, until they could see its superior performance for themselves.
    His pilot boats were bigger and stronger than traditional ones. With full main decks to enclose spaces below, they were safer and more comfortable. Being double ended and deep drafted, they could maneuver deftly in close quarters, regardless of the magnitude and direction of the seas. They were faster, too, a definite plus in the economics of their business, with their greater length and narrower beam. Archer also switched the planking from the traditional lapstrake (clapboard-like)to carvel (smooth sided), to preclude damage inflicted to the strakes when the boats came alongside ships in heavy weather.
    Archer carried many features of this design over to his better-known sailing rescue boats, the first of which, appropriately named the Colin Archer , was launched in 1893 (just after the Fram set sail north) for the recently formed Norwegian Society for the Rescue of the Shipwrecked. These double-enders were sturdy workhorses for the rough-and-tumble conditions in which they often found themselves: heavily ballasted; rather broad with a length-to-width ratio of three to one (forty-five feet long with a fifteen-foot beam); deep drafted at more than seven feet; armored with two courses of thick oak planking; braced by close-spaced, sawed Norwegian pine frames; and made relatively watertight (thus less prone to sinking) due to transverse bulkheads that compartmentalized the below-deck spaces. They were not swift, but more importantly in the job they had to do, they were steady, reliable, and seaworthy. Many of these features were also there in his masterpiece, the Fram .
    ››› A humble and modest man, and at fifty-eight twice as old as Nansen, the clear-eyed, contemplative Archer was at first reluctant to take on this grand and risky project. He had no experience building polar ships, he said, perhaps not realizing then that no one else really did either. There was little time, he added, to design and construct such a vessel, if Nansen’s urgency was to be satisfied (he wanted the expedition to begin within three years). He undertook it nonetheless, drawn to the challenge it presented to him as a naval architect and perhaps realizing what such an enterprise, if successful, might mean for his business. It is quite likely also that when Nansen first came to meet him in Larvik in December 1890, Archer, like so many others, came under the spell of this energetic, magnetic personality and got caught up in the polar fever. Perhaps, too, Nansen awoke in the older man something of his own remembered dreams, imagination, and adventures of his youth: from the boy of Scottish immigrants who grew up on the coast of Norway to the young man traveling to America, Hawaiian Islands, and Australia, where he worked for years tending sheep, till he finally came home to settle down and produce his special breed of boats and ships for others to sail in.
    By June of the next year, they sealed the deal with a contract. In consultation with Otto Sverdrup, trusted member of Nansen’s Greenland crossing and an experienced northern-water sailor, they began discussing ideas, pouring over plans and rejecting many, and building one after another of half models. (Half models,scaled-down versions of the full-sized hull split lengthwise from stem to stern, are not toys. They are, and have been from the earliest days, an important early step in conceptualizing a plan and a way to visualize the hull in three dimensions. In the words of modern master wooden-boat builder Greg Rössel in Building Small Boats , “It [a half model] catches the eye and the imagination in a way that no photograph or set of lines plan could. The lure of the half model probably has something to do with the synthesis of the visual and the tactile . . . it can be examined by touch in the same way one tests the full-sized hull for fairness [smooth, unbroken lines or curves].”)
    In his retrospective