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

contribution to The Norwegian North Polar Expedition, 1893–1896: Scientific Results , Archer laid out some fundamental considerations for any ship that was to face what the Fram ultimately did. First, he acknowledged that “no previous ship had been built with this in mind, for this purpose.” There were no maps of where Nansen was going and no previous experience for him to benefit by and plan from. He would be on his own. Similarly, there were no prototypes or existing models for Archer and thus no established standards to go by. He would be proceeding from his own experience and intuition, and from what had gone wrong with other ships. His ship could not be made over from one that originally had an entirely different purpose. Such retrofits had been tried in the Arctic ice, and all ultimately had failed in one way or another. A specific, one-of-a-kind ship would be needed for a voyage that had never been attempted before: to be frozen in on purpose rather than by accident, whether due to overconfidence or bad timing.
    Second, he knew, based on a long, sorrowful history of others, what the ship could never do. “To attempt to force a way through such ice was no part of the scheme. The part the ship would have to play was mainly a passive one. She would have to lie still and be squeezed.” This concept, simple and realistic as it was, would go against the bravura grain of many sea adventurers, who prided themselves on their strength, force of will, and personal action to conquer nature, no matter how terrible the odds. To them, passivity was, in effect, the same as succumbing, the flawed and fatal weakness of giving up. It would prove to be just the opposite in this special situation, as Archer had foreseen: yielding to a much greater, inexorable force and working not against it but with it would be not just a sign of strength but also the only way to salvation. Inuit had known this for millennia, but most white European explorers, often with cultural prejudices and rigid traditions of honor, had been loath to adopt another lifestyle regardedas more “primitive” (notable exceptions are the Scotsman John Rae, Norwegian Eivind Astrup, and American Charles Francis Hall).
    Third, closely related to the second, “it is sometimes expedient in an encounter to evade the full force of a blow rather than oppose it . . . something could be done to break the force of a ‘nip,’ and thus deprive it of half its terrors.” In this Archer was advocating for avoidance rather than confrontation as a way of “winning,” or at least surviving. This is exemplified in the core philosophy of the Japanese martial art aikido: One cannot defeat a stronger, quicker attacker by counterattacking or escape by running away. But by joining forces with an enemy, becoming intimate with it, so to speak, one can turn the aggression against itself and thereby neutralize it. “Ordinary” ships and boats, of course, employ this concept in their basic designs, such that wind, waves, and wateriness are not opposed but accommodated and even used to advantage. Craft that regularly dealt with ice, such as sealers, Archer noted, were made to rise up on the ice if pinched, avoiding direct impact with it (as do modern icebreakers, which ride up on the ice then let their weight fracture it from above before plowing a channel through). For a polar ship of this new undertaking, living with, indeed embracing, the feared elements of almost perpetual, and often lethal, cold and ice would require an unusual mindfulness to this principle. Archer himself had the image: “The whole craft should be able to slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice.”
    Fourth, “the strength of a ship will vary inversely with size.” In other words, the larger the ship, the more susceptible it would be to being crushed in the ice. It was simply a matter of physics. Therefore, he thought the ship should be as small as possible while still carrying a crew sufficient to