On a quiet morning in June 1910, just before daybreak, a ship stole out of the harbor of Oslo, Norway, and put out into open waters. The ship was perfectly at home in the cold North Atlantic Ocean, for it had been specially outfitted for travel in the arctic reaches. Unusually, in that full-steam-ahead age of industry, just two years before the metal giant Titanic met its fate in that same ocean, the ship, called Fram, was built entirely of wood. But not just any wood: Fram, whose name means “forward” in the language of the Vikings, was made of greenheart, a South American wood so strong that it cannot be worked with ordinary tools—and, more to the point, cannot be crushed even by the strongest of ice floes.
Fram had been built according to the exacting specifications of the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who designed a swooping keel that would, in the event the ship was in fact caught in ice, would ride up atop the floes. The rudder was retractable, as was the propeller, to prevent damage in shallow waters. The entire vessel was as snugly insulated as a Norwegian log cabin on land, and it carried supplies enough for its crew to survive for five years. It even had a windmill to
generate electricity.
Fridtjof Nansen.
Nansen was not aboard Fram on this 1910 day. Instead, another Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, had borrowed it for a trip he had said he was going to make in Nansen’s figurative footsteps, far north into the Arctic. Amundsen had considered Nansen a hero for years, following the older man’s exploits in the Arctic in the newspapers, waiting for an opportunity to take to the frozen northern seas himself. In 1897, when he was twenty-seven and had logged time as a sailor, he had that chance, signing on as first mate aboard a Belgian scientific ship that traveled in the opposite direction, to Antarctica. Belgica was quickly locked in ice, spending a dreadful winter on the continent, and only the quick thinking of an American doctor aboard the vessel, a man named Frederick Cook, saved the crew from death by scurvy and malnutrition.
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