Scott-Hansen Nordahl
(From a photograph)
On July 27th there was a disturbance in the ice such as we had not experienced since we got fast. Wide lanes were formed in every direction, and the floe upon which the smith’s forge was placed danced round in an incessant whirl, making us fear we might lose the whole apparatus at any moment. Scott-Hansen and Bentzen, who were just about to have a sail in the fresh breeze, undertook to transport the forge and all its belongings to the floe on which we were lying. They took two men to help them, and succeeded, with great difficulty, in saving the things. At the same time there was a violent disturbance in the water around the vessel. She turned round with the floe, so that she rapidly came to head W. ½ S., instead of N.E. All hands were busy getting back into the ship all the things which had been placed upon the floes, and this was successfully accomplished, although it was no trifling labor, and not without danger to the boats, owing to the strong breeze and the violent working of the floes and blocks of ice. The floe with the ruins of the forge was slowly bearing away in the same direction as the great hummock, and served for some time as a kind of beacon for us. Indeed, in the distance it looked like one, crowned as it was on its summit with a dark skull-cap, a huge iron kettle, which lay there bottom upward. The kettle was originally bought by Trontheim, and came on board at Khabarova, together with the dogs. He had used it on the trip through Siberia for cooking the food for the dogs. We used to keep blubber and other dogs’ food in it. In the course of its long service the rust had eaten holes in the bottom, and it was therefore cashiered, and thrown away upon the pressure-ridge close to the smithy. It now served, as I have said, as a beacon, and is perhaps to-day drifting about in the Polar Sea in that capacity—unless it has been found and taken possession of by some Eskimo housewife on the east coast of Greenland.
As the sun and mild weather brought their influence to bear upon the surface of the ice and the snow, the vessel rose daily higher and higher above the ice, so that by July 23d we had three and a half planks of the greenheart ice-hide clear on the port side and ten planks to starboard. In the evening of August 8th our floe cracked on the port, and the Fram altered her list from 7° to port to 1.5° starboard side, with respectively four and two planks of the ice-hide clear, and eleven bow-irons clear forward.
I feared that the small floe in which we were now embedded might drift off down the channel if the ice slackened any more, and I therefore ordered the mate to moor the vessel to the main flow, where many of our things were stored. The order, however, was not quickly enough executed, and when I came on deck half an hour later the Fram was already drifting down through the channel. All hands were called up immediately, and with our united strength we succeeded in hauling the vessel up to the floe again and mooring her securely.
As we were desirous of getting the Fram quite clear of the ice-bed in which she had been lying so long, I determined to try blasting her loose. The next day, therefore, August 9th, at 7.30 P.M., we fired a mine of about 7 pounds of gunpowder, placed under the floe 6 feet from the stern of the vessel. There was a violent shock in the vessel when the mine exploded, but the ice was apparently unbroken. A lively discussion arose touching the question of blasting. The majority believed that the mine was not powerful enough; one even maintained that the quantity of gunpowder used should have been 40 or 50 pounds. But just as we were in the heat of the debate the floe suddenly burst. Big lumps of ice from below the ship came driving up through the openings: the Fram gave a great heave with her stern, started forward and began to roll heavily, as if to shake off the fetters of ice, and then plunged with a great splash out into the water. The way on her was so strong that one of the bow hawsers parted, but otherwise the launch went so smoothly that no ship-builder could have wished it better. We moored the stern to the solid edge of ice by means of ice-anchors, which we had recently forged for this purpose.
Scott-Hansen and Pettersen, however, were very near getting a cold bath. Having laid the mine under the floe, they placed themselves abaft with the “pram,”[1] in order to haul in the string of the fuse. When the floe burst, and the Fram plunged, and the remainder of the floe capsized as soon as it became free of its 600 tons’ burden, the two men in the boat were in no pleasant predicament right in the midst of the dangerous maelstrom of waves and pieces of ice; their faces, especially Pettersen’s, were worth seeing while the boat was dancing about with them in the caldron.
The vessel now had a slight list to starboard (0.75°), and floated considerably lighter upon the water than before, as three oak planks were clear to starboard, and somewhat more to port, with nine bow-irons clear forward. So far as we could see, her hull had suffered no damage whatever, either from the many and occasionally violent pressures to which she had been subjected, or from the recent launching.
The only fault about the vessel was that she still leaked a little, rendering it necessary to use the pumps frequently. For a short time, indeed, she was nearly tight, which made us inclined to believe that the leakage must be above the water-line, but we soon found we were in error about this, when she began to make more water than ever.
For the rest, she was lying very well now, with the port side along an even and rather low edge of ice, and with an open channel to starboard; the channel soon closed up, but still left a small opening, about 200 yards long and 120 yards wide. I only wished that winter would soon come, so that we might freeze securely into this favorable position. But it was too early in the year, and there was too much disturbance in the ice to allow of that. We had still many a tussle to get through before the Fram settled in her last winter haven.