Ice Ship The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

About this book

In the golden age of polar exploration (from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s), many an expedition set out to answer the big question – was the Arctic a continent, an open ocean beyond a barrier of ice, or an ocean covered with ice? No one knew, for the ice had kept its secret well; ships trying to penetrate it all failed, often catastrophically. Norway's charismatic scientist-explorer Fridtjof Nansen, convinced that it was a frozen ocean, intended to prove it in a novel if risky way: by building a ship capable of withstanding the ice, joining others on an expedition, then drifting wherever it took them, on a relentless one-way journey into discovery and fame . . . or oblivion.

Ice Ship is the story of that extraordinary ship, the Fram, from conception to construction, through twenty years of three epic expeditions, to its final resting place as a museum. It is also the story of the extraordinary men who steered the Fram over the course of 84 000 miles: on a three-year, ice-bound drift, finding out what the Arctic really was; in a remarkable four-year exploration of unmapped lands in the vast Canadian Arctic; and on a two–year voyage to Antarctica, where another famous Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, claimed the South Pole.
 

Contents

- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue: Polar Fever, Myth, and Mystery
- Eel and Elephant

PART I. THE FIRST EXPEDITION, 1893–1896: THE ARCTIC OCEAN
- Trip to Nowhere
- Northeast Passage
- Into the Ice
- Drifting
- The Mad Dash
- Home Free
- Together, Alone
- What Would Life Be?
- Homecoming

PART II. THE SECOND EXPEDITION, 1898–1902: THE CANADIAN ARCTIC
- Leaving Again
- The Devil’s Way
- Chance Encounters
- Death on Ellesmere
- Unmapped Lands and Uncharted Waters
- New Land, New Dangers
- Hell Gate and the Cave of Ice
- A Third Winter
- The Promised Land
- A Fourth Winter, Breaking Out

PART III. THE THIRD EXPEDITION, 1910–1912: ANTARCTICA AND THE SOUTHERN OCEAN
- The Boss
- The Great Deception
- Terra Nova
- The Southern Ocean
- Rescue or Rebellion?
- Triumph and Tragedy
- Abandoning Ship
- A Wandering Albatross

PART IV. LAST VOYAGES
- Ships in Ice, Ships of Air
- The Lonely Places
- Always a Sailor
- Epilogue
- Postscript
- Notes
- References
- Illustration Credits
- Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Charles W. Johnson is the former Vermont state naturalist, a twenty-year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, and the author of several popular books on natural history. He has a lifelong interest in polar regions and exploration. He lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.