Free Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram by Charles W. Johnson

fill its bunkers with coal one last time. Here also, by prior arrangement with his Russian friend, fellow explorer, and geologist Baron Eduard von Toll, Nansen was to pick up extra Siberian sledge dogs, as there had been insufficient time to deliver them to Christiania before the Fram sailed. When the Fram dropped anchor outside Khabarova on July 29, there was no sign of the Urania , but the dogs were there, thirty-five of them.
    The dogs had made a lengthy journey of their own to get there, a six-month odyssey across the West Siberian Plain, through vast swamps and forests, over the Ural Mountains, and across the treeless barrens to this place. Their driver delivered them in good shape (only five had died), and he also helped train Nansen and his men in the handling of dogs and sledges, as they were still fairly new at that game, all too evident in the spills, snarls, and frustrations they experienced in learning.
    It was now August 4, the Urania had still not appeared, and Nansen was anxious to get going, with the Arctic winter fast approaching. He decided not to wait any longer, assessing that he had enough coal anyway, and had the dogs (now thirty-four, as another had died) loaded onto the ship. That night the Fram left, heading east into the “dreaded Kara Sea,” leaving Christofersen behind to wait for the Urania . Bentsen, for whatever reasons, remained on the ship. Three days later, the Urania finally showed up but turned around and went back the way it came, with the undelivered coal and homebound Christofersen. Among the letters he carried back was a note from Nansen to Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld,almost a thank you to the famous pioneer for showing him the way along the Northeast Passage.
    FIGURE 22
    Walrus hunting in the Kara Sea, north of Siberia, as the Fram worked its way through the Northeast Passage to where it would be frozen in for three years, September 12, 1893. Photograph by Fridtjof Nansen.
    They set their course for Cape Chelyuskin on Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula, over one thousand miles away and the northernmost point of any mainland in the world (850 miles from the North Pole). It promised to be a tough and treacherous stretch, as Nansen, writing in Farthest North , was aware: “I had always said that if we could get safely across the Kara Sea and past Cape Chelyuskin, the worst would be over.” Using the charts and maps Nordenskiöld had drawn on his Northeast Passage voyage, supplemented by others from earlier Russian explorers, and battling persistent fog and headwinds, they worked their way northeast, slowly and indirectly, generally following the coast as closely as they could to avoid the pack ice and rogue icebergs bearing down from the north.
    When the pack was not so pressing or the sea mostly clear of ice, they would head north, to gain as much latitude as they could. On one of these forays, they came across an island that did not appear on Nordenskiöld’s (or any other) map, which they named “Sverdrup Island” in honor of the man who first spotted it, the name it still bears today. As they proceeded, they were on alert for game to stock the larders with fresh meat for dogs and men. When amidst the loose floes, they hunted walruses and seals, and when closer to land, earlier on, they sometimes anchored and rowed ashore in search of the more elusive reindeer (caribou); either place might bring the appearance of a prized polar bear.
    After Yugor Strait, they approached the western side of the Yamal Peninsula, jutting as a four-hundred-mile-long arthritic finger into the Kara Sea. The peninsula is bounded on the east by the Gulf of Ob, into which flows Siberia’s greatOb River, one of the longest rivers in the world. They turned northward in what for the moment were ice-free waters and traveled along the coast of Yamal and then curved eastward and on toward Cape Chelyuskin. It was August 12 when they finally passed over the top of Yamal and the big island, Beli, north of it, three weeks