Fram

Fridtjof Nansen wanted to go further north than anyone had, and to do it he had to solve the problem that had beaten everyone before him: freezing ice crushes ships. His answer was not strength but shape. A hull could be formed so that the closing ice pushed it upwards instead of inwards, letting the ship float on top of the pack. He commissioned the shipwright Colin Archer of Larvik, Scottish-Norwegian by descent, to build it. Fram - 'Forward' - was launched on 26 October 1892.

She is a three-masted schooner 39 m long and 11 m wide, unusually broad and unusually shallow for her length, which cost her dearly in heavy seas: she rolled more than most ships. The outer layer was greenheart to take the ice, and she was built with almost no keel for the shallow water Nansen expected. Rudder and propeller could both be retracted out of harm's way. She was carefully insulated so a crew could live aboard for up to five years, and carried a windmill driving a generator that lit the ship with electric arc lamps.

Fram first went north under steam. Before Roald Amundsen's expedition to the South Pole in 1910 the engine was replaced with a diesel, a first for a polar exploration vessel, and one that let her voyage much further without refuelling. The ship Archer delivered carried Nansen, Otto Sverdrup, Oscar Wisting and Amundsen through Arctic and Antarctic waters between 1893 and 1912, and the whole plan of that first voyage rested on the shape of her hull: freeze her into the ice sheet and let the drift do the work.

Wreckage from USS Jeannette, lost off Siberia, had turned up in Greenland, and Siberian driftwood was reaching Svalbard. Nansen read this as evidence of a current running beneath the Arctic ice from east to west, and had Fram built to ride it. The expedition of 1893-1896 lasted three years. When it became clear the drift would not carry the ship over the Pole, Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen set off on skis, reached 86 degrees 14 minutes north and turned back to winter at Franz Josef Land on walrus and polar bear meat. They met the British Jackson-Harmsworth expedition and reached Norway days before Fram herself, after nearly three years in the ice at 85 degrees 57 minutes north.

In 1898 Otto Sverdrup, who had brought Fram home from the first voyage, took her to the Canadian Arctic Archipelago with her freeboard slightly increased. She left harbour on 24 June 1898 with seventeen men aboard to chart the Arctic islands and sample their geology, flora and fauna. The work ran to 1902 and produced charts covering 260,000 square kilometres - more than any other Arctic expedition. Amundsen then took her south between 1910 and 1912 for the first expedition to reach the South Pole, on which Fram reached 78 degrees 41 minutes south.

After 1912 Fram was left to decay in storage. It was the late 1920s before Lars Christensen, Otto Sverdrup and Oscar Wisting set up the Fram Committee to save her, and in 1935 the ship was installed in the Fram Museum in Oslo, where she still stands. She and the Dundee-built RRS Discovery are the only surviving expedition ships from the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration.

Her name has travelled a long way from Larvik. There is a Fram Island in the Laptev Sea, a group of Fram Islands off Antarctica, a Fram mesa, a Fram Formation on Ellesmere Island, and the Fram Strait between Greenland and Spitsbergen; the deepest point in the Arctic Ocean is the Fram Basin. Amundsen called his base at the Bay of Whales Framheim, 'home of the Fram'. There is a Fram Rupes on Mercury and a Fram crater on Mars visited by the rover Opportunity in 2004. Tony Harrison's play Fram premiered at the National Theatre in 2008, and SpaceX flew a mission named Fram2 over the Earth's poles in 2025.