362 NEAREST THE POLE 



would allow a ship to rise easily and readily under ice 

 pressure is desirable, and this desirability has been 

 recognised, no ship previous to the Fram had been built 

 to meet that requirement. 



In the Fram almost ever3rthing else was sacrificed to 

 this requirement. Seaworthiness was sacrificed, and 

 as the Frames experience in her two voyages shows, 

 ability to make her way through ice was sacrificed. 



For the purpose for which she was designed, i. e., to 

 enter the ice and then drift with it, evading destruction 

 from ice pressure, she was well adapted, but as the 

 designers of the German Antarctic ship Gauss said in 

 discussing the Fram model, she would have been even 

 better adapted for this had she been bowl-shaped. 



Contrary to popular ideas, the work which an Arctic 

 ship has to do is not principally that of breaking up 

 one season's ice, as is done by harbour and river ice- 

 breakers, in Canadian and Russian waters for instance. 

 Such conditions of level, unbroken ice of uniform thick- 

 ness are found only in Melville Bay on the upward 

 voyage, where the one-season ice is encountered, and 

 late in the season when the new ice is beginning to 

 form. The main work of the Arctic ship is that of 

 threading and pushing and wedging and prying her 

 way among and between and around fragments and 

 cakes and large fioes of ice, the latter of such thickness 

 (twenty to fifty or seventy feet) that nothing could 

 break a passage through them. Of course, nothing 

 can be done but squeeze a way around these. It is for 

 this reason that the powerful Russian Ermack is not 

 available for a Polar voyage, and why she is not treated 

 of in this discussion. Fifty Ermacks merged in one could 



