The icon of maritime voyages of discovery, which its captain Thorvald Nilsen once described as the "best ship in the world" after a storm at Cape Horn, is now stowed away and protected from the weather in its own roof-only house on Oslo's museum island of Bygdøy. Designed by Colin Archer in 1892 and built at his shipyard, the three-masted gaff schooner is a boat-building monstrosity: the 39-metre-long oak construction weighs an unimaginable 800 tonnes when loaded. The outer skin is a gigantic 1.25 metres thick in the bow area and still measures a solid 71 to 81 centimetres in other areas. The background: the boat was designed to withstand the pack ice; Fridtjof Nansen had the boat frozen in 1893 in order to prove the Arctic ice drift and use it to reach the North Pole. "Fram" gained further merits under Roald Amundsen, serving as a vehicle and base station on his legendary and successful race to the Pole (1910-1912).
A visit on board the "Fram", which brings the history of polar voyages of discovery closer: More about this in YACHT 2/2019, available from 2 January at the KIosk or here digitally and as a single issue
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Fridtjof Gunkel
Deputy Chief Editor YACHT
