Our sailmaker, Ronne, was transformed into a -- well, let us call it tailor. Ronne's pride was a sewing-machine, which he had obtained
from the yard at Horten after considerable use of his persuasive tongue. His greatest sorrow on the voyage was that, on arriving at the Barrier, he would be obliged to hand over his treasure to the shore party. He could not understand what we wanted with a sewing-machine at Framheim. The first thing he did when the Fram reached Buenos Aires was to explain to the local representative of the Singer Sewing Machine Company how absolutely necessary it was to have his loss made good. His gift of persuasion helped him again, and he got a new machine.
For that matter, it was not surprising that Ronne was fond of his machine. He could use it for all sorts of things -- sailmaker's, shoemaker's, saddler's, and tailor's work was all turned out with equal celerity. He established his workshop in the chart-house, and there the machine hummed incessantly through the tropics, the west wind belt, and the ice-floes too; for, quick as our sailmaker was with his fingers, the orders poured in even more quickly. Ronne was one of those men whose ambition it is to get as much work as possible done in the shortest possible time, and with increasing astonishment he saw that here he would never be finished; he might go at it as hard as he liked -- there was always something more. To reckon up all that he delivered from his workshop during these months would take us too long; it is enough to say that all the work was remarkably well done, and executed with admirable rapidity. Perhaps one of the things he personally prided himself most on having made was the little three-man tent which was afterwards left at the South Pole. It was a little masterpiece of a tent, made of thin silk, which, when folded together, would easily have gone into a fair-sized pocket, and weighed hardly a kilogram.
At this time we could not count with certainty on the possibility of all those who made the southern journey reaching latitude 90o. On the contrary, we had to be prepared for the probability of some of the party being obliged to turn back. It was intended that we should use the tent in question, in case it might be decided to let two or three men make the final dash, and therefore it was made as small and light as possible. Fortunately we had no need to use it, as every man reached the goal; and we then found that the best way of disposing of Ronne's work of art was to let it stay there as a mark.
Our sailmaker had no dogs of his own to look after; he had no time for that. On the other hand, he often assisted me in attending to my fourteen friends up on the bridge; but he seemed to have some difficulty in getting on terms of familiarity with the dogs and all that belonged to them. It did not quite agree with his idea of life on board ship to have a deck swarming with dogs. He regarded
this abnormal state of things with a sort of scornful compassion. "So you carry dogs, too, aboard this ship," he would say, every time he came on deck and found himself face to face with the "brutes." The poor brutes, I am sure, made no attempt to attack Ronne's person more than anyone else's, but he seemed for a long time to have great doubts about it. I don't think he felt perfectly safe until the dogs had been muzzled.
A part of our equipment to which we gave special care was, of course, the ski; in all probability they would be our chief weapon in the coming fight. However much we might have to learn from Scott's and Shackleton's narratives, it was difficult for us to understand their statements that the use of ski on the Barrier was not a success. From the descriptions that were given of the nature of the surface and the general conditions, we were forced to the opposite conclusion, that ski were the only means to employ. Nothing was spared to provide a good skiing outfit, and we had an experienced man in charge of it -- Olav Bjaaland. It is sufficient to mention
his name. When, on leaving Norway, it was a question of finding a good place for our twenty pairs of ski, we found we should have to share our own quarters with them; they were all disposed under the ceiling of the fore-cabin. At any rate, we had no better place to put them. Bjaaland, who during the last month or two had tried his hand at the unaccustomed work of a seaman, went back to his old trade of ski-maker and carpenter when we came into the trade-winds. Both ski and bindings were delivered ready for use by Hagen and Co., of Christiania; it remained to adapt them, and fit the backstraps to each man's boots, so that all might be ready for use on arrival at the Barrier. A full skiing outfit had been provided for every man, so that those who were to be left on board might also have a run now and then during their stay at the ice edge.
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For each of our ten sledges, Bjaaland made during the voyage a pair of loose runners, which it was intended to use in the same way as the Eskimo use theirs. These primitive people have -- or, at all events, had -- no material that was suited for shoeing sledge-runners. They get over the difficulty by covering the runners with a coating of ice. No doubt it requires a great deal of practice and patience to put on this kind of shoeing properly, but when it is once on there can be no question that this device throws all others into the shade. As I say, we had intended to try this on the Barrier; we found, however, that the pulling power of our teams was so good as to allow us to retain our steel-shod runners with an easy conscience.
For the first fourteen days after leaving Madeira the north-east trade was fresh enough to enable us to keep up our average rate, or a little more, with the help of the sails alone. The engine was therefore allowed a rest, and the engineers had an opportunity of cleaning and polishing it; this they did early and late, till it seemed as if they could never get it bright enough. Nodtvedt now had a chance of devoting himself to the occupation which is his delight in this world -- that of the blacksmith; and, indeed, there was opportunity enough for his use of the hammer and anvil. If Ronne had plenty of sewing, Nodtvedt had no less forging -- sledge-fittings, knives, pickaxes, bars and bolts, patent hooks by the hundred for dogs, chains, and so on to infinity. The clang and sparks of the anvil were going all day long till we were well into the Indian Ocean. And in the westerly belt the blacksmith's lot was not an enviable one; it is not always easy to hit the nail on the head when one's feet rest on so unstable a foundation as the Fram's deck, nor is it altogether pleasant when the forge is filled with water several times a day.
While we were fitting out for the voyage, the cry was constantly raised in certain quarters at home that the old Fram's hull was in a shocking state. It was said to be in bad repair, to leak like a sieve -- in fact, to be altogether rotten. It throws a curious light on these reports when we look at the voyages that the Fram has accomplished in the last two years. For twenty months out of twenty-four she has kept going in open sea, and that, too, in waters which make very serious demands on a vessel's strength. She is just as good as when she sailed, and could easily do it all over again without any repairs. We who were on board all knew perfectly well before we sailed how groundless and foolish these cries about her "rottenness" were; we knew, too, that there is scarcely a wooden ship afloat on which it is not necessary to use the pumps now and then. When the engine was stopped, we found it was sufficient to take a ten minutes' turn at the hand-pump every morning; that was all the "leaking" amounted to. Oh no! there was nothing wrong with the Fram's hull. On the other hand, there might be a word or two to say about the rigging; if this was not all it should have been, the fault lay entirely with the plaguy considerations of our budget. On the foremast we had two squaresails; there ought to have been four. On the jib-boom there were two staysails; there was room enough for three, but the money would not run to it. In the Trades we tried to make up for the deficiency by rigging a studding-sail alongside the foresail and a skysail above the topsail. I will not as-sert that these improvised sails contributed to improve the vessel's appearance, but they got her along, and that is a great deal more important. We made very fair progress southward during these September days, and before the month was half over we had come
a good way into the tropical belt. No particularly tropical heat was felt, at any rate by us men; and as a rule the heat is not severely felt on board ship in open sea so long as the vessel is moving. On a sailing-ship, lying becalmed with the sun in the zenith, it might be warmer than one would wish; but in case of calms we had the engine to help us, so that there was always a little breeze -- that is, on deck. Down below it was worse; sometimes "hoggishly mild," as Beck used to put it. Our otherwise comfortable cabins had one fault; there were