After climbing around Rjukan, I moved on to Oslo hoping to learn more about Norway’s exploratory pedigree. The epicenter of this history lies in a quad-fecta of museums on the Bygdoy Peninsula, a short drive around the harbor from downtown Oslo.

Chronologically, the first stop is the Viking ship museum, which houses three impressive boats dating from the 900s. These vessels, archaeologists believe, were used to carry rich and famous Vikings around, not to sail the high seas on long-haul voyages. That said, the construction of these boats gives a sense of the strategies that made Norwegian Vikings so successful. The ships are strong, light, and perfectly shaped to cut through the water with minimal drag. While other ships of the day struggled to keep water out, the Vikings used pine tar (and later iron rivets) to seal the planks together. The ships on display at the museum are very wide at the center, an adaptation that allowed them to sail easily in shallow waters.

Next up, the Fram, arguably the most important vessel in the history of polar exploration.

The boat was dreamed up by Fridtjof Nansen, who dreamed of sailing farther north than anyone had before. Ice was a common killer in the polar oceans, crushing ships like matchsticks and leaving the crew to fend for themselves in the harshest environment on Earth. Nansen designed the Fram to deal with the ice in a new way – rather than trying to withstand the force of the ice with brute strength, it would be pushed up by the ice, free from the ship-cracking strain.

Nansen took the ship on its maiden voyage from 1893-1896, spending three years locked in polar ice to learn about sea/ice currents. While the scientific bounty was important (ultimately getting people to see the Arctic as a resource-rich region rather than merely a frozen icescape), Nansen was driven largely by the record book. It soon became clear that the drifting ice would not take him to the north pole, so he tried to ski the rest of the way, leaving the Fram in the hands of the Otto Sverdrup. He didn’t get too far, and was soon picked up by a British expedition and returned home. Oh yeah, and he has a second life as a diplomat and human rights advocate, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

Nansen’s room on the Fram

Sverdrup next took the Fram on a journey to the Canadian Arctic to learn more about the ecology and geology of the high arctic. He discovered a number of islands, charting a total of 260,000 square kilometers. The key to the mission’s longevity and success was Sverdrup’s perceptive adoption of Inuit methods in clothing, transportation, and hunting. This adaptability and “live off the land” ethic was key, and Sverdrup was hailed as a national hero upon his return to Norway.

Fram got the most press for its role in Roald Amundsen’s South Pole Expedition from 1910-1912. Amundsen was competing with British explorer Robert Falcon Scott in a highly-publicized race to the bottom of the Earth. I’ve written a bit about this trip here, but the key factor in Amundsen’s success was his ability to adapt to his conditions. Scott used donkeys; Amundsen used dogs. Scott dressed in wool layers; Amundsen wore seal fur. In the end, Amundsen not only beat Scott to the pole, but also lived to tell the tale.

Up until a few years ago, Fram had sailed farther north and farther south than any other ship.

[Side note: in preparation for his South Pole journey, Amundsen cruised around the Arctic, becoming the first person to cross the Northwest passage — yet another trophy the Brits had spent a lot of human and financial capital pursuing. Amundsen’s ship for that journey, the Gjoa, is also on display at the Fram museum.]

The most recent subject matter on Bygdoy Peninsula can be found at the Kon Tiki museum, a monument to Thor Heyerdahl’s contributions to exploration, anthropology, and cultural preservation. One of Heyerdahl’s guiding theses was the notion that ancient civilizations could have been much more intimately connected than we think. He posited that ancient peoples used low-tech but highly-adapted materials and technologies to sail far and wide across the oceans. The famous Kon Tiki raft was built of balsa wood in Peru and sailed across the Pacific Ocean. This and other expeditions prove that it was likely possible for ancient South Americans to colonize Polynesia and Easter Island, but most anthropologists still think the movement was West to East, based on linguistic and genetic evidence.

Kon Tiki:

Certainly Norwegians have made enormous contributions to global exploration over the centuries. From their launchpad at the confluence of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, Norwegian explorers sailed to the ends of the Earth embracing, not dodging, the hardships and unpredictability of nautical journeys. Perhaps most importantly, they traveled light and used the right materials for their environments (from the Vikings’ pine tar to Amundsen’s furs to Heyerdahl’s reed rafts), lessons that remain applicable even today.

Boats in Oslo’s harbor