"Polar Bear"

When the ship was launched and christened "Polarbjørn" in December 1949, the champagne had been replaced with a block of ice that was sent to the bow of the ship. "Polarbjørn" was ready to go on its first seal hunt for the 1950 Newfoundland season. The maiden voyage did not go without problems. On March 30, a fire broke out at the entrance to the cabins aft, and the fire spread to the galley. All doors were sealed, and the crew got the fire under control with hoses and powder extinguishers. Just under a month later, on April 24, "Polarbjørn" hit a propeller blade against a lump of ice. The ship shook badly when they started the engine again, but they continued the hunt at slow speed, using the engine carefully. On May 8, they set course for Norway, and after a few days, the packing box began to play. On May 14, there was a strong blow to the propeller sleeve. The propeller can no longer be used as there are fears of a major leak. The salvage boat "Salvator" is then called out from Norway and arrives and tows "Polarbjørn" back to Brandal. Here "Polarbjørn" delivers 11.400 seals worth NOK 150.000. The following year the catch value was NOK 500.000, and the same was the case in 1956 and 1957, but then the ship is also fishing in the Danish Strait and delivers catch there in both years worth NOK 100.000.

Apart from the seal hunt, the "Polar Bear" was a regular fixture in Greenland. For the first time, in 1950, it also brought home live musk oxen to set out on Dovre. In the autumn of 1956, the "Polar Bear" was hired for a trip to the South Pole. Then they accompanied the "Polar Circle". The "Polar Bear" went straight to hunt at Newfoundland from there.

After the Newfoundland trip in 1957, the ship sails as usual to East Greenland on an expedition to replace crews at the stations and replenish supplies and equipment. There is a lot of difficult ice this year, and "Polar Bear" gets stuck in the ice when they try to get out. On August 24, the ice begins to screw against the ship's strong sides. At nine o'clock in the evening, the ship is cracking so much that they take boats, supplies and equipment onto the ice in case something goes wrong. An hour later, the ice presses in on the port side, and water rushes into the ship. All pumps are working and they manage to keep the ship afloat, but it is broken and there is little hope of repair. On August 28, an American helicopter is in Mestervig. They offer to try to rescue the 14 crew members and the 9 passengers. This may well be the only possible salvage, and when the crew considers it difficult to salvage the ship, they agree to be picked up by helicopter. The helicopter made 6 trips and flew the survivors to "Teisten" which was located at Robertson Island, and they later took them to Mestervig. Two days later, a Danish plane flew over the position where the crew had disembarked, by which time "Polarbjørn" was no longer visible. John Giæver was the expedition leader on the trip, and John Giæver jr. was a crew member. The latter has written this story about this sinking:

The NØG expedition 1957 – The sinking of the M/S "Polarbjørn"

This was to be my third and last expedition to North-East Greenland. There weren't many Oslo boys on the Arctic Ocean in those days. Perhaps because this was a life so different from city life, the memories of my experiences in the polar regions are still etched in my memory. Even though I was no longer considered a young skunk, I was still only 17 years old at the time. This trip was to have a dramatic ending. I will try to portray the events as they were experienced by this young city boy.

After a successful expedition to the Norwegian fishing and radio stations, we concluded, as usual, with polite radio contact with Myggbukta radio and Daneborg station to wish them a good winter and report that we were about to leave Greenland waters heading for Norway.

Then we got word from Daneborg that the Norwegian station at Kap Hersckel was having problems, because our man there showed all signs of having major alcohol problems. He was a first-time winterer, and had shown no signs of this, neither during the job interview nor on the crossing. The Danish police guys in the Sirius patrol had been to the station a couple of times, each time encountering a drunken guy who could barely explain himself, and who left the dogs and equipment to fend for themselves. The dogs were chained up and would not be able to survive unless they were fed. The Danes fed them, but had little faith that the fool himself would survive.

We therefore had to interrupt our return trip to go back to Kap Hersckel to save the guy from himself. There we found a drunken man wearing only long underpants and a bare torso, along with 16 hysterical sled dogs. All the equipment we had unloaded down on the shore was still there and the trapper's hut was a total mess. He had drunk the winter's quota of spirits (about two cases of spirits) and a liter of medicinal alcohol. He had also started the home distillation apparatus, a mandatory fixture at many main stations. We quickly realized that the station had to be dismantled, cleaned and winterized for any visitors. We transported the dogs and some of the provisions a long way into Youngsfjorden to Daneborg.

After everything was put ashore and the dogs were safely left with their new owners and were ready to sail out again, we received an ice warning from the Danish observation plane that there was a large ice drifting south. We said goodbye and sailed out of the fjord as quickly as we could, only to find that it was too late. "Polar Bear" backed around in the ice in search of a break out towards the open sea. Despite her many diesel engines behind solid hull sides, she eventually got wedged between two large ice floes of many square miles in size and several meters thick. Sunnmøre's most powerful Polarskute was stuck solidly.

We drifted helplessly down the coast. The distress signals crackled across the airwaves and were picked up by Myggbukta radio, which with its powerful transmitters relayed them to the rest of the world. Norway was notified and the American air base at Thule, in the far north of Greenland, also picked up the distress call. Then followed a long wait with many strange messages swirling in the air. Plans for how we would be rescued were launched, all rejected by “Polarbjørn” as unrealistic. It took a long time before Norway realized that we were surrounded by millions of tons of steel ice. Not even the Soviet nuclear icebreaker “Molotov” would have been able to reach us.

Where we were, the ice edge was so high that it could be attached high up on the straight part of the hull sides and thus prevent the ship from being screwed up by the ice. She was built on the same principle as the Arctic ship "Fram" with a hull shape that was shaped obliquely inward so that it could be screwed up by the ice like a cork. Many attempts were made to wiggle the ship free, including by pumping meltwater from the ice back and forth between the outer bunker tanks. When this did not work, the loading boom was attached to an ice anchor far out on the ice to break the ship out of the clamp. The attempt was stopped when the mast was about to break in the deck attachment.

Just behind us was a gap big enough to hold the ship, even if the crack were to collapse. Hoping that the tightrope we were in would loosen for a moment, the engine was put into reverse and idled for days in the hope that a miracle would happen.

We drifted south while the ice chewed at the hull. After a week stuck in a vice, nature decided to show its power. It was the middle of the night and most people were asleep when the hull began to creak. At the same time, there was a strange sound in the air, almost like the sound of a squadron of fighter planes from the days of the war.

What happened next would have had some entertainment value under other circumstances. People ran around in long winter underwear of various qualities, and jumped barefoot onto the ice in fear of going down with the ship. It dropped to minus 10 degrees at night, so there was a frozen and shivering crowd of sailors who witnessed the "Polar Bear" being chewed to pieces.

The pressure on the thick sides of the ship was so intense that the deck bulged in the middle. This first caused the hatch frames above the hold to rise above the railing and then twisted so that the tarpaulin over it snapped like toilet paper. The heavy iron covers over the bunker tanks were pushed up along with the deck and flew up like flying saucers, landing on the ice many hundreds of meters from the ship. If they had hit anyone, they would have been killed instantly.

The thick deck beams snapped like matches.

The frames burst on both sides and inch-thick iron struts were torn off like jam strings all along the side of the ship. The hull was squeezed against the tanks, which were crushed together, cutting into the lining at the same time. Water rushed in and all the pumps were running at full speed, yet the water quickly rose above the engine floor. The deck pumps were manned and we pumped hard.

Then followed a deafening silence, interrupted only by the aforementioned "flying thunder". There was a strange assembly standing on the ice. The most correct was the "arctic priest" Monrad Norderval, who had taken the time to put on a black raincoat that ran along his legs. Then the command words rang through the air. All men aboard again, up the hatch and out with a rowboat that was in the room. The ship's lifeboats were too heavy, and we needed a boat that could carry the most necessary equipment and that could be towed across the ice for use in large open rifts that had to be crossed. Belonging to the younger and therefore supposedly fitter guard, I was sent down into the hold to attach the lifting straps to the rowboat. It was a cold job because cascades of icy seawater were forced through cracks in the hull.

While we were working hard, we overheard a dialogue that gave our spirits a much-needed lift. It was mate Pedersen who approached parish priest Norderval and, somewhat sarcastically, asked him to say a few well-chosen words on the occasion. He received the following response.

"I believe the Lord will understand that we continue to work now, so we can consider whether there is anything to be thankful for later." No wonder the "priest soul" had such good contact with the happy citizens of the Arctic Ocean. Much has been said about this very special servant of God who later became bishop in Tromsø. The incredible thing is that most of it is true, albeit lightly spiced up in the usual Møre/Tromsø style. Because according to my father, who wrote several stories about him in his books, an everyday story was not really good until it was edited into a fully credible lie.

When we had done what could be done for evacuation and a possible strenuous hike to shore, the cook appeared on the ice with a large pot of hot Lappish stew that he had made while the rest of us were evacuating. He was asked if he had not noticed that we were about to abandon ship, which he confirmed that he had. But he believed that there were limits to how much one could work on an empty stomach and that we should wait to crash until we had eaten. A calm type, that cook of ours.

Until this happened, the situation seemed relatively undramatic. It all took on a completely different perspective when we were all gathered in the forward cabin and the expedition leader and officers told us that we were now drifting closer to a stretch of coast that was full of fjord arms with live outlets and glaciers that were constantly calving and sending “newborn” lumps of ice weighing a few million tons into the waters where we were stuck. These icebergs, with 90% of their mass underwater, were steered by the current and sailed like icebreakers through the sea ice, crushing everything in their path. “Polar Bear”’s chances of surviving this were on a par with an egg in a rock crusher. It was therefore decided that if help did not arrive during the next day, we should start heading for land.

Then came the message. We were all to start at the same time, but the first few turns of towing the light boat with the equipment would be taken by the oldest guys. When they were exhausted, we younger guys would use our strength to get to shore.

There was a long silence in the cabin until one of the guys exclaimed, "No shit." And so the discussion began. It was quickly stopped when the expedition leader said that this was not a suggestion, but an order. That way, more people would have a chance to survive. Because the same leader was my father, I made my first adult and unwavering decision there and then.

I didn't want to come home to Norway to my mother, nor did I want to live the rest of my life knowing that I had left my father on an ice floe to die. There were limits to betrayal. He probably tried to make me see the logic in the plan, but it ended up making me so angry and desperate that I had to take a long walk on the ice so that the others wouldn't see me crying.

Thank God it wasn't necessary. As so many times before, it was the Americans who did the thinking. They spontaneously reacted and sent down a Globemaster cargo plane from Thule Base with a Sikorsky helicopter in the hold. They landed at the airport in Mestersvig, then set up a fuel depot out on the coast, from where they began evacuating us.

In this connection, a situation arose that in retrospect must be described as a stroke of luck. It so happened that I had forgotten my camera at home, so my father got shipowner Petter Karlsen to lend me his. It was one of the finest cameras of the time. I discovered that among the American soldiers was a military correspondent. I had run out of film and asked if I could buy one from him. He then gave me the first color slide film I had seen and helped me set up Karlsen's super camera. I also photographed the entire sinking from the helicopter and thus documented the whole thing.

It is part of the story that this new color film was unknown in Norway and had to be sent to Sweden for development. When the Maritime Court wanted pictures on paper, they had to be sent to the USA for copying. The film is just as good today and has been copied and delivered to the Arctic Ocean Museum in Brandal, where some of them are hung on the wall. Once inside Mestersvig we were transferred to a DC-6 from the US Airforce which generously and free of charge transported us to Keflavik base in Iceland. There we were received with the same service-friendly treatment that we had received during the entire rescue operation. We were at the base for two days as guests of the Americans and were interviewed on American television (which we hardly had in Norway).

Staying at the base was an adventure for a young man interested in aviation. It was to be my future profession and the soldiers gave me a full tour. We were then sent home in 1st class on the luxury ferry M/S “Hekla” to Bergen. Even though we had washed both ourselves and our clothes in Iceland, we had no other clothes than the ones we were wearing when we left the ship. You could say that we stood out compared to the more well-dressed passengers, but we probably just seemed exotic and exciting, because everyone wanted to talk to us and have their photos taken with us.

In quiet reflection later in life, I can only express gratitude to fate that allowed me to experience all of this. My meeting with these incredible people who lived and worked in the polar regions and, not least, being raised by them, and shaped by them into the person I am today. For a cheeky street boy from old Vika and the east side of Oslo, the impact was enormous. The upbringing was simple, straightforward and fair, but would definitely not be approved by today's child psychologists. We could take a beating in those days. In any case, I am only grateful. I will therefore conclude with a funny episode that happened to me later.

When I reported for military service a few months after returning home, I was mentally a grown man compared to my fellow soldiers who had come straight from their childhood bedrooms. For a city boy, I had probably become reasonably good at shooting, which led to the following episode. The first time we were at the shooting range at the recruit school, I was given a Garrang-type rifle. A typical close combat weapon that also had a diopter sight that changed with each shot. I told our sergeant and was immediately accused of making stupid excuses for my lack of ability as a shooter. He had probably heard this before.

I then asked to borrow his own 7,62 precession Mauser and asked him to send a marker to the 300 meter flashes, in order to prove the opposite. The Mauser was handed to me with a grin that hardened after a kneeling series of five straight flashes at the 300 meter. He asked what the hell I had done before I joined the Air Force and then answered with false modesty and a slightly "reworked" truth, somewhat vague about three hard years as a trapper on the Arctic Ocean. If the crew of "Polarbjørn" had heard the stories that I eventually produced, they would have spit. My father, on the other hand, according to his narrative doctrine, would have nodded approvingly to his son's literary ability.         

John Giæver Jr.