As soon as the ice had really gripped the vessel and there was no further prospect of release, preparations for the winter were set on foot. The rudder was shipped, the hold was cleared out to make room for a joiner’s shop, the engine was taken to pieces and a mechanical workshop set up in its room, a smithy was erected, tinsmith’s work was done in the chart-room, and shoemaker’s and sailmaker’s work in the saloon. “There was nothing,” says Nansen, “from the most delicate instruments down to wooden shoes and axe handles that could not be made on the _Fram_. When we were found to be short of sounding line, a grand rope-walk was constructed on the ice.... There was always something to occupy us, and it was not difficult to find work for each man that gave him sufficient exercise and so much distraction that the time did not seem to him unbearably long.” It is not to be supposed, however, that Nansen did not suffer occasionally from ennui; and this was especially the case when the _Fram_, to his disgust, was drifted steadily south-west, for several weeks. Presently, however, she started once more on her northward journey, and from that time onward her course gave her crew little cause for dissatisfaction, though she did not approach the Pole quite so nearly as had been hoped; the ship, moreover, behaved herself splendidly in the ice and resisted the most serious pressures. Contrary to the opinion of many experts, who had held that, frozen into the pack as she would be, she could not possibly rise from her bed and thrust the oncoming ice beneath her, she would sometimes be raised so high above the surface that her bottom was almost visible. Though Nansen saw from the _Fram’s_ drift that she would follow very nearly the course he had anticipated, he thought that still more might be accomplished, and that the sea which lay beyond the ship’s route could be more thoroughly examined if he and a companion left her with dogs and sledges. Such an expedition could not, of course, hope to find the vessel again, as she would be constantly changing her whereabouts, and it would be like looking for a needle in a bottle of hay. The prospect of being obliged to find his own way home to civilised regions did not, however, deter the explorer, and, leaving Sverdrup in command, he started off on March 14, 1895, accompanied by Johansen, with twenty-eight dogs, three sledges, two kayacks, thirty days’ food for their dogs, and a hundred days’ rations for themselves.