In 1893, when the _Fram_ rounded Cape Chelyuskin, Nansen had found the Kara Sea almost as open as Nordenskiöld had done, but had met with more difficulties among the islands off the Taimyr Peninsula. A famous vessel, the _Fram_, the first of her kind, built specially for the ice to take her where it listed in the hope that she would drift to discovery like the _Tegetthoff_, and not to disaster like the _Jeannette_. The general idea was Nansen's, the carrying out of the idea was Colin Archer's. As Nansen says: "We must gratefully recognise that the success of the expedition was in no small degree due to this man." Plan after plan did he make of the projected ship, model after model did he prepare and abandon before he was satisfied: and never was a ship more honestly built. With her double-ended deck plan, with a side of such curve and slope that under ice pressure she would be lifted instead of crushed between the floes, and with bow, stern, and keel so rounded off that she would slip like an eel from the embrace of the ice, she was of such solidity as to withstand any pressure from any direction. Her stem of three stout oak beams, one inside the other, was four feet in thickness, protected with iron; her rudder-post and propeller-post, two feet across, had on either side a stout oak counter-timber following the curvature upwards and forming a double stern-post, with the planking cased with heavy iron plates; and between these timbers was a well for the screw and another for the rudder, so that each could be hoisted on deck, the rudder with the help of the capstan coming up in a few minutes. Her frames, ten inches thick and twenty-one wide, stood close together, carrying three layers of planking, giving altogether a side of two feet or more of solid wood, so shored and stayed for strength that the hold looked like a thicket of balks, joists, and stanchions. With a length of 128 feet over all, a breadth of thirty-six, a depth of seventeen, and a displacement of 800 tons, she was quite a multum-in-parvo engined with a 220 horse-power triple expansion, so contrived that in case of accident or for any other cause the cylinders could be used singly or two together. Rigged as a three-masted fore-and-aft schooner, with the mainmast much higher than the others—it being unusually high, for the crow's-nest on the main-topmast was 102 feet above the water—she proved equal to the demands on her, though in her case strength and warmth had to be thought of before weatherliness and speed. But her speed was not so poor, for when steaming and sailing after leaving Cape Chelyuskin on the 10th of September she was doing her nine knots.