Nansen could not hope to build a ship which should be strong enough to withstand this pressure, but he did hope to make one that would be able to rise above the ice, and escape the crushing altogether. His object was to have the sides so shaped that the ice would encounter a rounded surface on which it could not get any hold, and would therefore slide lower and lower down the sides of the ship until it at last met under the keel, lifting the ship above the dangerous pressure. The vessel, which Nansen called the _Fram_, was built according to his own plans, and when finished was a clumsy-looking craft. In an ordinary sea she pitched and rolled so badly that everybody on board was seasick, and during the first few days of her trip the sailors were one and all afraid that she would roll completely over and go to the bottom. In the ice she behaved exactly as Nansen had expected she would, and, once frozen to the ice, gave the explorer no anxiety that she would be crushed or wrecked. For three long years Nansen and his party were away on their expedition. Steaming from Norway to the coast of Siberia, where he took his pack of dogs on board, Nansen headed for the Polar Sea, and made all the speed he could to reach the farthest north possible before the winter set in, and was finally frozen into the ice where he supposed the current must be which was to bear him across the North Pole. To his infinite joy, he found, after weeks of uncertainty, that he was actually drifting with the ice, and that his theory was correct. He did not go as directly north as he had hoped, and on March 14th, 1896, after nearly three years of patient drifting, he made up his mind that the _Fram_ had gone as far north as she would go, and that henceforth she would take a southerly course. He was but three hundred and fifty miles from the Pole, and he determined to make an effort to reach it himself, with the aid of his dogs and kayaks. He therefore left the _Fram_, and, with but one man to bear him company, he made a dash for the Pole. He succeeded in covering ninety-five miles of the unknown ocean, and reached within two hundred and sixty-one miles of the Pole, but here he was obliged to turn back. All his dogs were dead and he had but two weeks' provisions left, so he turned his face south. His surmises about the _Fram_ proved correct; she drifted south, and eventually reached Spitzbergen. The immediate scientific advantages of Nansen's trip are that he found the Pole was covered by sea, and that no land existed there, as so many persons had believed. He found that the Polar Sea, far from being shallow, as had also been supposed, was a wide sea of vast depth. He explored many of the lands that lie in the Polar Sea, and made observations that will be of immense value to geologists and botanists.