On the publication of these views, they were not supported by the Arctic veterans. Some went so far as to characterise the whole scheme as being unworthy of serious consideration, while others, less overbearingly prejudiced, were aghast at the daring and audacity of the scheme. The possibility of the drift passing over the route suggested by Nansen was not gainsaid by those whose close knowledge of Arctic problems, and desire for general information, made them more tolerant than the keen opponents of the scheme--the latter, strangely enough, being men whose own exploits had not been the most successful in Polar exploration. The hero of the _Alert_ sledge journey admitted the feasibility of the drift theory, but shook his head at the idea of any ship withstanding the winter pressure of the great ice packs in the far North. A ship once caught and frozen in became part of the ice itself, and when the pressure crushed masses a hundred feet thick into minute fragments and powder, what chance would a vessel, held in such a mass, have of escaping? But Nansen was not to be discouraged. He had the true insight of genius, that insight which gave him the confidence in his own idea and which needed something more than verbal reasons to overthrow it. His idea also recommended itself to a Norwegian shipbuilder, Mr. Colin Archer, who expressed his readiness to construct such a vessel as Nansen had described. The Norwegian Government also were impressed by the scheme and voted over £11,000 towards the cost of carrying it out, and other support being forthcoming, the intrepid explorer was at length able to take definite steps to prove or disprove his contention. The building of the _Fram_ was at once commenced. She was built of wood and of tremendous strength, her beams and sides being of the utmost thickness, while on the outside of the hull not a single angle was allowed to remain. Every projection was carefully rounded off and smoothed, so that there should not be as much as half an inch protruding and capable of affording the ice a holding place. Even the keel was sacrificed to the general idea of avoiding possible holding places for the ice. The lines of the ship were necessarily different from those of the ordinary vessel. Her sides bulged outwards and the stern and stem sloped away, so that whichever way the ice exerted the pressure, the _Fram_ would present a smooth surface to the ice, inclined in such a way that the tendency of the ice would be to get under it and so lift the vessel up. This did not improve her qualities as a sea boat, and the way in which she pitched, plunged, and rolled, whenever she came into a moving sea, tried the seafaring capacities of every one on board.