The road to Houseboat Bay


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Posted by Tom Napier on April 02, 2013 at 07:20:29 user Didymus.

I was reading about the original Fram and found that while she had started life with a steam engine, by the time Nansen explored the Antarctic, she had been fitted with a diesel engine. This prompted me to wonder whether Uncle Jim's houseboat had, at an earlier point in her fictional life-cycle, been equipped with an engine. Had she once been an excursion boat which Uncle Jim had bought cheaply and remodelled as a houseboat? Had she reached Houseboat Bay under her own steam or had she been towed there after the original engine was removed? Did the weight of the stove counterbalance the missing engine?
Unlike the debate a few months ago on the motive power of the Beckfoot launch, we have little textual evidence. All I've noticed is the reference early in SA, "Her stern was like that of a steamship." This at least does not rule out an earlier life of free navigation.
And, by the way, would being frozen into the lake have damaged her hull?




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