IF ALL ROADS lead to Rome, then all roads lead from it. It kept cropping up everywhere I went on my journey. Himilco, the first Phoenician explorer to reach out of the Mediterranean, probably walked there. Pytheas too would have known it well. The Irish monks and the Celtic Church eventually had to capitulate to Rome and it is a toss-up whether the Vikings considered Rome or Jerusalem the centre of the world. Until the end of the Middle Ages Rome ruled Western Christendom. By the fifteenth century the great explorers were not Roman, but were largely Italians nevertheless: Columbus was Genoese, Cabot was Venetian, and Amerigo Vespucci, the man who gave his name to America, was Florentine. In the seventeenth century Italy produced a forerunner of the next great phase in the history of exploration: tourism. Like so many travellers I had come across on this journey he was another undauntable clergyman.
Francesco Negri was forty-one years old when he left Italy. He thought it reprehensible that Italians knew so little of their own continent, and set out to explore the ‘Land of the Midnight Sun’ of which the shelves of the great libraries of Italy were so silent. He did not know that books on Svalbard and Finnmark were piling up in the libraries of London, Copenhagen and Amsterdam. He travelled alone, and in 1663 reached Denmark. Later that year he made it across the Arctic Circle as far as the Torne River in Swedish Lapland, at 68° north, but was forced back by poor weather. He gathered his strength in Stockholm and the following spring he started on the road to Lapland once more. Again the weather deteriorated, but this time he persevered. By the time he reached the North Cape it was winter.
He was not well prepared for his journey, and as the Arctic darkness fell the weather became bitterly cold. The Laplanders he met along the way looked after him and saved his life several times. They must have pitied this ill-prepared Mediterranean priest so far from home. It was not until he approached the North Cape itself that he met someone with whom he could actually converse, in Latin. He described this meeting with the local priest in his account of the journey, written in the form of eight letters to his sponsor of which the final letter deals with Finnmark. On reaching Nordkapp he wrote, ‘from the end of the green world’: ‘Here I am at the North Cape, on the edge of Finnmark, and at the very edge of the world since there are no other inhabited places further north. I am satisfied to have reached this place, and will now return to Denmark and, God willing, to the land of my birth.’
Although his thoughts had turned quickly to home, the landscape of Lapland had taken a firm grip on his imagination, as did the kindness of the Lapp nomads and what he saw as the purity, freedom and simplicity of their lives. In only a few decades Rousseau would resurrect the concept of the ‘noble savage’ from the Greeks. Negri thought their lives as luxurious as those of the Hyperboreans who lived on in classical myth: ‘It is true, the Lapps do not live in palaces, but neither do they need to worry that these might one day fall down on them. With regard to glory and fame they have nothing to fear either, for they have nothing to lose. In all these ways the Lapps are better philosophers than Diogenes, who wanted a whole barrel for himself; for they are happy with even less.’
He had loved the North. For years afterwards he worked on the manuscript of his letters and lobbied the Duke of Tuscany to fund him for another journey to Lapland. In 1698 he died without returning there. Two years later his eight letters were published in Padua under the title of Viaggio Settentrionale, fatto e descritto, or, ‘Northern Journey, Completed and Described.’ Posthumously he had succeeded in his mission; the first book with a reliable description of the northern limits of Europe now stood in the Latin libraries of the continent. The North was no longer the preserve just of whalers, traders, and the navy, but also of independent travellers, who wanted only to see, learn, and travel home again.
After the surge in maritime exploration of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the flowering of the Enlightenment and the advent of industry brought a new class of explorers towards the edges of the world. Men like Francesco Negri, reaping the benefits of a surge in wealth and leisure, began to arrive singly. They came overland and by sea, clutching satchels of books and yearning to write books of their own. Theirs were not the pilgrimages of the Irish or the emigrations of the Norsemen or the plunder of the merchants and whalers. They did not seek wealth so much as knowledge and new experiences, and in that respect their journeys were perhaps more akin to those undertaken by the Greeks. The history of exploration had, in a sense, come full circle. But something new had been created by the abundance of wealth and the awakening of curiosity in Europe: tourism. It is not without its critics, but by seeking to preserve the customs and landscape of the lands that it visits, at least in some form, while generating an income for local people, tourism has been a welcome arrival. New ways of nurturing it are being developed all over the North.
I hitched a lift to the end of Europe. A Saami family driving a spacious Land Cruiser dropped me off. ‘Saami’ is the name preferred by the ethnic Lapp people of the northern Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia. ‘Lapp’ is reckoned an insulting term, long used by southern Scandinavians in their exploitation of their northern neighbours. This family had been on their way to visit relatives in Skarvsvåg, a small fishing village near the cliffs of the North Cape and one of the most northerly settlements in the world. The mother, father and little boy were all slight figures, with pale skin and Asiatic folds above the canthus of their eyes. The father, Nils, produced a wedding photograph from the glove box of their car to illustrate traditional Saami dress for me. In the photograph his wife wore a headdress and gown beaded in rainbows of colours and criss-crossed with elaborate brocades. He too had worn stunning formal dress: a multi-coloured hat with four points, each one stuffed to defy gravity, and slippers of reindeer skin with pointed toes. He asked me if it was true that Scotsmen wore skirts to their weddings and I said that it was, but disappointed him by being unable to produce a photo to prove it. As we drove along they told me all about the ceremony, now fifteen years ago, and took me twenty miles out of their way so that I would not need to walk. At the Nordkapp I climbed out of the car, thanked them, and was promptly confronted by a tollbooth and someone asking me for money. It was the first time in my whole journey that I had been asked to pay to see a part of the landscape.
‘What, I have to pay to get to see the cliffs?’ I asked, a little incredulously.
‘Yeah, sorry.’ The man in the booth was a bored college student, probably reaching the end of his three-month summer job. It had been a long season. Folded on the counter in front of him was a copy of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, in English.
‘How much?’ I asked.
If I was surprised by being asked for money, I was amazed by how much he was going to charge me.
‘Did you hitch all the way here?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘Well… don’t tell anyone, but I guess you can go in for free.’
Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish and Russian Lapland unravelled behind me in seemingly endless plains of tundra. The climate was still too Arctic for trees to grow, and reindeer grazed among the stunted grasses and the mosses that grew between the rocks. The Barents Sea lay before me, laminated in a thousand shades of blue. It was impossible to tell where the horizon welded the sea to the sky. On the headland in the middle of this magnificent open wilderness stood a monument to tourism and the new economy of the North; the Nordkapp Visitor Centre. On the ground all around it visitors had spelled out messages in the rocks, declaring their undying love for absent partners or celebrating their visit to Europe’s end.
There was no soil to pitch my tent, but I weighed the edges with boulders and sat down to watch the sunset. A busload of men and women in formal evening wear pulled up to the car park. In surreal succession they stepped off the bus and walked past me, nodding hello and pulling their dinner jackets and evening gowns tight against the cold wind. I followed them into the private function, and for an hour or two mingled with the rich and beautiful people of northern Norway. Waitresses served me glasses of champagne. I was dressed in waterproof clothes and hiking boots, spattered all over with the glacial mud of Svalbard, but no one gave me a second glance. The Norwegians are a tolerant people. I never did find out what the function was for.
Unlike the other places I had visited so far, Lapland was never ‘discovered’ by an explorer and then reported back to a literate southern culture; it was always known to the peoples who lived at its southern limits. There is some evidence that the Saami people originally lived much further south in the Scandinavian peninsula before the great Germanic migrations of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries pushed them into ‘Lapland’. The word ‘Lapp’ itself is thought to stem from a Finno-Ugric root meaning ‘peripheral’. Tacitus called them ‘Finns’ and described how they made arrowheads from bones. Procopius in the sixth century called them ‘Scridfinns’, and said, ‘they wear only skins sewn with sinew, and the women don’t breastfeed, the babies eating only fresh marrow.’ In the eighth century a Langobard called Diaconus wrote that in the far north lived the ‘Scritobini’ who chased animals by bouncing on pieces of bent wood, an early allusion to skiing.
By the rise of the Viking Age they were subjected to heavy taxation and exploitation by the Norsemen. Ohthere, a Viking from northern Norway, sailed to the court of Alfred the Great and described his ruthless hunting and tax-collecting sprees along the Finnmark coast as far as modern Russia. Alfred was so impressed with Ohthere’s descriptions that he wrote them into his then on-going translation of Orosius’ ‘History of the World’. Alfred thought Orosius’ fifth-century account of the northern regions of Europe so suspect that he deleted a chapter and inserted the Norseman’s description. His amended chapter is now in the British Museum, in Alfred’s own handwriting.
The sagas, too, talk of journeys into Lapland and describe the Saami, whom the Vikings considered shamans and sorcerers who were only there to be taxed. The tradition of persecuting them continued throughout the Middle Ages right up until modern times. In turn the Russians, then the Swedes, then the Norwegians, would make incursions into Lapland and redraw their national boundaries. Until fairly recently the Saami carried on exactly as they always had done, unconcerned by the imaginary lines invented in the courts and parliaments of the south, but carried on paying tributes in pelts and fish whenever forced to by the southern armies or their mercenaries. ‘Lapland’ is more a concept than a country with borders, and although the Saami people have been denied a state of their own by their neighbours it is impossible to compare them as a nation with, say, the Kurds or Tibetans. There are only about 80,000 of them divided between the four countries, half of that number living in Norway. They are now outnumbered twenty to one in their homeland by Scandinavians from the south. As the Danes had done in Greenland the Norwegians initially tried to wipe out their culture; until 1940 it was forbidden for non-Norwegian speakers to buy or lease land. More recently the Norwegians have been trying to make amends. Since 1989 the Saami have had their own parliament, in Karasjok, and now enjoy special privileges and unique passports allowing them greater freedom of movement.
Historically they have always been nomads, migrating with their herds of reindeer from the tundra to the coast and back again as the seasons come and go. Now they herd reindeer with helicopters, and with their new passports they can move in and out of Russia with much greater ease than other Scandinavians. A ‘Finnmark Law’ has recently been passed in Norway, giving the Saami parliament and the Finnmark administrative council joint responsibility for the land. Most of their area is just open tundra, but together they control 98 per cent of the land in Finnmark. Saami people now have their own TV news and newspapers, their own college in Kautokeino and their own theatre, the Beiwaš, based between Norway and Finland. As I had seen with the Greenlanders, their faith in themselves, and in their own identity, is growing.
The morning was dull and overcast, and the first chill of autumn shivered in the air. A busload of retired North Americans pulled into the empty car park. Only a few hours earlier the dignitaries had finally left and now the centre opened up again to receive the tour buses and camper vans that arrived daily from all over Europe. While they were looking around the centre I asked the driver of the first tour bus whether I could hitch a lift. He asked the tour guide, who in turn put it to the group, who had a vote. ‘Sure you can come with us!’ called out one of the elderly ladies, who wore a pink baseball cap and a matching tracksuit.
Every few kilometres across the tundra plateau the bus stopped to wait for groups of reindeer to get off the road. Nearer the town it pulled up at a roadside Saami tent erected for our benefit, where a man in traditional dress stood by his reindeer waiting to be photographed. The bus driver was Saami and stood by the bus while we tourists filed out, chuckling to himself and shaking his head.
The ports of the northern coast of Norway have been nourished for over a century by the coastal ships that carry cruise passengers and budget tourists, cargo and news between Bergen in the south and Kirkenes in the far north-east at the Russian frontier. The first ‘coastal steamer’ made the journey in 1893, and though there was a break during the German occupation, ships have called at each of the ports on the route regularly ever since. The villages are linked by air now too, but it is the Hurtigrute, the Norwegian name for the ‘Express Route’, that keeps them alive. In Honningsvåg I waved goodbye to the busload of Americans and climbed on board. This ship was sailing east, towards Russia.
The cliffs of Finnmark slid gently by. Snow clung to the cracks in the rock, obscured from time to time by drifting banks of fog. It started to rain, and then the rain turned to sleet. The ship was the Nordlys, ‘the Northern Lights’. It was huge and modern, with several decks and none of the comfort or charm of the Nordstjernen that had brought me down from Svalbard. It was so much like a hotel that at first I could not even find the way out onto deck. Apparently the passengers preferred to crowd against the windows in the ‘viewing lounge,’ and I had the deck to myself. There were cabins for the paying cruise passengers, and a single space set aside for people to doss down in. I heard rumours that the owners wanted to spruce up their image, and were considering making it compulsory to book a cabin. Some of the cruise passengers had complained, it was said, at the intrusion of scruffier passengers into their holiday. It remained to be seen whether Norwegian tolerance and egalitarianism would win out over the tourist dollar.
The Nordlys docked at a couple more ports on the way east: clusters of bright houses backed by the sombre grey of the cliffs and the tundra. Hardy men in oilskins stood out on the wharves handling cargo, squinting against the sleet and the wind. After a particularly barren stretch of coastline the ship drew into the ancient port of Vardø.
Vardø, or ‘Wardhouse,’ recurs again and again throughout the history of Lapland. It is a settlement on a small island flung out into the Barents Sea, lying as far to the north as the Arctic coast of Alaska, and as far east as Cairo. It was here that Chancellor rebuilt his ship, to here that Barents’ crew dragged themselves out of the frozen hell of Novaya Zemlya, and from here that the Danish navy thrust north to Spitsbergen against the Dutch and English whalers. It is less of a tourist destination than the North Cape, but for centuries it was the principal seat of power in Lapland.
Fishing boats bobbed in the harbour, slowly being covered in a layer of slush. Crowded around them were wooden houses, their paint chipped and peeling, and stacks upon stacks of fish crates. My breath turned to fog in the cold air. The island is shaped like the letter ‘H’, and the little town curled itself around the thin isthmus. A road led up the hill to the fourteenth-century Vardøhus Festning, ‘the Fortress of Wardhouse’. I turned away from the port and climbed my way up to it.
Strung out towards the Arctic, isolated by its climate, the mediaeval Norse wanted to plant a flag at what they saw as the northeastern limit of their domain. But there was more to it than flag waving. When Eirik the Priest-hater was on the throne of Norway the Russians were advancing into the Kola Peninsula and incursions into Finnmark were feared. The first fortress was built to provide a base for defence against these Russians and was completed by Eirik’s brother, Håkon V Magnusson. There was another advantage to garrisoning the far north; it made persecuting the Saami a bit easier. St Olaf’s Church (that was marked so clearly on Johann Ruysch’s map of 1508) was built to Christianise them. Though a border treaty of 1326 brought peace between Russia and Norway, both countries continued relentlessly to tax the indigenous people. After the union of Denmark and Norway (at the end of the fourteenth century) and the ravages of the mediaeval plague years the monarchy lost interest in the far north. But a couple of centuries later, when Greenland fell silent, the more accessible furs and walrus tusks of Lapland became important once again. King Christian IV visited Vardø in 1599, and in 1608 he wrote to its governor, reminding him to be merciless in collecting taxes from the Saami. He writes that it is good to burn a few for witchcraft every year, so as to keep them dispirited; ‘Lappish folk by nature and custom are inclined to magic,’ he wrote. ‘Thou shalt be careful to see that those who are convicted of using magic, after judgement held and sentence pronounced, shall be put to death without mercy.’
Thanks to Jón Ólafsson, the Icelandic gunner who described his voyages with the Danish navy in the waters around Spitsbergen, there is a record of a visit to Vardø around this time. Ólafsson had been chasing pirates around the Kola Peninsula and back into Russia when he docked at its harbour, which he said was dominated by a ‘huge castle’ surrounded by cannons. He and the other men were given lodging inside, and spent a few days enjoying the hospitality of the last outpost of Danish rule. It was by now seventy years since Chancellor had met Scots merchants there, but it seemed that the Scots still held positions of influence: ‘At the time when we came thither on this journey, a nobleman called Hans, of Scots extraction, was governor there… He was eccentric and very unaccountable in his ways, especially when in his cups.’
The Scotsman was John Cunningham, an admiral in the Danish navy who had served under Christian IV. With an English pilot named Hall he had ‘rediscovered’ Greenland for the Danes in 1605. As a reward he had been made commander of the fortress, ruler of Finnmark, and given the freedom to extract taxes from the Saami who lived there. It was a bleak coastline, a long way from Scotland. I wondered if he was glad to be living so far from his own country, if his eccentricity demanded the space and freedom of Finnmark to run free, or if he had stayed only for the money and power that he wielded there.
The present Kommandant fed me caviar from chipped china plates. His house was over two hundred and fifty years old, a relatively modern addition built into the defences of the fortress itself. It was hardly the ‘huge castle’ that Jón Ólafsson had reported. Cracked beams of ship’s timber framed the low ceilings, a hidden clock chimed with infinite patience, and the floors smelled of furniture polish. Portraits representing four centuries of long-gone commanders stared out from the yellowing walls. None of them looked as if they had been happy men.
He had pink cheeks and white hair, and he shuffled between the ancient rooms wearing wool slippers with which he polished the floor. He led me through a few of his favourite pictures, and when he reached two etchings of Nelson’s fleet his eyes began to shine. He told me the old story of Nelson’s death, that he was pickled in brandy after Trafalgar and buried three months later. When he said the date, 21 October, he looked up to see if I would correct him, but Nelson was his hero, not mine. I did know that Nelson had crippled the Danish fleet, and perhaps that was the secret of the Kommandant’s admiration. He was a true Norwegian patriot, and liked to read about the Danish getting their comeuppance.
He was semi-retired; Vardøhus was a peaceful posting as a reward for good service. The right to gather gull eggs on a nearby island was one of his few remaining privileges; he no longer burned Lapps every year or collected any taxes. Surveillance of the enemy was now the job of the dish antennae on the hilltops behind the town, and the cannons were no longer fired at Russian pirates. They still, however, needed to be polished, and every so often to be given a new coat of paint.
‘Hans Könning, John Cunningham, Hans Könning,’ he muttered, leading me through to the library. From a high shelf he brought down a rough-typed booklet listing each of the Kommandants since the days of Håkon V. In 1490 I read that Diederik Pining, the Hansa pirate sent to guard Icelandic waters against the English in the days of Richard III, had been in command there. For 1619 he found the entry. He translated for me, and I took some notes:
John Cunningham; known as Hans Kønning since arriving in Denmark from Scotland.
1622; lived in Bergen although still in control of Finnmark.
1625 – married Ellen Klauslatter Hundemark in Bodøgard. She remained living there or in Vardøhus at times.
1651 died. Buried in Sjaelland
Cunningham’s rule had bridged the old and the new era of exploration of the North. The first tourist of Lapland had missed him by thirteen years. The brief paragraph threw no more light over the Icelander’s description: ‘he was eccentric and unaccountable in his ways, especially when in his cups’. The Kommandant smiled in apology, and offered me a drink.
Later the rain on the turf roof slowed to a stop. Outside the sky cleared to the pellucid blue of a Nordic eye. I walked around the tops of the octagonal walls of the fortress, bouncing my feet on the grass and running my fingers over the cannons. They were painted a glossy black and grew warm and sticky in the thin sunlight.
In Vardø I found out that an ancient legend, concerning the irreconcilability of northern and southern peoples, was false.
Before time began there was only the Ocean. When first the waters were divided from the earth, the sisters of Ocean, the Great Rivers, were born. Of these the Nile was the greatest.
The Nile’s majesty was known not only for its immensity, but also for its unusual behaviour. Alone of all rivers it rose in summer and fell in winter. Eudoxus of Cnidus, a contemporary of Pytheas and Alexander the Great, reasoned that it must therefore have its source in that alien world of the Antichthon, where everything known and beloved of mankind occurred in its opposite: trees grew downwards, rain fell upwards, and sunlight itself was black as night. Its legend was part of the Greek conviction that the universe must always be in balance. As the Antichthon by necessity lay across a stretch of Ocean, the Nile was thought to traverse an underwater channel from the Other World before popping up in the deserts of Africa. Some disagreed: Ptolemy thought that it arose in a range of hidden mountains with magical properties which he called the Mountains of the Moon, a name later adopted by nineteenth-century explorers of Uganda. When Alexander found crocodiles on the Indus river he thought that the riddle of the Nile had been solved; it source was evidently in India. From India the Antichthon itself could even be seen; its northernmost tip was a headland called Taprobane, now known as Sri Lanka. There lived the Antichthones, a dark-skinned and barbarous people who lived perpetually roasted by the sun. ‘It is an alien world,’ it was said, ‘We cannot live with them, and they cannot live with us.’
In Vardø I met members of Norway’s most northerly refugee population: a community of Tamils. Norwegian immigration policy, designed to prevent the growth of ghettos in the cities of the south, disperses asylum seekers and refugees throughout the country. The Tamils had been living in Lapland for over a decade, and for most of them, it had proven a promised land. It had not been easy. Vardø’s climate is harsh even by Scandinavian standards, and the Norwegians, though welcoming, can be taciturn and stubbornly reserved. Torn between maintaining the strength of their own community and trying to integrate into Norwegian society some of the refugees have succumbed to drink, depression or neurosis. Most have not. That afternoon in Vardø I walked down the street behind two young Tamil girls on their way home from school. They were chatting with a Norwegian friend, and all three were wearing the Norwegian national dress.
Perhaps the Hyperboreans and the Antichthones can live together after all.
The next day I sailed south to Kirkenes and the Russian border. The town of Kirkenes is distinguished for its iron mines, its proximity to Russia, and the savaging it received under German occupation during the Second World War. The Allies’ only supply route to Moscow was to send ships in convoy around Nordkapp and into Murmansk. Hitler suspected that they would try to invade Norway, not France, and his intelligence told him British commandos were busy in Shetland. The long Norwegian coastline with its deep fjords provided refuge for his U-boats, and, when the time was right, might allow an easy route for the invasion of Britain.
By 1944 over thirty thousand German soldiers were posted in Kirkenes. The Soviets carried out over three hundred bombing raids there before it was liberated in October of that year. To add insult to the already considerable injury, the retreating Germans burned whatever buildings remained standing. Consequently its architecture is uninspiring.
In Kirkenes, the atmosphere was heavy with the presence of the Russian border, less than three miles away. Rusting vessels collapsed in the harbour, their home port written on their sides in dirty white: MypMaHCK, ‘Murmansk’. The goods in the town’s shops were priced in kroner and in roubles. Wealthy Russians regularly crossed back and forth to buy Western consumer goods. They were immediately recognisable among the Norwegians and the Saami, their clothes cut in the Western fashions of two decades past, their high cheekbones and sharp features marking them out from the locals. There was growing unease in Kirkenes about the numbers of Russians using it as a gateway to the West. I was told there that Norwegian brothels were now staffed entirely by Russian girls, and old Norwegian bachelors regularly took young Russian wives. Norwegian law grants them full citizenship if they stay married for three years, and with the divorce rate as high as it is these marriages of convenience were often as successful as more traditional unions.
In the tourist office I met a new Norwegian who had married for love. He worked behind the counter:
‘Snakke du engelsk?’ I asked him, ‘Do you speak English?’
‘Yep, sure I do, where ya from?’
‘Scotland.’
‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘I can usually tell. I’m from the States.’
He told me how he had visited Norway one summer, and had never managed to leave again. He had married a Norwegian woman, and for three years had been living in Kirkenes.
He looked out of the window and his eyes misted over for a moment. ‘Yep, love sure can take you to the strangest places,’ he said finally. ‘Anyway, how can I help you?’
‘I’m wondering where I should go to see some of the landscape around here. Are there any paths or trails to the border?’
‘I know exactly where you should go,’ he said, and his face unfolded into a generous smile. ‘And you’re gonna love it!’ He took out a map, and began to show me how I could walk down the Pasvik valley through the forest alongside the frontier. He gave me a pamphlet called ‘Conduct and Travel at the Norwegian-Russian Border’. ‘That’s just to stop you getting into trouble,’ he said.
‘What kind of trouble could I get into?’
‘Don’t go up to the Russian border fence if you find it, don’t try to speak or wave to anyone you see on the other side,’ he replied. ‘You know, the usual stuff.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Have you got a camera?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Zoom lens?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well… just keep it out of sight. And don’t forget to keep an eye out for the bears.’
The bus from Kirkenes down the Pasvik Valley took nearly three hours, stopping at every house to deliver mail, and going down all the side roads to take children back from school. Next to me sat an old Saami woman with a densely lined face and hair tied in braids, wrapped back over her head and held in place with a multicoloured Saami hat. The driver was jovial, smiling all the way, cracking jokes with the children and letting them post some of the letters for him. At one point we drove down a long track to drop a little girl at a homestead. She lived in a large wooden house in a clearing with some vegetable patches, a tractor, dogs and outhouses, with the Russian border visible through the trees across the river. Bicycles were left unlocked at the end of tracks leading off into the forest. Skis stood beside them, waiting for the day when the snows returned, which would not be long now. I felt as if I was entering a world sustained by trees, where unbroken forest extended hundreds of miles. There was a deep sense of peace there, as if the trees themselves gave energy and life to the air.
At the end of the road I got out to walk further in the forest. The whole valley was an intimation of what was to come as I travelled deeper into Lapland: low rolling landscape, intricate networks of silvered lakes and rivers, and endless, evergreen forest. There was a luxuriance of birch, spruce and Scots pine. The forest was dense and comforting, but the trees were widely spaced enough that walking among them was a pleasure. After the sterile sea-air of Svalbard and Finnmark the smell of the moss and the earth was delicious.
A voice came to him in a vision: ‘Go into an unpopulated, inaccessible country, into a thirsty land, where no man yet lived.’
And so Tryphon, the apostle of Lapland, walked north and west, through the forestlands of Karelia. He left his home in Russia and walked into Sweden. There were no fences in the forest then, in the sixteenth century, no signposts or marks on the earth, and the Finnish nation was still four centuries short of independence. Near the Pasvik valley he stopped, and built a monastery.
The area was a no man’s land, and for a few decades he worked among the Saami and the few Finns who lived along the rivers that seeped out of the lakelands to the south. He was living there when Richard Chancellor swept past, on his way to the Dvina and the palaces of Moscow. He was still living there when the Swedes arrived, marching overland, consolidating their control over the region when they heard that the English and the Dutch were sailing in northern waters to catch whales. Tryphon was an Orthodox Christian, and a Russian, so the Swedes killed him. He was one of the first to see the worth in the land, but more were to come.
Only a few years after Tryphon was killed, two men pushed through the swamps from the Baltic to the Barents Sea. They returned to Stockholm for an audience with King Karl IX, to tell him the news that they had wandered in his realm all the way to its furthest point, and they deemed the limit of Sweden to be the Nordkapp itself.
Swedish interest grew; travellers such as Negri were beginning to make the journey north, and the Swedes realised they knew less about the limits of their own country than these tourists. In 1673 another foreigner, a Strasbourg man named Scheffer, published his Lapponia, an exploration and discussion in Latin of what was currently known of the northern regions. Elsewhere in Europe interest in Lapland was also on the rise; only a year after Scheffer’s book was published it was translated into English by an undergraduate of Christ Church College, Oxford (the translator, Acton Cremer, was set the task as a punishment for ‘improperly courting a mistress’).
Europe was changing. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had ended the Thirty Years’ War and the power of the papacy. In England the Civil War was over and the Cavaliers, based in Oxford, defeated. It was in Cambridge that the next English revolution would begin, and unlike the Civil War, it would send shockwaves through the whole of Europe. Revolutions in thought have no respect for borders.
Isaac Newton was eighteen years old when he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. For four years he immersed himself in the works of the pioneers of the new Science. Cambridge still taught a strict diet of Aristotle, but Newton read promiscuously. Descartes, Kepler, Boyle, Copernicus and Galileo were among his favourites. In the summer of 1665 the Black Death reached England and the university closed. Isaac returned to his mother’s home in Lincolnshire, which may or may not have had an apple tree in the garden, and for two years stayed there in quarantine, thinking. When he emerged he had single-handedly redefined physics, and brought order to a world of apparent chaos.
He had invented calculus, years before Leibnitz. He had proved that white light was composed of a spectrum of colours, and had set the foundations for the invention of the reflecting telescope. He had formulated his three laws of motion, and explained the movements of the planets, comets, moon and tides. He wrote his laws concerning gravitation. It would be another twenty years before he would finally set down his vision in his magnum opus, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, but the intelligentsia of Cambridge, London and the rest of Europe were astonished. In 1669, at just 27 years old, he was elected Professor of Mathematics of Trinity College.
Newton represented a new breed of scholar, a man who refused to take knowledge on trust. Though he had a strong Christian faith he felt it his duty to uncover God’s secrets, and he was prepared to turn the whole world into his laboratory. There were many others with a similar attitude, and for an increasing number of them throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that laboratory would be Lapland.
I walked between borders born of a quite different kind of revolution, the one pioneered by Lenin. The Finnish border lay only a few kilometres away. In contrast to the Russian fence it had open gateways built into it, though you were supposed to tell the authorities before you went through them. The Scandinavian governments see no reason to fight over their borders any more. They have done too much fighting in the past. Finland has swapped back and forth between Russia and Sweden for centuries, persecuted and exploited by both. It was Czar Alexander who took Finland from the Swedes during the Napoleonic Wars. For a century the Finns were Russian, until in 1917 the November Revolution reignited their nationalist sensibilities. The Bolsheviks had barely taken their seats in the Winter Palace of Petrograd when the Finns declared their independence. Immediately there was civil war between German- and Russian-backed Finnish nationalists, but the country itself survived united. For the first time in their history the Finns lived in their own nation-state. They stayed on friendlier terms with the Swedes, now that they knew what it was like to live under the Russians.
The forest which straddled all these borders was a place in which to lose oneself. It ran across Lapland and over the Kola Peninsula, through Russian Karelia, across the Dvina basin and into the Urals. Over the Urals it was continuous with the unimaginable vastness of the Siberian forests, the taiga. In Siberia the taiga is feared for its immensity; it is said that travellers in it, on realising that they are lost, become paralysed with fear and lose their wits. It is one of the last places in Europe where bears still roam, and occasionally I would come upon their footprints in the moss of a bog, or their spoor by one of the rivers in which they fished. I never met one face to face. The European brown bear, unlike its American cousin, is timid and hides from men.
After only a couple of days I ran out of food and made my way back to the road. I had not intended to stay so long in the forest, but it kept drawing me back. I felt I wanted to go on and on, just walking in the silence through the trees felt like a meditation.
At a clearing by the road I found a campsite, but no sign of anyone in charge. I had just sat down on the step when a car pulled up and a woman with long blonde hair in a ponytail stepped out. She looked to be in her fifties, with large spectacles and a welcoming grin. A tall man in his sixties stepped out on the driver’s side. ‘How can I help you?’ he said, in English.
‘I’m just looking to see if there’s any food I can buy from you,’ I said. ‘I thought maybe the campsite had a shop?’
‘No, it’s closed now, late in the season,’ the woman said. ‘But let us offer you something to eat.’
They introduced themselves as Birgitte and Jøstein, and invited me in. Over coffee and cakes Birgitte explained that she had moved to the Pasvik valley in the 1970s, from Oslo.
‘I came for love,’ she explained. ‘My ex-husband was from this area, and so I came to be with him. But things didn’t work out. In the end it was he that left, and I stayed,’ she said, and shrugged. She told me that she loved Lapland for the stillness and the silence of winter. ‘And I love the cold, it is a dry cold. And the snow, it is so clean here in the winter. I love the cleanliness of it.’ She was looking forward to the first snowfalls of autumn.
Jøstein told me that before retirement he had been an engineer in the nickel mines that were still in use in the area. ‘I haven’t seen any sign of them,’ I said to him. ‘Where are they?’
‘No, it is only across the border now, in Russia, that you will see them. But they are quite obvious there, they make a terrible mess!’ He told me he was now retired, but had recently lived in Russia for a year while helping their mining programme. ‘They are such a welcoming people, the Russians,’ he said. ‘So generous, although compared to us in Norway they have so little.’ Living so close to Russia he had built up close friendships on the other side of the fence. From the car he retrieved an album of photographs, and showed me photos of his last hunting trip with his Russian friends, across the border in the Kola Peninsula.
‘What was this?’ I asked, pointing out photos of Jøstein standing in a crowd of skiers, all rosy-cheeked and smiling for the camera.
‘That is the three-nation ski race at Petsjamo!’ he said, his voice lifting in enthusiasm. ‘Once a year they ease all the border controls and we ski between Norway, Finland and Russia. Maybe you can come next year!’
‘Now then, you are looking for food, what can we offer you?’ Birgitte said. ‘I can give you some pasta. But I’m afraid there is no bread.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Jøstein. ‘I have an idea. Do you have a compass?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well come with us! We can find you some bread and take you to somewhere that will make you remember the Pasvik valley for many years to come.’
I climbed into the back of the car and they drove me down tracks in the woods, until we pulled up outside an old wooden farmhouse, deep in the forest. Birgitte and I waited in the car while he went inside. ‘An old Finnish lady lives in there, has lived in that house since she was born,’ she explained. ‘She bakes all her own bread and Jøstein goes in to check on her every few days.’
‘Why is she Finnish if she was born in that house?’ I asked.
‘The Finns used to own a corridor along the river here opening out onto the sea,’ she explained. ‘But because they were allies for a while with Germany in the Second World War the Russians and the Norwegians took the land from them when the war was over. In both Norway and Russia there are people whose language is really Finnish, and they just carried on living where they were when the War came to an end.’
Jøstein emerged a while later waving a homemade frozen loaf. I tried to give him some money but it was refused with a frown, as if I’d been rude to offer. ‘I didn’t want to leave her,’ he said. ‘I think she has not long to live.’
Too frail to leave the house, deep in this forest, a Finn caught on the wrong side of the fence at the end of the Second World War. I wondered how she viewed all the changes that had happened in the valley during her lifetime.
‘Now,’ Jøstein said, starting the car, ‘we will take you somewhere special.’
At a lake called Ellentjerne, ‘Helen’s Tarn’, they helped me unload my rucksack from the back of the car. The three of us stood and admired the beauty of the scene. The silence was luscious and enveloping there. ‘This is my favourite place,’ said Birgitte. The lake was a rare chance to see to a horizon of sorts, the view over the water unobstructed by the trees. There were no vantage points in the forest, no bare escarpments from which to look out over the treetops, but it was not claustrophobic. It felt warm and welcoming. Occasionally the stillness of the water was disturbed by grebes and ducks splashing among the reeds, or swans roaring through the water in take-off or landing. ‘Don’t get lost!’ they shouted to me as they drove off.
Over the next few days I walked around the lake, absorbing the thick silence, and going deeper into the forest towards the Russian border. When I reached it I found yellow and black posts marking the end of Norway, and looked across the river where the trees continued in an ocean of green. A solitary waxwing flew over the barbed wire fence. The only sign of a national boundary was an observation tower on the other side, built above the treetops on stilts. Below the towers, I had been told, stretched an electrified fence that ran all the way to the Black Sea. An iron bridge stood over the river. I might have been tempted to cross over, but it looked impassable, crumbling back into the water. I had gone far enough. It was time to head west again, and south, into the heart of Lapland.
From the border post at the end of the road I hitched a lift back up to Kirkenes in the back of a Norwegian army truck. The driver looked barely old enough to smoke, never mind carry a gun and defend Norway against a Russian invasion. I mentioned the bridge to him. ‘The Germans put it there,’ he told me. ‘In the War. They brought it piece by piece from Paris and rebuilt it so that they could get artillery into Russia.’
‘And did the Russians blow it up?’ I asked.
‘No!’ he laughed. ‘Almost as soon as the Germans built it they had to blow it up again, to stop the Russians coming after them!’
A couple of days later I reached Rovaniemi, in Finland. It was an island of concrete in the ocean of forest. Like so many other Lappish towns it had been razed to the ground by the retreating German army, and rebuilt as cheaply as possible. In its hostel I stayed for one night, sharing the room with an engineer from Dresden and two young Australian guys. The engineer planned to send a postcard to his mother from north of the Arctic Circle in each of Finland, Sweden and Norway. He was very excited to have made it into the Arctic at last. His grandfather had fought here, he said. The next day they were all going to visit ‘Santa Claus Land’, a Finnish initiative on the outskirts of the town which claimed to be the only home of the ‘real Santa’. Planes from all over Europe drop into its airport throughout the winter, with extra ones laid on around Christmas. As a boost for the local economy it has been a great success. Its future was uncertain, however. Its busiest weeks are in the run up to Christmas, when well-to-do families would bring their children to feed reindeer, see Santa, and go for sleigh rides in the snow. With the effects of global warming the snow, on which its appeal depended, had started to fail.
The Australian guys, Ray and Brian, told me they were ‘doing Scandinavia’. They shivered and said they had not intended to come so far north. They were glad to be able to say to their friends back home that they had made it to the Arctic Circle, but after seeing Santa they were going to straight back south. ‘How long will you travel for?’ I asked them.
‘Another year or two,’ Ray replied. ‘My sister’s getting married in Sydney in two years time and so I’d better make it back for then.’
‘I’ll just see how it goes,’ said Brian.
I told them that I was amazed by the phenomenon of young Australians and Kiwis travelling so far and for so long. I had met guys like them all over the world, and the enthusiasm and stamina they had for going on year after year was impressive.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ he said. ‘But you could say there’s too many of us Aussies travelling about. Bloody south-east Asia is full of the buggers.’
‘But you guys get everywhere,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a different attitude to the one that young people have in Europe. Europeans often still have this idea of exploration as being something you can only do in an “undiscovered” place, that it’s for mountaintops and the North Pole. I think you’ve got a better attitude.’
‘Well, for me anywhere that’s totally new to me is pretty much like exploring,’ said Brian. ‘Like, I don’t know anyone that’s been to… em,’ he paused for a while, struggling to think of a country where one of his mates had not at some point been. ‘North Korea!’ he said finally, with a note of triumph. ‘Now if I was to make it to North Korea, I reckon I’d feel like a bit of an explorer. What do you reckon Ray?’
‘North Korea?’ he said. ‘I’d just like to spend more time in bloody Sweden. Man, they got the most gorgeous blondes I ever saw in my life!’
In the morning I sat on the railway platform in Rovaniemi station. Most of the trains that passed were loaded with timber on its way to the pulp mills; some were hundreds of metres long. A troop transport arrived, loaded with chain-smoking soldiers on their way east to the borderlands with Russia. They piled out onto the platform to smoke and use their mobile phones, and the station was filled with the music of the Finnish language. Norwegian and Swedish are sung rather than spoken, their vowels jump up and down to their consonants in a Germanic staccato; Finnish is more fluid, more complex, and in many ways more beautiful. It repeats itself in short melodies which sound as if they have come from the earth itself. The Finnish language has the cadence and rhythm of streams and rainfall, it sounds the way that drawing circles in the mud with your fingers feels.
The southbound train, when it came, rolled through a narrow corridor of pine trees. Their tops were sharp and pointed, lining the railway line like a stake palisade. In the evening light orange clouds swam in the still green water of passing lakes. Occasional turrets flashed past, of stately homes rising through the treetops like fairytale castles. The forest seemed endless.
The Gulf of Bothnia stands like a Gothic arch over the Baltic Sea. I moved around it anticlockwise from Finland into Sweden. Rivers radiate from the Baltic like spokes from a hub, each one riveted to its shores by a town: Oulu, Kemi, Tornio, Luleå, Piteå, their names slowly wheeling through Finnish to Swedish with the curve of the coastline. The towns were all established initially as trading ports for the trappers and fur traders who brought their wares out of the forests; a reminder that once the only way of moving through the forest was by river. Each of their districts was called a March or a Lappmark; the Torne River and Tornio stand as the most northerly of these. From the apex of the Gulf of Bothnia the Torne waggles back and forth almost due north, and for its first 150 kilometres forms the border between Sweden and Finland. At its mouth the old trading settlement has, like the river, been divided. To the Swedish west it is called Haparanda, and to the Finnish east it is called Tornio. One day I walked across the bridge between the two, and the barriers, like the trees around them, pointed to the sky. No one really bothers about borders there; a census in the seventies had shown that one in four women in Swedish Tornedal had been born in Finland, and one in three Swedish boys had a Finnish girlfriend. Living conditions, education and employment opportunities were all found by the survey to be worse for the Finns. Despite farming the same soil the Finns are still poorer than the Swedes, though that is changing.
From Haparanda I travelled down to Luleå, and from there took another train further into Swedish Lapland. The carriage had ‘Trans-Arctic Railway’ written on the trestle in faded, grimy lettering.
Soaked with the stink of the bogs he had waded, clawing at the mosquitoes that tormented him, terrified by the barbarity of his travelling companions, one of the greatest minds of the eighteenth century stumbled into Luleå.
His name was Carl von Linné, a hot-headed young graduate of medicine, and he had come on a journey of discovery. Like Charles Darwin a century later he was a man of faith as much as a man of science, and like Darwin he possessed astonishing powers of observation. He invented binomial nomenclature, the system still used today whereby every organism on earth is assigned a Latin genus and descriptive name. It is thanks to Linnaeus (the Latinised name by which he became known) that we are Homo sapiens, ‘the thinking man’. Linnaeus presaged Darwin in other ways; when classifying man he realised that mankind and the apes were indistinguishable in terms of the classifications he used for the rest of the living world. He wrote:
I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character… by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But, if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so.
But in 1731 his solemn scientific future was still ahead of him, and he was just a passionate young man straight out of the cloister-like atmosphere of Uppsala University. His journals burst with the power of his developing mind, medical impressions of the people he meets, and with the universal preoccupations of young men.
In Luleå he is fascinated by a hole bored in the old church walls, used, he reports, ‘to judge the glans penis of men who had been rejected by their wives’. He follows this discovery with a discussion on the physiognomy of the women of Lapland: ‘The vagina in women does not become more ample when they are fat, more likely narrower; the thinner they are, the larger the vagina.’ Further around the coast in Tornio he indulges in a meditation on the relative merits of Finnish and Lappish girls: ‘The Finnish girls have big breasts, Lapp girls small ones of the sort a girl keeps unspoilt for her future husband.’ In the mountains bordering Norway he meets the beautiful daughter of the local clergyman, and notes in his journal that he must remember to write to her, for she seemed to have taken a liking to him. But he was not only interested in women and the various shapes of their bodies; his observations also touched on the economic potential of the North. The Industrial Revolution was not far off, and it struck Linnaeus as unseemly that all these trees should stand idle over so much of his country. He questioned why the whole lot were not burned for pitch or tar.
The consultations with the local people he met in the forests provide an insight into the medical world of the day. To a woman who has swallowed three frogs that keep her awake with their croaking he recommends tar. For headaches he reports that they put their heads in the smoke of the fire and place mashed spruce needles into their hair. He informs the reader that nosebleeds are secondary to suppressed menstruation, and they are common among those Saami women that work with the Swedish settlers. He notes that pregnant women he meets drink schnapps with pepper to initiate labour, and are rarely afflicted with hysteria.
Like Negri before him, the simplicity and happiness of the lives of the Saami people affected him deeply. It was the developing European preoccupation with the ‘noble savage’ again. He extolled the virtues of their simple lives; how they possessed great tranquillity, slept and woke as they wished, and seemed to luxuriate in a leisure that the people of the south had long since forgotten. They did not drink alcohol, they rarely smoked, in their tents both men and women walked around naked and unashamed, and it seemed to him that they lived in an unspoilt Eden. As Negri had done he resorted to classical metaphors to adequately describe the bounty of their lives, reminiscent of the Hyperboreans: ‘Ovid’s description of the Silver Age still holds true among the Lapps. The earth is not gashed by ploughs, nor is there clash of iron weapons; man does not descend into the bowels of the earth, nor is there strife about frontiers; the earth gives everything of its own volition.’ At the time of his journey the Finns were being encouraged to settle throughout the north, to bring it into cultivation. This meant forcing the Saami from land their reindeer had grazed for centuries. Two decades later the first borders were drawn, designed to preserve lands to the north and west for the Saami and their reindeer. By the nineteenth century, a few decades later again, these ‘borders’ had been moved further and were no longer designed as reservations, but instead to prevent the indigenous people moving onto territory now ‘owned’ by rich townsmen in the south.
But that was still a century away. Lapland was a relatively borderless landscape, the back door of Europe, the home of the Saami, and a playground for the best minds and the idle rich of continental Europe.
The forest was charmless from the roadside. The drone of the cars and the wet backwash from the trucks made walking beside it a misery. I did get one lift, from a man who told me that unmanned space rockets were regularly fired from the forests around Kiruna. I asked if he could take me to see the launch site, but he said I wouldn’t be able to get through. ‘You will probably be arrested as a terrorist!’ he said.
It was late afternoon when I walked into Jukkasjärvi. The village was as far north as Negri had managed on his first attempt to get to Nordkapp. Modern Jukkasjärvi is the home of one of Sweden’s most bizarre tourist attractions: the Ice Hotel. Every spring before the Torne River starts to thaw, great blocks of its ice are sawn out and piled into a giant walk-in freezer. In November, once the temperature has dropped, the blocks are rolled out and built into a hotel. Its design changes every year so that it is always possible for tourists to visit a new version of it. When temperatures outside drop to the minus thirties, inside it stays relatively comfortable at about 5°C below zero. Guests can sleep in an ‘ice-room’, on an ‘icebed’ draped with reindeer furs, and snug in a down sleeping bag. The hotel even has its own ‘ice church’, where the waiting list to be married is apparently quite long, and a bar, where vodka (which will not freeze) is served from glasses made of ice.
In September the hotel was a large puddle on a gravel field, strewn with tangled lengths of the wire used as structural support. The only sign of its rooms were sad little clumps of congealed reindeer fur. Inside the giant freezer nearby there were magnificent ice-sculptures, carved in preparation for the upcoming season. The décor too varies from year to year, and sculptors from all over the world contribute to the hotel’s changing image. A polar bear snarled over a cowering Inuit figure clutching a spear; a walrus and a musk-ox stood side by side; and over all of them towered a giant bottle, shaped like a well-known brand of Swedish vodka. The sculptures all glowed with soft blue light. The vast freezer for the iceblocks was open to visitors in order to make the most of the tourists, like me, who came by in the summer when there was little else to see. There were igloos built in the corners for those determined to spend a night sleeping on ice, but the place was deserted. A bored and very earnest girl at the counter told me to come back in the winter. ‘That’s when the fun is,’ she said, and smiled coquettishly; ‘have you heard about Swedish saunas…?’
A peculiarity of Jukkasjärvi is the ‘Sauna Academy of the Bastue’. Most Scandinavians are addicted to saunas, and many homes, even some of the smallest, have one installed. It is a transnational pastime, a common enthusiasm for Swedes, Finns and Norwegians. It is also a great way of staying warm in the winter. ‘The Bastue’ refers to the practice of being switched by birch branches while in the sauna, which is supposed to invigorate the skin and add to the sauna experience. I knew she was implying that saunas, which are traditionally mixed, are pretexts for unlicensed orgies. But I also knew from previous visits to Finland that she was spinning me a tourist’s line. The British, the Americans and many continental Europeans have a reserve about public nudity that the Scandinavians do not, and Swedes and Finns in particular take great pleasure in poking fun at uptight or over-imaginative tourists who either refuse to enter the saunas, or worse, go to them in search of sexual adventure.
I left the giant freezer and the puddles and walked down to the end of the village. Standing among a grove of birch trees by the side of the river stood an old wooden church. Four hundred years before the Ice Hotel was built it was the only tourist attraction between the Baltic and the North Cape. For those who could not face the three hundred more miles of swamp, forest and tundra to reach the latter, it came to represent the very edge of Europe. For a few of those ‘first tourists’, leaving a marker at the church was thought to be sufficient proof of travelling far enough into the north to be able to return south again with dignity. Like the modern travellers who want to send postcards from the Arctic Circle it saved having to make that final, gruelling journey across the tundra to the Nordkapp. Linnaeus had signed the guest book of the church in Jukkasjärvi, as had many other tourists whose accounts I had read, and I wanted to do the same. But there was one marker in particular that I wanted to see.
Inside the church the walls were painted with the pure whitewash of Swedish Lutheranism. A garish modern triptych over the altar celebrated the life of a man called Læstadius, considered the Lutheran proselytiser of the Saami. He was a Saami himself, a Lutheran minister trained in the south who travelled to his homelands to convert his people. On the triptych a dark-eyed Jesus dripped blood on the earth, from which sprang bunches of flowers in bright primary colours. In the pew nearest the altar a solitary woman sat weeping. In the foyer I found the inscription I had come so far to read.
GALLIA NOS GENVIT, VIDIT NOS AFRICA, GANGEM HAVSIMVS, EVROPAM QVE OCVLIS LVSTRAVIMVS OMNEM GASIBVS ET VARIIS ACTI TERRA QVE MARI QVE STETTIMVS HUC TANDEM MOBIS VRI DEFVIT ORBIS. DE FERCOVRT • DE CORBERON • REGNARD AVGVST 1681
It was branded with hot irons into a wooden plaque made from a Saami sledge. ‘Raised in Gaul, we have seen Africa, drunk of the sacred waters of the Ganges, and seen the whole of Europe; Fate has driven us across land and sea, and now we stand here at the pole, where the world ends. De Fercourt, De Corberon, Regnard, August 1681.’
Jean-Francois Regnard was a rich kid on a grand tour of the Old World. He was twenty when he inherited a fortune from his father, a wealthy Parisian merchant, and set off at once for Italy. Six years of adventuring later he reached Jukkasjärvi. In his satchel he carried a copy of Scheffer’s Lapponia, and later wrote a book himself about his travels in the North. In it he describes how he and his companions went as far as the Torne River just west of the little church, and decided they had gone quite far enough. They climbed to the top of a promontory and looked out to the north and west. To make himself seem a little more intrepid he had to use some artistic license in describing the panorama before him.: ‘Here we concluded our northward journey and raised the tent poles… When we were up there we saw Lapland in the west and the Arctic Ocean to its full extent as far as North Cape. This, gentlemen, can be called touching the Earth’s axis and being at the end of the world.’
Regnard returned home via Poland, Turkey, Hungary and Germany. On arriving in France he bought himself a position in government. Soon afterwards he moved out to his estate of Grillon in the department of Seine-et-Oise where he lived as a country gentleman. In later life he became a successful playwright, but his Lapland book lay unpublished until after his death in 1709. Publishers had started to notice a trend in the public appetite for a strange new genre known as ‘travel writing’. It began in 1697 with the publication of William Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World, and would continue to accelerate throughout the century. It was still only the super-rich and sponsored who could tour the globe, but ever-cheaper printing presses meant that now those who did not have the time or the inclination to travel could read the accounts of those who did.
Back in the forest, wandering along the roadside, I followed the borderlands north again. The further I travelled from the towns the kinder and the more open the people seemed to be. Lasse Malmström was one of the kindest, and the most enthusiastic. He pulled up beside me on a rainy afternoon when most drivers would have carried on. ‘I used to do what you are doing,’ he explained, ‘and it’s good to treat people how you’d like to be treated yourself.’ He and his three sons drove a spacious van, and on the trailer was a brand new snowmobile for the coming winter. Lasse had his own business running a cross-country ski centre, and the snowmobile would groom his tracks for him. ‘But you must come and see our place!’ he cried.
‘Where do you live?’ I asked, taking out my map and leaning forward between the seats for him to show me.
‘Where we are going is not on any map. I will take you places where no tourist ever set foot!’
We passed through village after village, small clusters of buildings against the impassive forest, their names soft murmurs of Finnish and Saami despite the Swedish sovereignty of the lands: Keräntöjärvi, Parkalompolo, Muonionalusta. As we drove, Lasse told me the villages’ different claims to fame as tourist attractions: ‘That one has the largest sundial in the world!’ he exclaimed. ‘That one has a paddle steamer all the way from the Mississippi!’
But Lasse was worried; despite the attractions he did not have as many bookings for the coming winter season as he would have liked. He was trying to dream up new ways of attracting them. He lived on an island in a river that separated Finland from Sweden, and his ski centre he had called Rajamaa, ‘Borderland’. He cursed the bureaucrats of the south for placing borders on rivers. ‘Rivers are where people live!’ he cried, ‘not where they should be divided!’ He was a Swede, his wife was a Finn, and his children spoke both languages with ease. The youngest was fifteen, and was keen to talk in English. Next year he would move to the residential school in Kiruna, and next year would not come quickly enough. He was bored by the forest.
After Lasse announced my presence to his wife an extra place was set for dinner and she brought out the best meal I had seen since the Nordstjernen, a mountain of spaghetti. We talked of borders, and of the European Union. Norway is not a member, and the people of Finnmark are far better for it, he told me. Finland and Sweden are tied to rules and regulations which work for Brussels, but not the thin population and precarious economy of Lapland.
‘I wondered if you could help me with something,’ he asked after dinner. ‘After that I promise I’ll take you over the border into Finland.’
‘Of course,’ I told him. ‘Whatever you like.’
He was preparing some publicity material for his ski centre, and wanted some help with a translation. We sat in his little office and I wrote out a key for his map of the area, explaining what each of the symbols represent in English. The phone rang, his face became very serious. A worried look came into his eyes, and then faded. By the time he came off the phone he was beaming with happiness. ‘The Estonian Cross-Country ski team are going to train here this winter!’ he said, his smile widening as he spoke.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked him.
‘Even if we don’t get too many tourists, it will be a great season after all!’
His wife and sons came through to see what the noise was about. ‘Get the bottle of champagne,’ he said to them. ‘We’re all going to celebrate!’
Adventurers and men of letters continued travelling to Lapland throughout the eighteenth century. In 1718 Aubry de la Motraye, a Frenchman but ‘a subject of Great Britain’ travelled throughout the forest with the Saami on their reindeer migrations. He said that their nomadic lives and their generosity reminded him of the Tartars, with whom he had also lived for a while. He compared the milk of the reindeer with the mares’ milk he drank on the steppes of central Asia.
Five years after Linnaeus staggered out of the swamps two more advocates of the new science arrived. Pierre de Maupertuis was the greatest proponent of Newtonian science in France. Newton had proposed that the earth was not round after all, but was actually an ‘oblate spheroid’, flattened at the poles. With Anders Celsius, the Professor of Astronomy at Uppsala University and inventor of the temperature scale, de Maupertuis set out into Lapland to prove Newton right. In the hills above Jukkasjärvi the men took measurements that proved the earth really was flatter in Lapland. Science was still a gentleman’s activity, it was still possible to make new discoveries in widely ranging disciplines, and later in his career de Maupertuis gave up on geography and turned to biology. He was the first to realise that the human embryo goes through a process of development and differentiation. Before his revelation it was assumed that semen contained many tiny perfectly formed homunculi, which required only to be nurtured in the womb.
Public fascination with travel and the exotic proliferated. In London the last quarter of the eighteenth century saw the establishment of the British Linnaean Society and the African Society, to encourage interest in both botany and travel. Asian and African colonialism gathered pace after the American colonies were lost. Cheap editions of the voyages of Captain James Cook became available, and it seemed that everyone with means wanted to explore the unknown. Even today most maps of Europe still cut Scandinavia off at the latitude of Oslo and Stockholm; Lapland provided an ideal destination for those who wanted a bit of adventure, but not too much. It was remote and austere, but it was still very much a part of Europe.
Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, also sought refuge in Lapland. He was there in 1795, aged just 22. The godson of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, he escaped there from revolutionary France and a legend in northern Sweden persists that he left a blue-blooded bastard in the forests near the Jukkasjärvi. There were other consequences of the French Revolution, much farther reaching. The Napoleonic Wars were to redraw the map of the North. It was because of Napoleon that Sweden lost Finland to Russia, and it was after his defeat at Waterloo that Norway was gifted to the Swedes. The Torne River became the border between Russia and the West, as the Pasvik would be a century later.
The Pax Brittanica which followed Waterloo made exploration even easier. Britain turned its attention abroad. With mercantilism over, the seas were free for trade. In London the Palestine Association, ‘for the exploration of Syria and the Holy Land,’ had been formed in 1804; now other distinguished societies joined it. In 1828 the Zoological Society, in 1830 the Geographical Society, and in 1831 the British Association for the Advancement of Science. After the defeat of Napoleon the British Navy had less to do, and so under Sir John Barrow, secretary to the Admiralty, they were sent to all the corners of the earth. His men travelled across the deserts of Africa and through the Arctic archipelagos of Canada. He himself journeyed extensively in China and elsewhere in Asia. All in their quest to make the world British.
As the might of the British Empire grew, the travel accounts of its subjects in Lapland become more and more pompous, and less and less enamoured of the Saami and the simplicity of their lives.
After a lengthy and outraged discourse on the smell of fish in the fishing villages, one writer takes issue with the apparent weakness of his Saami porters: ‘Our luggage was not heavy; two Negro carriers on the Congo or the Gold Coast would have capered with it,’ he says. He is appalled by the apparent immorality of mixed saunas, while commenting that ‘female personal beauty of any sort is not brought to any high stage of cultivation.’
The First Marquess of Dufferin, later Governor General of Canada, then Viceroy of India, the man who would orchestrate peace with Afghanistan and the annexation of Upper Burma, visited Lapland in 1856 as part of a tour of Iceland and Spitsbergen. His private yacht Foam put in at the harbour of Hammer-fest on the Finnmark coast. He found the Saami ugly, but ‘not unintelligent’. According to the developing science of ethnology, he outlined the contemporary theory that the Lapps were related genealogically and linguistically to the Australian aborigines. As mankind ‘bubbled up’ out of central Asia, he explains, the inferior races were driven to the extremes of the world, thus making the Saami first cousins with the ‘Polynesian Niggers’. He finds their customs barbarous, but amusing.
It is unclear if he realised that the British Isles lie farther from central Asia than Lapland. One wonders what the Saami made of all these distinguished and cultivated guests.
‘I used to stand by the road, waving packets of cigarettes,’ she said. ‘That’s the only way I could get a lift.’
She would never smoke them, she was much too clean-living for that. But picking up foreigners in the Chinese Autonomous Region of Tibet was illegal, and cigarettes were her only bargaining power.
‘It used to drive me crazy! Seeing trucks go by, and picking up some local people there on the road ahead of me, but they wouldn’t stop for me.’
She was small and neat with blonde hair and blue eyes. Her name was Susanne, and in her home town of Umeå she would have been lost in a crowd. But in China she had been far more conspicuous.
‘Trucks never stop for me,’ I complained. ‘They only seem to stop for women.’
‘It’s only trucks that stop for me,’ she said. ‘I wish it wasn’t. That’s the guy who brought me down out of Norway this afternoon.’ She jerked a thumb back over her shoulder, where a thin moustached man sat behind a clutch of empty beer bottles. He was staring at us.
I tried to picture her waiting by the roadsides of Tibet with her yellow hair and outsized rucksack, jumping up and down for each truck that went past, a tiny dot of Europe on that immense landscape.
The truck driver stood up and lurched to one side. He looked as if he was summoning the courage to make a rash proposition. She turned round to me with some urgency and asked, ‘Where are you staying?’
There is a thin spit of Finnish territory which points an accusing finger to the West, running between the forests of Sweden and the tundra of Norway. In the middle of this narrow corridor lies Enontekiö, and I was staying in its campsite. It is a languorous stretch of a town, only a few houses wide but over two kilometres long. It was a quiet place, but like so many other villages I had passed through in the north, warmly so. The presence of the trees was inescapable, they breathed on the peripheries both of the settlement and the lives of its people. Even in death they did not escape. The forest crowded the little cemetery in the centre of the village, roots snaking over the surface and digging deep into the soil. Through the roots of the birch, spruce and pine, the people of Enontekiö find immortality. The campsite too was more trees than grass. My tent stood between them by the river bank.
‘I’ll go and sit by the river while you change your clothes and get into your sleeping bag,’ I said.
‘You can sit where you like,’ she replied. ‘I trust you. It’s strange, but I have often found that people who travel the same way as me are the most reliable of all.’
I lay in the half-light listening to her talk of approaching the Nepalese border from the north, the poverty of Lhasa, the closed Kingdom of Bhutan, the Qinghai plateau. The branches of the forest swayed in the breeze, and when I slept I dreamt of the wind that blows from the Taklamakan Desert.
When I awoke I was back among the trees of Lapland. I was very happy to see them.
Little children all over Europe are told that Santa Claus lives in Lapland. This leaves the children of Lapland justifiably asking their parents, ‘Where exactly does he live?’
The answer? On top of the Pallastunturi National Park.
Pallastunturi rises from the Finnish forest like a muted Uluru from the Australian desert. It soars over the treetops. Immense folds of brown and grey stone, smoothed by the Ice Ages, stand high above the forest plains. Most of the interior of Lapland is so flat that its mountains are a novelty, and a tourist attraction. The park, or ‘Pallas Ounastunturin kansallispuisto’ as it is mellifluously known in Finnish, is a ski resort. Pigga and Antte, a couple I had met in the bar in Enontekiö, invited me on a trip to see where Santa really lives.
They lived on the outskirts of the village where the path to their house meandered between the pines. Antte worked as a policeman, and Pigga was a teacher of the Saami language. They had lived there a year, they said, but had never visited the bar. The first night they did so they were so surprised to find a Scotsman there that they decided it must be a sign that they should get out more, and they decided to invite me to go camping with them for the weekend.
The sky was the pure blue of gentians, and a few wisps of cirrus formed high above Norway to the north. From the summit of the range the forest stretched to every horizon in a sea of velvety green, jewelled with lakes. The soft undulations of the landscape were like the slow swell of waves. Marching up out of Sweden a procession of cumulus clouds cast shadows on the forest, forming patchwork patterns of light that melted and reformed in ceaseless motion.
To the north beyond the horizon the forest ran into tundra, and from tundra into the Arctic Ocean. From the top of Pallastunturi there was no sign that people had ever lived, or would ever live, in the forest. I laid out all my maps on the summit, weighed them down with stones and orientated them correctly to get my bearings: that way was Jukkasjärvi, that way to Pasvik and Murmansk, that way to Rovaniemi and that way to the North Cape. But trying to put markers and pointers on the forest was to take something from its beauty. Its beauty was its immensity and its borderlessness, its uniformity and its timelessness. It was unphotographable.
From the east the cumulus clouds were being pushed aside by a slate-grey cumulonimbus, a giant storm cloud. Lightning flashed down onto the trees below us, and the timing of the thunder advanced. Antte grew nervous; we were on the highest point for hundreds of miles in every direction. ‘We should think about getting down,’ he said calmly, with characteristic Finnish understatement. Ten minutes later the lightning sparked and bounced over the rocks at the summit as we ran for the shelter of the valley below.
The rain washed freshness into the air. The forest seemed renewed. Every twig sparkled with raindrops, and a wet, loamy smell rose from the earth. The following day, after a breakfast of Norwegian shrimps, Pigga drove me into Norway. She worked at the college in Kautokeino, fifty miles north of Enontekiö. In the borderlands, she said, it was common to live in one country and work in another. Outside the window I watched the pine give way to sparse birch, and then to tundra. She talked, and I listened.
She was a Finnish Saami from Utsjoki, another border town further east, and grew up speaking Finnish, Saami and Norwegian interchangeably. Like Nils had done back at the Nordkapp she showed me a photo taken on her wedding day in which she wore the magnificent traditional dress of her people. Antte was a Finn, not a Saami, and in the photograph he stood by her side in funereal black. He was learning her language, she said, but it is very complex. It is Finno-Ugric, loosely related to Finnish and the languages of the Siberian nomads, but its consonants are far harsher. It is filled with sibilant dhz and cz sounds which give it a Slavic flavour.
Neither of them had ever been outside Scandinavia. They preferred to live on the edge of Europe. At the time I met them they were planning to drive to Rome. Several months after I had returned home I received a postcard from the French Riviera. They loved the sunshine, they said, but had yearned for home. They had missed the trees of Enontekiö.
Petrol stations are good places to hitch. People feel kinder when they have a full belly and a full tank of petrol.
My driver was Saami, and he said he was going all the way to Hammerfest. He was short and sprightly and when he smiled his eyes disappeared in the folds of his face. He offered me two options: I could ride on the mound of reindeer skins in the back of the van, or I could sit up front and keep him company. I rode up front. People are more interesting than reindeer skins.
He said he was a ‘businessman’. He made full use of his Saami passport for ‘trade purposes’.
‘All these borders are a good thing,’ he said, ‘they make opportunities for business.’ His eyes narrowed and his voice slowed when he said the word ‘business’; you could tell it was one of his favourite words. He was a good businessman, and he liked making risky deals.
‘Who do you do most business with?’ I asked him.
‘I like all the people, but the Norwegians are friendliest, the Swedes they want everything on a fax, and the Finns they try to con you,’ he said. ‘But the worst are the Russians!’ he broke into a high-pitched giggle. ‘Some of them even try to get me to send them money before I see their merchandise!’
He had bought a load of reindeer cheap from Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he had a long story about being conned by the Murmansk mafia.
‘But I think most of all, I like to sell to the Norwegians.’
‘Why?’ I asked him.
He turned to me and gave me an impish grin. ‘Because they have got so much money!’
‘Haven’t they got the highest taxes of all the countries?’ I asked, but he just looked back at me with a surprised expression. Of course he had never paid them.
In Hammerfest the falling snow melted gently into drizzle. I pitched my tent on a hill overlooking the town. Reindeer grazed around me as I cooked my dinner. The view looked out onto the island of Sørøya, where rows of grey cliffs squatted in the mist.
For years Hammerfest had been considered the most northerly town in the world, but a few decades ago was surpassed by Honningsvåg, thanks to the North Cape and the tour buses. The town councillors had fought back; next to the harbour there was a refurbished ‘Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society’ building, ready to offer cruise passengers lifelong membership and an official-looking certificate for a couple of hundred kroner. Further into the town there was an oriental pagoda built to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the society. There are numerous descriptions of Hammerfest by tourists passing through over those two centuries, none of them complimentary. I read one that was offended by its smell of blubber and fish, while another commented that its lunatic asylum was the biggest building north of the Arctic Circle. It’s clear that the writer thought this was a sign of the madness that the town seemed to induce, rather than a mark of a civilised approach to mental illness.
I spent an evening wandering around Hammerfest. The port was grimy and heavy with rusting cargo containers. Cars roared through the main street, and I was the only person who seemed to walk anywhere. I did not want to fall into the same trap as the previous visitors, and was looking for something to like about it. I found it in the local cinema.
The local operatic society was putting on a show of songs from the 1920s to the 1980s there, and in the interval I chatted to a young man who worked as a psychiatric nurse in the local hospital. He was wearing a dinner suit and spats, and had a feather boa hung around his neck. He told me that there were no more ‘lunatics’ in Lapland; the local psychiatrists had a small ward in the hospital but most people were looked after in the community. I asked him where I could find the old asylum, but he did not know. ‘It was probably destroyed by the Germans,’ he said, ‘like everything else.’
I told him about the books that I had read that never seemed to be very impressed with Hammerfest. ‘But these people, they don’t know what it is that they are looking for,’ he said. ‘I came here from Oslo because it is so beautiful here, there are mountains to ski in and the people live life so much more gently. And look at what I am wearing!’ He lifted up the feather boa and raised his eyebrows. ‘Would I ever have ended up doing something like this, having so much fun, if I had stayed in Oslo?’ The question was presumably rhetorical. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
Another writer to have visited the town, and written of it in more poetic terms, was W. H. Auden. He was a seeker after the silence and the stillness of the North, and by the time he came to Hammerfest he had already written a book describing his travels around Iceland with Louis MacNeice. Back then, in the 1930s, Europe was sliding towards fascism, and in a road-side restaurant Auden had met Hermann Göring’s brother. Göring was the chief of the Gestapo at the time. ‘He didn’t look in the least like his brother,’ Auden commented, ‘but rather academic.’ Sixteen years after the War ended he came to Hammerfest on a pilgrimage. It was a place he had been drawn to in atlases since childhood, ‘the northernmost township on earth,’ he called it in his poem written after the visit. He had a distinctly Greek viewpoint, opposite to that of the Victorian adventurers. For him the North represented all that was furthest from civilisation, and therefore beautiful and untainted. In a poem about his stay he described how he pottered through the streets of the town and slept through sunny nights. He felt he had travelled into another world, where social mores had changed. He had gone beyond ‘the Moral Circle,’ and he mourned the devastation wrought by the War. The only building left standing in 1945 had been the church.
I walked around the churchyard. A few of the graves had clear plastic protective covers over them. Condensation had formed underneath the plastic, and the stones looked as though they had been weeping.
The photograph is grainy, but still recognisable as Hammerfest. The hill I had camped on behind the town is just within the frame to the right. Tin-roofed houses clamber up its slopes. Fishermen’s warehouses stand out along the wharf, and a fine yacht floats in the harbour, decked in Norwegian flags. The whole town was out to celebrate the homecoming of the Norwegian nation’s favourite son.
The photograph was in a book published in London in 1898. It was taken on Monday 17 August 1896, from the deck of the Hurtigrute steamer on its way into harbour from Vardø. The photographer was Fridtjof Nansen, on his return from the North Pole. I had caught up with him again, the man who achieved the limits of exploration of the North. It was fitting to cross his path once more on my way back home.
Nansen had proven with his crossing of Greenland that he was one of the few men in history who have had the hubris to take on world opinion. With his expedition to the Arctic he became acclaimed as the greatest pioneer of what was later known as the heroic age of exploration; the last phase in the history of discovery in the Arctic and the beginning of exploration of the Antarctic. From 1893 to 1896 he developed revolutionary methods of travel, hauled sledges over hundreds of miles of pack-ice, sailed across the Arctic Ocean in improvised kayaks, and wintered in a hut on the shores of Franz Josef Land. In Hammerfest he faced the scrutiny of the European media and was reunited with his wife, who had begun to fear he was dead. She had not heard from him in over three years.
In June of 1893 he and his crew had left the Oslofjord, and by September were frozen into the ice of the Laptev Sea to the north of Siberia. They drifted on their specially designed ice-strengthened ship the Fram that winter, for the whole of the following year, and for the following winter. In March 1895 Nansen realised he was drifting no nearer to the Pole, but only west towards Spitsbergen. With another consummate skier, Hjalmar Johansen, he decided to make a dash for the Pole.
The ice was intolerable. The pressure on it had mangled and wrenched it into ridges so high that the sledges had to be carried over them. They had dogs, but not enough of them. On 8 April Nansen wrote in his diary, ‘this continual lifting of the sledges over every irregularity is enough to tire out giants.’ Two days later he gave up. They had reached 86°14′ north, and had not seen land further north than Russian Franz Josef Land back at 82°. The Arctic seemed to be an ocean surrounded by land after all. He did not think there were any more Hyperborean lands to discover.
They had a banquet of chocolate and hot whey to celebrate reaching farther north on the globe than anyone had before them, then turned back. They knew they had no hope of finding the Fram again after such a tortuous journey; their only hope was to make for Franz Josef Land and the northern coast of Spitsbergen. Nansen slept in one morning and forgot to wind his watch. With the sun high above them both day and night and no accurate knowledge of the time they had no way of calculating their longitude. Nansen had to guess.
They barely made it to Franz Josef Land before autumn, and used the last days of sunlight to build a small shelter from stones and the frozen hides of walruses they had slaughtered. The men had little in common; when Nansen described the six months of darkness he said, ‘our life was so monotonous that there was nothing to write about. The same thoughts came and went day after day; there was no more variety in them than in our conversation.’ Sometimes it would become calm and clear, and he and Johansen would walk out on the ice under meteor showers and the aurora borealis. The glow from the southern horizon at noon seemed to Nansen like the flames of Muspelheim, the Norse fire-world from which Óđin had made the earth.
They had nothing to read but an almanac, and both men grew to love it as their only token of civilisation. They ate only frozen chunks of walrus and polar bear, and spent hours fantasising about food. Again and again they discussed how they would spend the following winter if they survived to return to their families. But on the whole they were happy.
‘It was a strange life, and in many ways it put our patience to a severe test; but it was not so unendurable as one might suppose… Our spirits were good the whole time; we looked serenely towards the future, and rejoiced in the thought of all the delights it had in store for us. We did not even have recourse to quarrelling to while away the time,’ he wrote.
In May the ice had melted sufficiently for them to start out once more. They had been living in the hut of walrus skin for eight months. They knew that they would have to go west to reach Spitsbergen, and so they assembled their kayaks and set up their sails once again. A little over a fortnight later they were rescued by another gentleman adventurer.
Frederick George Jackson was a little more spirited than most. He had actually applied to join the Fram expedition four years before, but been refused because he was not Norwegian. As a wealthy man he resolved instead to make his own bid for the Pole, and that spring was in Franz Josef Land reconnoitring the land for a possible sledge journey north. He had been frustrated to find that the land extended only a little past 82°. It was Jackson’s relief ship, the Windward, that took Nansen and Johansen back to Vardø and their beloved Norway.
He had only been in Hammerfest three days when he received a telegram from Otto Sverdrup, captain of the Fram. He too had broken out of the pack that summer, and had just arrived in port a few miles to the west. The telegram read: ‘Fram arrived in good condition. All well on board. Shall start at once for Tromsø. Welcome home.’
The beak-nosed figure of Roald Amundsen frowned over Tromsø harbour. His eyes gazed out towards the north, as if contemplating his Arctic adventures. He was not a pleasant man, and the majority of Norwegians are not particularly proud of him. His statue stood alone. Gulls stood on his head, and his aquiline profile was streaked with guano.
Amundsen initially trained to become a doctor. A son of highly ambitious parents, he went to medical school to please them. When they died half way through his course he quit, and concentrated his mind instead on how to find funding to become a polar explorer. He studied for, and eventually obtained, his master’s ticket. Between 1905 and 1907 he captained a vessel that located the north magnetic pole, and completed the first navigation of the North-West Passage. Like Nansen he used his time among the Inuit to learn their survival skills and how to handle sledge dogs. By the time he got back to Norway he felt he was ready for an assault on the Pole. In their common cause of Norwegian Nationalism Nansen gifted Amundsen the use of the Fram, and by 1909 he was ready to sail north.
Disastrous news arrived at their departure with a telegram claiming that Robert Peary, an American, had already reached the Pole. Peary’s claim was later discredited, but Amundsen had to think fast. His funding was at stake, and so, telling no one else but his crew, he instead decided to sail south, to see if he could beat the British expedition to the South Pole led by Robert Falcon Scott instead. The tale of Amundsen and Scott’s race to the Pole is known to both British and Norwegian schoolchildren, in different versions. But what is not often retold is how when Amundsen reached it, on 14 December 1911, he wrote in his diary, ‘no man has ever stood at the spot so diametrically opposed to the object of his real desires.’ He still preferred the Arctic.
At this point Amundsen could have turned his attentions elsewhere, and rested on his laurels. Nansen had realised when he was getting too old for the heroic age of exploration, and quit while he was ahead. After his bid for the North Pole he had gone into politics and eventually settled in London as the Norwegian Ambassador (where he was rumoured to have had an affair with Lady Scott while her husband was freezing to death on an Antarctic ice shelf). He represented the League of Nations in the 1920s, organised famine relief for post-revolutionary Russia, and was involved in negotiating the resettlement of Greek and Turkish nationals following their war of 1920-22. Polar exploration for him was just one element of his monstrous ambition. But for Amundsen, getting to the Pole was all, even if it meant becoming a tourist to do so.
An attempt to freeze into the ice and drift to the North Pole failed, as it had done for Nansen, and so in 1926 he grabbed at a new opportunity. An Italian, Umberto Nobile, was experimenting with the new technology of airships. With Norwegian backing he piloted Amundsen and a rich American financier called Lincoln Ellsworth from Svalbard over the North Pole to Alaska. Together they dropped three flags onto the Pole itself: an Italian tricolour, a Stars and Stripes, and a Norwegian cross. It was too dangerous to try to land, but they did verify once and for all that there were no more lands to discover on their way across the Arctic Ocean. The heroic age of exploration was over. It was enough to find a rich backer and be flown wherever you wanted.
Amundsen and Nobile squabbled for the honour of being first at the Pole, and in 1928 Nobile tried another attempt, this time funded entirely by the Italians. Three hours from take-off the airship went down. Amundsen, unable to let go of his drive for glory, or perhaps motivated by remorse for the way he had behaved in his squabbles with Nobile, took off from Tromsø in a French plane to look for him. Nobile was rescued, but Amundsen was never heard from again, and his plane was never found.
In Tromsø I stayed for a while with Mads Gilbert, the Professor of Anaesthesia and Emergency Medicine there. He was a close friend of a former colleague of mine in Edinburgh, who had told me to get in touch if I was ever in Lapland. For a week or so I enjoyed the feeling of being back among busy streets and letting myself slowly readjust to the idea that my journey was coming to an end. Tromsø manages to combine the cosmopolitan vibrance of a university town with the austere beauty of living on the edge of the Arctic. It is built on an island, sandwiched between the crystalline glacial scenery of the Lyngen Peninsula and the soft green fringes of the Atlantic sea-board, still warmed by waters which flow all the way from the Caribbean. In its bars I met people who were genuinely worried about climate change. One woman told me that if the Gulf Stream did divert, her whole town would freeze to death. On the hillsides around it many of the birch trees were already bare. They stood silhouetted by the snow which had begun to lie on the wintering earth.
My host, Mads, had made me especially welcome, though I had never met him before. When I arrived he gave me the keys of his house and his car, and sent me off exploring the countryside. He also arranged for me to see first-hand the work of the emergency hospital services in that remote and isolated part of Norway. I flew on hospital transfers all over Finnmark, and went out in the helicopter ambulance to rescue stranded mountaineers deep in the Lyngen Alps. While in Tromsø Mads’ work as a professor keeps him busy, but his career has taken him all over the world. Together with Hans Husum and Torben Wisborg he has founded the Trauma Care Foundation, an organisation dedicated to helping victims of trauma, including land-mines, in countries as far apart as Mozambique, Iraq, Cambodia and Afghanistan. ‘We are the smallest NGO in the world,’ he joked. ‘But that way we actually get things done!’ The Foundation is committed to providing low-cost training in trauma first aid, and to preventing reliance on Western expertise and technology. He told me stories of working in some of the harshest and most dangerous places on the planet. Gesturing out of the window at the magnificent mountains that surround the town, he said that it was only by being able to return to this ‘mountain fastness’ that he managed to keep going in his Foundation work. I am grateful for the discussions we had during my stay there, his reflections on the life he has chosen to lead, and our conversations about the choices open to all of us to try to improve, rather than inflict more damage on, the world around us.
I kept on moving south. All along the coast there were fishing villages hunkering down to the shoreline, backed by spectacular Alpine mountains. Islands stood out to sea like scattered jewels, encrusted with foam as the power of the westerly ocean swell broke over them. The Hurtigrute snaked through ever-narrower fjords and straits, past the islands of Kvaløya, Senja, the Vesterålen archipelago, until it came alongside the Lofoten Islands.
Lofoten is a place apart, a chain of islands that hover between reality and myth. Impossibly steep mountains erupt out of the sea in a series of peaks and gulleys that do not seem to belong to this world. The sheer granite slopes look polished and brittle. The summits teeter over great scooped-out walls of rock, as if the islands were sculpted by giants. When the sky clears, rays of sunlight slide between the summits, like shafts of golden light falling into a cathedral.
I hitched slowly down the spine of the islands, preferring to walk away from the road into the mountains when the light or the landscape demanded it. Since the days of the Vikings the islanders have made their fortune from the migrations of cod through their waters, and every village I passed was announced at its outskirts by rows of wooden racks used to dry the cod harvest, destined mainly for Spain and Italy. Some of them were draped with fish that rustled softly in the wind, dripping their oil onto the ground. The grass below them was a lurid green, in sharp contrast to the muted landscape.
In the evenings the sun slid unhurriedly towards the horizon on a gentler incline than we are used to in the south. As it dropped to the west the eastern sky would well up with lavender and lilac light. There were only a few hours each night when the sky grew dark enough to see the stars, and one magical night I managed to see the flood of the aurora borealis. I had not seen them since Shetland, way back in May. The sky had been too light since then.
The tail of Lofoten dripped into the sea just beyond a little village called simply ‘Å’. The road ended in a turning circle for coaches and a noticeboard for tourists. It was late in the season, and I seemed to be the only one left. Beyond the noticeboards the headland ran down to the water’s edge where a serration of impassable cliffs stretched the last few kilometres. Across a small strait stood the island of Mosken, the tidal rips caused by the underwater channels so severe that they cause whirlpools. Mosken stood guard over the most famous whirlpool of them all, the original ‘Maelstrøm’. Negri was disappointed to find it so tame, but Jules Verne was more impressed; he imagined it sucking a ship twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea. Beyond it lay the last two islands of the Lofoten chain, Værøya and Røst.
Watching the water in vain for any signs of a whirlpool, I took a ferry over to Værøya and spent my last days in Lapland walking around the island in circles, thinking about my journey and sleeping by its shores. I did not want to leave.
The Great War of 1914-1918 sent its ripples out even to these furthest reaches of Lapland. It was thought to be the War to end all wars. It was hoped that Europe had learned its lesson. Never again, it was said, would there be such naivety, never again such enthusiasm for bloodshed, never again the carnage of the fields of the Somme. But the harsh terms of German surrender forced it into an economic quagmire which proved fertile soil for the new politics of National Socialism, or Nazism.
Fifteen years after the Treaty of Versailles Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. Within two months he had secured a four-year term of dictatorial powers. Within a year he had withdrawn Germany from the League of Nations. By August 1934 he had assumed the presidency, and named himself the Führer of the Third Reich. He deprived all Jews of citizenship, and in defiance of the Treaty began to ship armaments into the Rhineland. With a flying ace from the Great War called Hermann Göring he set to work on his four-year plan to re-establish the dignity that he believed the German people had lost.
Britain and France watched warily, hoping to keep peace by complying with German expansionism. First the annexation of Austria, then the occupation of Sudetenland, then the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Until the invasion of Poland they were still hoping to avoid war.
The beleaguered intellectuals of the Czech nation had not been so optimistic. They had lived under the threat from Germany throughout the twenties and thirties and their history, like that of Finland, is one of being overpowered alternately from the west and from the east. In 1923 the Czech playwright Karel Čapek earned international acclaim with R.U.R., a play that warned of the dehumanising potential of an increasingly mechanised and industrial society. To give voice to this new threat, he had to invent a new language, and in it he coined the term ‘robot’. In 1936 he published his social satire on the rise of totalitarianism, The War with the Newts. At the time the threat from Germany was darkening, and Čapek felt oppressed. Like Auden in Iceland the same year, he decided to journey into the North in order to breathe more freely. The description of his trip to Lapland is published in English under the title, Travels in the North: Exemplified by the Author’s Own Drawings. For Čapek, Lapland was a refuge from the hell he saw breeding in the south. As he travelled by boat from Denmark to Sweden and then by rail through Norway he felt increasingly released from the dark cloud of Nazism. But it was never far from his mind.
Čapek was to be the last of the travellers I would follow in the North. He travelled in the Europe of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation and he saw a society there in many ways similar to our own. I would follow him last because he saw Lapland just before the historical upheaval of the Second World War (the consequences of which are still being played out), and because of all the travellers and explorers that had accompanied me since Shetland, when he comes to describe the beauty and the value of the northern fringes of Europe, he speaks for me too.
From Bergen he took the Hurtigrute to Lofoten. Its scenery made a profound impression on him, and of all the landscapes he travelled through he loved it best. ‘A bouquet of mountains: you can’t express it in any other way; and here you can see that the world blossomed in granite before it could flower in bird-cherry and lilac… it gives you more the impression of something brimming over, of terrible abundance and exuberance.’
From Lofoten he journeyed on to the North Cape, but the barren tundra made him think only of death, and his mind turned once more to the destruction of all that he loved far away in Bohemia. His journey was a pilgrimage, he said. He had gone into the North to be reminded of the sublime in nature, to remember that it transcends the meanness and pettiness of humanity.
The colonial empires of the European states stretched right around the world. British schoolchildren looked in atlases and marvelled that ‘half the world is pink’. France administered the whole of West Africa. The Dutch and Belgians too had their share, but the old ways were passing on and a new era in global history was about to begin. The world was shrinking. The power of the United States grew every year, and the Great Bear of Stalin’s Soviet Union growled over Europe, which is only a peninsula of Asia, after all.
Even on the eve of war Čapek still could not see the new order, did not anticipate that Europe could not face the new threat alone. Near the North Cape he came upon a boat-load of American tourists, and his comments give voice to an opinion commonly held at the time, and a sentiment that is unfortunately still uttered today. ‘What do they want here, after all? The end of Europe, that’s our affair; let them go and have a look at the end of America, if there is one; and if there isn’t, let them make one for themselves.’
He travelled, he said, to have a last look at God’s peace, but now it was time to go back home, ‘where men were at their busiest’, and where the Europe he loved was coming to an end. He died in 1938, just in time.
From the rail-head at Narvik it was seventeen hours by train to Stockholm. The line had been built during the War to channel iron ore from supposedly ‘neutral’ Sweden to German ships waiting in Narvik’s occupied harbour. The assistance the Swedes gave to the Nazis is one of the many reasons Norwegians still distrust them. Outside the window the forest was black; black as charcoal, as pitch, as the slag of the iron ore that had been mined beneath it. The train rumbled south, and I passed over the Arctic Circle for the eighth and final time on my journey. It dropped out of the forests to slide along the shores of the Baltic. As we moved south each settlement that we passed seemed busier, gaudier, and dirtier than the last.
In Stockholm there were bikers with swastikas tattooed on their shaved scalps. On the outskirts of town, on the way to old Uppsala, I found the university campus and its library. There were no barriers, no ID checks, and with the liberalism characteristic of the Scandinavians the lectures were open to all. I heard an American from Harvard discourse on Nietzsche, and how National Socialism had twisted his rhetoric of the ‘blonde beast’ to include the Japanese, who were also to be considered an Aryan race. The Swedes were all blonde. They listened politely, and afterwards asked insightful questions in articulate English.
When their society seemed threatened by corruption, greed and violence, the Greeks looked to the North. Modern writers such as Karel Čapek and W. H. Auden turned to it for the same reasons, voicing a need that many of us in the south still feel. The northern fringes of Europe were once the edge of the world, a back-country of the imagination where reality and myth intertwined. Now with the growth of tourism these magnificent spaces have become accessible to us all. I thought of all the people I had met on my journey who had a deep love for the North and the peace that they found there. Of Paul Whitworth in Shetland, painting in blizzards and from his open boat while the North Atlantic storms raged. Of Peter and Berlina in Faroe, and how pleased they were to get home from their holidays in continental Europe. Of Anna and Ólafur in Iceland, starting new careers in London but always finding ways to take their lives back home. Of Jukku and Maria in Greenland, gazing forward to a future free of the constraints of colonial rule. Of Stefano and the tour guides in Svalbard, taking tourists out in safety to a world of polar bears and glaciers. Of Birgitte and Jøstein in Norway, Pigga and Antte in Finland, and Lasse and Kaisu Malmström in Sweden, who had all gone far out of their way in order to take me to a part of their country that they loved, so that I might love it too.
In the two and half thousand years since Pytheas made his voyage there have been shifts in Europe that to him would have seemed wildest fantasy. The northern countries no longer seem so primitive and barbaric as they once did to the Greek world. Following their centuries as the spawning grounds of Viking raiders the Scandinavian countries have developed a fierce ethic of social responsibility. Their health, education and social security systems are now the envy of the world, while those of Greece and the Mediterranean world struggle to keep up. Thanks to oil discoveries and robust state support for industry and enterprise they are now very rich countries (with taxes to match). In a recent survey examining the proportion of GNP spent on charity and foreign aid among developed countries, Norway, Sweden and Denmark came out on top.
Arctic Europe has changed a great deal in two and half thousand years. The threat posed by global warming seems to be the greatest challenge it currently faces. Part of its beauty lies in the seeming timelessness of its landscapes, but on my journey I had seen that that ‘timelessness’ was more fragile than it appeared. The Arctic is changing, and changing fast.
But its landscapes still give the traveller a magnificent sense of the sublime in nature. As his train sped south towards central Europe, Čapek tried to put this into words:
And then there is still another journey, or pilgrimage, North; this makes for nothing else but just the North; because there are birch trees and forests there, because grass grows there, and plenty of blessed water is sparkling there; because there is a silvery coolness there, and dewy mist, and altogether a beauty that is more tender and more severe than any other… no flaming South is so copious, and buxom, so juicy with sap and dew, so blessed with poverty and beauty, as the land of the midnight sun.
From Stockholm I took a bus to Oslo, and from there a train over the mountains to Bergen. From Bergen I caught a ferry west across the North Sea to Shetland. I was almost back home.