The place of greatest dignitie
John Davis, mariner,
1550?–1605
HERDS OF REINDEER move across ice and snow. Slim-shouldered Lapps squatting on skidoos nose their animals towards an arc of stockades. A man in a corral holds a pair of velvet antlers while another jabs a needle into damp haunch. I make my way towards the outer palisades, where Lapps beyond working age stoke beechwood fires and gulp from bowls of reindeer broth, faces masked in musky steam. The first new snow has fallen, and the Harrå Sámi are herding reindeer down to the winter grazing. A livid sun hangs on the horizon. Sámi, or Lapps, were the last nomadic people in Europe, and until recently castrated reindeer at this place by biting off their balls. In the stockade I take my baby son from his wooden sledge, prowed like a miniature Viking ship, and wrap him closer in his calf pelts.
The Lapps divided the corralled herd, each smaller group husbanded by an association of families (sijdda) in pastures close to home. Down at the end of summer, up at the end of winter; the cycle of life above the Arctic Circle. At half past three, the sun vanished. It was the cuspy season between white nights and darkness at noon, the period in which the Arctic turns inside out. The thunderous pounding stopped. Below the corral, people who had come to recover stray reindeer struggled to load them into stumpy horse boxes. In the distance, the lights of Harrå shimmered through a dark haze. The silence of the winter forest settled over the corral, fractured only by the cry of a nightjar. When I came to unwrap Reggie from his pelt, the soft green and orange beams of the Northern Lights swept the sky.
Fifteen years earlier I had spent some time in Antarctica. Its geographical unity and unownedness attracted the younger me, as did the lack of an indigenous human presence and inability to sustain terrestrial life. It was a metaphor for a terra incognita; an image of an alternate and better world. I was prejudiced against the complicated, life-infested north. Time passed, and I travelled briefly with the Sámi and their reindeer. I started thinking about the collar of lands round the Arctic Ocean. Fragmentation, disputed ownership, indigenous populations immobilised on the threshold of change – those very things Antarctica lacked appealed to the older me. Especially fragmentation. When I thought about the Arctic, in my mind’s eye I glimpsed an elegy for the uncertainties and doubts that are the chaperones of age. Was the Arctic a counterweight to the Antarctic? (The Greeks called it arktos, the Great Bear, or Northern Pole Star, and the Antarctic was the anti-arktos – the opposite.) Or was it just a frozen mirror image, and I who had changed?
The Arctic is our neighbour; part European; part North American; us. What could be less romantic? And the world seems a wearier place than it did a decade and a half ago. It is the Arctic that captures the spirit of the times. The Arctic is the lead player in the drama of climate change, and polar bears are its poster boys. So I went. On a speck of land in the northern reaches of the Arctic Ocean, the encircling water chaotic with floes, I heard a snow bunting sing. Not a single songbird breeds on the Antarctic continent. The sweet trill of the small black-and-white bird brought the Arctic to life.
Where is the Arctic? An ocean surrounded by continents, and an indistinct geographical zone. The top part – the High Arctic – is a dazzling hinterland where myth and history fuse; a white Mars. The Haughton Crater on Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic hosts camps of Martian aficionados testing potential housing in preparation for man’s arrival on the red planet (‘This is as close to Mars as we can get,’ one of them told me). The southern limits of the Arctic are moveable feasts. Some consider that the Arctic Circle at 66º 33' constitutes the frontier: people like the farmers in northern Sweden and Finland who wish to claim EU Arctic Farming subsidies. In Canada the definition fails, as swathes of typical Arctic territory (permafrost, permanent ice cover, absence of topsoil and significant vegetation, polar bears, all of these) lie well south of the Arctic Circle. Sixty-six degrees simply marks the point at which the sun fails to set at summer solstice (21 June) or to rise at winter solstice (21 December); climatological and other factors produce divergent conditions at different points on the Circle. The Gulf Stream warms the oceans and the surrounding air to create clement conditions for the subsidy-claiming Scandinavian farmers, and in Finland the viviparous lizard thrives north of the Arctic Circle, whereas parts of the sub-Arctic are colder than anywhere else on earth. The residents of Oymyakon in the Sakha Republic three degrees outside the Arctic Circle once recorded a temperature of -72.11ºC (-97.8ºF), a level at which trees explode with a sound like gunfire and exhaled breath falls to the ground in a tinkle of crystals. In addition, some cartographers and politicians use the isothermal line to define the Arctic, thus including all the places where the long-term mean temperature of the warmest month is below 10ºC. And in the biggest gerrymandered constituency on the planet there are four North Poles.1
I think the southern boundary of the Arctic is most appropriately defined by a combination of the treeline and the southern limit of continuous permafrost on land; and by the average extent of winter pack ice at sea.
Since 1900, the mean global temperature has risen by 0.6ºC. In the Arctic, the figure is 2–3º. But there is still a lot of ice. In July 2008 I took a Russian ice-breaker across the Arctic Ocean and stood day after day on the bridge with the captain (a saturnine figure who talked too fast, like so many natives of Vladivostok) and we watched the cutaway prow smashing through thousands of tonnes of it. The extent of the ice is not the only critical issue. Unlike the Southern Ocean that swirls around the Antarctic, the Arctic Ocean is more or less enclosed – what marine geographers call a mediterranean sea. Most of the water that leaves flows through a deep channel south-west of the Faroe Islands (it carves through a row of transatlantic sills). In this gap, cold, salty water from the Arctic moves south beneath warm, fresher water from the tropics travelling north. Various ‘pump’ sites in the Greenland Sea shift these warm and cold currents around the planet. As glaciers melt and water flowing from the Arctic becomes less salty, the pumps could lose power, and a growing body of data indicates that they will turn off altogether. Or will the Siberian permafrost first break down and release tides of carbon dioxide and methane as well as baby mammoths still sporting their ginger hair? Either way, the survival of civilisation as we know it hangs on what happens in the Arctic. Anxiety, panic, concern and scepticism have inflamed the public imagination. As we powered through the ice, I asked the captain what he thought about the big melt. He looked out over the splitting white, took a deep drag on his Troika cigarette, and yelled over the racket of six engines, ‘I not know.’
Scientists, for the most part, don’t know either. I spent many weeks hunched over holes in the Greenland ice sheet or hauling samples from the slimy bottom of an Alaskan lake. As far as possible I tried to enter the minds of individual researchers to see what made them creative. My own mind was open. History reveals many periods of cooling and warming, and I learned that the science is more dramatic than media headlines indicate, as well as a million times more complicated, nuanced and uncertain. In many respects we do not know how ecosystems will respond to climate change. The Arctic has been the locus for Armageddon two generations in a row now. It was the front line of the Cold War, with both sides pouring money into long-range nuclear bomber installations and lone figures crouching on floes straining to hear enemy subs (or was that a ringed seal scratching its back?). Nuclear holocaust, then apocalyptic climate change: something about the region attracts millennial anxiety. I picked up a scent among the Lappish reindeer and pursued it through the journeys described here. What does the Arctic tell us about our past? What does it reveal of the future?
Besides climate panic, the emergence of the Arctic as an energy frontier has similarly shunted the region into public consciousness. The Arctic already produces about a tenth of the world’s oil and a quarter of its gas.2 As you read this, geologists and palaeontologists from many nations are chipping indicator fossils from bedrock to locate more. Hydrocarbon extraction is set to remain an economic driver across the polar regions, and issues around the exploitation of natural resources recur throughout these pages: hard-rock mining as well as oil and gas (a hard-rock mine excavates ores from which metals are extracted). Everybody wants what the Arctic has and as a result, shortly after I started working on this book, a simmering international row over ownership boiled over onto the front pages. All five polar nations – Denmark, Norway, Russia, Canada and the United States – set about proving that their continental shelves extend far to the north under the waters of the Arctic Ocean. This, they hope, will secure navigation rights over mineral reserves beneath the seabed. In July 2007 a Russian nuclear submarine sent a diver to drill a titanium flag into the bedrock under the North Pole itself, a gesture that made the Pole as Russian as gold teeth. The Canadian prime minister went haring up to his bit of the Arctic to express comparable views. In Chukotka, the back end of Siberia and a region the size of Turkey that Russia had forgotten, President Medvedev stepped out of his helicopter onto the tundra to pat a reindeer and listen to some pleasant Chukchi folk songs in a local school. (I was there!) He was the first Russian head of state to bother; no tsar had ever come within a thousand miles of Chukotka. Five days previously, in a speech on Arctic policy to the Security Council in Moscow, Medvedev had flagged the reason for his visit. ‘This region’, he said, ‘accounts for around 20 per cent of Russia’s gross domestic product and 22 per cent of our national exports . . . Experts estimate that the Arctic continental shelf could contain around a quarter of the world’s hydrocarbon resources.’ The main issue, Medvedev insisted, ‘is that of reliably protecting our national interests in the region’. Like the diver who planted the flag, Mr President was showing how very Russian it was in the north. That night’s television news followed him touring the new supermarket, the first in the region, where he peered into freezers while a supervisor gave a running commentary on cylinders of Arctic Roll made in a factory on the outskirts of Petersburg.
The burst of political concern highlights the transitional state of the inhabited Arctic. In Nuuk I saw a pair of nylon panties pegged on a washing line next to a row of curing seal ribs. Something mysterious and indefinable has outlived cultural collapse. There was the twenty-year-old Inupiat woman with two children; almost everyone in her family was drunk almost all the time, she had never been out hunting, she ate Western junk food and watched The Simpsons. ‘I sense where I come from’, she said, ‘when I see the milky ice on the creek split in the spring.’ Inuit art has expressed a spiritual connection between man and nature for three thousand years, and in the myths and beliefs of the far north, humanity and the world give each other meaning. The Magnetic North describes the semi-inhabited fringes of the Arctic: the transition zone. ‘It’s not about polar bears,’ says Mary Simon, head of the Tapiriit Kanatami, which represents Canada’s 45,000 Inuit. ‘It’s about people.’
Although the beauties and intractable problems of the contemporary Arctic framed my journeys, I could not ignore generations of explorers. Like the scientists who succeeded them, they went north to unlock secrets. Their adventures frequently descended into a tragic farce of shoe-eating (when they ran out of food) and poetic death, but still; heroic individual struggle is a theme of this book. Who can resist the David squaring up to a Goliath-army of towering bergs? In America, Arctic mania persisted from the Civil War to the First World War – even at a time when Americans were going west, the North Pole and its whaling waters cast a spell, luring Pole-seekers in little wooden ships, in balloons, zeppelins, planes, ice-breakers and submarines. A hundred years ago, in 1909, two Americans on separate expeditions claimed to have stood at the North Pole. Over in the Old World even Pope Pius XI was not immune to worldly longing. As a young priest, Achille Ratti, as he then was, applied to join one of the Duke of Abruzzi’s expeditions. Ratti was a keen alpinista, but the duke judged that a priest would be bad for morale.
That said, this is not a comprehensive history. I have picked out stories illustrative of themes (the drama of pioneering polar aviation, or the heroism of the Norwegian Resistance); so legendary that it would be perverse to ignore them (Sir John Franklin, shoe-consumer to beat them all); or because I liked them too much to leave them out – though in this last category a superfluity of candidates did oblige me to ditch some favourites. I was sorry that Valerian Albanov failed to make the last cut. He was a gifted navigator whose ship froze into the Kara, most dreaded of Arctic seas. Fed by four of the great Siberian rivers, the Kara is frozen for nine months of the year, an annihilating wilderness spread over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. In 1912 Albanov set off from the Murman coast on a projected 7,000-mile voyage to Vladivostok in search of fresh marine hunting grounds. When the Kara ice closed in, twenty-five men and one woman drifted 2,400 miles in eighteen months, during which time they ran out of fuel and had to chop up the wooden walls of the cabins to keep the samovar going. In April 1914, Albanov and thirteen others set off by sledge for an uninhabited archipelago using a hopeless map and a faulty chronometer. Three men quickly returned to the vessel, but the rest marched on for ninety-two days. They were weak and dreaming of peaches, but Albanov got them there carrying an icon of St Nikolas under his parka. He couldn’t keep them alive though. I stood on the headland where nine lie in unmarked graves. A passing Russian boat rescued the other two, Albanov one of them. Those stranded on the ship were never seen again.
When I left the Sámi to their herds back in 2002, my Lappish host presented me with a bracelet made from the base of an antler. More bangle than bracelet, as the two ends didn’t quite meet, it was a handsome object that I liked very much – I fancied that it smelled of smoke and beechwood – and it sat on my desk for many months as I mapped out my journeys. One day, as I fingered the bangle, I hit on the idea for a structure. I would make a circular, anticlockwise journey – Siberia to Alaska to Canada to Greenland to Spitsbergen to Lapland and back to Russia, to the White Sea. The ends would not quite meet up. The voyage would be a series of small journeys spread over two years, each planned to shed some dim light on the enigmas of the Arctic. Russia was a natural starting point, as it has more Arctic territory than any other country, 5,000 miles of coastline that unspools from Europe to the Pacific and a wilderness of tundra in which everything has evolved in response to cold. The southern boundary of Russian permafrost coincides with the treeline, the unguarded frontier that loops from the Finnish border, south of Murmansk, across the White Sea and chops off the top of the Urals before proceeding through the Norilsk nitrate fields and dipping into a U-bend on the central Siberian plateau. The coniferous forest below, a wide and monotonous sub-Arctic sash known as taiga, is the salient ecological feature of all northern Russia, a little-known region haunted by mythical spirits and gulag ghosts. Chekhov said that only migratory birds know where the taiga ends.
Twenty-six different ethnic peoples have herded and fished the Russian Arctic for centuries, yet they are invisible in most versions of the national past – unlike the dashing horsemen of the southern steppe or the turbanned anglers of Lake Baikal. Their Arctic land, like the Federation itself, is split by the Urals, the mountain border separating Europe and Asia. The Asian part of Russia, one twelfth of the landmass of the earth, consists of Siberia and the Russian Far East, and Chukotka, where Medvedev inspected the Arctic Roll, is as far as you can go without running the risk of bumping into Sarah Palin. This was to be my starting point. Nine time zones from Moscow, the region is closed to foreigners, and has, in a quarter of a million square miles, no soil in which anything can grow. (As one traveller said of the mountain basins of north-eastern Siberia, ‘twelve months of winter, and the rest is summer’.) Roman Abramovich chose Chukotka as his fiefdom: because of the region’s low tax base it suited him to register his companies in Chukotka, and while he was at it he got himself elected governor. Small children run around wearing Chelsea caps. Maybe the reindeer will be next.
Tundra looks the same whatever the longitude, but whereas Chukotka is continental, the true Canadian Arctic has crumbled into a glaciated archipelago. In June 2007 I went there to join a small, publicly funded geology project. The island was bigger than Switzerland, but nobody in Toronto had heard of it. Every day I went off in a helicopter with a pair of geologists and a local man who waved guns at polar bears; every night the scientists met in a tent in the middle of camp and discussed what they had observed in a session they called Rock Talk. Out on the tundra, as bull caribou spooked us and horned larks looped high, Inuit polar bear monitors told me about killing spiral-tusked narwhals in the bay and playing Poker Stars on the Internet.
Across the Davis Strait, on the top of the Greenland ice sheet, a bulbous-topped pole resembling a parking meter plugs the most sacred site of Arctic science – the hole from which, in 1993, a team of researchers pulled two miles of ice cores that awakened the world to the speed of contemporary climate change. I camped nearby, on a dot of the ice cap, with a team of atmospheric chemists who spend three or four months each summer in temperatures of -30ºC, measuring halogens coming off the snowpack in parts of one or two per trillion. The Arctic is jammed with paradox but there in Greenland one struck me forcefully. In the northern hemisphere, the people who live furthest from pollutants are the ones most affected by them. A leading public health expert has said that in the 1990s, many Greenlanders were so toxic they would have qualified as hazardous waste. The marine food chain is among many complex factors in this catastrophe, as it passes some of the deadliest pollutants upwards. The bio-accumulated toxins are stored in fat, and indigenous peoples eat a fat-rich diet. The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme recently logged data revealing that endocrine-disrupting chemicals handed up the food chain have triggered changes in the sex of unborn children in the first three weeks of gestation, resulting in the birth of twice as many girls as boys in some villages in Greenland and among the Inuit nations of eastern Russia. The Svalbard archipelago, which includes Spitsbergen, is further north than Greenland or Russia and the secrets of its toxic status are only beginning to emerge: not in humans, as there are none, but in bears, seals and whales. The bowhead whale has a long story to tell. A small (50-ton) male harvested in May 2007 had a harpoon embedded in its neck blubber. One of the busy whaling yards in New Bedford, Massachusetts manufactured the weapon in 1890, when Benjamin Harrison was president and Herman Melville growing old in obscurity. Slow growth and long life are characteristics of polar organisms: an Arctic poppy takes two years to husband the energy to form a two-millimetre bulbil. This is biological haiku.
Pollution, plunder, the gleeful killings of the Norse sagas – the Arctic is not a white Garden of Eden. All kinds of degradation crop up in the Inuit past: these pages contain a story of the deliberate slow starvation of an orphan. And there is epic cruelty in the north. History is a catalogue of man’s inhumanity to man, as one knows all too well, but in a monastery on the White Sea where many thousands of gulag prisoners died, I heard and I believed that in all the terribleness, ‘the murderers have not killed the spirit. The spirit lives.’ There was something indefinably redemptive folded up in the layers of Arctic mystery. Explorers, scientists, rogue writers – we were all on its tail.
In Ittoqqortoormiit, a municipality the size of Great Britain with a population of 562, a girl in Wrangler jeans and Nike trainers drinks Coca-Cola with her sealskin-clad grandmother. Uncluttered polar landscapes reveal differences lost in the south. Semi-subsistence marine mammal hunters still harpoon walrus in north-west Greenland, and if the solitary Inuit no longer stands motionless over a seal hole for twenty-four hours at a stretch, his father did. (Compare the Comanche taming bison on the plains. He is as remote as Odin.) Above all else, the stripped-down Arctic exposes the way each country has treated its indigenous peoples. Every nation devastates native cultures, even if it doesn’t actually kill everyone off. Russians did it with bureaucracy, Americans with money, Canadians (in the end) with kindness. Swedes and Finns did it with chainsaws that chopped down forests. And everyone did it with booze and syphilis. Acculturation is a theme of The Magnetic North. It is a grim story, but I was not looking for a pretty picture. I was looking ‘to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory’.
The laboratory effect of the polar regions also amplifies national stereotypes. Norwegian expeditioners share a sleeping bag for nine months before suggesting that they might start addressing one another by their first names, Italian aviators emit cubic tonnes of hot air when their balloon crashes and Americans in thrall to the cult of the individual almost kill themselves in the attempt to be first because being first is all that matters. Elsewhere, fools think being British is enough to beat Johnny Savage; slaves of Soviet ideology make two-hour speeches on the role of the Fifth Party Congress while drifting on a pane of ice 1,000 miles from land; and Danes quietly go native in Greenland, where getting married involves moving to her side of the igloo. Propaganda? Mussolini despatched airships to illustrate the technical brilliance of a rejuvenated Italy; Dickens transmogrified the shoe-eating failure of Franklin into a fine victory in which 127 dead sailors were right and the Inuit, who were still fishing, were wrong; Stalin used aviators to deflect attention from the show trials, and shot his aircraft designers when the planes crashed. Where is post-war American anxiety more solidly visible than the lonely DEW line radar stations strung out across the western polar lands, the raw poetry of the name winning through despite itself?
Bathed in Arctic clarity, the Greenland Vikings enter the realm of parable. Theirs was among the most bizarre colonies ever to have flourished. Greenland is an inhospitable land offering marginal opportunities for the pastoral farmer, but when a longship glided into peaceful fjord waters in about 980, Erik the Red and his warriors fell in love with a patch of lush meadowland. The 5,000-strong colony thrived for almost half a millennium. Greenland Norse lived like their kin in Fennoscandia: under feudal conditions in a federation of chieftains, taking care over their churches and cathedrals, killing each other in quarrels with zest, sticking rigidly to pastoralism even when hay refused to grow, foreswearing fish even when hungry, burning wood not blubber even though there were no trees, and sending their crusade tithe to the Pope in the form of walrus tusks and polar bear hides. But after 450 years they all died. The mottled grey walls of their church at Hvalsey remain, dwarfed by mountains and the luminous whiteness of the summit snows, glassless windows looking blindly over the silent fjord 600 years after Torstein Olafsson and Sigrid Bjørnsdatter exchanged wedding vows in 1408. That marriage was the last recorded event in Norse Greenlandic history, the church a lonely monument to what man can achieve, and what he can lose. On a June day the ruins solidified a sense of transience – even reproach. Why did the Greenland Norse fail after such feats of physical and cultural survival? The climate did alter, as over the course of the fourteenth century the Medieval Warm Period cooled into the Little Ice Age, but the Inuit in Greenland survived, and anyway the Norse colonists had weathered climatic fluctuations before. As I set out on my own journey I wondered what lessons were buried beneath the lintels of Hvalsey. I had a photograph folded in my passport of baby Reggie in his little wooden palk alongside a herd of grazing reindeer (he could write now, and had captioned the picture ‘A Reg on a sledge!’). When I took it out, I thought of the ruined church at Hvalsey, the sudden failure of the Norse who had flourished for so long, and the uncomfortable truth that the unifying theme of collapsed civilisations is collective blindness to the depletion of natural resources. One wonders how historical hindsight will judge our own pursuit of oil at all costs.
The raw beauty of high latitudes has inspired an elite band of artists and writers and some of their stories crept into my own, especially when they informed a contemporary aspect of the Arctic. In Greenland Rockwell Kent painted with his brush sticking out of a hole in his mitten, and in the 1960s the Togolese writer Tété-Michel Kpomassie got off a ship and tried to live like an Inuit. He was twice the height of everyone else and the only black man for a thousand miles, but he integrated all right – within two months he was hospitalised with a suspected case of gonorrhoea. Many saw art as a flight back to nature. Others invested the Arctic with their own imaginative longings. Arctic stories usually embrace an element of myth, even those purporting to be true. Twelfth-century Norsemen told of mermen and mermaids, while Elizabethan navigators sprinkled their maps with bergs and glaciers created by the optical illusions common in refracted light on the Arctic Ocean. The myth of a circumpolar land that included the North Pole inspired travellers for centuries (some packed dinner suits in the event of royal hospitality upon arrival in the illusory land); when they accepted its non-existence, they pursued another myth – that of an open polar sea that was not occluded in ice (now, of course, that is turning out to be true). The Arctic attracts fiction to its facts with remorseless zeal. The two Americans lied about being first to the Pole, the celebrated 100 Eskimo words for snow are a canard, the fourteen-year-old midshipman Horatio Nelson did not fight off a polar bear as my Ladybird book promised. Though I began to sympathise with the Nelsonian position after a close encounter of my own.
Even in a region of myth and fiction, the chapter now opening in the Arctic is notably uncertain. There is no coherent picture of what the region is or has been or will be. I like that: an opacity, like the drawing down of a veil. There are no answers, only stories, and irreducible difficulties. Both polar regions appeal to something visceral in the spirit, especially in an era when we have lost contact with the natural world. But in the Arctic, unlike its southern counterpart, there is a figure at the centre of the picture. The Arctic is an image of the real world in all its degradation and beauty, and it is intimately connected to us – to our future, our crises and our dreams. John Davis, most sympathetic of Elizabethan navigators and a pioneering scientist in an era before science was partitioned off from everyday life, called the Arctic ‘the place of greatest dignitie’. As soon as I read that phrase, I identified with Davis. I love the pared-down existence of polar lands and the grace of their peoples under pressure.
1 1. The North Geographic Pole. At 90ºN, the fixed cap of the earth. 2. The North Magnetic Pole. The compass points to this one, and it wanders about. 3. The North Geomagnetic Pole. It centres the earth’s magnetic field, and also shifts. 4. The Northern Pole of Inaccessibility. The point in the Arctic Ocean farthest from land, approximately 680 miles (1,100 kilometres) north of Alaska, at 84º 05' N, 174º 85' W. A fifth pole, The North Celestial Pole, is in the sky: the astronomical extension of a line drawn through the earth’s axis.
2 Figures produced in 2007 by AMAP (the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme).