In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
From W.H. Auden,
‘Musée des Beaux Arts’
IN 1993, CORES pulled from Greenland ice awakened the world to the speed of contemporary climate change. Teams of corers drilled out almost two miles of ice, the end section 110,000 years old. At the time, they were the deepest cores ever recovered. Bella Bergeron was one of the drillers. ‘We drilled for four years,’ she told me in a Mississippi purr, ‘and halfway through, we started realising it was a big deal. Basically, the cores showed the anthropogenic impact on atmospheric composition – a big increase in sulphates, for example, from 1900 onwards, and a leap in nitrates starting in 1955.’ She was about the size of my ten-year-old son – an elf – and it was hard to imagine her manhandling a telegraph pole of ice.
Bergeron was back in Greenland working on a shallow-core environmental chemistry project. Cores contain excellent records of slow, orbitally-caused climate change (temperature fluctuations caused by orbital wiggles). They also yield information on specific events that drive the climate system, like volcanic eruptions. The six-strong Summit team were looking at volcanic ash layers to establish what happened to the sulphur deposited after a 1454 eruption on the South Pacific island of Kuwae: the event appeared in the ice at a depth of about 145 metres. They had been slugging it out for three weeks when I arrived. The landscape around their camp was entirely without topographical features: a glittering white plain that thrummed with energy as it batted back the sun’s heat. But there is nothing quiet about a coring camp. A generator roared away behind the two drillers, one of whom sat in front of a control console while the other stood in a pit manually manoeuvring a drill into a borehole. It was a 10 cm drill suspended inside an 8 m pole, and it was attached to a motorised pulley. After it had drilled out a 1 m core, the pulley hauled the pole out of the hole and a graduate student wielding a long-handled lavatory plunger prodded the core out onto a table. Another student moved it to another table, sealed it into a tubular polythene bag and packed it into a box. Each individual core had already cost several thousand dollars to extract. ‘It’s a delicate business,’ reported one Greenland corer. ‘A nose drip has more of some of the contaminants under examination than many metres of core.’
Condensed in the air as aerosols, the tiny sulphate droplets from volcanic emissions cool the earth by reflecting sunlight back into space, a countervailing force to greenhouse warming. After the 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, farmers in North America and Europe dubbed the following year, ‘the one without a summer’, and the crops failed. Over a mug of tea in a tent, the generator off, Bergeron expanded on what her cores might reveal. ‘The stuff comes out of the volcano as sulphur,’ she began. ‘It ends in the ice as sulphate or sulphuric acid, and it’s that chemical transformation that interests us. It’s the same process as the oxidisation that occurs when you burn coal and get acid rain. We are using the Arctic as a litmus paper for the planet.’ Earlier she and I stood alongside the pile of cores. ‘Snow that fell during the American Civil War,’ she noted, pointing at one plastic tube. ‘Battle of Hastings era,’ she said as she tapped another.
Bergeron and her co-driller spent the rest of their tea break extolling the new flange-type apparatus at the end of the drill. It had recently replaced the old ‘drill dogs’, and the drillers were ecstatic. Ice coring is a complex enterprise fraught with operational hazards. I had seen hot-water drillers at work on the West Antarctic ice sheet, and it seemed to me it was the hardest kind of science that there could possibly be, from a practical point of view, that involving extra-planetary travel excepted. It made the celebrated cores from the nineties even more impressive. The project was called GISP-2, which stood for Greenland Ice Sheet Project, and one day forty-one-year-old Bergeron took me to see the original borehole. Topped with a bulbous pole resembling a parking meter, the hole constitutes the most sacred monument in Arctic science. ‘We couldn’t get accurate dates beyond 110,000 years because of flow distortion,’ Bergeron explained as we crunched around the tubular temple to technology, ‘but we think we went roughly to 200,000 years.’ They worked underground, in a drill dome, and were sprayed constantly with butyl acetate, the chemical used to prevent the borehole from collapsing under the weight of the ice. Worse, a sound system played Pink Floyd. Off shift, the recreational folklore was legendary. It ranged from the Spear-Throwing Olympics to a murky scandal referred to as Gispgate and a diesel-powered sauna built from surplus construction material (it was still there, and I used it). Twenty-eight kilometres to the west, another drill mission, the Danish Greenland Ice Core Project, ran simultaneously with GISP-2. The two teams produced exact replicas of one another’s data. It was one of the most fruitful endeavours in the history of science, and it ushered in a new era of palaeoenvironmental investigation.
Over the course of GISP-2, military aircraft flew 83,800 pounds of ice out of Summit. The National Ice Core Lab in Denver stores the unanalysed portions, and anyone who wants a bit is able to go before a panel to make a case. ‘We only stopped when we came to silty ice and rock that turned out to be a boulder,’ Bergeron concluded. ‘And we also analysed that.’ Later, when I watched her working, I noticed that when a core was fractured at one end, she took it as a personal failure. ‘I perceive the Arctic’, she told me, ‘as a beautiful route to knowledge.’ Admirable: but not if we use the knowledge to bolster our own particular certainties. We carry on as if we live at the end of time, but, as cores graphically reveal, we actually exist in a continuum, and are less important than we care to think. The awareness had survived among the Inuit, people who live peacefully with the certainty of their own cosmic insignificance – not something that could be said of Robert Peary. But the greatest explorers knew it. Failure, Fridtjof Nansen acknowledged, would bring ‘only disappointed human hopes, nothing more’.
I had flown to Greenland from Copenhagen, over the ice cap and down to the west coast, where aquamarine pools flecked the rucked glacier ice. I was heading for Kangerlussuaq, but over the tannoy the pilot said we were going to Søndre Strømfjord, the old Danish name. We followed the brown sinews of the fjord deep inland. On decanting into the airport terminal, everyone hurtled into the airside duty-free store. I followed, thinking this must be the route out, into the free open air of Greenland. But no. People were stocking up on vodka.
It was June, and the sky the fabled Arctic blue. It was my first trip back to the north after a winter’s hibernation in lower latitudes, and I had beaten the mosquitoes to it. The temperature was 15°C, the air suffused with renascent clarity. I was a guest in Greenland, bizarrely, of the American government. Its National Science Foundation supports a research station at the top of the ice cap, and I had been invited as a writer-in-residence. The Greenland ice sheet is a protagonist in the ongoing drama of climate change: with more ice than anywhere other than Antarctica, the speed of its melt is a critical factor. If the drain proceeds at its current lively rate, thousands of tonnes of fresh water will flood the oceans, reducing salinity, raising sea levels and disrupting currents. I was keen to see the famous ice sheet before it vanished, even if I couldn’t see anything happening (it was not yet melting that fast). Ed, whom I had met fourteen years previously in the heavy shop at McMurdo Station, the main US Antarctic base 12,000 miles away, welcomed me warmly outside the terminal building of the Kangerlussuaq airfield. He had fixed a fuel pipe on a stove for me, and we both remembered. Ed was now working on Arctic logistics, and he and his colleagues at ‘Kanger’ – horrible American abbreviation – organised transit arrangements for Summit Station. We tossed my bags into the back of his pickup and drove to my billet, the promisingly acronymed KISS (Kangerlussuaq International Science Support). On the way, Ed revealed that my flight to Summit had already been delayed for three days.
Back already at the polar waiting game, I settled into KISS, a functional two-storey facility on stilts on a long sloping road among half a dozen other buildings of the same persuasion. My room had a small window, two single beds and the kind of self-assembly wardrobe that could be despatched with one angry slam of its plywood door. Inside the wardrobe, someone had left a set of golf clubs. Almost all the other bedrooms were empty, as it was still early in the season, but a few wanderers prowled the corridors, waiting to depart for their field camp. I found the arrhythmia of constant daylight disorientating, and woke in the middle of my first night in Greenland when a layer of dark nimbostratus split down the middle, pouring sunshine through the curtainless window. Sledge dogs were howling in their pens near the airport perimeter fence, as welcome as the Canadian dogs which serenaded me through my first night in Iqaluit.
Originally a seasonal Inuit hunting and camping ground, Kangerlussuaq had developed as an American airbase in the Second World War. (After the German occupation of Denmark in the spring of 1940, the US military took over responsibility for the defence of Greenland. They were worried that the Germans would use the island as a military staging area, or cannibalise its cryolite, a crucial component in the manufacture of aircraft aluminium.) US Bluie West Eight became a refuelling station for bombers and cargo carriers headed for the fronts: at one point, it soaked up 8,000 personnel. In the fifties, Bluie metamorphosed into a supply base for the four DEW line radar stations in Greenland; this was when the Arctic took on the mantle of imperial frontier. The base closed in 1992. In truth, Kangerlussuaq was still little more than an airfield. There were no roads to other settlements. The community consisted of several dozen houses, a couple of airline office monsters, an arc of warehouses, a post office, a shop and a pizza parlour. Kangerlussuaq was not run down and depressing, like Iqaluit, nor an identikit of southern cities, like Fairbanks. Nor was it an ill-fused coupling of old and new like Anadyr. It was a transit camp in a spectacular setting. The sallow saffron hills of Mount Hassel overlooked the settlement to the north; more mountains loomed to the north-east; and in the south stood the cliffs of Black Ridge, where I hiked every day beyond the Watson River while I waited for my military flight up to Summit.
I saw musk oxen there, on the slopes above the shining eye of Lake Ferguson. They were truffling for lichen and sedge in a small herd, relics of the ice ages blinded by curtains of chocolate guard hair. The broad, flat bosses of their horns, pressing on the brow, swept down and out in a low, wide curve that ended in lethal tips. A polar bear resembles a grizzly and a caribou looks like an impala, but a musk ox only looks like another musk ox. It is the only Arctic mammal that sits out a winter blizzard: besides the ground-length outer hair, the musk ox has a thick wool fleece of exceptional warmth-to-weight ratio. The mountains behind rose in a crescendo, peaks sharp against the sky. The air tasted pure and sharp. Millions of tiny flowers swirled over the foothills: purple saxifrage, white Lapland rosebays and pink willowherb, known to Greenlanders as niviarsiaq, ‘the young girl’. When I strode around the scarps with their tight carpets of crowberries and fireweed the exhilaration of the moment carried everything before it: nuannaarpoq, the Inuit say, to take extravagant pleasure in being alive. Late one evening, squinting in buttery light, I sat down on a slope, watching a musk ox downwind rake its horns over a circle of earth that once was a tent ring. Prehistoric immigrants from North America followed musk oxen migration routes down the Greenlandic coasts. One only had to look over the berry-bearing hills with their shards of bone and feather to glimpse a heaped-up past. The musk ox looked at me sceptically. Cliffs dark as pitch frowned towards the Davis Strait, and Canada, and on the other side, far off, the ectoplasmic fog of the ice sheet blurred the horizon. Straight ahead, airstrip and fjord blended into a single caramel agglomeration. The carmine Greenland Air Otters and Cessnas were parked near the terminal, but the hulking National Guard C-131s were out at the western end of the strip. From where I was, they looked like ships coming up the fjord, tail fins rising like a mast.
Erik the Red invented the name Grøn-Land after sailing his longboat from Iceland in 982. He wanted to make the place sound fertile to potential settlers. In fact, crops couldn’t be grown anywhere, and still can’t, though around the modern capital Nuuk the government subsidises a little sheep farming (the animals must remain inside all winter). As for Erik, when his friends arrived he had to brazen it out. Half of those who had survived the journey went back, some to one of the dismal shipwrecks that darken the sagas. The others persevered, facing the unknown.
Denmark laid claim to Greenland, a landmass fifty times its size, under Christian IV in 1605.1 Missionaries, trade monopolies and general attrition notwithstanding, Greenland Inuit experienced less interference than their Canadian neighbours and had not been comprehensively outnumbered like their American ones. Avanersuaq in the northwest actually managed to remain outside Danish control until 1937, making the Inuit there the last group of all the world’s Arctic peoples to live as subjects of a nation state. The spirit of another age, however, moved to the far north. In 1979, Greenlanders won Home Rule. Greenlandic Inuktituk staged a revival in schools, though linguistic differences pointed up less tractable cultural divides: numbers in Greenlandic only go up to twelve – after that you use the word for ‘many’, which is amerlasoorpassuit. Six years after Home Rule, following the disappearance of the cod when the ocean cooled, and then the arrival of a foreign fishing armada trawling for other species, Greenlandic politicians managed to wrest their country out of the EEC, to which Denmark had been admitted in 1972. While I was in Kangerlussuaq, the main national radio station broadcast a speech by foreign minister Aleqa Hammond in which she explained, ‘We do not feel ourselves part of Europe – we are an Arctic people.’
Hammond is an Inuit, like most of the 57,000 Greenlanders, and majority status has allowed her people to march forwards with a greater degree of cultural integrity than the Chukchi and the other Russian herders. Greenlanders have made the leap from subsistence hunting to a developed, technology-dependent society in two generations. On the radio Hammond went on to express the wish that independence would one day follow Home Rule, a hope shared by most Greenlanders, Danish subsidies amounting to a third of GDP notwithstanding. A midwinter referendum in 2008 moved the country closer to this goal when an overwhelming majority approved a system of increased local control and the replacement of the subsidies with a share of oil revenues, following the Canadian model (hopefully with more success). In one of the many ironies of a warming climate, the loss of ice that has deprived many Greenlanders of traditional hunting grounds may yet usher in foreign investment, and jobs, as newly exposed rock yields up its minerals. A trial dig by Hudson Resources of Vancouver recently unearthed a 2.4 carat diamond at Garnet Lake in west Greenland, prompting the arrival of diamond hunters from all over the world. Exploration companies have also located sources of gold, zinc and lead, and oil multinationals are negotiating licences to explore vast tracts of open water around the coast. The story already had a familiar ring.
From Kangerlussuaq I eventually made it up to Summit with the New York Air National Guard 109th on a ski-equipped C-130 4-prop Hercules. It was a two-hour flight, and once we had crossed the coastal margins the glaciers stretched out like paws. The active faces were blue and creamy, and rolled into vertical folds, curtain-style. Then it was corrugated ice and more green pools until the dark tops of the coastal mountains disappeared below the encircling horizon and we looked out from the plane over hundreds of miles of flat and hypnotising white simmering in refracted sunlight. The pools are moulins. A moulin is a tubular chute that travels all the way to the bedrock at the bottom of the ice sheet and carries the meltwater to the ice edge: it is part of the complex internal plumbing system regulating the volume of the ice cap. The water acts as a lubricant, speeding up the flow of the glacier to the ocean. In an attempt to assess the speed of the flow, in 2008 NATO scientists threw several hundred yellow rubber ducks down a moulin, each stamped with an email address and the offer of a reward in three languages, one of them Inuktituk. In places 3,000 metres thick, Greenland’s frozen coating covers 80 per cent of a country four times the size of France. Like the musk ox, Summit ice really is a relic of the last ice age. The ice has survived because its volume sustains its own climate. It reflects light and heat, its elevation keeps it cool, and it is too large to be dented by warm weather systems from the south. Its mass is even likely to protect it from substantial diminution as the climate warms, largely because increased melting at the margins will be offset by a rise in snowfall in the interior.2 Glaciers, on the other hand, are more sensitive to climatic shifts. The four-mile-wide Jakobshavn glacier near Ilulissat has doubled its speed in a decade, flowing towards the coast at about 7 kilometres per year and annually discharging in excess of 10 million cubic miles of ice. As flow accelerates, tongues shatter and retreat (the remains of the Jakobshavn tongue retreated more than 6 kilometres between 2000 and 2006). There is nothing new in climate variability. During a medieval warm period, Britain exported wine to France and vintners harvested grapes in southern Norway.
Suddenly – we must have reached 72°N – a handful of tiny buildings and a few dozen orange pyramid tents appeared below. Then we landed, the door of the Hercules opened, engines still thundering, and I stepped out in a tumultuous rush of thin air, diamond dust swirling above my head and the snow crust friable beneath my boots. Camp manager Cathy Young was waiting to meet me, shouting indecipherably against the engines. I piled my gear on a banana sledge and we rode a snowmobile to the Big House, a structure bristling with antennae that resembled a rectangular sputnik. Inside, four long tables and three sofas separated the galley at one end from the communications room at the other. A disco ball and lines of cut-out snowflakes dangled over a small library. While I was waiting for Cathy to start the safety briefing, I pulled out a volume. It was a guide to the Bahamas. After the briefing, Cathy and I stood on the Big House deck and watched the C-130 that had brought me making three attempts to take off again. Before the fourth, a crewman got off and fixed up rockets to give it an extra boost. It was called Jet Assisted Take-Off.
Cathy had nine staff, including two cooks and a paramedic. Polar environments attract the type of support staff that used to be called ‘alternative’, and at Summit you could barely move for ponytails swishing in the Arctic breeze (that was the men: the women favoured Number 2 cuts). The carpenters met for yoga in the recreation tent before going on shift. The Arctic drew in not outsiders but misfits, as I had seen in Alaska: people who wouldn’t submit to the routines of the south. It was not a place for the indolent. The ice cap in particular was inimical to life. To manufacture water, Cathy’s team collected snow and melted it with heat expelled from the generator shed. Regulations required residents to husband water: one short shower every four days. You could tell how far someone was into the four. The staff lived in the Greenhouse, another stilted sputnik, but the twenty-three scientists and visitors camped in Tent City. The tents were called Arctic Ovens. They were standard double-wall pyramids adapted for the polar regions with a dark lining designed to absorb solar radiation and therefore heat the interior. Over the course of a long first night, I had time to reflect that the name was misleading and the theory flawed (the tent was too big for the radiation to heat it). The temperature subsided to a demoralising -27. I couldn’t get warm, I couldn’t sleep, and, much the worst thing, I couldn’t find a way of reading without my hands freezing. Camp was at 10,500 feet, but the effective pressure altitude was between 12,000 and 13,000 feet, so I also experienced the tight-headed feeling that precedes altitude sickness. I had been guzzling Diamox, a prescription prophylactic; but when I was still, I could hear the beats of my heart as the blood rushed past my ear drums. I lay awake for many hours, convincing myself that I did not need to go to the lavatory (actually a pee-flag), which of course I did, as I had been drinking water by the bucketful in order to stave off altitude sickness. And so the first night passed with many rueful thoughts. I was no longer the carefree young traveller who lived in a knackered text in the -30s for months on end, shampooing my hair in washing-up liquid or not at all, and going home when I felt like it (or not at all).
Crawling out from the Oven each morning like a creature at some key stage of evolution, the first thing I could make out, through the iced-up fringe of my eyelashes, was the opaque glow of Sat Camp huts half a mile away. Named for its satellite status, the small camp was the domain of a multi-institutional, multi-year atmospheric science project led by Jack Dibb from the Climate Change Research Center in New Hampshire. When I first met forty-eight-year-old Dibb he was wearing a T-shirt printed with the legend, Mall Wart: bringing you cheap plastic crap. He had a round belly, a short dark ponytail and a grey beard, and when he wasn’t doing science he raised alpaca on his New Hampshire farm.
The Sat Camp team had already been working for a month – they had set up in temperatures of -50 in the first weeks of summer light, and were finding the minus tens we were currently enjoying too balmy. A fortnight before I arrived, they had made a discovery. Their instruments had detected bromine oxide and short-lived acidic bromine gases just above the snow, with evidence that the acids were enhanced in the air filling pores in the snow pack. Yes! Dibb and his team were convinced that the bromine could unlock some of the complexities of the photochemical cycling that controls the earth’s atmosphere. Now they had to work out where the gases were coming from.
The fifty-foot-long Sat Camp tent became a haven for me, a Greenlandic home where I scribbled in my notebook while members of the team scrutinised columns of data on screens, checked instruments, analysed snow, weighed glass bottles, pored over satellite images, threw around theories and drank sachets of revolting latte tea. Sometimes I was allowed into the meteorological suite to change the ionised water and triethanolamine in the test bottles.
Bromine is a member of the halogen family, a group of highly reactive elements that includes chlorine and iodine. Scientists first realised that halogens play an important role in atmospheric chemistry in the seventies, when Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland deduced that fluorocarbons – halogens with carbon attached – were responsible for the stratospheric ozone hole in the polar regions (a discovery for which they won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995). Since then, a few small groups of crusading chemists have found that surprisingly small amounts of halogens strongly perturb chemistry in the troposphere (the lowermost part of the atmosphere) as well, but mainly in unusual places like polar sea ice, salt flats in desert regions, and some volcano plumes. A vocal subset of the group suspects that bromine oxide and other halogens may be present at just a few parts per trillion throughout the troposphere. If they are correct, the impact on global ozone and the oxidative capacity (the ability to break pollutants into smaller molecules) of the atmosphere would be significant, and would radically alter understanding of both climate change and pollution.3
A passionate commitment to the secrets locked in halogen particles motivated everyone at Sat Camp, from Dibb and his senior associate Greg Huey, a professor from Georgia Tech who wore Carhartt dungarees with one strap undone in homage to the good old boys of the south, to Katrine Gorham, a Californian graduate student and the only female, and Tony, an undergraduate who attracted accidents. On his first day Tony had gone outside to the lavatory tent (it was strictly for solids only: liquids were deposited directly onto the ice). Mistaking the tent window for the door, he got stuck halfway in, remaining stranded for some minutes with his legs scissoring in the breeze. Compulsive bloggers to a man and woman, Tony’s colleagues stampeded outside to get the best shots. They competed both for the most hits on their sites, and for scoops, though the latter was a tough business in a place where little happened, and a trawl through the blogging season revealed reiterated comments about how well the instruments were running and photographs of the thermometer registering -25. An engineer uploaded a fresh photograph of himself each day to illustrate the progression of his beard. My arrival had precipitated a frenzy of mendacious reportage of the ‘Famous Writer Visits Sat Camp’ variety accompanied by voluminous pastings from Amazon.
Once every three days, Dibb changed his T-shirt. Next up, after Mall Wart, was Protons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic. A global thinker with a truly speculative mind, Dibb had demigod status at camp despite his logos. He had been working in Greenland for two decades, and explained that non-scientists and non-crew, such as visiting dignitaries, journalists and spare parts like me were known as Useless Eaters. There were many logistical challenges to polar atmospheric research, and the concentrations of gases the team were detecting were crazily small: they were measuring some in parts per trillion. But Jack believed he was onto something. ‘In 1998,’ he explained over a nalgene flask of black coffee, ‘we had a eureka moment. A bunch of us discovered that nitrogen oxide was coming out of the ice. That was the smoking gun. Nitrogen was being photolysed in the snow, kicking off the kind of smog photochemistry we see in LA: it was the first time anyone realised things were going on actually in the snow, rather than stuff just falling on it. Follow-up studies showed that the fast chemistry at Summit was not quite like standard smog chemistry, leading us to wonder if halogens could be playing a role.’
Like the author, the reader perhaps finds the complexities of snow chemistry challenging. But these are the issues under scrutiny in the Arctic today; they are hard for the uninitiated, and not easily reduced to sound bites. Screaming headlines about impending catastrophe and images of orphaned polar bear cubs have not yet solved many problems.
I was out checking the instruments with Dibb one afternoon, struggling to keep up with a lesson in the periodic table, when a wind swept across from the east, whipping up snow crystals which swirled around camp. Dibb hurried back to the tent, me panting in pursuit, and we found everyone in a state of febrile anticipation. It turned out that the crucial bromine discovery earlier in the season had followed a wind event (it was never windy at Sat Camp – there were just ‘wind events’), and the team were hoping that this new wind might produce more bromine. But it didn’t. ‘This makes things more complicated,’ said Huey. Every day they came up with new theories and tossed around hypotheses. Their collective and as yet unproved hunch was that the newly detected halogens were mixing down from the troposphere, and were indeed ubiquitous in the global atmosphere. And that could affect lower latitudes, as models show that even very low levels of halogens shake up ozone distributions. ‘This one would make us famous, if it’s true,’ said Dibb. ‘But it’s going to get more complicated before we understand it. It’s a mess. It’s a wonderful mess.’
As a guest of the US government in an extreme environment I had endured a round of medicals before my appointment as writer-in-Greenlandic-residence. It was a requirement of the organising institution. The dental regulations alone were too agonising to warrant repetition here. I made fiscal history once again (as I had done many years ago, when I went to the Antarctic) by claiming a syphilis test against tax. TB, Hepatitis B & C, excess cholesterol, mammograms – at least prophylactic surgery had been abandoned. Until a few years ago the Australian Antarctic Programme required winterers to submit to an elective appendectomy. But at Summit I discovered that preventative hazard removal has not vanished entirely from polar medicine; that scientific advance has unintended consequences; and that Americans are sometimes too clever for their own good. Doctors at the National Science Foundation still insist that visitors to Summit have their wisdom teeth removed prior to arrival in Greenland (mine, fortunately, came out years ago). The week after I arrived, a graduate student contracted a jaw infection following the removal of his wisdom teeth prior to deployment. It was his first field trip. Tyler, the Summit paramedic, prescribed antibiotics, but the bacteria failed to respond. Doctors back in America examined the infected area via satellite video link. Tyler installed the patient in his cupboard-sized surgery in the Greenhouse, and began to look haggard himself. He was a remote region specialist, but hardly relished the prospect of lancing an abscess at the back of a throat and securing the wound, especially as the doctors coaching him disagreed on point of entry (one favoured oral entry, the other wanted go in through the cheek on the basis that it would be easier to guide the operation on a screen). On the third day the spreading infection looked as if it might close the patient’s windpipe. The rest of us waited in the Big House for updates. Early in the evening, we heard there was going to be a medivac. The patient was to be airlifted to Thule Airbase, where the Twelfth Air Command maintained an operating theatre. Cathy chartered a Twin Otter from Nuuk, but when the weather closed in there, it couldn’t take off. The patient’s face ballooned and he was put on an intravenous drip. Tyler looked hunted. The hours ticked away in the Big House, and the cloud layer came down to meet us. People talked in low tones, waiting for the next volley of static. But at four in the morning the weather began to clear, and at 5.15 the scarlet Greenland Air livery appeared in the pale blue sky. We heard later that a Thule doctor had stabilised the patient, and that he had returned to the US and made a full recovery. But we all knew that the dangerous and ferociously expensive medivac had taken place as a result of an unnecessary procedure that was designed to obviate – a medivac. The bloggers went wild.
An African in Greenland was first published in Paris in 1981, a period in which Lévi-Strauss and exotic ethnology had captured the imagination of French intellectuals. In this book they got two for the price of one, for the first chapters deal with the author’s childhood in rural Togo. It was a long journey from Togo to the Arctic Circle.
The author, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, records how as a small child he fell out of a tree while gathering coconuts and, following a purification ceremony by the High Priestess of the Python, was destined to be initiated into her cult. The prospect was so terrifying that he dreamt of escape – to Greenland, which he had read about in a missionary bookshop in Lomé. Greenland was, to the young Kpomassie, the antithesis of the jungle – white, frozen and python-free. When he was sixteen, he took off. The journey to the distant unknown is among the oldest stories ever told, but in his book the self-educated Kpomassie makes it his own. It took him eight years to get to Greenland, working his passage up the west coast of Africa port by port and taking jobs in France and Copenhagen. But his real break came when he found a wealthy mentor in Paris.
In 1965, aged twenty-four and an Arctic greenhorn, Kpomassie arrived at Julianehåb, known to Inuit as Qaqortoq, on the southern nose of Greenland. Even at five feet eleven he towered above the Inuit, and of course, he caused a sensation. The national broadcasting station announced his arrival on the evening news. ‘I had started on a voyage of discovery,’ he wrote, ‘only to find that it was I who was being discovered.’ An African in Greenland – which I found in a bookshop in Brighton rather then the tropics – did what I most like a travel book to do. It held up a mirror, and the Arctic reflected back the world.
Kpomassie was a man for whom the interior and the exterior life converged, and he recorded his observations and responses with the same artless ingenuity, combining comicality, like all the best writers, with a sense of the sad absurdity of life. As an African, he did not carry the white man’s burden, and it would not have occurred to him to romanticise Inuit lives. He describes a baby suffocated by drunken parents; a meal of rabid dog; a group conversation in someone’s front room which continued as each person took his or her turn squatting over the shit bucket. More significantly, he notes more than once ‘the crying lack of mutual help in a Greenland village, and the villagers’ profound contempt for their poorer countrymen’. But he took everything in his long stride. When his drunken host pissed in his rucksack, soaking all his clothes, he was unperturbed. The Inuit competed to host him, and he immersed himself in their lives, learning both language and customs. Greenlandic society was on the cusp in 1965 – or rather, had just teetered over the edge of the slope that led to westernisation. Qaqortoq already had a cinema, though the projectionist halted the film every ten minutes for a muffled voice to translate the last batch of Danish subtitles into Inuktituk over a tannoy. (There was still no bank in the country, however.) In the populated south the old customs had already vanished. ‘Children are sent to school,’ Kpomassie observed, ‘but are not taught anything about the traditional activities. Even worse, that way of life is disparaged to their faces, although it is their own. When they grow up, they can’t even paddle a kayak.’ Like many white men before him, Kpomassie relished the Inuit Greenlanders’ enthusiasm for casual sex, and for loaning out wives. Until, that is, he found his special girlfriend snuggling up with another. ‘I was quite willing to share other men’s girls,’ he notes, ‘but not my own’. Endemic boozing and gonorrhoea eventually lost their appeal. ‘Greenland morality was beginning to disgust me,’ he writes, and so he made his way up the west coast in search of the pure white land he had read about in the Togolese jungle.
As he moved north, Danes faded away. He wintered in a turf hut entered through a tunnel on all fours. ‘The house’, he wrote, ‘vaguely reminded me of an African mud-walled hut.’4 His host was Robert Mattaaq, a destitute paterfamilias who wore trousers tied up with string that he did not take off for the entire winter. Mattaaq had papered the walls of his igloo with pictures torn from magazines; he referred to the collage as his library. Under his supervision Kpomassie drove dog sleds, perched alone in the darkness on a mound of frozen fish, and he came to see the patterns that had governed Inuit life for centuries. Even wife-loaning had a practical significance – if a man was killed hunting, his wife’s lover provided for the dead man’s family (so there was some mutual help after all). It was a survival mechanism. Above all Kpomassie immersed himself in the spirit world. In the inner life of the Inuit, not only did all living creatures have souls, but so did inanimate objects. Each rock, lamp and sealskin had its inua, or owner: ‘These inue [plural form]’, he writes, ‘are not exactly souls but manifestations of the strength and vitality of nature.’ They are spirits that walk around at night, and talk. For the Inuit, it made their empty land less lonely. Rituals designed to appease the spirits governed every aspect of life, from hunting to mourning the dead. ‘In the eyes of an Eskimo hunter,’ marvelled Kpomassie, ‘the Arctic world with its vast, frozen expanses, its barren, snowy peaks and great bare plateaux – all that drab, white, lifeless immensity of little interest to an African like me – becomes a living world.’
Alaskan road-builders and pipeline engineers had the opposite relationship with the environment. It was they who invested it with meaning, not the other way round. Once the dismantling of Inuit culture began, there was little chance for those myriad spirits that had been roaming the hunting grounds for two millennia. In Kpomassie’s time there were still only three Catholic priests in Greenland, but their Protestant predecessors had effectively turned the entire population into Lutherans. The first pastor, the valiant Norwegian Hans Egede, who arrived in 1721, kick-started mass conversion when he translated ‘daily bread’ as ‘daily seal’.
In the 1950s and 60s the Danish government pursued the now infamous G60 policy. To facilitate administration, civil servants decided to concentrate Greenland’s population in the bigger communities of the south, and as a consequence they relocated the occupants of villages with fewer than 500 inhabitants. In larger settlements the Grønlandsk Teknisk Organization bulldozed turf dwellings and replaced them with flimsy wooden houses. At the time of Kpomassie’s visit, Robert Mattaaq lived in the only turf home left in Upernavik. Danes were trying to transform the Greenlanders from hunters to fishermen in order to create a commercial fishing industry in the south from which they, the Danes, would profit.
Kpomassie found the Greenland he sought in Mattaaq’s turf burrow. Had pack ice not prevented him from travelling further north, he would have discovered whole settlements even more deeply involved in the old ways. Still now, fifty years on, in Siorapaluk, the northernmost natural settlement in the world, a few dozen families survive by fishing for halibut or by hunting seal, narwhal, walrus, birds and polar bears. Siorapaluk is 500 miles from Avanersuaq and the isolated Uummannaq settlement, called Thule by westerners.5 Uummannaq-Thule was one of the oldest indigenous polar sites east of Canada. At about the same time as Kpomassie, another French speaker fetched up: Jean Malaurie, author of The Last Kings of Thule, one of the best books ever written about the Arctic. He knew the southern fringes of Greenland well before he left to spend a year in Uummannaq. ‘The Arctic in 1950’, Malaurie wrote of that area, ‘was a living Lascaux in some ways,’ its inhabitants ‘witnesses to what the postglacial era may have been in Europe and Asia’. In the course of his demographic research the twenty-eight-year-old Malaurie lived in his own igloo, learned to hunt, to speak the dialect of the Inuhuit, the Arctic people of the north-west, and to practise the rituals of the pulaar, or social visit. In the winter, certain Inuhuit (and some dogs) suffered perlerorneq, a kind of polar hysteria that strikes in the dark months. Everyone was hungry then, and often the only food available was kiviaq, a rotted and fermented guillemot dish. ‘I pulled a leg,’ wrote the gallant Malaurie, ‘and the carcass slipped free of the skin and feathers . . . Flesh, heart, coagulated blood, and fat virtually ran into my hand. I let the meat melt slowly in my mouth.’ Citing Montaigne, ‘Every man calls barbarous that to which he is not accustomed,’ he nonetheless drew the line at oruneq, a gourmandise of warmed partridge droppings.
The 300-strong community at Uummannaq had not seen wood until 1818, when the English explorer John Ross appeared among them – their first contact with the white man. A Greenlandic Inuk who had gone to Scotland on a whaler and returned home with Ross famously painted the encounter. John Sacheuse’s ‘First communication with the natives of Prince Regent’s Bay’ reveals Ross and his second-in-command wearing cocked hats, tailcoats and white gloves and shaking hands with fur-clad figures half their size. Malaurie lived with descendants of the same people in the dying days of their isolation. As he saw it, ‘In that pure state, the Inuit built his sense of self only through the group and through being one of the group.’ Out harpooning walrus one day, a hunter told him, ‘The more I think as an individual, the less I feel I exist.’ The Frenchman found the experience deeply uplifting. ‘It obliged me,’ he wrote, ‘to discover in depth my own identity. They [his Inuhuit neighbours] reminded me that a man’s life should be a constant challenge that enables him to become what he truly is.’
The Thule airbase where our medivac patient recovered went up in a hurry close to Malaurie’s adopted home in 1951, a Cold War bomber installation which cost a reported $800 million. To describe its effect on the hitherto isolated Inuhuit population as seismic would be an understatement. Nobody had consulted or informed the Inuhuit: plans had been kept secret from them. From their igloos, reported Malaurie, who saw it all, they watched a fortress rise. In 1954 the Minister for Greenland, speaking in Copenhagen, announced that the Thule Inuhuit ‘had decided’ to move 125 miles north to Qaanaaq, on the edge of Murchison Strait.6
Before the bombers came, the north-west of the island had already found a man to express its bleak landscapes in paint. Greenland discovered its Gauguin in Rockwell Kent, the early American modernist who saw his Tahiti in the starlit winters of Igdlorssuit. Kent, or Kinte as he was known to his Greenlandic neighbours, twice spent a year in the north-west of the island, in flight, as he said, from the chaos of 1930s America.
Born in 1882 in Tarrytown Heights, New York, Kent had an appetite for geographical extremes: besides Greenland he painted in Newfoundland, Alaska and Tierra del Fuego. Uncluttered landscapes allowed him to reflect on mystical aspirations. Besides ‘the warlike glamour’ of the beluga hunt, the challenges of his dog team and the pleasures of the kaffemik, or coffee ceremony, Kent wrote of the rewards of Greenland – ‘the contentment of merely being’. He was an accomplished writer as well as an artist and printmaker, and his Arctic books include Salamina, the story of a year spent in the care of his eponymous kifak, or housekeeper. The ‘moral’ of Salamina, according to the author, is that ‘people don’t need gadgets to be happy’, a message that would be easy to dismiss as a truism, if only contemporary culture didn’t remorselessly reinforce the opposite message. Regretting the inroads made into traditional life by western ideas of progress, especially the introduction of a monetary economy that encouraged Greenlanders to buy unnecessary items, like we do, Kent concluded, ‘What do men need? Who knows? And anyway, it’s too late now.’
Often he camped out on the sea ice to work for days at a stretch. ‘In Greenland one discovers, as if for the first time,’ he wrote, ‘what beauty is. God must forgive me that I tried to paint it.’ The stylised portraits that emerged, in the form of woodcuts or pencil drawings, depict broad-chested, heroic figures with high cheekbones and seal-skin kamiks that come to a point at the toes. In fact, the graphic art tradition in which Kent worked was quite English – one thinks of Hogarth and Blake. His superb skills as a draftsman had already brought him worldwide fame as a book illustrator. At one stage, he was the most popular artist in America. But post-war abstract expressionism left no room for figurative and landscape compositions. More seriously, Kent’s outspoken leftist beliefs led to trouble in the McCarthyist fifties – there was no ‘contentment of merely being’ in that bitter landscape – and although he never joined the Communist Party, the State Department revoked his passport. He went on to ally himself with Stalinist Russia, won the Lenin Peace Prize, and bequeathed much of his work to the Pushkin Museum in Leningrad. In 1969 his home in the Adirondacks was struck by lightning and all his notebooks and canvases went up in flames. Fortunately, many paintings had already gone to market. Kent’s stock is again high. In 2003 Sotheby’s in New York sold Blue Day, Greenland, for $232,000. So perhaps his message wasn’t too late after all.
The Guard came to Greenland from their base in Scotia, New York for ten-day stretches, and the next flight period was approaching. Jake, one of the pony-tailed brigade, began grooming the ski-way in his Caterpillar tractor, trundling up and down for twelve hours, then leaving the ice to cure for two days before starting again. Discussion dragged on in the Big House about how we were going to haul the cores out from their storage chamber under the ice in preparation for their journey to a laboratory in South Dakota. (Retrograding ice cores was a notoriously hazardous business, and every ice scientist had a story about faulty refrigeration, soggy cardboard boxes and a million dollars down the drain.) People started pulling gear on banana sledges to the cargo berms on the outskirts of camp. Empty hydrogen cylinders from Sat Camp stood lashed together, like comrades in a doomed adventure. I started packing up my Oven, as I was leaving with the ice cores.
Those last days were luminous. I hiked the ski-way under blue skies until a white-out swallowed Tent City in a cosmic gulp, and I was obliged to follow the flag line home. Ice prairies bent in every direction, edging towards the margins, where they curdled into glaciers and flowed across the tundra to the ocean. Far from tiring of the intimacy of camp, I had grown accustomed to it. It seemed normal to be flossing one’s teeth while talking to a stranger, or to drop one’s windpants at a pee-flag without checking who was around. A number of people were leaving with me, and camp life took on a valedictory tone. On the day before the last one, the chemists scheduled their traditional football match, Over 35s (Old Pirates) against Under 35s (Snow Bunnies). It was English football, but, in deference to the altitude, we played four seven-and-a-half-minute segments. Or rather, they did. I was too frightened of falling over. Guile prevailed over fitness and the Pirates triumphed.
The morning of departure, everyone gathered in the Big House waiting for an Off-Deck time from Kangerlussuaq. Cathy chaired a meeting to coordinate activities and allocate jobs. I was on the team getting forty-six cores out of storage. We used a snowmobile to tow out boxes four at a time, loaded thirty-two boxes per pallet, and threw cargo nets over the pallet mountain. Jake appeared on a Cat forklift, and we watched with trepidation as his clumsy machine tottered over ice ridges, a pallet of almost priceless ice cores quivering in the air. It was a painfully gorgeous day. Then the wait – the endless waiting of a polar camp. We sat around the coffee urn listening to Huey, still with one dungaree strap down, retailing the already familiar story of how he once waited three days on account of cross winds. But we did leave that day, with the assistance of rockets. It was a Cold Deck flight, which means that for the benefit of the cores a crewman keeps the temperature well below zero. So the cores stayed frozen. And so did I.
As I shivered in the Oven in high-tech fabrics, sustained by plentiful American provisions, I wondered how the Norse Vikings had survived 450 years in Greenland. And why they had eventually failed, after such remarkable success. The story of the explorer Gino Watkins, another outsider who had challenged the Greenlandic environment, complemented the Norse saga, as taken together, the two raised questions about individual versus collective effort; about adaptation versus reluctance to change; and about a climate that can cool or warm in a slow, devastating trend.
‘Exploration is the physical expression of the intellectual passion.’ The sentiment of Captain Scott’s sledger Apsley Cherry-Garrard lies buried beneath the shoe-eating to which exploration often descends. In Greenland the nobility of discovery fuses with heroism and tragedy in the dashing figure of Gino Watkins, a young Englishman, beloved by his countrymen, who took on the ice sheet and pioneered jet routes across the Atlantic. In the 1920s, politicians and businessmen agreed that commercial air travel held the key to economic development. It was known that the shortest distances between destinations did not follow lines on maps, but traversed the curve of the earth, which meant that the shortest air route between Europe and North America would cross the Greenland ice cap. After refuelling in the Faroe Islands and Iceland, experts argued, planes could stop again at both east and west Greenland before proceeding to Southampton Island, where I had so recently stayed with Noah and the Canadian geologists. Pan Am sent Charles Lindbergh to investigate a northern route. A Swedish pilot made many much publicised attempts to fly to New York via the Arctic. The Canadian government invested in air travel north of sixty. It was the space race of the age, and a major topic of public debate, like climate change today. (History has a killing sense of humour sometimes.) The least known portion of any putative polar route was the east coast of Greenland and the central ice plateau, and much had to be learned of their topography, weather and magnetic effects. Watkins realised that if he could prove that the most difficult section of the Arctic air route was viable, and that passengers and mail could therefore reach Vancouver from London in five days, airline operators would open their wallets to fund exploration. Like Erik the Red, Watkins wanted to make Greenland attractive, not to settlers but to aviation chiefs. Like Kpomassie, Malaurie and Kent he embraced the Inuit (in some cases literally) and lived at least partly off the land, learning to kayak and eating what he hunted. Like Jack Dibb and the corers, he wanted information.
Watkins was one of a group of Britons who came to embody the marriage of intellect and action that characterised exploration in the twenties and thirties. Mallory, Tilman, Shipton – all exemplified the romantic metaphor of travel as a personal quest, a pure and idealistic pursuit that transcended war and economic depression. In addition, in 1920 it was only eight years since Captain Scott perished on the Ross Ice Shelf, and the jingoistic British public were still gasping for polar heroes, especially since ideals had perished by the million in the Great War. Explorers were knights errant who enabled national self-belief, and Watkins was the man for the hour: the perfect pin-up. In 1935 the Prime Minister himself, Stanley Baldwin, ended a warm and fulsome tribute, ‘They talk of decadence in this country!’ Watkins emerged as a male version of the aviatrixes of the period: Amelia Earhart, Beryl Markham, Amy Johnson, Jean Batten – glamorous figures who hogged the front pages in goggles, flying suits and sexy rubber headdresses.
Watkins grew up in a grand house in London’s Belgravia at a time when the battle between horse power and the internal combustion engine was at its most intense, and in Grosvenor Place, close by the Watkins’ family home, motorised taxis competed noisily with horse-drawn growler cabs. Like many men of action, as a child (he was born in 1907) Gino was considered sickly; as an adult, also like many explorers, he played hard and worked hard, seeking out what a friend called ‘a life bright with contrasts’ (who doesn’t?). He had beautiful manners and looked the part: there was a touch of the matinee idol about him. He wore his custard-coloured hair parted on the right, had clear blue eyes, a delicate straight nose and a small gap between his front teeth. He was strong and athletic and eager for adventure, and when selected to lead a university expedition while he was at Cambridge, he grasped the opportunity. The team made the first crossing, and the first charts, of Edgeøya off the east coast of the Spitsbergen archipelago 500 miles north of Norway, and Watkins revealed a flare for communication: according to a team-mate he never gave orders, ‘it was more Gino’s house-party style of leadership’. The fact that the others called him by his first name speaks for itself.
In 1928, before he had ever been to Greenland, Watkins set out on a nine-month exploration of Labrador to map the head waters of the Unknown River. He had put a brilliant proposal to London’s Royal Geographical Society, arguing that mapping might lead to the discovery of minerals, or of hydroelectricity to power British wood-pulp plants. The three-man team travelled steerage to St John’s in Newfoundland and from there, with a year’s stores, continued on a mailboat to Rigolet on the Labrador coast. There they discovered how Labrador had acquired its sinister reputation as an impenetrable wilderness where game was scarce and the remote settlements infested with TB (one of them called his book about the expedition The Land that God gave Cain).7 The team paddled canoes and portaged for the first 100 miles, battling mosquitoes and eating muskrats. Most of the time they were really hungry, as the hunting was poor. When winter drew in they switched to dog-teams and sledges, struggling through deep, soft snow and sleeping in sodden bags. The scientific results justified the cost of the expedition, and stoked Watkins’ reputation when they were published in The Times. The Arctic pulled him back: he had an emotional connection with the elemental landscapes of high latitudes. ‘It is queer how it gets hold of one,’ he reflected. ‘The call of the North.’ There was something of the poet in him. He now prepared a plan for Greenland, calling his project The British Arctic Air Route Expedition. Dog sledges on the ground and planes in the air: in future years many were to call Watkins’ era the golden age of polar exploration. BAARE was Watkins’ biggest and most ambitious expedition to date, and in the search for fresh sponsors, he turned to industry. He befriended Augustine Courtauld, youngest son of the textile dynasty. Courtauld was not an intellectual, but he too had a poetic imagination. His mentor was Peter Rodd, the handsome delinquent and adventurer on whom Evelyn Waugh partially based the character Basil Seal. Unlike Watkins, Courtauld looked a mess. He was also courageous and introspective, characteristics upon which he was to draw deeply in the ordeal to come. Watkins took him on, and although Courtauld’s father refused to bankroll the expedition, aunts and cousins gave generously. The rackety Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII) agreed to become President of the Committee: flying was his latest craze, and he had recently bought a Gypsy Moth, characteristically failing to grasp the point that he was not allowed to fly in his own plane or anyone else’s. Besides Courtauld, Watkins recruited twelve men including an army doctor and two pilots. The average age was twenty-five. Fifteen years ago I met one of them, by then a sprightly nonagenarian. Alfred ‘Steve’ Stephenson had joined the expedition as chief surveyor straight from his finals at Cambridge. I went to his home in the New Forest to interview him about another, Antarctic, expedition. But he showed me photographs of Greenland, and reeled off the name of each of the fifty sledge dogs.
Watkins chartered Shackleton’s old ship, the 125-ton Quest, a sealer with her bow sheathed in greenheart. He purchased two De Havilland Gypsy Moths and a pair of motorboats and travelled to Copenhagen to make arrangements with the Danish government. He signed up an exclusive newspaper deal with The Times, explaining his plans to the public in lengthy news columns. ‘By the iniquity of Mercator’s projection,’ he began, ‘Greenland seems to hang like an enormous tongue of ice and snow far above the trade routes of the Atlantic . . . Actually it droops its pendulous snout straight between England and Canada.’ On 6 July 1930, the Quest left Gravesend after hoisting the expedition flag, which depicted a polar bear with wings. A man had gone ahead to Jakobshavn in west Greenland to purchase sledge dogs. He took them on to the Faroes, and waited on a lighter till the Quest arrived to pick them all up along with a ton of whalemeat. Then it was on to Iceland, and a last bath in the hotel. Approaching Cape Dan in Greenland, Watkins decided to head up the bottle-neck fjord leading to Angmagssalik (now Tasiilaq), the chief settlement on the east coast. After landing thirty miles to the west, the men worked twelve-hour shifts to unload and erect their prefabricated hut on a spur at the foot of Sulusuk (Shark Fin) mountain. The weather was fine, but not the mosquitoes. Besides the hut, they put up two 70-foot wireless masts and built dog pens and a hangar for the planes, which had been fitted with skis. Crowds of women and children searched through the rubbish for empty baked bean tins with which to sole their boots. The East Greenlanders had had little contact with the outside world, unlike their neighbours in the west whose largely ice-free coast had facilitated trade for two millennia. Every two or three years they journeyed down the coast to Auarket to trade with West Greenlanders, bartering walrus and narwhal ivory for tobacco, rice and tea.
A year after my trip to Summit I returned to Greenland on a Russian ice-breaker and saw for myself the remarkable isolation of the east coast even today. There was no land access to almost a million square kilometres. The ship sailed south alongside King Christian X Land, a lonely, uninhabited coast carved out with intricate fjord systems and deep channels scoured of ice by 140-knot katabatic winds racing off the glaciers. The light was diaphanous, lacquering the high mountains with sucrose sheen, and rockfaces bounced back booms of calving glaciers. It was a landscape of ancient resonance; one could imagine a Viking longship rounding the headland. I had my eldest son Wilf with me. At Ittoqqortoormiit in Scoresbysund, the most isolated settlement in Greenland on the biggest fjord system in the world, he made friends with small boys who ran down to play jumping games on our zodiac boats, the linguistic problem mediated by references to the Manchester United line-up. On Sabine Island in Hochstetter Forland we hiked for three hours across plains so boggy that Wilf sank up to his thighs. He was happy, as he had just found a caterpillar of the Greenland moth. In a typical example of Arctic adaptation, this furry brown larva spends thirteen years growing two centimetres, producing its own antifreeze so it can essentially go into cryogenic suspension every winter. When it turns into a moth, it lives for just one year. In the case of both the caterpillar and the musk ox we had also seen that day, Wilf failed to identify which end was the front and which the back and was obliged to photograph them from two directions.
To facilitate access to the interior, Watkins set up a base fourteen miles from the hut at the top of an icefall that the men christened Buggery Bank (in the official, published account, it appears as Bugbear Bank). He was keen to locate a depression Nansen and two other explorers had reported running across the interior: he hoped that by following such a depression, a plane might be able to fly lower, and more safely. Sledging parties went out to gather weather records, and men went up in the planes to use aerial photography to map. They ate what they killed and picked, from ptarmigan to crowberries, augmented by porridge, treacle, boiled beef and jam from the stores. Watkins favoured simply consuming supplies till they ran out rather than imposing rationing (‘If it was worked out by slide rule that each man had 0.65 ounces of jam per day, it seemed to take its flavour away’). The cosy hut had electricity, a proper curtain at the window and live-in Eskimo staff. The kitchen maids had to be reminded to wash up after dinner every single night, as it seemed to them such a waste of time. Watkins had an affinity with native Greenlanders and enjoyed their company as well as appreciating their skills. They, in turn, revered him. Knud Rasmussen, who knew the land and its people as well as any outsider, later wrote that Watkins ‘was almost a God to all the Eskimos from Alaska to Angmassalik’. Some of the girls were pretty. Percy Lemon, an army captain, was the first to take an Eskimo mistress. Watkins followed. The lover of F. Spencer Chapman, the ornithologist and ski expert who went on to become one of the most distinguished expeditioners of the era, had a son before the men went home. This kind of behaviour did not suit the public image, and so the public never knew of it. (The moral superiority of the explorer had long been another polar myth.) Some of the team disapproved. Army man and surveyor Martin Lindsay expressed outrage on practical as well as moral grounds: all winter he had a woman climbing over him to get at Watkins in the bunk above.
They established another station actually on the ice sheet. The upward haul through soft snow was hell, the terrain hatched with crevasses. On 10 October, Chapman noted in his diary that he had ‘never felt as miserable’, and that it was impossible to get any colder. But everyone who made the journey to the station was overawed. ‘From now on’, wrote Chapman in his diary after leaving Buggery Bank, ‘the scene changed to what most of us will carry with us always as the most intense and lasting memory of Greenland . . . No rock or patch of earth nor any living thing broke the monotony of this featureless plain of dead white.’ The interior of an ice sheet is the most mesmerising of all polar landscapes. People marooned at southern latitudes think an absence of mountains and valleys renders a landscape monotonous. But in the polar regions the opposite is true. Courtauld referred to ‘the ascetic nakedness’ of Greenland. The otherworldly emptiness ushers in a transcendent calm that stills the spirit. The coastal landscapes of Greenland reveal the potential of man’s symbiosis with nature. The abiotic inland ice is beyond nature.
Up on the ice cap everyone acknowledged the ghostly presence of Nansen, who had died suddenly a month before the expedition left England. It was he, along with five companions, who had made the first crossing of Greenland; according to one polar historian it was ‘the first great geographical goal since Stanley settled the sources of the Congo and the Nile eleven years before’. The people of Christiania (now Oslo) lionised their modern-day Viking on his return, thousands crowding the quayside to catch a glimpse of the conquering hero. Oscar II, the king of Sweden-Norway, concluded that Nansen’s status was a consequence of ‘the ultra-Norwegian mania for a “great man”’. By 1889 Nansen fever had spread beyond the Nordic lands. His double-decker tome recounting the ski trip across Greenland, published simultaneously in English and Norwegian in 1890, brought alpine-style skiing to the attention of the outside world. Nansen was the intellectual giant of polar exploration. Among many other accomplishments he was a founder of neurology. Initially a zoologist, he had gone on to study the central nervous system, discovering that nerve fibres, on entering the spinal cord, bifurcate into ascending and descending branches. They are still known as Nansen’s fibres.
Watkins enjoyed similar status in Britain, and modern polar aviators continue to venerate him for what he achieved in Greenland. One of the helicopter pilots at the geology camp on Southampton Island often talked of him, always in reverential tones. But perhaps the laurels should go to Courtauld. When one man was required to stay alone on the ice cap to keep records going during the winter (there was insufficient food for two to stay), it was he who volunteered, arguing that as long as he had enough tobacco, food and books, he would relish his solitude. On 6 December 1930 the others sledged off to the coast leaving him in a double-layered dome-shaped tent entered by a tunnel beneath the snow. It had a chimney-like ventilator, which gave the whole construction the appearance of an upturned umbrella, and a large Union Jack flapping on top. ‘There is nothing to complain of,’ Courtauld wrote in his diary on his first night alone, ‘unless it be the curse of having to go out into the cold wind every three hours to observe the weather.’
Back at the hut, the others settled into a winter routine. They skinned bird specimens, ground rocks for the microscope, repaired sledges and spent a lot of time charging batteries, as others still do everywhere in the inhabited Arctic. The gramophone was popular among both expeditioners and Eskimo, as was the wireless, that symbol of the interwar years, especially when it was able to pick up the BBC – on a good evening, at 9.30 men listened to Big Ben striking midnight. Besides that there were moonlit skiing parties followed by dancing at Eskimo settlements to the light of seal-blubber flares. At the end of February they started catching shark, and a week later dynamited holes in the 4-foot layer of ice over a lake to fish out trout. In the middle of February, a message crackled over the wireless from a German science party 350 miles to the north. The leader, Alfred Wegener, had brilliantly produced the hypothesis of continental drift in which he argued that continents had gradually moved laterally, crashed into one another and partially fragmented (eventually proved correct, continental drift led to the science of plate tectonics). Wegener’s peers, all ‘fixists’ who maintained that continents did not move, reviled his theory, setting earth sciences back fifty years. Now, according to the message from his coastal base, Wegener and an Eskimo assistant had failed to return from Eismitte station, their ice-cap camp. Their colleagues concluded that due to the lateness of the season, Wegener must have decided to sit out winter at Eismitte with two scientists already there. In which case, the party would be running short of food. Could Watkins send supplies? Watkins said he would go as soon as the weather improved. But before it did, they heard from the wireless that two bodies had been found. Wegener and his companion had not remained at Eismitte. They had tried to ski to their coastal base. Down in the British camp, the disaster raised anxieties about Courtauld. Until this point the others had not been unduly worried, though they knew their colleague would be busy shovelling snow. But Watkins had been sending regular wireless despatches back to England, and the Courtauld family had begun to panic. Now, in response both to the German news and to pressure from England, Watkins ordered a relief party to set out earlier than planned. Men spent a month criss-crossing the plateau in a fruitless search for the flag above Courtauld’s tent. One concluded that snow must have buried the tent (‘And people who are buried are generally dead’). By the middle of March, anxieties took hold. Had fumes from the primus suffocated Courtauld? Or did he walk off to tend the instruments and get lost in a sudden blizzard?
The second relief party left on 21 April. On 5 May, Watkins spotted the top of the ventilator shaft. ‘But as we got near,’ wrote Chapman, ‘we began to have certain misgivings. The whole place had a most extraordinary air of desolation. The large Union Jack we had last seen in December was now a mere fraction of its former size . . . the vast snowdrift submerged the whole tent with its snowhouses and surrounding wall. Was it possible that a man could be alive there?’ Courtauld had been alone for 140 days. Watkins approached. He knelt in the snow and shouted down the ventilation pipe. ‘August! August!’ A sheet of coppery cloud rippled across the sky. From the depths, they heard a voice. ‘He looked as if he had stepped straight from Ober-Ammergau,’ wrote Chapman when they had dug out their man. Courtauld’s hair and beard were knotted and matted, his face was stained with smoke and grime and his cheeks hollow. The instruments outside the tent revealed that over the course of his incarceration the temperature had fallen to -53°C.
Courtauld had read The Forsyte Saga, played chess against himself and planned a yachting tour with the help of Bartholomew’s Touring Atlas. He had drawn up table plans for banquets, and menus, including the wine for each course and the vintages of the port and brandy to be served. He had sipped lemon juice to ward off scurvy, and planned where in Suffolk he was going to buy his house (‘Fewest possible servants’). But he had thought he would be relieved in mid-March. He began to go very short indeed. His toenails fell out. He had barely any fuel left, and by Easter he was lying in darkness all the time. ‘If it were not for having you to think about as I lie in the dark and can’t sleep,’ he wrote to his fiancée Mollie Montgomerie, ‘life would be intolerable. I wonder what you are doing.’8 By mid-April he was smoking tea and eating uncooked pemmican. He could no longer heat the tent. He did not despair: quite the reverse. He wrote of ‘the curious growing feeling of security that came to me as time passed . . . while powerless to help myself, some outer Force was in action on my side, and I was not fated to leave my bones on the Greenland ice cap’. To a man who had grown up surrounded by luxury (the Courtauld London town house is now the Dutch Embassy), he coped well. He had eventually trapped himself inside the tent by leaving the spade outside, and he disliked no longer being able to take weather observations (though he estimated wind speed from what he could hear, a practice now known in polar regions as ‘taking tent weather’). Extraordinarily, the relief party arrived a few minutes after the primus died.
They had a hard sledge journey back down to the coast, disorientated by sun dogs and other polar mirages. But there was something more peculiar. A Junkers monoplane flew over and dropped supplies they didn’t need. This was an inexplicable development – perhaps another as yet undocumented mirage? – until letters that descended with the food revealed that news of Courtauld’s disappearance had ignited a conflagration of anxiety at home, where newspapers were bored with the Budget and the king’s bronchitis.
In spring, with saxifrage and alpine azaleas blooming around the hut and Arctic terns streaming over the fjord, Watkins ordered all hands to learn to kayak. It was the only efficient way to hunt seal. On viewing the ciné film of the expedition the following year at London’s Plaza cinema, the Times reviewer wrote, ‘To see Mr Watkins and his men, strapped into native canoes, turning turtle in the icy water so that they may learn how to right themselves without assistance, struggling with their tents in the teeth of a blizzard, and practically lifting heavy sledges up steep, endless slopes by means of pulleys pegged into the ice is to realise that the Arctic explorer is born, not made.’ By the summer, the team had successfully mapped a US-European air route and located positions for fuelling stations. ‘It is quite clear that this route will be used,’ Watkins wrote. He thought he was doing what was right, like most people, and in the context of air travel, he was. His work mapped the century, in aviation terms. Technology failed to reveal what was going to happen when hundreds of thousands of contrails dissolved in Arctic skies – just as it failed to reveal that the nurses accompanying the X-ray machine brought a killer virus, or that prophylactic tooth extraction would lead to a full-scale evacuation.
When Watkins reached England in November 1931, the king heaped him with medals. Reports of his success were bright spots in newspapers dominated by the ongoing economic chaos that followed Britain’s disastrous departure from the Gold Standard in September. Facing strikes, unemployment, shortages and an austerity programme, the public greeted Watkins, their golden-haired hero, with adulation. When Jacopo Bassano painted him, London’s National Portrait Gallery hung the picture. Meanwhile, on the ground, cars had won the battle for the streets of London, and horse-drawn cabs had vanished from Grosvenor Place, and from everywhere else. It was air travel that now gripped the public imagination. The First World War had pushed aerial technology forward, and throughout the twenties flimsy biplanes set the records. Daily flights had been in service between London and Paris for a decade, in 1929 an RAF man made the first non-stop flight from Britain to India in a Fairey long-range monoplane, and, on the day Courtauld emerged from the deep, the first airmail service was on its way from England to Australia. (It took twenty days.) Pan Am offered Watkins £500 in return for a further year of meteorological data. He set about raising the rest of the cash while simultaneously seeking funds to pay off the debts of the last expedition. He was allocated an office on the second floor of the Royal Geographical Society, opposite Hyde Park, and received a telegram there addressed WATKINS EXPLORER ENGLAND. At the BAARE welcome home party he had sat next to a tall, fair-haired pilot called Margaret Graham, and before Watkins left for Greenland again on the Pan Am mission the couple announced their engagement. Margaret travelled with her fiancé to Copenhagen. ‘She was wonderful, but it was hell,’ Watkins wrote of the moment when she stepped off the pilot boat – the final farewell. ‘Ten months seems a long time.’
Watkins’ second expedition to Greenland was leaner than the first, and as the four participants could not afford to charter a vessel, they travelled across to Greenland in a Danish government ship. At Angmagssalik news spread that Watkins had come back, and a hundred kayaks and umiak raced through the fjords to find him. After three days, the team proceeded 120 miles north-east to a Y-shaped fjord, where Watkins selected a section of dry ground above a river mouth and erected a dome tent. When it was clear there, the skies frosted the mountains in pastel pinks and blues. A 100-foot wall of ice longitudinally streaked with lines of moraine debris stopped the northern head of the western prong of the lake, the debouchement of an active glacier. They began work immediately, preparing weather charts in the areas where Pan Am planned to build fuelling depots. On this trip Watkins intended to keep both men and dogs supplied with seal meat: it had meant more room for surveying equipment on the ship. It was therefore vital to lay in sufficient supplies before the winter set in, so Watkins himself left camp each day at dawn, and after four or five hours, or sometimes six, he returned with a seal.
By late August the film of grease ice that forms before the sea freezes was growing thicker every day: in the polar regions the freeze and thaw of the sea replaces the rise and fall of sap. On the 20th, while his companions skied north to collect data, Watkins set out as usual in his 18-foot kayak to hunt seal. He travelled east towards the middle of the lake. Wisps of mare’s tail cirrus pencilled the sky. Seals broke the surface of the water, the ripples spreading into concentric circles, but Watkins waited. Neither he nor the seals heard the faint crack from high above that signalled that hundreds of tonnes of ice were about to calve from the glacier. When the berg fell, the displacement of water created waves twenty feet high. Watkins capsized, losing sight of both kayak and paddle. He got back to his kayak, the harpoon still held in place by a small string of ivory beads. His gloves were tucked under the sealskin line, and the hunting line itself was coiled on the kayak tray. But by that time, Watkins was too numb to haul himself up. He drifted peacefully down the slender lake until his fingers uncurled from their holding on the lashings and he slid quietly into the friendly Arctic waters. He was still only twenty-five. ‘That he should be dead now’, Courtauld wrote when he heard the news, ‘is the worst blow for England that I can think of.’
The blithe spirit of early aviation laid the foundations for what might be the next in a long line of climate catastrophes for humanity. But climate is rarely the only factor. The 5,000-strong Norse Viking colony that flourished for 450 years lit the way to its own demise even as it endured a certain degree of climatic shift. The hopelessly conservative settlers failed to learn to fish or to make skin boats in which to hunt whale or spiral-tusked narwhal like the Inuit with whom they shared the island; they did not even eat fish. A damaged environment was a second factor in the collapse. Norsemen cut down all the alder and willow, because unlike the Inuit they never used blubber for heat and light. As a result, they were always short of fuel, and as they cut turf they were short of land too. The mantra by which they lived – ‘We are Europeans!’ – meant that they starved in the presence of abundant food resources. They clung to Christian images of home with a tenacity that killed them, using precious wood to roof a church rather than manufacture a fishing rod and fretting about the fashions of the ancestral homeland rather than making friends with the Inuit. When a ship brought news that Viking belles had switched from hair combs with tines on one side only to a double-sided variety, Greenlandic settlers set about procuring up-to-date combs with which to pin up their own blonde hair. A changing climate also played a role in the abrupt failure. Erik the Red established his colony in a period propitious – by Greenlandic standards – for growing hay and pasturing animals. (Our own civilisation, similarly, arose during an anomalously stable interlude.) In about 1300 the climate began to cool and become more variable, heralding the Little Ice Age. Inuit thrived in the colder conditions, as ringed seals were plentiful. Hay was not.
In the words of the brilliant ecological geographer Jared Diamond, ‘The environmentally triggered collapse of Viking Greenland and the struggles of Iceland have parallels with the environmentally triggered collapses of Easter Island, Mangareva and the Anasazi, the Maya, and many other pre-industrial societies.’ Whole civilisations, especially complex ones like ours, do not fail solely as a result of environmental damage or the failure to manage environmental resources. There are always contributing factors. The Norse colony in Greenland was a small, peripheral one in a fragile environment, wholly different from a twenty-first-century industrialised behemoth. But after listening to Jack Dibb and watching cores slide out of the ice, I wondered if we could dismiss its relevance. The Norse example shows how the deadly nature of a slow trend (cooling, in their case) can be concealed by wide fluctuations, and that in some circumstances failure is the only alternative to adaptation. Remember that Inuit living on the same island as the Norse did not fail. As Diamond concludes, ‘Greenland history conveys the message that, even in a harsh environment, collapse isn’t inevitable but depends on a society’s choices.’9
Halfway through my circumpolar journey it was clear that conditions in the Arctic that could lead to a major climate shift were more significant than I had anticipated, and more directly linked to fossil fuels and greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture. The Norse colonists revealed the human propensity to sacrifice the long-term interests of the species for the short-term gain of the individual. Just as the Arctic shows what we are good at – individual endurance, initiative and dogged investigation as demonstrated by Watkins, Courtauld, Dibb and the corers – it also reveals what we are bad at, which is collective, preventative action. I do not think one could spend long in the Arctic without concluding that the present way of the world is unsustainable and that many chickens will race home to roost in the lifetime of our children, if not in our own. Like the Viking chieftains, we in the developed world might find that we have merely bought ourselves the luxury of being the last to starve. But contrary to what many claim, there is no single most important problem. All environmental challenges are interconnected, including those resulting from an unsustainably swollen population. In the words of James Lovelock, sanest of Cassandras, in some respects the Earth functions as a single organism and regulates itself, and will go on regulating itself with scant regard for humanity. Of course, we are part of the system, and although we will never be able to control it, it would be in our own long-term interests to reduce our impact on it. What we could learn from the Norse, as Diamond has pointed out, is the necessity of ‘long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values’. These he recognises as ‘crucial in tipping outcomes towards success or failure’. In the case of Watkins, a Greenland glacier calved and killed an individual. A changing climate converged and interacted with a range of other factors to kill 5,000 Vikings. Was there a lesson? Or was it just a foreshadowing of what John Updike described as ‘the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem’? I was to reflect on this during the months after my Greenland travels. The Arctic was present in our house in London – in maps on the wall, in talk of trips, in the 18-inch Siberian walrus penis bone with which my children regularly brained each other. It was hard not to wonder if they would talk to their children’s children about the Arctic as my generation speaks of black-and-white television and tinned spaghetti. That summer I read one of my sons Gulliver’s Travels. The day after we finished, he asked, out of the blue, ‘Which are we, Mummy – the giants or the little people?’
1 Denmark was acting within the political framework of the Dano-Norwegian union until 1814, when the latter was dissolved, and Denmark gained total control of Greenland.
2 But satellites have revealed a weakening of Greenland’s gravity, apparently a result of the loss of tens of thousands of tonnes of ice. So perhaps the ice sheet is vulnerable. NASA specialist Waleed Abdalati recently stated categorically, ‘The ice sheet is starting to stir’.
3 Basically because none of the current models include widespread halogen chemistry, so even the best must be getting something wrong.
4 In fact, it was an iglu. Contrary to western belief, an igloo is a traditional, turtle-shaped house made of stone and peat, entered by a tunnel (katak) and ventilated by a hole in the ceiling (qingaq). Sometimes it was clad in an extra insulating wall of snow blocks (torssusaq) which did make it look like our idea of an igloo. The window (equut) was made of seal gut. Glass was already available in the sixties, at the Danish trading stores, but it cracked in severe cold.
5 It was the Danish-Greenlandic ethnologist and hero Knud Rasmussen who brought the name Thule to Greenland. He founded a trading station next to Uummannaq and named it Thule; soon the toponym was being applied to the region. The name was apparently first bestowed on an unidentified northern land by the Greek geographer and explorer Pythias in the fourth century BC. The notion of a mysterious sub-Arctic Thule has recurred ever since then in myth and magic. Louis XIII’s cosmographer described the people of Thule as ‘pygmies who hiss like geese’. The name also featured in fantasies of Nordic-German idealised societies in the Weimar Republic. In 1916 Hitler joined the closed organisation Thule Gesellschaft as a gast, or visiting brother.
6 Malaurie continued to visit the region, witnessing the old ways growing weaker. Productive life dwindled, as working as a cleaner at the base brought in more cash than hunting. ‘The decline of this plurimillennial hunting society’, he concluded, ‘has derived more from an economic system and from the civil law that sustains it than from any so-called culture shock. It was not Danish culture or Christianity that initially undermined it, but rather the capitalist system of exchange.’ But in the late seventies, he saw a measure of Inuit power become a reality.
7 ‘The Land God Gave to Cain’ was how French navigator Jacques Cartier described the north shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence when he spotted it from his ship in 1534.
8 Courtauld married Montgomerie. After his death in 1959, she married Rab Butler. She died in 2009, aged 101.
9 Recent scholarship suggests the plague back in Norway brought the colony to an end: a reduced population boosted the availability of farming land, so the Greenland Norse went ‘home’. So was this the choice they made?
