Their life is death for us
Randall Jarrell, ‘The Iceberg’
The fucking world is running out of gas
John Updike, Rabbit is Rich
AS THE ARCTIC took centre stage in the warming climate drama, a cruise industry sprang up to ferry tourists to the polar bears before they all drowned. It was another example of the world moving towards the Arctic. In July 2008 the 15,000-tonne ice-breaker Kapitan Khlebnikov sailed from Murmansk on a sixteen-day, 3,256-nautical mile (6,000-kilometre) journey across the Arctic Ocean. I took my wildlife-loving, ten-year-old son on it, Reg’s big brother Wilf. It was his future at stake in the Big Melt.
The sun was shining when our charter flight landed at Murmansk, and the pilot announced 69º. Inside the terminal there were no computers at the immigration counters, no trolleys at the baggage carousel and no paper in the lavatory. On the bus into town, Wilf and I gazed out at the wooded slopes of the Kola Peninsula, the quietly glimmering lakes, the timeless melancholy of the far north. A Norwegian conservationist recently called this region of few roads and many bogs ‘the largest area of uninterrupted natural landscape in Europe’.
But after half an hour, Murmansk sprang out from behind the beech trees. The city had been built up a hill in tiers of concrete devyatietazhki, the nine-storey blocks that put down root across the Russian permafrost in the Communist period along with the stubbier khrushchevka. Beyond the butter-coloured civic buildings on Five Corners Square, and the squashed green cupola of the railway station, seventy-five years of centrally planned vandalism had done their work. The settlement was a study in urban decay, a nasty blur of stained concrete, cracked facades and dribbling rubbish. The sun had gone in. It was hard to imagine the sun ever shining on Murmansk.
The wheezing concertina buses on Prospekt Lenina, once yellow, now kippered with soot, competed with spent trams to climb the hill to St Nikolas’ Cathedral, a plain grey, single-domed monument to Russian tenacity, as it was built in 1985 (the Kremlin despatched miners to blow it up, but, in an early indication of the Soviet melt, protesters prevailed – and lived). Few Murmanchaners were on the streets; those who had ventured out appeared hunched and drawn. One-litre plastic beer bottles rolled on the cracked pavements, slewing, drunk themselves, between iron lampposts. Outside the cathedral, a wedding party alighted from a fleet of Ladas, the pasty bride battling to subdue both veil and skirts as a gale swept in from the Kola Gulf, bringing a whiff of salt, and the chief bridesmaid engaged in a private struggle of her own to light and smoke a cigarette in the time it took to walk between the Ladas and the cathedral doors.
Situated in the Sámi heartlands halfway between Moscow and the North Pole, Murmansk was founded in 1916 on the sheltered and deepwater east bank of the Kola Gulf. When Nazi troops arrived in June 1942 having bombed half the port to smithereens, a resistance fighter found a ticket for a banquet to celebrate the city’s surrender in the pocket of a dead German’s uniform. But there was no surrender. What Murmanchaners withstood, in terms of siege conditions and destruction, was second only to Stalingrad.
We had flown in from Helsinki along with the rest of the icebreaker’s passengers and some replacement crew. Before depositing us at our vessel, the transfer bus stopped at the highest point of the city, a platform dominated by a 42-metre concrete statue of a Russian infantryman facing west across the Kola Gulf towards the River Litsa, where Soviets held the German invasion of 1941. Murmanchaners baptised the statue Alyosha, the Russian John Doe, the boy-man who perished in millions in both wars. On the cargo docks below, stevedores beetled along the gantries. Next to Alyosha’s eternal flame, someone had scrawled Vechnaya pamyat on the concrete – eternal memory. Even the graffiti was tragic in Murmansk. Russians were at that time studiously rehabilitating Stalin, and had recently voted him the third greatest Russian of all time. There was to be no sober reflection; ‘memory’ had barely outlived the century.
The cutaway prow meant we could pick out our ship long before the transfer bus had inched its way through the crowded port lanes. In the days of a command economy the Soviets commissioned the best ice-breakers, and in the struggling market economy that followed the disintegration of the USSR, entrepreneurial tour companies converted several into cruise liners. It was a tourist ice-breaker that brought news in 2000 that there was no ice to break at the North Pole that summer as it had all melted. The Khlebnikov was a typical shallow-draft escort vessel designed to enter Siberian deltas in ambient temperatures as low as -50, hopefully not something we were going to put to the test. Foul weather and unexpected sea ice constitute the chief hazards of Arctic travel, but in our case another menace queued up for attention: Russian bureaucracy. Having boarded along with ninety-odd other passengers, and found our cabin on deck 7, we waited thirty hours for ‘customs clearance’, the international maritime term for a wad of large ones. All we could do was cool our heels, marooned among ziggurats of coal and the low elephant grief of other ships’ horns.
The delay gave us a chance to meet fellow passengers as they loafed around the decks taking photographs of the birds, the port, and each other. They were predominantly American, though France, Germany, Switzerland and South Africa were well represented. Many were repeat customers. ‘It gets in your blood,’ said a Swedish university lecturer. Wilf, the only child on board, reduced the average age by several decades. The eldest cruiser, an eighty-nine-year-old Italian contessa travelling alone, was the same size as Wilf. He took to seaboard life immediately. On the second day, one of the logistics team asked if he could help coil some zodiac ropes. A friendship was born. Igor Konyenko was strong and thick-set with cornflake-coloured hair, an excess of energy and a natural disrespect for authority – the perfect companion for a pre-teen.
Murmansk harbour is a major transhipment port for north-west Russia as well as a base for the Barents Sea oil industry and a hub for the fishing trade around its shallow southern banks, a business controlled by gang bosses of the ubiquitous mafiya.1 From our lookout on the top deck, we watched hundreds of cranes opening bucket jaws over pyramids of coal and slate, piles of anthracite and neat towers of aluminium ingots. Seagulls carved tunnels in vapour from the refinery stacks, and walls of Norilsk Nickel shipping containers that had sailed down the Dudinka dwarfed the cornflower blue customs house, the rusty pontoons and the spaghetti of dented pipes that twirled through the docks. Alongside the Khlebnikov, a collier was taking on its freight. The fuel, falling in thunderous booms and discharging acrid black gases, was heading for Siberian coastal villages ahead of the big freeze. Beyond the tarry smells and clattering railyards, tier after tier of identical grey tower blocks reached up the hill, the weak Arctic sun glinting off glassed-in balconies. A mist had closed in on the city and cars crawled through the streets, headlights diffuse in the vapour. On the ridge on the other side of the inlet, the authorities had stuck a model of a fighter plane.
A thousand dollars changed hands in the end. After a decade of turf warfare, racketeering and extortion had regularised themselves in Murmansk; the daytime assassinations of the late nineties had all but ended and everyone more or less knew their place. We certainly did. The tannoy crackled out an order, and we presented ourselves in the ship’s lecture theatre for a passport and face check in front of a row of saurians coiffed in stiff-peaked headwear so huge that one wondered how they remained upright. The tugs finally cast us off at midnight. It was not quite twilight, or even owl light, but it was not daylight either. The brilliance of arc-welding lamps dazzled from the derricks, and, over the low green hill behind one of the loading piers, the eternal flame of Alyosha flickered. For several hours we laboured up the Kola inlet. At Severomorsk, home base of the Northern Fleet, a steel jungle clogged the calm waters of what remained a heavily restricted zona, while at the shadowy Nerpa shipyard cranes sheltered the floating dock on which the carcass of Kursk bled its nuclear fuel. When the Oscar II-class K-141 sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea after an explosion during a training exercise, the whole world listened to the ghoulish knocking of the trapped submariners. All 118 perished.
At the mouth of the inlet, one last tug whisked off the harbour master. He had to go back to Murmansk, poor thing.
The Arctic Ocean covers in excess of 14 million square kilometres (almost five and a half million square miles), which is one and a half times the area of the United States and sixty United Kingdoms. Ice covers almost all of it in winter, and about half in summer; the ice cap grows and shrinks with the seasons. But in 2007, when satellites revealed record summer shrinkage, news outlets throughout the world led with alarm on this fresh indication of imminent catastrophe. The role of the Arctic Ocean in climate change is complex and occluded in uncertainty. At a macro level, alterations in temperature, salinity and reflective properties affect currents and heat transportation in ways that fundamentally impact on our climate. At a micro level, a warming ocean has begun recalibrating the planet’s carbon exchange by heating billions of life forms in the microbial soup at the bottom of the food web. These processes are improperly understood, and outcomes can be good as well as bad. A shifting phytoplankton population might result in an abundance of fish, solving, at a stroke, the planetary protein deficit.
My first close-up experience of the ocean unfolded in the cyclone zone of the Barents Sea, and it was hard to think about anything except not being sick. The ship listed violently to port, and then to starboard, and waves crashed onto the decks with such force that one was denied even the solace of fresh air. Dining saloons stood empty. Like everyone else, I clung to the stair-rails as we plunged in and out of the rollers, reflecting miserably that this was not quite the same as trekking over the flat and solid Greenland ice sheet, or climbing gentle Finnish fells.
The cruise was to trace two sides of a triangle, heading up to the remote Russian archipelago of Franz-Josef Land before turning south-west, skimming the top of the Svalbard group, crossing hemispheres, sailing down the east coast of Greenland and ending up in Iceland’s Reykjavik. On this first leg Khlebnikov followed the west coast of Novaya Zemlya, an elongated archipelago extending out of the Urals between the Barents and Kara Seas. A pod of humpbacks led the way, cetacean plumes flagging the route. But the history of Novaya Zemlya has little in common with the friendly image of a whale. The islands are uninhabited and far from monitoring stations, and between 1955 and 1990, military personnel detonated 132 nuclear warheads on their rocky tundra. On days when the wind blew east, the fallout landed on Siberian reindeer pastures. Lichens take nutrients from air rather than soil and so absorb many times more radioactive isotopes than green plants. In winter, reindeer eat lichen, and herders eat reindeer. The bio-accumulative effects of radiation must have been worse than even Chernobyl. (Winds were blowing towards the monitoring stations in Sweden on the day Chernobyl went off. So we knew all about that straight away.) After the explosions, workers dumped radioactive waste and spent nuclear reactors in the deep fjords that dissect the northern island of Novaya Zemlya. The development of Soviet nuclear power focussed on the north, and between 1950 and 1970 the Northern Fleet matured from the smallest of the national armadas to one that was larger and more significant than its not diminutive siblings on the Pacific and the Black Sea. Yet the Soviets only had one centre for reprocessing used nuclear fuel, at the Mayak complex in the upper Ob river basin in western Siberia, now the most radioactive place on earth, so the Arctic Ocean became a nuclear rubbish dump. Submarine reactor cores with high radiation levels ended up in the oil and gas-rich Kara Sea.2 Wilf’s new friend Igor had worked as a bosun for a state hydrological research company. On one job, they measured contamination from the fissionable, enriched uranium control rods of the nuclear ice-breaker Lenin. The rods went to the bottom of Tsivolka Bay near Novaya Zemlya following an accident in 1965 involving a loss of coolant. ‘After we had finished the landings on Novaya Zemlya,’ Igor told me in the bar one night, ‘we took bunches of birch twigs back on board for the sauna, like we always do. One day someone was fooling around with a Geiger counter. It went totally crazy near the sauna, and we finally worked out that it was the twigs. They were alive with radiation.’
Meanwhile six new naval bases were operating along the Murman coast from Zapadnaya Litsa in the west to Gremikha in the east. (Soviet bureaucrats had a mania for renaming, and these bases appear on old maps under a variety of disguises: Zapadnaya Litsa was also known as Murmansk-150, Zaozerny, Severomorsk-7 and Andreyeva Bay.) By 1989, Russian Lapland held over one fifth of the world’s total nuclear reactor capacity. Obsessive Soviet secrecy once kept this high-specification military matériel hidden from international view. But now the visitor may inspect both stockpiles and infrastructure as it rots on the beaches of the north-west. In 2000, the writer Roger Took counted forty decaying nuclear reactors and 900 uranium fuel assemblies in ageing canisters at Gremikha, where Sámi and Pomors processed whale blubber and cod liver for so many generations. As for accidents: environmental groups have uncovered many, and the authorities have owned up to others in order to appeal for clean-up money (which they often get), so imagine the number that must have taken place – the ones never revealed. A series of incidents at Zapadnaya Litsa in the eighties involving spent fuel storage started when the concrete and steel lining of a storage pool cracked due to poor construction and frost effects. Radioactive waste water started to leak at a rate of 30 litres a day, soon reaching ten tonnes an hour. Yes, ten tonnes an hour.3 Large quantities of the Northern Fleet’s spent nuclear fuel and waste remains in insecure and volatile conditions across Lapland, and a number of fuelled submarines loll like beached killer whales awaiting decommissioning that never comes. In the meantime the industry is working hard on competitive Arctic shelf technologies. A 2008 Bellona report reveals details of the planned construction of nuclear-powered underwater drilling ships to be deployed in the Kara and Barents Seas as well as floating nuclear power plants. That same year, assessors estimated that one field in the Barents Sea contained 3.2 trillion cubic metres of gas in reservoirs 2 kilometres below the seabed.
On the second day, the tumult subsided to oceanic calm. We leant over the rails watching wavelets die under a film of dark grease ice that followed the movement and contours of the swell. When the film thickened, it turned white, like a rind; the Inuit call that isigoanjazuk. Green water filled basins under the pressure cracks, and frost smoke wafted from the leads. Later we entered fields of heavy floes that were dark blue, like bruises, and twisted at the edges into sinuous galleries of statuary. The Eskimo’s multiple words for snow might have an element of the canard, but Inuktituk has a rich fund of expressions for different kinds of sea ice. If, while paddling your umiak, you heard a cry of ‘Sugainnuq!’, you would look up in alarm and see ‘a huge moving mass of ice that threatens the integrity of the lead edge; it might be a large piece of pack ice or an agglomeration of multi-year ice and first-year ice’. Aluksraq, on the other hand, would indicate the more benign ‘young ice punched by seals forming a blowhole’, and agiuppak an entirely harmless ‘smooth wall of ice along the edge of landfast ice formed by other moving ice’. The wind blew hard, chasing ragged sheets of stratus fractus. When the Khlebnikov’s hull broke young ice, rectangles overlapped in quilted patterns of dark and light. On average, ice in the Arctic Ocean is seven years old and ten feet thick. First-year ice is greyish, multi-year ice blueish (another clue: multi-year ice is thicker, so sticks out the water further). Salt gets pushed out when sea ice freezes, as it doesn’t fit in the structure of the crystal, and the older the ice, the less salt it contains, which is why, as every expeditioner knew, you can wash with melted first-year ice, cook with second-year ice, and make tea with multi-year ice. Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge, has been travelling under the ice cap in Royal Navy submarines since 1976, using an upward-looking echo sounder to measure ice thickness. His published data suggests that for thirty years Arctic sea ice has been thinning everywhere. In March 2007, under the ice in HMS Tireless, Wadhams discovered that the thinning rate has accelerated; the ice is now 50 per cent of its 1976 thickness. ‘This enormous ice retreat in the last two summers is the culmination of a thinning process that has been going on for decades, and now the ice is just collapsing,’ Wadhams said at the end of 2008. ‘This is one of the most serious problems the world has ever faced.’
A cold period might allow the ice to recover. But since a blizzard of studies have shown a faster melt than expected (and even a sharp decrease in the extent of winter sea ice), predictions of an ice-free Arctic Ocean are being constantly revised downwards. ‘If you look at the papers over the past decade,’ says Dr Colin Whiteman, an expert in Quaternary Arctic landscape change, ‘the estimated time frame for total melting of summer sea ice shrinks by five years per year.’ At the time of writing, most scientists are predicting an Arctic Ocean free of summer ice before the end of the century. When, in 2008, a professor of earth systems at the University of East Anglia invited fifty leading climatologists to nominate their tipping points – likely events involving dramatic outcomes – a massive summer ice melt over ten years appeared at the top of the list. (Second was significant alteration in the Greenland ice sheet within 300 years; third the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.) Respondents cited loss of reflective properties as a major factor both in accelerated sea ice melt and in the rapid warming of the Arctic in general. Ice operates as a reflective lid, bouncing the sun’s heat back into the atmosphere, whereas open water absorbs about 90 per cent of sunlight that hits it. The albedo of an object – from the Latin for whiteness – is the extent to which it diffusely reflects light from the sun; albedo can range from zero per cent (no sunlight reflected – all absorbed – hot earth), to 100 per cent (all sunlight reflected – none absorbed – cold earth). Anything that changes the earth’s albedo, such as an increase in sea ice melt, therefore also changes the amount of energy the planet absorbs. As more ice melts, more heat goes in, causing more ice to melt, and so the melt is exponential, which is why a big ice sheet can disappear more rapidly than a small one. A warmed ocean has many thousands of repercussions for marine life. Heating a can of Coca-Cola drives off the fizz, which is carbon dioxide. Heating the oceans does the same thing. As I travelled around the circumpolar lands I met many glaciologists, physicists and other researchers working on the surface heat budget of the ocean. I began this book back in Chukotka with an open mind, but figures recording the loss of sea ice the size of the UK indicate both the potential scale of this particular feedback effect and the extent to which feedback effects in general dominate the earth’s complex climate system.
Sidney, a South African passenger travelling with his sister, had returned to the Barents Sea after more than sixty years. He had served as a rating on a convoy. When the German assault on Russia gathered momentum in the second half of 1941, the Allied merchant navy established a supply route through the Barents Sea to the railheads at Arkhangel and Murmansk. The Nazis, recognising the critical importance of the route, sent up dozens of U-boats and surface raiders and hundreds of aircraft; these were the planes Jan Baalsrud’s colleagues in the Norwegian Resistance had died to foil. The ocean floor beneath us was a corner of a foreign field tens of thousands of times over. The water seemed to have curdled. ‘Nobody can ever know’, Sidney told Wilf and me as we lounged on deck, ‘what the combination of fear, cold and constant strafing can do. But we were lucky. We were three months ahead of PQ-17.’ In the summer of 1942, en route to Murmansk, convoy PQ-17 came under heavy bombardment. The Admiralty radioed orders to switch destination and head for Arkhangel, and, later, to scatter. The convoy lost twenty-five vessels out of thirty-six. Besides killing sailors, the combined action of U-boats and the Luftwaffe sank 142,500 tons of PQ-17’s cargo including 3,350 motor vehicles, 200 bombers and 430 tanks. Horace Carswell served as chief steward on the Empire Tide, one of the few ships to survive PQ-17. In the middle of one bombardment he gave a critically wounded rating a fireman’s lift down the ladders and, in the absence of a doctor, operated himself using carpentry tools. There was no anaesthetic. ‘I summoned the pantryman and a few others of the First Aid party,’ Carswell recorded in his diary. ‘“There’s nothing to worry about, son,” I assured the patient. “I’ll soon fix you up all right . . .” His lurid remarks betokened pain and resentment when I probed the gaping wound in his thigh and the ship lurched to the concussion of a bursting bomb . . . it shook me to find an unexploded shell from an Oerlikon gun embedded in the chap’s thigh! . . . Having dug the live shell out, I put sixteen stitches in the wound.’ Casualties were so high that the Allies began setting sail in winter, as it was harder to be detected in the dark, but the other enemy, the weather, was almost as bad as the German one, with swells in excess of seventy feet and temperatures so low that the torpedoes froze.
‘Land!’ yelped Wilf. The rockfaces of Franz-Josef Land glittered beyond the porthole. The sky was streaky, and bergy bits floated in the channel between ship and shore. Taking turns at the porthole, Wilf and I saw the helicopter deck where the crew were reattaching propellers and, on the port side, a crane dropping zodiacs overboard. Igor was in one of the dangling boats, and he saw us at the window as he went past. He waved and beckoned to Wilf, who was by that time worked to such a pitch of excitement that he was unable to manipulate the zips and buckles of his cold-weather safety gear.
Crouched along the rim of the Barents Sea, the 200 uninhabited islands of Franz-Josef Land boast some of the most extraordinary geological formations on the planet, their sequence of crystalline basalt cliffs and sedimentary tableland racked with deep channels. Heavily ice covered and usually tented in fog, the archipelago was not discovered until 1873, when an Austro-Hungarian expedition named it after the emperor. The crew went exploring, and when the temperature dropped to -55°C, their eyes froze open and their breath vapour froze, so they tinkled when they walked. But the Arctic Ocean still had secrets, even then. Nobody knew there were 37,000 km2 of land between the Kara and Laptex Seas until 1913, when Russians found a fresh archipelago they named Severnaya Zemlya – the last major landmass on the planet to be discovered. As for Franz-Josef: the Soviets kept westerners out.
A zodiac ferried us over to Cape Norway, the western extremity of Jackson Land. Despite a latitude of 81º, purple saxifrage and lemon snow buttercups flourished alongside cushiony moss campion and white poppies, all nourished by the last gasp of the Gulf Stream. Not a single flower grows at that latitude in the southern hemisphere, even in the short burst of summer. Still, Arctic plants engage in a long and laborious energy-storing process in order to produce even a tiny bulb. It can go on for years. On some Arctic islands it takes 10 millennia to form 2 centimetres of topsoil.
In the middle of the vegetation, a few hundred yards from the ocean, a pile of stones lay in a shallow trench covered by a driftwood trunk once used as a roof ridge. It didn’t look much. But in 1895 the great Nansen sat out the winter in the hole. The unprepossessing hollow had become one of the most sacred sites of polar history – up there with Scott’s hut – just as the drill hole on the Greenland ice sheet represented a hallowed monument to science.
As news trickled in to the Scandinavian nations of the latest round of shoe-eaters frozen into Arctic waters for months and years, Nansen had an idea. If Arctic ice drifted in the direction of the Pole, he argued, why not deliberately allow a ship to freeze in, and drift with it all the way to 90ºN? When he tried, the ship failed to reach the top spot, and after two years, refused to come unstuck. In August 1895, Nansen and stoker Hjalmar Johansen set out for help on maple-wood skis and in kayaks, knocking off a Farthest North while they were about it (they got to 86º, just 230 miles short of the Pole. It was the biggest single advance for 400 years). Nansen was a brilliant man but he forgot to wind the clock, so they were unable to chart their longitudinal position. The pair travelled over the ice for 146 days, covering 600 miles, and when they reached what later became Cape Norway they built a hut with stones and walrus hide, copying the dry-stone huts of the Norwegian uplands. This was the trench in which I now made Wilf pose for snaps. It was 10 feet long and 6 feet wide, and it was sunk three feet into the tundra. To celebrate reaching land, Johansen changed his underwear for the first time in four months. ‘I like the sound of that,’ said Wilf. If only he had been joking.
The pair lived off bear and walrus and spent the winter huddled in the same sleeping bag (Wilf was less attracted to that). Johansen, a short man from Telemark, recorded in his diary that one day Nansen said to him, ‘Why don’t we start addressing one another in the familiar du form now?’4 They had no idea where they were. When the ice thawed in May, they paddled for a hundred miles on the wildest of outside chances that they might reach Spitsbergen. Walrus destroyed the kayaks, and food was running out. On 17 June, Nansen heard dogs barking. Leaving Johansen to guard the kayaks, he skied off, and three hours later rounded a hummock on Cape Flora in the south-west of Franz-Josef Land and saw a man in a tweed jacket. It was the English explorer Frederick Jackson, who happened to be on the spot having set off in 1894 on an expedition sponsored by press baron Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe. Nansen skied up to him. The two men shook hands.
‘Aren’t you Nansen?’ asked Jackson, scrutinising the shaggy face of the world’s greatest living explorer.
‘Yes, I am,’ the reply came.
‘By Jove,’ spluttered the Englishman. ‘I’m damned glad to see you.’ The whole world thought Nansen had perished. Nansen’s first question was about his wife. Then he asked if Norway and Sweden were at war. Jackson noted that he was very fat. Back at Jackson’s hut, Nansen ate fried guillemot, rice pudding and jam, had a bath and put on clean clothes while a sledge party went to fetch Johansen. Jackson and Nansen sat up talking till eight the next morning. ‘A more remarkable meeting than ours was never heard of,’ Jackson wrote in his diary. ‘Nansen did not know I was in Franz-Josef Land.’ Nansen had not known that he was in Franz-Josef Land himself.
Jackson had applied to join Nansen’s expedition, but Nansen had rejected him, as he wanted only Norwegians. Instead, Jackson had persuaded Harmsworth to follow the lead of his American newspaper colleagues and sponsor a polar expedition of his own. It was the equivalent of owning a football team today. Jackson and his men mapped and explored Franz-Josef Land for three years. In their winter quarters at Cape Flora they washed in a canvas bath once a week, though hot water was banned, as the moisture would have rotted the wood (they made an exception when Nansen appeared). They slept on the floor, rolling up the bags in the day to make more room, and kept a bear cub for company, feeding it tins of condensed milk. They had one two-year-old newspaper, and in the winter learned the contents by heart, even the advertisements.5 In his diary, Jackson recorded that when he thought of home, he wondered if they were getting good bags on the moors.
The two Norwegians went home on Jackson’s supply ship in July 1886 and reached Christiania at the same time as their own vessel, which in the end had unfrozen. Nansen later named the island where they were rescued after Jackson. To the Norwegian people, Nansen was a hero, but Johansen had no public persona: his is the other face of exploration, that of the failure and misfit. In many ways Nansen’s shadow, he was introspective, and seethed with regret and gloom throughout his life, in permanent exile from the rest of humanity. He went to the polar regions to escape himself. Once he reached the open sea on Jackson’s ship, homeward bound at last, he wrote in his diary, ‘Now when I think of how wonderful I thought it would be to say goodbye to the ice and to all suffering, and compare that feeling with my reality now, I find that reality, after all, is not so wonderful as it appeared to me in the midst of our hard life.’ A champion gymnast and accomplished skier, Johansen went on to explore Antarctica with Amundsen, but the leader left him out of the party that conquered the South Pole. He separated from the woman for whom he had pined in the long winter nights on Franz-Josef Land, and took refuge in alcohol. In 1913 he holed up in a boarding house in Christiania, destitute, and it was there that he shot himself. Nansen paid for his funeral. The refuge at Cape Norway remains, a troglodytic memorial to what men can endure. ‘Polar exploration’, wrote one of the pioneers, ‘is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.’
It was one of those perfect Arctic days on which ocean and sky compete to achieve the most vulgar blue. Thickened grease ice lay on the ocean like a rubber blanket, its saltwater pockets flexing with the waves. Back in the zodiac, I trailed a hand in the water and felt the sticky surface of frazil needles. The driver cut the engine, and we listened to mush ice clinking along the edge of the pans. When we floated around a headland, a female polar bear was standing on the fast ice. Her huge front paws were splayed over the ice edge and her raisin eyes focussed on a cub shaking its fur in a starburst of droplets. Sunshine reflected off the newly moulted sheen of her yellow guard hairs. When it sensed that it was too far away, the cub smacked its lips. Mother nosed into soupy ice. Then she went down on her forelegs, and slid silently into the ocean.
The sailor who power-hosed our boots when we returned from landings was a gnome-like figure with a tea-cosy hat and a mouthful of gold teeth. He smiled broadly all the time, and it was pleasant to see a man enjoying his work. After we returned from one outing and he had sluiced us down, he pointed out a bear that was gorging on the entrails of a seal on a floe piled with sugar snow. For an hour we were all hanging over the stern rail taking photographs. That is to say we were absorbed in the wonders of the natural world having burned up hydrocarbons by the tonne to reach them. Knitting at the guillotine? Or fiddling while Rome burned? Either way, this particular ship of fools illustrated the environmental conundrum of our time. When we went down to lunch after watching the bear I talked with the captain, Pavel Ankudonov, an inscrutable chain-smoking Vladivostokan and a veteran of both polar regions. ‘On this voyage’, he said, ‘we burn 439 metric tonnes of IFO, heavy fuel. Average is 35 tonnes per day, though on last trip, through North East Passage from Anadyr, was more ice so we burn 60 tonnes a day.’ The presence of my wildlife-loving son attenuated the irony: would all this be here for his children’s children? Or would nuclear-powered ice-breakers solve at least this particular problem? I asked Ankudonov if his job would be easier on a nuclear vessel. First he snorted. Then he said, ‘Nuclear captains just sit at wheel and go like through butter. We have to steer course. Monkey can pilot nuclear ice-breaker.’ It was exactly what jet pilots said about astronauts. Puffing his Troika cigarettes, Ankudonov manfully maintained the ship’s Russian flavour despite her international clientele. It was difficult to reconcile the happy images of a pleasure cruise – the grinning boot-hoser, the oldies on holiday, the genial captain and the natural beauty – with the threat of global inundation as the ice melted. Somewhere in the distance, one heard the strains of a band playing on. Hope was one thing. Refusal to listen was another.
When we weren’t galumphing over the tundra or cruising the pack, Wilf and I looked out for wildlife, either from the flying bridge, or from Steel Beach on Deck 7 (it was next to the engine vents). There were always birds in the sky. Every day we saw northern fulmar, blacklegged kittiwakes and Brünnich’s guillemot (called the thick-billed murre in North America), and most days red-throated divers (loons in the US), creatures so highly adapted to ice that they can barely walk on land. On Viktoria Island, Wilf spotted nesting ivory gulls. Two hundred and forty nautical miles from the other parts of Franz-Josef Land, the lonely Viktoria snow dome marks the westernmost point of Russian territory. The Khlebnikov dropped anchor among so much ice that we had to chopper ashore, landing on a shingle spit marked on a military map as Cape Knipovich. On one side of the spit, hundreds of terns had taken refuge in the rusted fuel tanks outside a pair of abandoned stations. One functioned between 1954 and 1993 as a meteorological observatory, the other as a Frontier Guard post. Wiping a circle in a frosted window at the front of the met station, I saw an open book on a desk and an oilskin on a hook with the sleeve turned inside-out. In 1993, having received neither salaries nor supplies for a year, the staff simply walked out of the door when a ship came. There was no money for keeping weather records, or for guarding useless frontiers. Soviet scientists operated 110 Arctic stations before the USSR fell. In 2008 there were three. It was a tragedy for science, as years of good data just stopped. Things would get better, but not yet, and in the meantime, ivory gulls and terns had the island to themselves.
By the time the KK approached Greenland four days later the ocean was showing off hundreds of bergs – mast-high fleets of them, towering with spires, funnels and Moorish arabesques. One, the size of a French cathedral, had flipped over, and the ship sailed so close that we were able to inspect whorls of algae on the freshly exposed underside. We had no darkness, but the light changed with the cycling of the day, and late at night long shadows cast the forms of bergs into singular prominence, as shafts of sunlight do in a lamplit room. I started to rise before five, in order not to miss the early morning reds and pinks glowing on the berg pageant. ‘There is a glamour about those circumpolar regions,’ Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in 1880 after seven months on a whaler. ‘You stand on the very brink of the unknown.’ We were all facing the unknown now. An undefinable truth of the Arctic was emerging from what I had seen in the beautiful ice.
One thing that was known, however, was that the ship’s remorseless three-meals-plus a day regime threatened calorie-induced paralysis. But in the bowels of the vessel, I discovered a gym. Leaving Wilf on bear alert, I joined iron-thighed Russian sailors as they thrusted and flexed to Siberian rap, the crash of waves on the bow directly above adding tympanic rhythm to the piston-pounding from the boom box. The session concluded with a birch-twig thrashing in the sauna. A girl can have a worse time at sea.
From the ship’s Mi-2 helicopters we watched the KK breaking ice with a bird’s eye. As the 45-millimetre steel skirt on the cutaway prow smashed into the pack, it pushed layers up on top of one another until towers of shattered portions tottered sideways, or forced them under the hull, where an ice knife pulverised them into white rubble. The waves formed by the breaking process, as Sylvia Plath wrote about waves somewhere else, went off ‘mouthing ice cakes’. As old ice is thicker than young, its dispersal requires increased horsepower, and the KK ramped its six diesel engines accordingly, tanking out, at maximum capacity, 24,200 hp. Snug in our cabin, we learned to calibrate the blows. Halfway across the Greenland Sea, at three o’clock in the morning, the ship struck with such ferocity that as he was hurled out of bed Wilfred shouted, ‘Yikes!’ (or something ruder). ‘That must be really old ice!’ Alert to the drama, we dressed quickly and hurried to the bridge, where Captain Pavel was smoking inside (a nice touch of echte Kultur) and poring over a chart. Sea ice is expressed in tenths on a maritime log, and on that day, at 81º 04' north, the ice master had inscribed ‘10/10’. Ankudonov had cut thousands of miles of ice at both ends of the earth. ‘In satellite images we receive,’ he explained as the three of us peered out of the bridge window at the solid white ocean ahead, ‘fog obscure the ice cover, so we sail a bit blind. None of this ice at which we look appears on the charts, even though is not first-year ice – probably nobody charted this area last year.’ Wilf asked which was harder – north or south. ‘Antarctic much easier,’ Ankudonov replied, ‘as ice down there softer. Has snow on top, so cuts more easily. Up here I see pressure ridges forming and rising before eyes. Also, in Antarctic you only need to break ice close to land. Arctic Ocean has 50 per cent ice cover.’
Managing to smoke, talk and inspect ice all at the same time, the captain revealed that he had joined the KK straight out of his naval academy in 1985 and worked his way up, learning on the job the chaotic complexities of sea ice. Years ago he discovered that the key to polar travel is flexibility, and indeed that day, the one on which we reached the unbreakable ice, he changed our course, heading back out to sea and skirting the frozen barrier in order to hit Greenland further south than planned.
There had been a tremendous amount of talk in the bar, where most of the talking went on, about an imminent solar eclipse. Everyone knew something about it, but collective knowledge amounted to nothing at all, so it was a relief when the tannoy summoned us into the lecture theatre for an eclipse briefing. The event (we learned) was one of the Saros 126 1,280-year cycle, and as it turned out, Ankudonov heroically got the KK and us into the region of 90 per cent totality. Pinhole viewing boards were distributed, though as there was a bit of gossamer cloud cover we didn’t need them, and as we watched the moon steadily blot out the sun, for the first and only time on the expedition, and for two minutes, we experienced something approaching darkness.
When I returned to the bridge later, Ankudonov, still at his post, had a pair of binoculars jammed into his eye sockets. They were pointing south, where there was nothing to see but ocean. When he had lowered the binoculars and put them back into the wooden case attached behind the wheel, he said, I thought almost wistfully, ‘Only thousand miles to most important water in world.’
Faroe Bank: heard it on the shipping forecast? The narrow, deep channel south-west of the Faroe Islands has functioned for ten thousand years as a key transit passage for the currents that shift warm and cold water around the planet. But all is not well in the cold and salty deep.
The warm waters of the Gulf Stream flow from the tropics on the surface of the North Atlantic and, in conjunction with associated wind patterns, heat the air around western Europe, creating a climate far warmer than the latitude would otherwise permit. (One limb of the Gulf Stream releases a trillion kilowatts of heat as it powers past Ireland.)6 At the same time, cold water flows south from the heart of the Arctic, and the discrete layer of warm water slides over the top of it because the cold, saltier mass is heavier. The warm water gradually releases heat, becoming saltier and heavier, and at pump sites in the Greenland Sea it sinks, piles up and drives the southward flow. (Not many people know that ocean flow is measured in units called Sverdrups, with one Sverdrup equivalent to one million tonnes of water a second.) The exchange of warm water for cold, called the meridional overturning, is a key component of thermohaline circulation, a kind of oceanic conveyor belt driven by salt and temperature (thermo heat, hals salt). For the exchange to work, extremely large volumes of cold, salty water must sink. But as Greenland glaciers accelerate their melt, they discharge more fresh water into the Arctic Ocean. Without sufficient salinity, the cold water is not dense enough to sink. A series of long-term data-gathering projects have tracked declining salinity in the Faroe Bank gap, while devices attached to narwhal tusks have transmitted valuable information on both reduced salinity and higher temperatures in parts of the ocean inaccessible to research vessels. In one of the many ironies of climate change, were the overturning circulation to stop, Britain would cool even as the planet itself continued to warm. Like most factors that influence a changing climate, overturning circulation is a chaotic and complicated story. Recent studies pioneered by a team from the university of Southampton have revealed that Atlantic currents are far more variable than previously understood.
I once asked a group of oceanographers during a coffee break in a polar conference if they considered it likely that the conveyor belt would stop altogether, switching off the overturning circulation. At first, they laughed. ‘You can’t expect us to agree on that,’ one said. ‘It won’t happen this century – we won’t fight about that at least,’ said another. ‘And certainly not this week, as it did in the movie The Day After Tomorrow! The threshold of collapse remains unknown – how much fresh water is needed to shut down thermohaline circulation. There are things we don’t understand that play a crucial role. The North Atlantic Oscillation, for example, which is a multi-decadal seesaw of high and low pressure. We do know for sure that the top 1.5 kilometres of water in the seas around the main Greenland pump have freshened rapidly.’ Someone said he thought thermohaline circulation might have been responsible for sudden climate shifts in the past, stimulating the switch between ice ages and non-ice ages. The discussion went on for a few minutes, to and fro. ‘If the Greenland ice sheet starts to disintegrate – that’s the big one in all this,’ someone concluded; and we walked back into the conference hall.
The ice has always been uncertain: always the big one. The riches of the Oriental spice trade had lured both European and Russian ships into its traps for many centuries. The prized North-East Passage (following the Russian coast east) and the equally vaunted North-West Passage (threading westwards through the Canadian Arctic) meet at the Bering Strait, the narrow strip of water separating Russia and North America that decants into the priceless Pacific. The pursuit of both passages were epic in scope, involving rescuers who had to be rescued, the mightiest propaganda a country could brew, and many cameo appearances by the Grim Reaper.
Attempts to find a North-East Passage had begun in the sixteenth century, perhaps earlier. (The term refers to the entire Europe-to-Pacific route along the Russian coast, Murmansk to Vladivostok, dark for half the year and frozen for longer.) The Bering Strait at one end was a notoriously dangerous stretch of water, Vitus Bering himself one of many to have drowned in it. As far as anyone knows, the first man to get through was Baron Adolf Nordenskiöld, a Swede born in Finland who had been contracted to find ‘that strait where the Old and the New World seem to shake hands’. Ice stopped his ship, the former whaler Vega, 130 miles short of the Strait, and Nordenskiöld and his crew had to spend the winter of 1878-9 in the pincers of a floe off Chukotka before proceeding east into the Pacific.
Meanwhile, in faraway New York, a newsman with an eye for a story decided Nordenskiöld needed rescuing. James Gordon Bennett Jr was the son of the proprietor of the New York Herald and at the helm himself for half a century. He had sponsored numerous expeditions and popularised the now standard technique of creating news, the more sensational the better. In a Herald story about an earlier Arctic voyage headlined ‘Eight Days Between Meals’, the reader only learned halfway through the piece that it was the huskies which had gone the eight days. In what turned out to be Bennett’s last great attempt at an Arctic scoop, he despatched Navy Captain George Washington DeLong to rescue Nordenskiöld (it didn’t matter to Bennett that Nordenskiöld didn’t need rescuing) and to find the North Pole by the Pacific route while he was at it.
DeLong, a balding figure with a swanky moustache, steamed out of San Francisco in 1879 in Jeanette. As soon as he reached the East Siberian coast, he learned that Nordenskiöld was out of the ice and on his way home, and immediately got stuck himself. In New York, the Herald assured the public there was no need to panic, thereby assuring that they did. In June 1881, Jeanette sank. The frightened crew set out for the Lena delta on five sledges. The Lena, which drains a million square miles of Siberia, has a coastal outflow 260 miles across, and the men were soon comprehensively lost. Obliged to eat not only their shoes, but also their trousers, they lost body parts to frostbite, and although one party eventually came across a Cossack courier who galloped news to the tsar, twenty out of thirty-three died, including DeLong. It was the biggest American Arctic disaster ever.
The Soviets renamed the North-East Passage Severnyy Morskoy Put, or Sevmorput, known in English as the Northern Sea Route. Stalin was having a love affair with both industrialisation and polar exploration and when he unleashed the second Five-Year Plan in 1932, he flagged the opening of a Northern Sea Route as top priority. That same year, a former Newfoundland sealer under Soviet command pulled off an Arkhangel-to-Vladivostock transit in one season. Ice off the north coast of Chukotka smashed the ship’s propellers, and a trawler towed her the last bit; but still. A year later, Stalin launched the Chelyuskin expedition, which was to be the second to sail the length of the Northern Sea Route in a single season. Chelyuskin got through the Bering Strait, just, before the pack crushed her. One person died and the other 104 set up camp on the sea ice 80 miles north-east of Vankarem. The story of their survival and rescue hardened into a central Soviet myth. When a plane finally arrived to pick them up, the stranded men allegedly demanded an immediate report on the Seventeenth Party Congress and listened to it without interruption for two and a half hours.
The Arctic, in that lamentable decade, was to play its most sinister role. Stalin deployed his polar aviators and explorers as heroic diversions, trumpeting their achievements across acres of newsprint while hundreds of thousands died and the country moved towards the fully-fledged slaughter of The Great Terror. A couple of hundred miles from the Chelyuskin ice camp, a prison ship froze in on its way to Kolyma. The Dzhurma was the first vessel to sail a new route from Vladivostok, the 4,000-mile passage to Ambarchik on the Arctic Ocean, at the mouth of the Kolyma River. Dzhurma had 12,000 prisoners below decks. When she reached Ambarchik in the spring, they were all dead.
During the thirties Soviet vessels made increasing commercial use of both ends of the Northern Sea Route, and ocean shipping acquired a glamour that the great rivers, economic highways for centuries, entirely lacked. By 1936 the Northern Sea Route Administration, or Glavsevmorput, had 40,000 employees on the payroll. In the rush to develop the Arctic coast ships transported whole towns north, prefabricated. Eager polyarnitsa and polyarniki (polar workers, women and men), in receipt of rations that included twenty-five cigarettes a day, toiled to Stakhanovite targets and built a chain of radio stations to assist navigation and aviation, over fifty polar bases, and a network of towns and cities such as Igarka on the Yenesei, the first port in Arctic Siberia servicing the coal mines. Security agents recruited thousands of Arctic border guards to watch over a frontier as sacred as those to the south facing terrestrial enemies. Propaganda films were made to romanticise these pogranichniki (frontier guards). ‘Professions are chosen,’ went the old KGB slogan, ‘but poets and border guards are born.’ Otto Yulyevich Shmidt, captain of the Chelyuskin and ‘Russia’s Arctic Hero No. 1’, headed Glavsevmorput. ‘He spoke of the Arctic as Rhodes would have spoken of South Africa or as an eighteenth-century pioneer of America, as a land of promise,’ said a Times journalist who interviewed Shmidt in Moscow. Under Shmidt’s leadership, Glavsevmorput even set up an Institute of Arctic Agriculture to coax potatoes out of the permafrost. ‘We are really making friends with the polar world,’ said the greatest apologist the Arctic has ever known. ‘We are bringing it to life, and life to it.’
The next development in Soviet efforts to conquer the ice was the drift station. Stalin had claimed the North-East Passage as one of his countless achievements, but the movements of ice remained enigmatic, and technicians devised camps that floated on moving chunks of solid sea as part of a wider mission to achieve mastery. The first station began its drift in early May 1937, after a 4-engine N-170 landed four men on a 10-foot-thick floe about 12 miles west of the Pole. The leader was Ivan Papanin, a multidisciplinary scientist and zealous first-generation communist born in 1895 in Sevastopol on the Black Sea. Originally a sailor in the tsarist navy, Papanin was 5 feet 3 and a half with a toothbrush moustache. He and his colleagues lived on the floe in tents which they repegged every day. They ate rations from soldered tin containers; each man had 1,470 grammes of caviare. One had done a short medical course prior to deployment on which he had practised sewing up sutures on hunks of beef. They had a wireless on which they heard the chimes of the Kremlin clock, operatic arias from Paris, and the news that fascists were bombing Barcelona; Eugene Federov also learned that he had become a father. They powered the wireless with a bicycle generator. Two men had to pedal at once in order to transmit just one of the many articles they penned for Pravda, Izvestiya and other papers; it was a popular job, as pedalling was the only activity during which smoking was permitted (rather a counterproductive regulation, one would imagine). They worked constantly, taking samples and depth soundings and meteorological observations and collecting data on ice dynamics that would unlock the mysteries of the Arctic Ocean. Someone had accidentally left behind the alcohol required for certain experiments, so they distilled some from brandy, possibly the only time the transaction has gone in that direction. They had a rubber boat and a husky called Merry who later had a refrigerated kennel at Moscow zoo; they held Party-Komsomol meetings, and political discussion meetings, and meetings to hear one another talk about the history of the Bolshevik Party. Comrade Stalin, according to Papanin, was ‘the greatest man of modern times’, and a portrait of him hung in the main tent. ‘Stalin has devoted the whole of his life to secure a happy life for the workers,’ wrote Papanin. Even Captain Scott, it turned out, would have been all right had he enjoyed the benefits of Soviet society. ‘I recall the tragic note written by Captain Scott,’ opined Papanin. ‘Returning from the South Pole, he was tormented by anxiety as to who would take care of his family if he perished. We have no such anxieties; behind us stands the entire Soviet people, our party and our government; with us is our beloved Joseph . . .’
As they drifted south for a year the floe shrank, the fissures widened and the growling and rumbling grew louder. When the breaking ice was really noisy, they put a record on the gramophone. On 19 February 1938 an ice-breaker picked them up in the southern Greenland Sea, a thousand miles from where they had started. They returned as Heroes of the Soviet Union, and so did the pilots who had flown them in. Aviators were whizzing busily around the Soviet Arctic at the time. ‘Our people call it Stalinist aviation,’ Papanin wrote, ‘because Comrade Stalin himself is so keenly interested in its development.’ After one particular pioneering Arctic flight, eight miles of cheering crowds met the three airmen. Again, Papanin and his colleagues were tools – smokescreen tools. While they were hammering out their reports, the number of arrests based on spurious counter-revolutionary crimes tripled, and the purge extended outwards from the Party and spread to peasants and workers. The show trials had begun, and polar heroes represented progress, youth and triumph to be compared with unenlightened Old Bolsheviks who had to be killed off. While a batch of distinguished military commanders who had pioneered the modernisation of the Red Army were being tried for imaginary crimes in June 1937, a group of polar explorers on Rudolf Island in Franz-Josef Land sent in a message demanding their execution (in fact they had already been shot in secret). According to a leading historian of the Terror, there were at this time – 1938 – about 7 million ‘purgees’ in the camps.
When heroic deeds went wrong, retribution was swift. Test pilot Valery Chkalov generated the usual vast press coverage when he flew over the North Pole and landed in Washington State in an ANT-25. When he later crashed, Stalin’s stooges shot the head of the aircraft industry, the designer of the plane and the director of the plant where it was built. The talented aviation engineer A.N. Tupolev was tortured into a confession of sabotage in October 1937. State security hoodlums murdered weathermen for failing to predict poor weather.
Shortly after the Second World War ended, US air force commander General H.H. Arnold declared, ‘If World War 3 should come, its strategic centre will be the North Pole.’ His colleagues agreed, and the United States and its allies poured money into the DEW line and the Thule bomber installation which cost a reported $800 million and which rose like an extra-planetary monster among the Greenlandic Inuhuit. At the same time Shmidt and his colleagues pioneered such dramatic advances in nuclear technology and sub marine design that an expanded and enhanced Soviet fleet was able to patrol under Arctic ice for months. Some vessels could go four years without refuelling. Throughout the Cold War, both sides knew that the shortest route between them for conventional bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles was across the Arctic Ocean, as Gino Watkins had recognised. As a result, to complement the work of the submarines, both established dozens of drift stations like the one pioneered by Papanin for reconnaissance purposes. The white and trackless Arctic was perfect war territory. New submarines could dive deeper than their conventional ancestors and so pass under the thickest Arctic ice. In 1958 two US nuclear submarines went all the way to the North Pole. A nuclear capacity had realigned the role of the Arctic, as the general had predicted.
Europeans had been trying to find a way through the fabled North-West Passage since the time of Henry VIII. The channels through what is now the Canadian archipelago were navigable for only two or three months a year, and the pattern and extent of sea ice altered dramatically from one season to the next, as they still do. A glance at the map reveals the names of patrons who had sponsored early expeditions. The fur traders made capital of it. They had little time for unseasoned bunglers. ‘In sailing along the Union Coast,’ reads an unpublished document found in a trapping station on Hudson Bay, ‘. . . we also discovered many shoals and islands unnoticed by former Navigators, in particular an extensive sand-bank which at low water forms an Island . . . This Island I have named Brown-Bottom-Island in honour of my Friend and relative Lord Brownbottom.’ (Little changes. In 2007 Artur Chilingarov’s flag made the North Pole Russian – though at least he didn’t try to name it after himself.)
In 1745 a Parliamentary Act in Britain put up a £20,000 reward for the discovery of a route through Hudson Strait north of the bay, the first of many acts and bounties. Captain Cook himself sailed up to have a look, categorically concluding that there was no waterway from the Pacific to the Atlantic. By 1820 any passage that did exist was known to lie too far north to accumulate trade advantage; the quest had become a geographical challenge, and imperial pride was a significant motivator. The hour had its man. He was Mr, later Sir, John Barrow, second secretary at to the Admiralty and once a cabin boy on a whaler. If, Barrow argued, a full traverse of a passage were ‘left to be performed by some other power, England by her neglect of it, after having opened the East and West doors, would be laughed at by all the world of having hesitated to cross the threshold’. England was not yet accustomed to being laughed at. Barrow had the tools for the job, as when the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the Admiralty had a glut of idle ships and officers on its hands; and until the Crimean War in 1853, no major conflicts to fight. So Barrow hurled his men again into Arctic waters that made and unmade reputations in a prolonged orgy of shoe-eating and death. William Parry crawled to 82ºN. John and James Clark Ross spent four winters locked in the ice, James sledging to the North Magnetic Pole while Uncle John sawed off a stoker’s mangled arm. Even as the innovation of the steam engine displaced the rigours of rigging, still the dream lived: the old Arctic dream in which man voyaged over the horizon to find whatever was there. But one figure towers over the rest in the pages of Arctic exploration and its mythology: Sir John Franklin, a household name in his lifetime and, like Captain Scott, more than that beyond it. In 1845 Franklin sailed into the pack with 128 men, determined to nail the Passage once and for all. But it was the other way round. Neither he nor his crew were seen alive again.
What compels in an adventure story? Survival against the odds, as in Maurice Herzog’s ascent of Annapurna? Or heroic redemption combining death and deathless prose, as demonstrated by Captain Scott? Or is it perhaps the sheer derring-do of a Livingstone hacking through malarial jungle? Sir John Franklin’s story has none of these ingredients, yet he is perceived as a five-star polar hero, commemorated in Westminster Abbey with marble and bad poetry by Tennyson (‘Not here! The white north has thy bones’) and in America with quasi-canonisation. The New York Times characterised the Franklin expedition and its aftermath as being ‘as noble an epic as that which has immortalised the fall of Troy or the conquest of Jerusalem’. But the story, it turns out, is not about feats of exploration at all, just as the Soviet pursuit of the North-East Passage is not. Both quests reveal the power of myth-making; the manufacturing of national legend; and the manipulation of history.
Franklin was a deeply religious, uneducated Lincolnshire man who joined the Royal Navy at twelve and fought at Trafalgar. By the time he married his ambitious second wife, Jane, he was a veteran of high latitudes and had led two polar expeditions, charting and gathering magnetic data. Jane too was a keen traveller from an early age, racing up mountains on six continents and lugging a customised iron bedstead around the globe. Despite making a cock-up of both his trips to the High Arctic (nearing starvation on one sledging journey, he ate his boots), Franklin, knighted in 1829, had established himself as a celebrity. He was actually a dullard. Jane told him off for writing boring letters. It was his malleability that attracted her, and she controlled his career from the outset, entering the most momentous phase of her own career when she secured her husband another polar command. Weighing in at over twenty stone, fifty-nine-year-old Sir John was hopelessly unsuited to the task. Daguerreotypes taken prior to departure depict a member of the Politburo in an admiral’s hat. But in 1845 Franklin sallied blithely north with two ships, HMS Erebus and Terror, at the head of the last Admiralty expedition to look for a North-West Passage. When neither ship reappeared after two years, Jane began to lobby on her husband’s behalf, despatching an armada of rescue ships and even trying to sail north herself. She dragooned Dickens into service. In the pages of his periodical Household Words the most famous author in England kept the public rigid with anticipation during the Franklin search, making, at the same time, a significant contribution to the image of the Arctic that was to dominate the public consciousness for decades. ‘Think of Christmas in the tremendous wastes of ice and snow’, thundered Dickens in 1850 ‘. . . where crashing mountains of ice, heaped up together, have made a chaos round their ships, which in a moment might have ground them to dust; where hair has frozen up on the face; where blankets have stiffened upon the bodies of men lying asleep . . .’ The reading public had been gobbling up stories set in the Arctic since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus caused a sensation in 1818 when publication coincided with a revival of British efforts to find a North-West Passage. If subsequent travellers had thought less about artistic embellishments and more about the skills and equipment required to live without actually courting peril in the Arctic, fewer would have died horrible deaths after consuming their footwear.
As for Lady Jane: she handed the captain of each rescue vessel a wax-sealed envelope addressed to her husband. ‘I desire nothing’, she wrote in one, ‘but to cherish you the remainder of your days, however injured and broken your health may be – but in every case I will strive to bow to the Almighty Will, and trust thro’ His mercy for a blessed reunion in a better world.’ Each time, a gloomy sea dog returned the letter unopened. Manipulative and temperamental, Lady Jane got on people’s wicks from Spitsbergen to Sydney (even her loving father eventually disinherited her). Nonetheless, she emerges a far more interesting figure than her useless husband. Many of her rescue ships made important discoveries as well as charting thousands of miles of North American coastline. It was she who created the image of Sir John Franklin that has been handed down to posterity. Newspapers dubbed her ‘our English Penelope’, and country fairs sold Staffordshire figures of the couple, he peering through a telescope, she anxiously fingering her shawl. Clairvoyants began to see Franklin and his men staggering around on the ice when they stared into their crystal balls. Overheated civic planners named a row of houses near Wormwood Scrubs prison North Pole Road, and an Arctic Street sprang up elsewhere in London. This was the Arctic legacy Gino Watkins inherited.
Lady Jane wrote to President Taylor appealing for an American rescue expedition, but it was a private citizen, New York businessman Henry Grinnell, who came up with real money. Grinnell’s second expedition captivated the American public like no other. The equivalent of a ticker-tape parade greeted its leader, Dr Elisha Kent Kane, on his return, and the New York Times cleared the front page for a week. Kane published his account of the voyage in 1856, and for a decade the two volumes sold almost as many copies as the Bible. Queen Victoria invited Kane to breakfast when he visited Britain. The furore, once again, was largely based on an illusion: Kane announced that he had found an Open Polar Sea, whereas in fact he had found only a temporarily ice-free stretch of water. In addition, far from being heroic, the expedition could have furnished a script for Carry On up the Arctic. Inuit hunters saved Kane and his crew from near starvation, almost everyone had something amputated and rats plagued the ship. Kane tried to fumigate, bivvying the men on deck, but when the cook popped down to the galley to check on the soup, he collapsed from asphyxiation. The ship caught fire, and later sank (the men walked across the ice to Greenland, where they met a rescue ship). Three died. At least Kane didn’t go north again, though he wanted to. The effort of writing his book took its toll. ‘This book, poor as it is,’ he told his publisher when he handed over the typescript, ‘has been my coffin.’ I know how he felt. Meanwhile Irishman Robert McClure entered the archipelago from the west in HMS Investigator to see if Franklin might have broken through to that side. Looping round the east of Banks Island and disembarking, McClure sledged north, and, standing on a peninsula and looking out through a telescope, saw a frozen channel. ‘Can it be possible’, he wrote in his journal, ‘that this water communicates with Barrow’s Strait, and shall prove to be the long-sought North-West Passage?’ It did, and it was. Trapped for two winters, his crew half-starved and scurvy ridden, McClure then sledged to meet a rescue party coming from the east. So the passage – that part of it now called McClure Strait – had been traversed, though not in a ship. Inevitably, it was an anti-climax.
Of Franklin, however, there was no news until 1854, when Orkneyman and Company surveyor John Rae returned to London. Eskimo hunters, Rae reported, had encountered forty starving members of Franklin’s party dragging a boat near the north shore of King William Island (which almost touches the mainland), and later the same season others found thirty-five white corpses near the same island’s Great Fish River. The bodies had been partially eaten, and fragments of human flesh floated in the kettles. Nobody wanted to hear that. Dickens sorted it out with magisterial authority by concluding that the chaps were simply too decent to have set about one another with a knife and fork. ‘We submit’, he declaimed angrily in one of two pieces in Household Words, ‘that the memory of the lost Arctic voyagers is placed, by reason and experience, high above the taint of this so-easily allowed connection; and that the noble conduct and example of such men, and of their own great leader himself, under similar endurances, belies it, and outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people, with a domesticity of blood and blubber.’ These latter were the Inuit, and Dickens’ diatribe constituted propaganda of the Soviet variety. ‘We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous and cruel,’ Dickens insisted. And of course, at bottom he was right about that, because the Inuit are just like us.
Yet more ships now had to sail off to the Great Fish River. In 1857, crewmen found written records stowed in a cairn (only three men died on this, the last of so many Franklin searches). The records revealed that Franklin had expired before most of his crew. In addition, a small party of men, but not Franklin himself, may have found another passage through to the Pacific, two years before McClure looked out at his. The news only spurred Jane on to higher goals. Through sophistry, tireless hard work and shrewd politicking, she persuaded the Admiralty and the world that the hapless Franklin had discovered the Passage. He had done no such thing. Today it would be called spin.
The public was gasping to transfigure Franklin. Victorians liked transforming earthly journeys into spiritual ones, and they passed the habit down to succeeding generations. People made the most tremendous meal of it in the case of Captain Scott, and after the First World War they were at it again when Mallory vanished on Everest. It was the idealised Arctic that mattered to the armchair explorers, not the protean one on the map; for those reading about it at home the landscape exerted a moral force that conveniently fitted their world view. The explorer, providing he was British, brought order and civilisation and reminded everyone at home that theirs was the greatest nation on earth. Furthermore, explorers were associated with feelings that soared fearlessly above earthbound banalities. Grandeur and violence; cosmic mystery; the primal power of wilderness; the spiritual relationship between man and nature – the Arctic had it all, as Mary Shelley had recognised. Tennyson (poet laureate, as well as Franklin’s nephew-in-law) portrayed exploration as a spiritual or intellectual quest. The business of transformation and romanticisation brought out the worst in everyone. Wilkie Collins supplied The Frozen Deep, a terrible melodrama loosely based on the Franklin story, the action centring on a group of women waiting for news of their menfolk, these latter having vanished on an Arctic expedition, and on the men themselves, valiantly setting off to relieve stranded colleagues. Collins’ friend Dickens helped out with the script, setting to and penning a verse prologue.
One savage footprint on the lonely shore,
Where one man listened to the surge’s roar;
Not all the winds that stir the mighty sea
Can ever ruffle the memory.
In his pet role of actor-manager, forty-five-year-old Dickens went on to stage the play with characteristic gusto, and to act the part of the protagonist, Richard Wardour; The Frozen Deep was the sensation of the London season, and Dickens so famous that Queen Victoria went to see the play, dragging Princes Leopold of Belgium and Frederick of Prussia. During the course of rehearsals for a short run at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Dickens met an eighteen-year-old actress called Nelly Ternan. It was a coup de foudre, or perhaps a coup de glace, but unlike most strikes, it lasted. For the rest of his life, Dickens maintained a secret home with the blue-eyed Nelly, shuttling between her and his estranged wife Catherine, with whom he had nine children (a tenth had died). It was a set-piece straight out of one of his novels, revealing Dickens as something other than the Pickwickian paterfamilias of legend (another case of the power of myth). Nelly was the one who emerged with her dignity intact, as she never told her story. The theme of double lives occurred often in the Dickensian oeuvre, and the great man cited Wardour as a model for Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. It was encouraging to see the ghost of the Arctic there too.
The glory days of the Northern Sea Route and its passage to Asia are only a memory in the defunct offices of Glavsevmorput, Sevmorput and FESCO, the Far Eastern Shipping Company that owns the Khlebnikov. FESCO once operated 250 ships on the Northern Sea Route. Now it has fewer than a fifth of that number. To the end (though in truth we have not yet reached the end), polar waterways reflect national concerns. The Russian market economy does not footle with its marine routes: it goes straight for the gasfields. But the 900 miles of deep channels that form the North-West Passage have recently returned to the news pages. Basically they have unfrozen, and once again the commercial potential of the route has set pulses racing. The first vessels to get through did so in two seasons or more, sitting out the winter locked in the ice. In 1944 an ice-strengthened schooner belonging to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police made the first transit in one season. Since then, traverses have been contingent on favourable ice conditions, or on the resources of specialist ships and expeditions. In 2007, however, for the first time, an entirely ice-free passage briefly opened from ocean to ocean. As temperatures rise and ice vanishes, the passage may regularly open to commercial shipping, perhaps even for four or five months a year. This crucially important scenario has ratcheted up a long-running quarrel over ownership of the channels. In April 2007, Canada formally declared that all five routes through its Arctic archipelago constitute inland waterways. Both the USA and the EU, however, insist that these are international waters, which would mean foreign ships could pass through without permission (the USA has sent the odd warship from end to end to prove the point). To reinforce the claim, in February 2008, Washington, via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of New Hampshire, published a map showing that the continental shelf extending from Alaska includes a portion of the North-West Passage.
Wilf and I continued our adventure. We sailed down the coast of East Greenland among many bergs, and Wilf photographed his first musk ox to add to his first polar bear. The KK powered through the Greenland Sea and crossed the Arctic Circle close to Iceland, where we disembarked at Reykjavik. Wilf said he was sad to think he might not be able to repeat the journey with his own son, if the ice really does melt.
1 The flat and frugally populated seascape of the Tersky coast in the south and east of the Kola Peninsula, always a smugglers’ coast, has turned into a Klondike for a cornucopia of traffickers, the proceeds drunk away or funnelled out through the administrative centre of Umba.
2 The Soviet Navy dumped the following three special vessels in the Kara near Novaya Zemlya after the ships had provided technical maintenance to merchant and military nuclear-powered operations; all were heavily contaminated and carried solid radioactive waste. 1) The Nikolai Bauman, dumped in 1964 in Tsivolka Bay. 2) The Olga Bay, a tugboat, dumped in 1968. 3) A special-purpose technical maintenance vessel, designation PSSN-28, dumped in 1976, which also carried liquid radioactive waste.
3 According to the science-based environmental organisation Bellona, total radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste at Zapadnaya Litsa reaches approximately 1,018 Becquerel, or 27 million curies. Overall radioactivity of the release of radioactive substances during the Chernobyl accident was around 50 million curies.
4 Shipton said more or less the same thing to Tilman when the pair reached the summit of Nanda Devi, suggesting that they start to use Christian names. But Tilman couldn’t do it: surnames or nothing.
5 Like the trapper we met in Svalbard who posted last year’s newspaper in his mailbox on the way out to his traps each morning, the tautological antiquity of ‘news’ means nothing to the polar explorer starved of contact with the outside world. The celebrated French adventurer Jean Charcot put a two-year-old edition of Le Matin and Le Figaro on the wardroom table of his ship the Pourquoi Pas? each morning. He said both news and scandals were as interesting as when he first read of them, and that he was always impatient for the next day’s instalment. On the Greely expedition in the High Canadian Arctic, men peeled scraps of soggy newspaper wrapping from their anti-scorbutic lemons and sat around in the evening reading them aloud. When even old news is scarce, any sample of the printed word becomes gripping. A modern day Frozen Beard once recited to me the cooking instructions for porridge oats in Swahili, as they were printed on the packet, which was all the reading mat erial we had in the tent during a week-long blizzard. We had already eaten the porridge.
6 As an American scientist said, the Gulf Stream ‘partly explains the accident of European civilisation’.
