The Ice Passage: A True Story of Ambition, Disaster, and Endurance in the Arctic Wilderness

245 Pages·2009·1.9 MB·English

by  Brian Payton

By the Same Author
Hail Mary Corner
Shadow of the Bear: Travels in Vanishing Wilderness

FOR LILY
Table of Contents
Prologue: Reckoning
I
1. Days of Paradise
2. The White Edge
3. The Great Blue Chest
4. Possession
5. Articles of Faith
6. The Long View
7. Star of Plenty
8. Enduring Night
9. The Search
10. The Red Scarf
11. Water Sky
12. Bay of God’s Mercy
II
13. Hunters, Scavengers
14. Parry’s Rock
15. A Taste for Mountain Sorrel
16. The Wasting
17. The Surgeon’s Report
III
18. Advent
19. Exodus
20. Show of Hands
21. Uncommon Prayer
22. Between Ships
23. Dominion
24. Restitution
25. Dissolution
Photo Section
Author’s Note
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
ARCTIC NORTH AMERICA (Coastline Known to European Mariners in January
1850)
ARCTIC NORTH AMERICA (Journey of HMS Investigator)
Prologue
RECKONING
, a small craft sailed effortlessly around the Earth
ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2007
fourteen times, just as it had every day for nearly a dozen years. The
payload module of RADARSAT-1 resembled an upright refrigerator
swaddled in gold leaf. With its long, wing-like solar arrays stretched out
on either side, it was a cubist’s albatross on a perpetual glide above the
sea. From five hundred miles above, it cast a cold and unblinking eye on
great swaths of land, water, and ice. It surveyed the naked Earth through
changing veils of cloud, snow, smoke, and smog. On this day, the images
it captured and beamed back showed that a rift had opened at the top of
the world.
The polar ice cap—a shifting, frozen mass the size of Europe—had
been in steady retreat since the 1980s. In 2005, scientists were
astounded by satellite images revealing the greatest single-year
reduction in sea ice ever recorded. When the pictures arrived on
September 16, 2007, they showed something much more ominous. That
day turned out to be the year’s “apparent Arctic sea ice minimum,” the
point at which summer melt comes to an end and autumn accumulation
begins. It would also be, by far, the lowest extent of sea ice ever
recorded. One million square miles of ice—an area nearly four times the
size of Texas—had gone missing. For perhaps the first time in a million
years, a large expanse of the Arctic Ocean was exposed, signalling both
the realization of a long-held dream and a warning of potential
catastrophe.
Polar ice scientists, oceanographers, and climatologists found
themselves scrambling for new adjectives to render their sense of alarm
and dread. However, having relayed dire warnings about polar ice
retreat two years before, the media were slower in reporting this more
profound event and its implications. This time around, leading the news
in many parts of the world was the fact that the Northwest Passage—sea
lane of myth and legend—was not only open for the first time, it was
essentially ice-free.
We have wanted it badly and for a very long time, this lazy route
between Europe and the Orient. Once found, it was to link the great
markets and resources of the world, ushering in a new era of
unprecedented wealth and power for those who could manage it. It was,
after all, what inspired Christopher Columbus to sail boldly west to
reach the East. Despite mounting contradictory evidence, the great
navigator took to his grave the staunch belief that he had indeed
reached the Indies and Cathay—that he had succeeded in making the
dream come true.
Belief in this passage persisted as the map of the New World was
gradually sketched in. The faith adapted, transformed, and evolved into
three denominations: a Northwest Passage through North America, a
Northeast Passage along the top of Eurasia, and—that ultimate prize—an
Open Polar Sea. This least known and most improbable idea was
tantalizing in the extreme. Proponents claimed that behind a seemingly
impenetrable ring of ice lay a large, warm, open body of water at the
pole.
Speculation about a temperate polar region stretches back to the
earliest conception of a spherical Earth. While most ancient Greeks
believed that the poles were frozen wastes, some claimed that beyond
Thrace, where the god Boreas (the North Wind) dwelled, was
Hyperborea—a land of leisure where the sun always shone. In early
modern times, the belief in a navigable Polar Sea was first suggested in
print in 1527 by Robert Thorne, agent of a prosperous Bristol-based
trading company, whose father had been a crewmember of John Cabot’s
original 1496 voyage to Iceland. Thorne proposed the notion of an Open
Polar Sea in a letter to Henry VIII. When the king showed little interest,
Thorne published his hypothesis in a pamphlet entitled Thorne’s Plan. In
it, he declared: “there is no doubt, but sailing Northward and passing the
Pole, descending to the Equinoctial line, we shall arrive at the Islands of
Cathay, and it should be a much shorter way than any other.” Explorers
Willem Barents and Henry Hudson shared the belief. In the seventeenth
century, England’s Royal Society debated Dutch reports that they had
actually discovered such a passage across the pole. The notion of an
Open Polar Sea was eventually set aside, as neither scientific nor
practical evidence could be found.
Then, in 1817, reports of an extraordinary breakup of sea ice occurred
on the coast of Greenland and revived the faith. It would gain further
credence as the search for the Northwest Passage gained momentum.
The great Arctic explorer Sir William Edward Parry, a believer,
continued the search for a way through the “barrier” of ice and into the
open water. In 1845, Parry sent Sir John Franklin to continue the hunt
for a Northwest Passage as well as for open water leading to the pole.
Franklin’s quest famously resulted in the disappearance of the two ships
under his command, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, as well as all 128 men
in his expedition. As the years passed without word from Franklin, some
suggested that he and his men could still be alive among an unknown
race of people on the palm-fringed shores of the Open Polar Sea.
In an unprecedented international rescue effort, twenty-three ships
were dispatched between 1848 and 1853 to find the lost explorer and
solve, once and for all, the persistent mystery of the Northwest Passage.
Although the tools, technology, and vessels employed were the finest
available, the mariners’ charts showed enormous gaps in knowledge. The
price of filling those holes would ultimately be measured in human lives.
One crew sent to the Arctic during that great search would succeed in
being the first to circumnavigate the Americas and return with the
answer to that larger, older question. They would find and cross the last
link of the Northwest Passage and complete what was considered the
greatest maritime achievement of the age.
On January 20, 1850, HMS Investigator set sail from Plymouth with a
favourable wind. Her officers and crew would ultimately face starvation,
madness, and death in an unknown wilderness. They would bring back
the first sustained observations of the climate, flora, and fauna of the
western Arctic Archipelago, and be among the first Europeans to contact
the local native people. Theirs was a four-year battle with the polar ice—
engine of oceanic currents, reflector of solar energy, regulator of the
global atmosphere, habitat of the supremely adapted, testing ground of
ambition and endurance, fortress of myths and dreams.