by Tim Severin
Brendan began to tip away from the face of the new wave. She leaned over and over until, on the lee side, I found myself looking almost straight down at the water and still hanging on to the upright of the H-frame. “My God, she’s going to capsize!” I thought. “She can’t possibly hold this angle without tipping over. What’s going to happen to the men in the shelter and under the tarpaulin? Will they be able to get out?” It was a long, very unpleasant, moment. Then instead of capsizing, Brendan began to slide sideways down the face of the wave.
The next instant, the wave covered Brendan. It did not break in a spectacular roar of white water or tumble over her in impressive foam. It did not even jar the boat. It simply enfolded her in a great mass of solid water which poured steadily across Brendan like a deep steady river. Sea water swept across the tortoise and plucked at my chest. Looking forward, Brendan was totally submerged. Not two yards away, the cabin top was completely covered. The life raft, which was strapped on top of it and stood twenty-one inches higher, was under water. Only the masts could be seen, projecting up from the water. Brendan seemed to have been absorbed into the body of the wave. In a curious distraction, I thought how her long, low profile and the two stubby masts looked exactly like a submarine with its periscopes hidden in the wave. And like a submarine emerging, Brendan struggled up from the sea. The air trapped under the tarpaulin and in the shelter simply pulled her up out of the wave. The water swirled off quietly, and Brendan sailed on as if nothing had happened. I was amazed. At the very least I expected the whole cabin to have been twisted and all the tarpaulins split. But when I clambered up on a thwart to survey the damage, everything was still intact.
The only casualty was my peace of mind. From my vantage point at the helm I knew exactly how close we had been to capsizing. And when my watch ended and I crawled into my sleeping bag, I found that I could not sleep although I was bone-weary. The rumble of every big wave sweeping down on the boat made me tense up to await a certain disaster. I did not get a moment’s rest, and when the watches changed again, I mentioned the rogue wave to Arthur. “Yes,” he said. “Everything inside the cabin went an underwater green.” And that was where, by tacit agreement, we left the subject; and did the same a couple of days later when George had a similar bad experience thinking that Brendan was about to roll over during his watch. Such episodes in our lives seemed best left without discussion.
Only seventy or eighty miles from the edge of the Greenland pack ice we were at last rewarded with a break in the weather. On the morning of May 25 a much-needed calm succeeded the high winds, and we could enjoy the revival of sea life around us. On the horizon great flocks of gulls were circling and diving. As they flew closer, we made out the bursts of white spray beneath the birds where a school of dolphin was hunting the same shoal of fish from below. Then a separate, excited group of dolphin approached. They were escorting one single, very large, very fat fin whale. As usual the whale changed course to visit us, and brought his dolphin escort with him. When he was close, the whale gave a deep puff, sank down, and swam under Brendan’s hull. But his dolphin escort stayed at the surface, leaping and jumping, twisting and turning all around us like gamboling dogs. Glancing astern of Brendan we could see the turbulence thrown up by the whale’s broad flukes, coming to the surface and flattening the small waves, so that for a moment it looked exactly as if Brendan had her own propellers churning up a wake. Then the big whale surfaced, blew twice, and circled round us for one last look before he puffed off to the east, his spout visible for four or five miles.
It was, in fact, a typical “whale day.” George was leaning over the gunwale to scoop up a pot of salt water to boil the lunchtime potatoes when he glanced up and said in a matter-of-fact voice, “There are five big whales watching us, just astern.” “What sort are they?” I asked. “I’m not sure; they seem different,” George replied. Trondur stood up and looked over the stern. “These are sperm whale,” he said, and we watched as yet another of the whale species cruised quietly up to Brendan to take a look at her, their strange blunt heads shoving steadily through the water. One member of the pod swam to our bow to have a closer inspection and then all five moved majestically on their way, not bothering to dive but wallowing on the surface.
The calculated risk of running close to the ice edge paid off. On the afternoon of May 25, the wind began to blow steadily from the northeast, and Brendan started to move parallel to the ice edge, heading toward Cape Farewell. Prins Christianssund Radio broadcast a gale warning, which proved to be correct. All that night the wind stayed near gale force, and the night watch awoke to the chilling sound of hailstones crackling off the tarpaulins like the sound of crumpling cellophane. There was another gale warning the following morning, and the morning after that, too, and also on the third and fourth days. But now the wind always came out of the north or northeast, and Brendan fairly scampered along, helped by the East Greenland current which pushed her even faster, giving us an extra twenty or twenty-five miles a day. On May 26 Brendan put up her best performance, 115 miles on the log in twenty-four hours. This equaled her best day’s run the previous season, and would have been a respectable achievement for a modern cruising yacht.
The scrawled comments on the daily log sheets summed up the conditions of those Greenland days; “fog,” “drizzle,” “thick mist,” “gale warning” were repeated monotonously. Under such adverse conditions, Arthur’s cameras began to give trouble. The salt atmosphere was penetrating their delicate mechanisms and the shutters seized up. Painstakingly Arthur disemboweled the cameras into dozens of little pieces on the shelter floor, cleaned and oiled the bits, and from two camera bodies salvaged one camera which worked if he gave it a hearty cuff between shots. We had now been more than three weeks at sea and our fresh food supplies were running out. We ate the last of the apples, and regretfully finished off the cheddar cheese. There was still plenty of smoked and dried meats, but our German black bread was a disappointment. It had turned sour, and there was green mould on every slice when we opened the packets. But the reduction in our stores and the amount of water we had consumed now meant that Brendan was nearly a third of a ton lighter, and she was beginning to ride a little more easily.
Living conditions daily grew more basic. The contents of the cabin had been stripped down to essentials—there remained only our sleeping bags, a kit bag of clothes for each person, radio, sextant, a bag of books, and the cameras—nothing else. Also the shelter was beginning to smell strongly with the permanent smell of wool drying out, of leather, and of damp, unwashed bodies. We were growing accustomed to living with permanently wet hair, wet shirt sleeves where the water oozed past the cuffs of the oilskins, wet socks, and wet sweaters. Fortunately no one suffered any illness, not even cuts or sprains. The only problem was Trondur’s hands, which puffed up with fat red swellings on knuckles and fingers with a pitted sore in the center of each swelling. But Trondur only shrugged and said it was a normal affliction for fishermen who handled nets and lines in cold water. The rest of us merely came off watch with fingers like dead white cucumbers, grained with cracks of grime, and it took a couple of hours for the normal color to return.
We began to treat the daily gale warnings from Prins Christianssund with a certain downbeat humor. We joked among ourselves that the wind never seemed to reach the ferocious speeds that were forecast, though our little barometer agreed with the pressure readings that were being broadcast. A series of low pressure centers, sometimes as low as 970 millibars, were rubbing shoulders with the Greenland high pressure gradient where the gale winds blew. We wondered whether we were avoiding the worst of the winds because Brendan was so low in the water and sheltered by the troughs of the waves. Certainly we did not feel the full blast of the gales, and we were surprised when we received a worried message from Páll Bergthorsson to say that a ship, not sixty miles from Brendan, was reporting a wind speed of force 10, full storm. The message was relayed by an Icelandic fishery research boat, Arni Fridriksson, which
was operating to the north of us, and when Arni Fridriksson finished her tour and left for home, our radio link with Reykjavik was broken and we felt even more isolated. The high winds and poor visibility grounded the aircraft in South Greenland, and even the Ice Patrol plane, which was supposed to look for us, was unable to fly due to bad weather.
On May 29 Brendan at last cleared the tip of the ice ledge extending south from Cape Farewell and we breathed more easily. We were now crossing the wide approaches to the Davis Strait which divides Greenland from North Labrador. Here, to our frustration, we came into an area of calms, light airs, and pea-soup fogs. Almost every wind, when it did come, arrived from the south and west, and Brendan’s advance slowed to a crawl. Once again, the pencil line of our course again began to zig and zag and make erratic circles on the chart.
“May 31st” read a typical day’s entry in the journal. “Began calm, but a northwest wind by noon, and we altered the course more directly for Newfoundland. Then the winds turned southwest, and we are virtually hove to, lolling through the water. Nothing of interest.”
Tedium became our new enemy. Once or twice we glimpsed enough sun to make it worthwhile to hang the sleeping bags in the rigging and to try to dry out our clothes. But usually the weather was too foggy or too damp for any success. And it was so cold that the next migrant to land on Brendan, another water pipit, also failed to survive the night and perished. To pass the time, there was a shipboard craze for fancy rope work, and Brendan’s rigging sprouted complicated knots and splices, intricate lashings, and every item that could possibly be embellished with a Turk’s head was duly decorated. To add to the boredom, there was an increasing sense of remoteness brought about by our limited horizon, which seldom exceeded three or four miles because of constant fog. Often the fog banks closed in so thickly that we could see no more than fifty yards in front of the vessel, and it was impossible to distinguish the line between air and sea, so that Brendan seemed to be suspended in a muzzy grey bowl. The only consolation was that there was very little chance of being run down by a ship. These were desolate waters, crossed only by an occasional fishing boat on its way between North American and the Greenland fishing grounds. Nor were there many coast stations either, and so Brendan gradually fell into a gap in the communications network. The radio voice of Prins Christianssund grew fainter and fainter until finally it could only just be heard. Then came the day when their signal vanished entirely and we still could not make contact with the Canadian stations ahead of us. Above, we heard the airliners reporting their positions to air traffic control, but they did not reply to Brendan’s calls and we seemed very alone.
On June 11, we picked up a Canadian Coast Guard radio station broadcasting an advisory message to all ships, giving Brendan’s description and announcing that as nothing had been heard from Brendan for sixty hours, any vessel sighting her or hearing her signals was to report to the Coast Guard. Frustratingly, we could not reply ourselves to the message because of heavy atmospheric interference. But on the following day a sudden improvement in conditions allowed both the Canadian and Greenland radio stations to pick up our position report and the Canadians advised us of the position of the main pack-ice edge off Labrador. According to their observations, the main pack ice was retreating steadily northward, and from the chart it looked as if Brendan would be clear of the Labrador ice. Only a week earlier the Canadian news bulletins had been describing the fate of the ferryboat Carson about two hundred miles east of us. The 8,273-ton Carson was built as an icebreaker, but on her first run of the season up to Goose Bay, she had hit ice and sunk. Fortunately the weather was ideal and she was close to shore. Military helicopters had rescued her passengers from the ice floes without loss of life, but her sinking was a grim warning.
Thirteen seemed to be our lucky number, because on June 13 we finally got a favorable wind, and Brendan ran up the miles all that afternoon and the following night. During the evening watch George mentioned that he was disappointed. “It seems a pity to have come all this way, and never to have seen any ice. I don’t expect I’ll ever be up here again,” he said. Next morning at dawn, George was making himself a cup of coffee. “Hey!” he called in delight. “Ice. I do believe it’s ice.” There, floating by like some strange Chinese carnival dragon, was a queerly contorted chunk of ice, bobbing gently like a child’s toy. “There’s another chunk, just ahead,” George said. We all lined up to watch. Brendan was beginning to slide past humps and bits of loose ice. They were extraordinarily beautiful, lurching and dipping and occasionally pieces splitting away and breaking free. And then the whole chunk of ice would revolve as its balance changed, spinning over to reveal some entirely new profile. All the while the constant surge and wash of the swell on the ice came to our ears as a low, muted roar.
Trondur beamed with pleasure. “Good,” he said. “Now we see more birds and more whales. Near ice is good fishing.”
I pointed away to the east. “Trondur, what is that white line over on the horizon? It looks like ice blink, according to the description in the pilot book. Do you think there is pack ice in that direction?”
“Yes,” he said, peering in the direction I was pointing. “Yes, there is much ice.”
I was puzzled. According to the latest information, there should not be any ice in that direction. “I expect it’s a big isolated raft of ice broken from the main part,” I said confidently. “According to the most recent ice report we should be clear of the main ice, and there shouldn’t be any pack ice in this area. I expect we’ve come between the land and some stray drifting ice.”
I was wrong. Unwittingly, I altered course to starboard to pass inside the ice “raft” and sailed down toward the ice blink. As we came closer, the ice edge became more definite. It was an awesome sight. The solid edge of the ice was made of brilliant white floes, which shimmered in the strong sunshine. Every hundred yards or so, the carcasses of larger and thicker floes had been driven in the lighter floes and jammed there. These larger floes were made of multi-year ice, ice from several years of freezing, and broken chunks of icebergs. These larger pieces stood above the general level in strange sculptured shapes, some soft and round like melted butter, others grotesque and jagged, all sharp edges and spines. A fringe of smaller ice debris drifted along the main edge, and into Brendan’s path. We wove our course between them, innocently admiring their shapes. They looked like little boats, pieces from a jigsaw or sea serpents. One small floe was banana-shaped and was promptly dubbed the “ice curragh.”
Treacherously the wind began to shift into the northwest, and try as we might, we could not prevent Brendan from sidling closer to the ice edge. The sun clouded over from time to time, and the pretty shapes looked less enticing. “The swell is really grinding the ice,” commented George. “Look at that big, dark-colored floe over there. Look how it’s lifting and falling.” He was pointing out a sizeable block of ice, perhaps the size of a two-storey house, which had a distinctive, ugly grey band along its lower edge. Each time the swell moved it, this chunk of ice rose up ponderously, tilted, and then came smashing down with its dark underbelly so that the water gushed from the undercut edge. “It wouldn’t be very pleasant if Brendan got driven under the edge of that one,” I commented. “We’d be pulverized as if by a steam hammer.”
Steadily we glided past the ice edge, keeping it to port. Arthur was taking photographs; George steering; and Trondur sat on the shelter roof, gazing at the marvelous vista. In the distance, across the hummocks and rifts of the lesser ice, we could distinguish the massive shapes of true icebergs locked in the depths of the ice field. “I don’t think we’re going to clear the tail of the ice raft,” said George in a worried tone; “it seems to stretch a long way ahead, and we’re drifting down toward it rather fast.” A nagging fear took shape in the back of my mind. We were about 160 miles from land, and a long distance from where the main pack ice was reputed to be. But this ice looked remarkably solid. George spoke again. “What if we’re just running oursel
ves into an ice bay? I can’t see how we would get out without being crushed.”
I glanced inquiringly at Trondur. “Brendan must find a hole in the ice. There is safe,” he said and, pulling out his pencil, sketched what he meant—Brendan should try to find an open patch within the body of the pack ice and lie there as if in a lagoon. But the ice edge was unbroken. There was no gap and no haven, least of all for a skin boat. Just at that moment George exclaimed, “A ship!”
It was the first vessel we had seen since the patrol ships of the Icelandic Coast Guard. Low on the horizon she looked like a fishing boat skirting the edge of the ice raft. “I’m afraid she won’t see us against the ice,” I said. “White sails against white ice, and even our radar reflector will just look like a small blob of loose ice.”
Suddenly George had a brain wave.
“The signal mirror!” he exclaimed, and quickly dug out the little metal mirror from its storage place.
Blink! Blink! Blink! We took it in turns to focus the sunlight on the distant ship. When first sighted, she had been heading almost straight at us, but then she had turned aside to steam parallel with the ice edge. Blink! Blink! Blink! “Let’s hope we can get some fresh food,” Arthur muttered longingly. “I rather fancy some fresh milk and bread.” Blink! Blink! “She’s turning, she’s seen us!”
Quarter of an hour later the boat was almost within hailing distance. George peered through the binoculars. “Her name is Svanur, and hey! Trondur, I do believe she’s a Faroese boat.” Trondur beamed with anticipation. He cupped his hands and bellowed a string of Faroese across the water. His shout was greeted with a mass of waving arms from the boat’s crew, who were lining the rail. “I wonder what they’re thinking on Svanur,” George said, “meeting up with a leather boat off of the ice.”
