Icebreaker

by Horatio Clare

  The voice sounds strained now, a bit desperate, and there is a burst of harsh laughter on our bridge.

  ‘What’s going on there?’ I ask.

  ‘The Russians, they can be very good, or they can be … I don’t know what.’

  We break the way to Rahja. At deck level the noise of the ice is furious, roaring sometimes, so that you look for a low-flying plane. At midnight we lead Ostbense in. Rahja tonight is nine lights, two cranes, a couple of storage tanks and wuthering currents of snow.

  The channel is menacingly tight. It curves and narrows into a southerly hook, buoys winking close by us on either side. Ville, Arvo and Villi-Matti, three master mariners, are watching a fourth, the ageless Sampo, who has taken over just in time to do the horrendous bit. Having broken a passage almost to the mouth of the port, he must now reverse us back along the constricting, curving channel. The snow has turned the glare of our searchlights into a dizzying white glow, the light bouncing back at the screens. The wind is angry and strong. Sampo handles the ship with a synthesis of calculation, sensation and instinct that cannot be taught or automated. Forces too various and unpredictable to be accounted flow through the helmsman, his body like the reed in a clarinet, turning the mechanical power of the engines and the organic pressure of the wind into movement like a restrained and stately music.

  ‘Reversing Otso is my favourite thing,’ Sampo says, his tone mild, his speech uncharacteristically slow as he concentrates. ‘She just won’t go straight at all,’ he murmurs, almost to himself. ‘This is the part where we dent the propellers. It’s really shallow and there are rocks …’

  Inch by inch, somehow, he keeps her in her track.

  ‘Now we turn around.’

  He must spin us through the wind in a channel exactly as wide as the ship is long. Every move demands a countermove – he counteracts each touch of the throttles and each twitch of the rudder control before he feels the effects of the initial intervention. You can sense the others judging, comparing, willing him to get it right. At such low speeds steerage is all but lost; control is maintained by a constant juggling, holding the forces of turn and counter-turn always in dynamic opposition, pushing the ship by tiny degrees through her arc. I find myself absurdly thinking of Byron: ‘One shade the more, one ray the less, had half impair’d the nameless grace.’

  Otso turns in her own length. The AIS, the electronic chart, shows Sampo keeping her precisely between the lines of the fairway. At some mysterious point the other officers sense the job is done, and the bridge clears. No fuss is made, no praise given. Sampo has done what was expected, but the moment seems to merit more than satisfied silence.

  ‘I’ve never seen ship handling like it! How’s the adrenaline?’

  ‘Pretty good!’ he exclaims with a burst of laughter. ‘Now we just have to go back once more and flush that last bit of ice.’

  And back we go again, until a blast of wake turbulence clears the final ice bar. ‘Tradition,’ Sampo says, ‘and good manners.’

  Now we move seaward and pull into a foxhole. Ostbense passes, a pilot aboard, almost home. There is a deep satisfaction in the night’s work. One more wind turbine reaches Finland; the Russian captain will report its safe arrival in good order to his charterers as Otso records another assist, but there is more to it than this. A decade ago a quarter of Russian imports travelled through Finland; five years ago Russia was Finland’s second-biggest export market. European Union sanctions against Russia and its tottering economy have inflicted on Finland years of economic contraction and stagnation as she has sought to replace her Russian partnership by pivoting towards Germany. As a result, what was a mutually beneficial relationship is now ambivalent. The old partnership endures out here. For all that we were bullish, we were grateful for Ostbense. We needed her as much as she needed us. The flags the two ships fly and the nationalities of the crews are insignificant compared to the achievement of Ostbense making port through the clawings of the ice and the driving snow.

  CHAPTER 13

  Noises at Night

  LATE-NIGHT GOSSIP ON the bridge. Sampo explains GM, the measure of a ship’s stability. ‘Think of it as the force that whips you back up,’ he says. ‘Some ships carry wood on the deck so that in a very hard roll the wood will go overboard, lowering the GM, so she doesn’t go too far. With a very low GM she rolls slowly but doesn’t necessarily roll back up! I have been on a ship that rolled thirty degrees, forty-five degrees. When we took Otso to Greenland she was rolling like crazy, but we have this engineering miracle, you know.’

  The miracle is the heeling tank, a grey rectangular box like an enclosed swimming pool resting on its side behind the bridge. If Otso rolls to starboard air is forced into the starboard side of the tank, pumping water into the port side and righting the ship.

  A rolling icebreaker, the Tarmo, has a place in Finnish history. Her first appearance in her nation’s story is March 1918, at the height of the civil war, when Tarmo’s crew smuggle Pehr Svinhufvud aboard in Helsinki. Finland’s future first president has been on the run in the city, which is in the grip of the Red Terror. Once at sea the Finnish crew overpowers a small force of Russian marines, the garrison of this strategic asset, while they are at breakfast, and Tarmo sails Svinhufvud to safety. She reappears, rolls and all, in February the following year.

  The war is over, and Mannerheim, interim regent of the new country, must carry off Finland’s first state visit, to Stockholm. The Tarmo is the nearest thing Finland possesses to an official vessel and has pedigree; firing on a Soviet icebreaker has made her the first ship of independent Finland to engage an enemy craft. Packing a splendid and newly designed Finnish army uniform – one of only four in existence at that point – Mannerheim embarks. He must embody his nation and manoeuvre around the question of the Åland Islands, which Sweden will not give up. Tarmo’s rolling, the freezing weather, the thin material of his new uniform and the stress of the occasion make Mannerheim ill. King Gustav offers him a palace for the duration of his stay, but Mannerheim refuses, returning each night to Tarmo, where he sweats out his fever. The visit is a triumph. The Åland Islands question will eventually be resolved in Finland’s favour. The Swedish press and King Gutstav dub Mannerheim a hero.

  Tarmo fought on through the Winter War and the Continuation War, was retired, then, like Mannerheim, unretired. The steamer, built on the Tyne in 1907, last broke ice in the dire winter of 1970. There is astonishing footage of her filmed in the 1920s, at work off Helsinki. The ship roars through ice a metre thick as a crowd in hats and coats dances and dawdles around her onrushing hull. A bicycle and a motorbike shoot across in front of her. Men and boys nip out of the way as the bow axes past them. The grins of the boys and the gaily streaming crowd convey an extraordinary relationship with peril. A touch of judgement, quick feet, a bit of luck, and a thousand-tonne icebreaker becomes a plaything.

  The times have changed more than the people, judging by Sampo’s laughter when I ask him about his adventures.

  ‘Well I was young and foolish. I was on the Viking Mariella. Here she is …’

  On the screen he summons up a picture of a gigantic red and white ship, brave and boxy as the 1980s and still sailing today. Two and a half thousand passengers, six hundred cars and the world-record holder for journeys between Helsinki and Stockholm, the ship is an established character in the relationship between the two capitals.

  ‘She had this problem with the anchor. We were going through heavy seas, and when we slammed down into troughs the anchor was banging against the hull. We thought it might come through the side into the car deck. I went out to see if I could bring it up further, make it more secure. When I was out there, this … huge rush of sea came across the decks. I jumped up and grabbed on to a sill on the gunwale. OK, that was close!’

  ‘But you felt you had to do it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t now! But you have to try.’

  Ferry crews have every reason to fear a banging noise in the bows.

&
nbsp; ‘The Estonia …’ I begin.

  ‘Yeah. The Estonia was a similar ship; she started as the Viking Sally.’

  Sampo’s face darkens at the mention of her name. Originally a Finnish ship, she became an Estonian vessel and a proud symbol of post-Soviet independence. Disaster struck at five to one in the morning of 28 September 1994. The Estonia went down in a Baltic gale between Tallinn and Stockholm. Eight hundred and fifty-two lives were lost, the worst maritime disaster in European peacetime after the Titanic. Sampo’s expression is clouded, angry.

  ‘The doors failed, and they were going too fast,’ he says, his hand miming a throttle pressed down. Now he punches a fist into a palm. ‘Bang bang through a heavy sea, and the bow doors couldn’t take it.’

  His anger is a seafarer’s revulsion at malpractice. The accident investigation concluded that the doors were under-designed and that the ship should have slowed when noises were heard at the bow. His vehemence is also a rebuttal of the rumours which have attended the sinking – stories involving military equipment, spies and an explosion near the bow. At the suggestion of the Swedish government, the wreck of the Estonia was partly buried in pebbles in an attempt to inter her and lay her dead to rest. The site is monitored by Finland and has been aggressively defended by the Swedish navy. Conspiracy theorists allege the wreck contains stolen Russian hardware which was taken aboard with the collusion of British spies. Russian intelligence, they say, wanted the ship stopped and returned to port. The Swedish military confirmed that the ship had been used to transport military equipment on two voyages that September. This, combined with the Estonia Agreement of 1995, a treaty signed by a slew of Baltic nations, Russia and the UK, which prevents nationals of these countries from approaching the wreck, has given the rumours an afterlife in articles and documentaries.

  That a seafarer should have no patience with the conspiracy theory is understandable. The story of the Estonia’s sinking is nightmarish, even by the standards of the sea. The banging, the lurching, the band playing on, then the list and the stairwells and doorways which became death traps, and the cold culling by drowning or hypothermia of hundreds of the unlucky, of the elderly, of the young. To contemplate that the horror was caused deliberately is bad enough, though we know that some governments do not hesitate to slaughter civilians when it suits them. To imagine the collusion of the signatories of the treaty – Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Denmark, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and the United Kingdom – in a cover-up is to lose faith in humanity. Let the doors have failed, you pray. Relatives of Swedish and Estonian victims continue to call for a transparent investigation of the disaster.

  Shivering, I walk the decks. Fragmented ice around us is moving in the darkness. It knocks and clicks with a sound like bowling balls colliding. Slabs pile, drift and slip in splashes and snorts of air.

  CHAPTER 14

  Kalevala Day

  ‘KALEVALA DAY!’ I say to everyone I meet. ‘What does it mean to you?’

  ‘School …’

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘Not much …’

  The Kalevala, meaning Land of Heroes – Finland – is the national epic, a collection of story cycles gathered, shaped and embellished by a physician and scholar, Elias Lönnrot, who first published them in 1835. Lönnrot collected the verses on a series of intrepid journeys across the country, eliciting and writing down tales and songs, paying for them, often, with recitals of others he had gathered. Travelling into Karelia, far north and east towards the White Sea through territory which is now in Russia, Lönnrot found rune singers whose memories held thousands of lines of epic poetry. One singer, Ontrei Malinen, a fisherman who contributed four thousand lines, told Lönnrot that his father, Ivan Malinen, would have kept Lönnrot up for weeks, recording all he knew. Ivan could sing for night after night on fishing trips, Ontrei said, and never repeat a verse. The book’s beginnings are all music: twelve thousand unrhymed eight-syllable lines, vivid with the rhetoric, parallelism and variation of folklore. There is no earliest date for the roots of this epic singing; the tradition is thought to be at least two thousand years old.

  After six hundred years of Swedish cultural and linguistic hegemony (and at a time when Russia held Finland as an annexed territory), it took time for the work’s huge impact to be felt. A Swedish translation brought the Kalevala to the ruling class, while Lönnrot first expanded the book, then condensed it for use in schools. But during the 1850s and 60s it drove a wave of national romanticism through a nation asserting her identity against the dominance of Russia. Finland now had a masterpiece in her own tongue, establishing Finnish as a literary language.

  The book caused a sensation in Europe. Here was an apparently fully formed Homeric myth cycle culled from the songs and stories of the people of Lapland, Karelia and central Finland, bearing few marks of Christianity upon it, carried by word of mouth out of pagan antiquity.

  At the centre of the story is the mysterious Sampo, an object forged by Ilmarinen, the blacksmith-artificer who also makes the sky. (Creation in the Kalevala is a playful delight: the world is made of shards of duck egg; a dead man is reanimated with the help of a bee.) The Sampo might be a mill which grinds salt, gold and corn; Lönnrot believed it was an idol. Other theories include a treasure chest, an astrolabe, a Byzantine coin press and a world-creating forge. It is the ultimate object – enriching its owner and inspiring theft, pursuit and war. The Sampo’s twin progenitors, the hero Väinämöinen and the smith Ilmarinen, seem to represent magic and science respectively, with the shaman Väinämöinen having the best of their encounters – perhaps a projection of the hope of the bard-singers of the original stories that their magic would not be eclipsed. In the Sampo’s synthesis of science and magic is the blend of trepidation, wonder and desire that communities in the wilds of Finland must have felt at the approach of technology and the rise of individualism over family-grouped collective endeavour. In the final battle for the Sampo the device is lost at sea.

  Our second mate winces slightly at the mention of the Kalevala.

  ‘Sampo? You’re in it!’

  ‘Yes, this amazing … machine that makes everything, or whatever it is.’

  ‘What does it mean to you?’

  ‘Doesn’t it make the sea, the salt? That’s quite useful.’

  Asking a Finn what the Kalevala means to him or her is too wide a question. One of its translators into English, Keith Bosley, sums up the problem: ‘From the English-speaker’s point of view, the Kalevala is the Finns’ Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth rolled into one; but the genius of its sources could neither read nor write.’

  No wonder my shipmates look shifty when I ask them about the epic. Even a literature student could be forgiven for blanching at such a compilation, and these boys flew through maths and physics instead. The book is much more influential than read, but Kalevala Day is also Finnish cultural day, the modern history of the two being indivisible. The Kalevala inspired Jean Sibelius and the work of Akseli Gallen-Kalella, the country’s most prized painter, both driven like Lönnrot to establish a national mythos. Sibelius drew on the Kalevala as an iteration of the spirits of Finland and the wild, the music of nature made myth, in which the heroes are semi-supernatural musicians. ‘The Kalevala strikes me as extraordinarily modern and to my ears is pure music, theme and variations,’ he wrote to his fiancée in 1890.

  Many of Sibelius’s best-known works, tone poems, choral symphonies and orchestral suites are drawn from the Kalevala; his music established the work in the wider world. The paintings of Gallen-Kalella are much less well known outside Finland, partly because of the devotion they inspire within the country, where they are treasured, collected and studied. Few hang in galleries abroad. From Lönnrot, Sibelius, Gallen-Kalella and Eliel Saarinen, who designed Helsinki’s railway station, the national museum and a clutch of town halls and churches, the cultural identity of an independent Finland flowed. Even our ship has her forebear in the Kalevala’s runes. The hero Väinä
möinen first commands Otso to calm down, good practice when parleying with bears, then informs him of his cub-hood, a description built on charming observation.

  Sacred Otso grew and flourished,

  Quickly grew with graceful movements,

  Short of feet, with crooked ankles,

  Wide of mouth and broad of forehead,

  Short his nose, his fur robe velvet;

  But his claws were not well fashioned,

  Neither were his teeth implanted.

  Swore the bear a sacred promise

  That he would not harm the worthy,

  Never do a deed of evil.

  Väinämöinen also explains that Mielikki, a wise forest spirit, made Otso’s teeth from a fir with silver branches and his claws from its golden cones. She ‘taught him how to walk a hero, and freely give his life to others’, a laudable aspiration for icebreakers, if rather optimistic for bears.

  In a climactic struggle on a boat between the ageing Väinämöinen and Louhi, queen of the Northlands, who fights in the form of an eagle, the Sampo is smashed and lost overboard. Väinämöinen is delighted; no more will heroes and witches battle to possess it. This object of terrible power and desire will salt the sea and nourish Finland instead.

  Vainamoinen, ancient minstrel,

  Saw the fragments of the treasure

  Floating on the billows landward,

  Fragments of the lid in colours,

  Much rejoicing, spake as follows:

  ‘Thence will come the sprouting seed-grain,

  The beginning of good fortune,

  The unending of resources,

  From the ploughing and the sowing,

  From the glimmer of the moonlight,

  From the splendour of the sunshine,

  On the fertile plains of Suomi,

  On the meads of Kalevala.’

  Our Otso continues her mission to guard the worthy from harm. We lead Ocean Trader towards the pale strip of peeled blue which separates ice and sky. She is Otso’s two-hundredth ship this winter, following us through slabs of white mint cake, icing sugar and hard black glass, across which we drive like a chisel, Ville in shades listening to Eminem. Exchanging Ocean Trader for Arne, we lead another wind turbine towards port. Ville watches Arne’s track and calls her: ‘Alter course to starboard; you have heavy ice in front of you.’