The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  The bears in the photographs stared at us as we walked towards them to inspect the bullet holes. The cameramen had all done well, perhaps because we spend so much of our time aiming long lenses, but I said I would much rather use the chilli spray if we were to meet an aggressive bear, instead of shooting it. Fred agreed that we should always try to scare bears away first, but added that with some there may not be time to choose.

  ‘This bear was shot soon after the photograph was taken. It was just over a metre away. Your targets were set at thirty metres. How long do you think it would take a running bear to cover that distance?’

  The answer was four seconds, just enough time to aim and fire four times.

  ‘Don’t wait too long to decide.’ He paused by my bear, looked at the cluster of holes over its chest and said, ‘Well done, dead bear.’

  It was the least welcome praise I have ever received.

  Siberian hunters may have been the first people to visit Svalbard. The first Europeans were probably Dutch explorers, led by Willem Barentsz, who came here in 1596 while searching for a North-East Passage to Asia. Barentsz reported that the fjords were packed with whales. Dutch and British ships soon came to hunt them. In time the whales were wiped out and geologists prospecting for minerals replaced the whalers. They noticed that the islands’ cold rocks contained fossilised plants from much warmer climates, which even included the remains of ancient rainforests in the form of coal. They solved this puzzle later, by determining that Svalbard had moved north, carrying its fossils with it. In 1906 an American called John Munro Longyear opened the first coal mine in the town, which still bears his name. It was an uncomfortable place to work: after dodging polar bears the miners had to cut through ice as well as rock to reach the coal.

  During the Second World War Longyearbyen gained the dubious distinction of being the only town to be shelled by the German battleships Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. They scattered the small Norwegian garrison and set fire to a mine. It was quite a sledgehammer to crack a nut but the attack had more to do with weather forecasting than with coal. Cold Arctic air affects the weather over much of Europe and accurate forecasts, incorporating the latest information from Svalbard, were vital to both sides for planning bombing raids, aerial landings and attacks on convoys. Under cover of the shelling the German Luftwaffe landed a team of meteorologists on an out-of-the-way island, where for some time they remained unnoticed by the returning Allies, who hurriedly rebuilt their own critically important weather station. Later there were occasional skirmishes and one unlucky weatherman was shot as he returned to his hut after photographing birds – a salutary tale for any wildlife filmmaker. By 1944, four separate groups were sending encoded weather data from Svalbard to Germany. When the war ended some of them were stranded and became the very last German troops to surrender, four months after everyone else.

  Svalbard is still an important base for science, with an observatory for studying the Northern Lights and a seed bank housed in vaults dug deep into the permafrost, where plant seeds from all over the world are stored and will remain frozen even if civilisation collapses. Of the many expeditions to have used Svalbard as a base, the most fascinating set their sights on the North Pole, starting here because, in most years, these islands are the easiest place in the high Arctic to reach and travel around by ship. When we arrived in Longyearbyen to start our search for polar bears, we found that this summer was proving rather different.

  Our skipper, Bjørne, is a smiling man wearing a cardigan and an Errol Flynn moustache. He says that our plans may be affected by the unusual amount of ice around the north of Svalbard, then takes me to the bow to point out fifteen codfish dangling from the rail: ‘They are drying,’ he explains. ‘It will take weeks.’ He thumps his chest. ‘This is grown-up food, not for children!’

  He supervises the last piece of equipment coming aboard. It’s a large aluminium boat. The Havsel’s winch tightens and the steel cable jumps, smoking around its drum. We all grab lines to guide the boat gently onto its wooden cradle, with an inch of deck space to spare on either side. It belongs to Jason, the ebullient Australian who is in charge of our logistics. He calls his boat the Buster and it has been set up to try something new. A crane mounted in the middle carries a sophisticated stabilised camera of the kind more usually found on helicopters. It has a very long lens and will be operated by a cameraman called Ted, sitting in the boat and watching a monitor screen. A third cameraman, Mateo, and I will be sharing a cabin in the Havsel’s stern. It’s below the waterline but at least it seems nice and quiet. The last member of the team is Steinar, our Norwegian field assistant. He and I will spend most of our time together, filming with a simpler camera in the old-fashioned way, with a long lens and a tripod.

  We finish loading our gear in the early hours of the morning. The only cargo left on the dock is a basin for a new kitchen, brought on the ship from Tromsø for a friend of Jason’s. It seems we really are taking everything but the kitchen sink.

  ‘So – we go!’ Bjørne shouts. The mooring lines are cast off and a gap appears between the Havsel and the pier. It’s the first small step with which all journeys begin. As we leave, Steinar points out four other ships at anchor in the fjord. Within the last week each one has tried to sail north around the islands but they all became stuck in the pack ice and had to be rescued by an icebreaker. We are going that way too, in our search for bears.

  Bjørne steers from a corner of the wheelhouse. From the bow I can see his face hemmed in by the radar, the echo-sounder and his radio equipment. A fulmar passes on stiff wings, like a miniature albatross, as much at home riding a wave or surfing the air displaced by the ship. As it goes by its eye meets mine.

  The coast is lined with saw-toothed mountains, interspersed with glaciers. The landscape is unremittingly black and white and from time to time I glance at the Havsel’s painted deck, to be reminded of green. Barentsz saw these mountains when he made his first landfall. He called the largest island in Svalbard’s archipelago Spitsbergen, which means ‘jagged peaks’ in Dutch. Jason joins me at the rail and asks how far away I think the mountains are. They seem startlingly close but I double my guess to twenty kilometres. He tells me it’s more like forty: there is so little moisture in the cold air that it’s gin clear. Aside from the Norse in Iceland, Barentsz was one of the first Europeans to meet a polar bear. His men shot at it, then, finding their muskets made little impression, they used a lasso to hoist it aboard their ship and when the bear became truculent they killed it with an axe. Encounters like that set the tone for human–bear relations until the 1970s.

  I can think of little worse than coming here to film bears and having to shoot one instead, but it is a possibility we have to face because they are formidable animals. In Longyearbyen I studied a male bear, stuffed and standing upright in a hotel lobby. His eyes were considerably higher than my head and he had weighed five times as much as me. Dropping mittens in his path would probably not have delayed him very long. I have filmed large predators before but always with somewhere to retreat to close at hand, most often a car. Now we have left Longyearbyen there are no cars and scarcely any roads. When we meet bears we will be either in boats or on foot.

  Bjørne beckons me inside to look at the charts. ‘There are so many glaciers in these valleys that most of them don’t have names,’ he says. ‘They are numbered alternately, like houses on a street. Even I can understand it.’

  On the chart table there are some photographs showing him standing on a riverbank, surrounded by birch trees and holding an immense salmon: ‘At home in Alta,’ he says proudly. He lays a chart on top of them. It shows the whole Arctic Ocean with the coasts of Russia, Alaska and Canada enclosing it almost completely. There are only two places where water can enter and leave: the Bering Strait, above the Pacific Ocean, and where we are now, at the top of the Atlantic. There is only one deep-water channel, a trough in the seabed just west of Svalbard. Above it runs a current flowing all the way from the Caribbean. It b
rings enough warmth to fill the sea with life and it helps melt the ice, making the west side of these Arctic islands usually accessible by ship. The north coast is a different matter.

  Today’s sea-ice map has just arrived by email. At its heart is Svalbard, coloured grey. There is precious little open water and most of the sea is covered by blue cross-hatching, showing the varying ice density. It is an incredible jumble, reflecting how the currents swirl around the islands. Here on the west side the water flows north, but on the other coast, where the ice is thickest, it flows south and it is on this conveyor belt from the high Arctic that we are most likely to find polar bears hunting seals. To reach them we must first pass along the north coast of the main island, Spitsbergen, and that’s where Bjørne says we will meet a wall of ice. He compares today’s map with the one from two days ago. The north coast then was a mess of blue checks, like a ragged tablecloth, with ice pressed hard against the shore. In the same place today there are mostly blue circles indicating ‘very open drift ice’, according to the key. These maps are drawn from satellite pictures, so no one has been able to check how accurate they are. Bjørne peers like a schoolmaster over his half-glasses.

  ‘It seems to be opening a little but who knows?’

  On either side of us the map shows ice extending hundreds of kilometres further south. To reach most of the bears we have no choice but to go on.

  In a whole day travelling, the only flat area we have passed is at a place called Virgohamna. In 1897 it became the base for an expedition to the North Pole that was extraordinary, even by Svalbard’s standards. From here, on a globe, the pole seems within easy reach but, by the late nineteenth century, several expeditions had slogged north across the frozen sea, only to find they were further south at the end of the day than when they had started. The conveyor belt of ice was moving in the opposite direction faster than they could walk. It must have been soul-destroying. To a Swedish engineer called Salomon August Andrée the answer seemed obvious: he would fly there, and in style.

  Andrée came to Virgohamna with a balloon which he called the Eagle. It had been stitched together by seamstresses in Paris from panels of varnished silk. He mixed acid with an iron compound to release hydrogen gas, which filled the balloon. Fully inflated, the Eagle was 20 metres (67ft) across and it made an impressive sight while Andrée’s team made their final preparations. In a posed photograph, Andrée is working on a paper plan with three companions, including Knut Frænkel and Nils Strindberg, who were to fly with him. His face is impassive but one of the other men stands with his hand to his head, as if he is dismayed at the prospect of the journey. He had every right to be, because to pass over the pole, and then reach the safety of Alaska or Siberia, the Eagle would need to fly at least 2,000km (1,250 miles). Andrée had placed a great deal of faith in technology. He planned to hang ropes from the basket, to drag across the ice and help him steer, and he even took a remotely controlled cooking stove, which could be lowered and lit out of range of the flammable hydrogen. When the meal was ready it would be hauled up and eaten from specially made plates, bearing the expedition’s initials. He seemed to have thought of everything.

  The Eagle was photographed just after it took off, on 11 July 1897. A few figures stand silhouetted in the foreground, frozen in that moment of hope and excitement. They had no idea that for the next thirty-three years they would hear nothing more of their friends in the balloon. In the Arctic such stories of failure are alarmingly common.

  The ship’s propeller shaft passes under the floor between Mateo’s bunk and mine, so our cabin sounds like the inside of a cement mixer. Earplugs help until I lay my head on the pillow, when my teeth start to vibrate. Then we hit the ice. The Havsel rings like a dull bell and the floes growl along her side, less than an inch away through the hull. It is less noisy and more interesting in the wheelhouse, because we are rounding the tip of Spitsbergen and for the first time we can see the north coast ahead. The pack ice is a few kilometres away, a bright line like a frozen wave, but in front of us the water is open where, just two days ago, ice would have blocked our way.

  Bjørne points out that when the ship hits a large floe the mast vibrates like a ruler twanged on a desk. He seems unconcerned and explains that his ship’s hull has been strengthened and her rudder and propeller are safely enclosed in steel housings. Below the waterline the Havsel is shaped like an egg, so she should pop up if she is trapped between floes. He is more worried that the ice might be blown towards us, trapping us against the rocks. He climbs to the crow’s nest and steers from there, squeezing his ship between the ice edge and the shore.

  In the golden light of late evening flocks of little auks skim the water, black and white like the dappled mountains. Every small iceberg is fringed with them, standing upright and evenly spaced, all preening their feathers. We enter a wide fjord and the Havsel cleaves a mirrorcalm sea as we pass our first bearded seal, hauled out on the ice. Its body is long, with a small head and a snub-nose like an otter. Its eyes are rheumy in the cold and its cheeks are pale and round, like apples, dotted with regular spots where its whiskers sprout. They are more of a moustache than a beard, but splendidly long and curled none the less. Others roll in the water, showing just their glossy backs and dark crowns. This is encouraging: if there are seals here there might also be bears.

  The water is choked with icebergs but this is not low-density sea ice, one or two years old: these pieces have fallen from a glacier and Bjørne is less sanguine about hitting them. Ice becomes as hard as concrete after thousands of years of being compressed by the weight of more ice accumulating above, and it floats low in the water where it is difficult to see.

  ‘What would happen if we ran into that piece, Steinar?’ Miles asks.

  ‘It would make a big hole in the ship.’

  Bjørne brings the Havsel to a stop, 100 metres from the glacier. It’s almost eleven at night and perfectly quiet. A long blue-white wall drops sheer into the sea, except in one place where it rests on rock. Jason says this island was barely visible three years ago: the glacier is retreating.

  ‘Bear!’ I follow Bjørne’s pointing arm and see it striding along in a beautiful setting below the glacier front, where the ice is bluest and most crevassed. Against the cold tones the bear’s fur is the colour of rich cream.

  ‘It’s a male,’ says Steinar, at my shoulder. ‘His neck is much thicker than a female’s, shaped like a cone. It’s impossible to fit radio collars to male bears, they just slide off.’

  The bear eases himself into the sea, as though his bulk might crack the fragile margin. He swims without a ripple and pulls himself out onto a small iceberg, raising and lowering his muzzle to test the air. He is hunting. The others rush to launch the Buster while I keep track of the bear. Jason has filmed bears from a small boat before and he says the trick is to choose carefully: small bears are likely to be wary and they will swim away, while larger ones are often too curious or aggressive. This one is an ideal, medium-sized bear but he’s already swimming quickly through a maze of icebergs and we will soon lose sight of him from the deck. The boat crew must put on immersion suits in case they fall in but they are struggling with the unfamiliar zips and Velcro. Eventually they scramble down the rope ladder, Jason starts the outboard and they’re off. By now the bear is just a distant head. Steinar and I guide the boat towards him by radio.

  On the distant ice we can see two dark shapes. At this range it is hard to tell whether they are seals until the bear surges from the water onto the same floe. The shapes do not move: they must just be blemishes on the ice. Perhaps he also mistook them for seals.

  ‘When bears are hunting they can swim a long way underwater and change course if they think you are following,’ Steinar says. ‘They’ll surface behind some ice to check where you are, just by smell. It’s easy for them to lose you.’

  He says that ‘fjord bears’, like this one, behave differently from the bears on the pack ice because their hunting grounds do not melt in the summ
er. Some use the same fjords for many years and they will also take nesting birds. Steiner and I are hoping to film a bear searching for eggs or chicks, when the Havsel drops us on the other side of the fjord tomorrow – today actually; it is already after midnight.

  The boat is returning and, although the bear did not find any seals, everyone comes aboard smiling. Ted plays back his rushes and it is clear from the first shot that this is something special. The camera tracks smoothly alongside the bear as he swims. We are at his eye-level, almost in the water with him. Ice drifts through the frame, sometimes blocking him from view then sliding aside. He feels close enough to touch but the lens is so powerful and the boat so far away, that without his monitor Ted could not see the bear at all. When he climbs onto a floe, rings of light, reflected by the ripples of his swim, travel his full length, defining every curve as if the sun is scanning him. It’s a promising beginning: if he had found a seal to hunt, the pictures would have been extraordinary. In the final image Ted has framed the bear with the light directly behind him, so his warm breath condenses in a golden cloud.

  It is three o’clock in the morning. To celebrate filming our first polar bear we eat some of the world’s most northerly bananas, then, in the silence of the fjord, we fall asleep.

  One of the many explosive devices in the Guns and Ammo box is a tripwire with four spring-loaded launchers, which can be placed around a tent, allowing campers to sleep without nasty surprises. A visiting bear is supposed to displace the wire and trigger the flares but sometimes this goes wrong. On one occasion Svalbard University sent out a group of scientists, one of whom was a professor called Bjørn. It’s a common name in Norway but ‘bjørn’ also means ‘bear’. The group camped for the night and carefully set up the tripwires and flares around their tent. In the small hours Bjørn woke up needing a pee and left the tent quietly, remembering to step over the wire. On the way back he forgot and the exploding flares woke his friends, who grabbed their guns in a panic, expecting the thin walls of their tent to be shredded at any moment. All they could hear outside was the professor shouting in Norwegian: ‘It’s bear! It’s bear!’