Arctic Obsession

by Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

  ARCTIC OBSESSION

  Copyright © Alexis S. Troubetzkoy, 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Editor: Shannon Whibbs

  Design: Jennifer Scott

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Troubetzkoy, Alexis S., 1934-

  Arctic obsession [electronic resource] : the lure of the Far North / Alexis S.Troubetzkoy.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Electronic monograph in EPUB format.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-4597-0037-6

  1. Arctic regions--Discovery and exploration. 2. Arctic regions--Environmental conditions. 3. Arctic regions--Strategic aspects. I. Title.

  G615.T76 2011b 917.1904 C2011-901599-4

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  www.dundurn.com

  ARCTIC OBSESSION

  The Lure of the Far North

  Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

  To my former students at Bishop’s College School,

  Selwyn House School and Appleby College, in gratitude

  The Song of the Siren

  “And now they saw a firm island, Anthamaessa,

  where the fair-voiced Sirens beguiled with their sweet songs

  whoever cast ashore there, and then destroyed them …”

  The Argonautica by Apollonus

  Introduction

  The Arctic: Who Is She?

  ON BOARD THE RUSSIAN Arctic research vessel, Akademik Fedeorov, and the nuclear-powered submarine Rossya on that bright summer day in 2007, the moods were distinctly jubilant. And there was every reason to celebrate, for they were headed home to Murmansk; their mission completed.

  Following weeks of planning and exhaustive trial runs, the expedition had launched the 18.6-ton submersible, Mir-1 on its momentous underwater assignment in the high Arctic. Eight hours and forty minutes later, the tiny vessel returned to the surface, its task accomplished. After a fourteen-thousand-foot descent through inky darkness of those frigid waters, a “soft landing” had been made on the ocean’s floor — a perfect landing at the precise terrestrial point of the North Pole.

  With their vessel resting on the bottom, the crew went quickly to work scooping up samples of sand, collecting vials of water, and making observations of the rock formation. Artur Chilingarov, chief of the three-man crew, radioed the mother ship above. “It’s lovely down here with yellowish ground all around us,” he said, before adding, “there is no sign of sea dwellers.” The most perilous part of the journey was the return to the surface. Had the navigation been even slightly off, the tiny sub might easily have missed the exact gap in the ice through which it had entered; possibility of entrapment in the Arctic ice sheet was real. All went well, however.

  But the sensational aspect of this risky journey to “a point no one had so far been able to reach” was the planting of the Russian flag at the North Pole, a one-metre-high construction of corrosion-resistant titanium. “If in a hundred or a thousand years from now someone goes down to where we were, they will see the Russian flag,” Chilingarov gushed enthusiastically. A symbolic claim had been made to that significant spot; insofar as the expedition’s elated crew was concerned, the North Pole was now Russian.

  The story of the underwater conquest on that August day made headlines around the world, creating a flurry of excitement in many capitals. Not unexpectedly, the most vociferous outcry came from Ottawa, where foreign minister Peter MacKay condemned the achievement. “This isn’t the fifteenth century,” he thundered. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming your territory.’” In a more reflective moment he later declared, “There is no threat to Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic … we’re not at all concerned about this mission. Basically it’s just a show by Russia.” Nevertheless, the true terrestrial pole had been reached.

  The expedition was a costly venture for Russia, but the country was prepared to assume it in the interest of making a strong statement. Russia is a northern nation and the Arctic is an integral part of its inheritance — beware, those making claims there. Whatever the country’s political and economic vicissitudes since the days of Sputnik, its scientific and technological capabilities remain robust. Russia is not only ineluctably wed to the Arctic, but it possesses the wherewithal to realize its full destiny in those far reaches.

  But for Chilingarov, the passage to that unique dot on the earth’s surface transcended any political statement. His voyage was a personal triumph, one for the record books; he had achieved what for centuries many had deemed improbable. The call of the North had been well and truly answered – the Arctic Siren had sung her beguiling song, as it were, and he had successfully ignored her. Not so, the scores of others who over the centuries found themselves lured by her call, drawn as if by a magnet into a deadly embrace.

  The Arctic seems to forever cast a spell over man’s imagination, with the North Pole being a particularly tantalizing draw. A corner of the world of ice-encrusted shores and unbounded frozen tundra, of endless days or continuous nights and of scarcity and want. A land that is as unpredictable and dangerous as it is alluring and wondrously beautiful.

  Although barely populated, the Arctic is rich in history and tales of its explorers, adventurers, and competitive entrepreneurs are legion. Since early medieval times, man has ventured into those hostile expanses for one purpose or another. The outcomes for these early gallants invariably proved disappointing — mirages of sorts. The passage seemed just beyond the next point, but it wasn’t there; the binding ice packs are certain to give way, but they only grow firmer; the objective will be reached tomorrow, but the tomorrows kept passing by — like chasing rainbows. Some survived to tell about it while others perished and left the telling to their chroniclers.

  The early thrusts were ever plagued by defiant ice, deprivation, haunting solitude, and above all, by unimaginable cold. Listen to one nineteenth-century explorer, George Kennan:

  Our eyelids froze together while we were drinking tea. Our soup taken from a hot kettle froze in our tin plates before we could possibly finish eating it, and the breasts of our fur coats were covered with white rime while we sat only a few feet from a huge blazing campfire. Tin plates, knives and spoons burned the bare hand when touched, almost exactly as if they were red hot, and water spilled on a little piece of board only fourteen inches from the fire, froze solid in less than two minutes The warm bodies of our dogs gave off clouds of steam, and even the bare hand, wiped perfectly dry, exhaled a thin vapor when exposed to air …1

  What manner of persons were these early hardies — the likes of Sir John Franklin, for example? On his final quest of the elusive Northwest Passage, every sort of calamity befell him and his crew: exposure and hypothermia, starvation and scurvy, tuberculosis and lead poisonin
g. What force propelled him so resolutely to battle the formidable ice packs of the Canadian north in the first place? The draw of the Siren’s “sweet song,” possibly? “Nothing is dearer to my heart … than the accomplishment of the Northwest Passage,” he once declared. Twice he tried to break through the ice, and on the third attempt in 1845 he and his company simply disappeared, swallowed by the hostile expanses and “taken to their eternal rest.”

  A polar bear attack on one of Barents’s crew members during his second expedition into Arctic waters. His frightened colleagues reacted at first by running away, but soon returned and found the animal “devouring the man … the beare bit his head in sunder and sucked out his blood.”

  Consider also the likes of the Dutchman, Willem Barents, “the most distinguished martyr to Arctic investigation,” who more than two centuries before Franklin set out no less determinedly in the opposite direction, to uncover the Northeast Passage. And like Sir John, he too made three journeys, on the last of which his small vessel became decisively ice-bound. The crushing packs continued to press, and eventually the vessel was heaved up like a toy and broken beyond repair. Barents and his tiny crew came ashore and with no small effort constructed a shelter from material of the wrecked ship. They thus become the first Europeans to pass an entire Arctic winter — long, dark days in constant fear of intruding polar bears. Once, the horrified crew witnessed such a beast attacking and killing one of their numbers and then gorging itself on brain matter that spilled from the split skull. Some of the crew returned home to tell the tale of the incredible adventures, but others, Barents included, forfeited their lives in futile missions.

  One of the most compelling tales of man’s resourcefulness and endurance in the Arctic is that of the four Pomori hunters who in 1741 found themselves accidental castaways on one of the Arctic’s most inhospitable islands, in Spitzbergen. For six years they managed to survive in isolation on what little they happened to have carried originally: the clothes on their backs, a musket and twelve rounds of ammunition, a knife, an axe, a small tea kettle, a tinderbox, twenty pounds of flour, and a pouch of tobacco. That and later, a hunk of driftwood which had washed ashore — providentially, with a spike driven through. What sort of men were these, and what force was within them that allowed for survival?

  Franklin, Barents, and Kennan: three among scores of others who over the centuries answered the call of the North. These valiants came from England, Russia, United States, and Denmark, from Norway, Sweden, and Canada, from Germany, Italy, and Hungary. Most were spurred on in search of fame and fortune while others, by hopes of discovery or simply through a sense of adventure. However one might view them, they were all outsiders not belonging to the Arctic, interlopers really. These Europeans form one of two stout threads that are woven into the fabric of Arctic history. The other thread finds its strength in the scattering of indigenous peoples who arrived to those far northlands centuries before any European and settled there — the Inuit of Canada and Greenland, Aleuts of Alaska, Yakut and Chukchi of Siberia or Lapps of Scandinavia, to name but a few. It was their homeland that suffered European incursion, but it was they who ultimately showed many of the outsiders how to cope with those inhospitable environs. These were the children of the Arctic Siren, who smiled benevolently upon them. Two distinctive threads that share a commonality — their histories are equally framed in display of courage and stubbornness, in conquest and failure, and in death and survival.

  So, for starters, how to define the region known as the Arctic? Where does it begin and end and what exactly is the North Pole, the so-called “top of the world”? Simply put, the pole is that point on the surface of the northern hemisphere through which passes the tilted axis of earth’s rotation. This geographic North Pole is not to be confused with the magnetic North Pole, the globe’s constantly-moving point where the earth’s magnetic field tips vertically downward and from which the compass finds its bearing.

  Strictly speaking, anyone laying claim to having stood at the pole is in error for, as we have seen, such person was positioned some four kilometeres above it, on the ice-covered ocean surface. Of the world’s five oceans, the Arctic is the smallest, yet in linear terms from one shore to the opposite, distances exceed 3100 miles. The nearest landfall from the pole is the obscure island of Kaffeklubben 440 miles away, off the coast of Greenland. Had the same claimant been challenged to point east or west, he would have been unable to do so, for at the pole all directions point south. Had the adventurer looked directly above at the night sky, he would have found the most telling celestial body in the northern hemisphere, Polaris, or the North Star. From ancient times, astronomers and navigators took their bearings from this apparently stationary star, around which the night sky seems to revolve. The star is also known as “the Great Bear,” and the word for bear in Greek is arktos — hence, “arctic”.

  The circumpolar region with the Arctic Circle. The irregular dotted line indicates the approximate treeline.

  Map by Cameron McLeod Jones.

  The term “arctic” has two commonly used, varied definitions, neither of which is 100 percent satisfactory. The neatest, less amorphous demarcation has it in terms of earth–sun relationship: the Arctic Circle at latitude 66°33' N is the clearly drawn boundary. Here on one day of the year (about June 21) the sun does not set, and on one day of the year (about December 21), it does not rise — the summer and winter solstices. The second definition is rooted in terms of climate and vegetation. The Arctic is delineated by the irregular and shifting 50ºF July isotherm — the line closely corresponding to the northern limit of tree growth: to the south, taiga and low-lying trees, and to the north, the treeless tundra. By accepting the latter definition, it must be appreciated that much of what is called “the sub-Arctic” falls within these parameters. This book’s purview is framed by that second definition, for within the broader bounds are found the majority of the Arctic’s indigenous population, which today is being dramatically affected by climatic change. The canvas before us therefore is sizeable and broad brushstrokes are required to come to terms with it.

  Amid false hopes and mirages, early explorers competed as much for glory and kudos as for discovery and territorial claim. But for today’s explorers and entrepreneurs the mirages are a thing of the past — scientific and technological advances have written an end to them with unsettling rapidity. Pressures wrought by climate change and environmental concerns, the dogged quest for fresh sources of energy and political jockeying of nations for strategic positioning have brought fresh realities to the North. The principals in the continuing rivalry are the five prime Arctic nations: Russia, Canada, United States, Norway, and Denmark — all taken up in the whirlwind of transformation of which the greater public generally is imperfectly informed.

  Beneath the Arctic landscape lies a vast wealth of hidden treasures — gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, uranium, cobalt, titanium, and platinum. But it is oil and gas that attracts most attention. Estimates of the region’s oil reserves are wild, with some figures running as high as 40 percent of the world’s total. If such is the case, the Arctic’s potential eclipses those of Saudi Arabia and Iran combined. The challenges of exploration and extraction are one thing, getting it all to the markets is quite another matter. But with global warming and the retreat of the ice caps, the promise of an open shipping channel is an eminent reality. An ice-free Northwest Passage will not only permit the transport of Arctic riches to the markets, but would unlock a trans-polar route for east–west shipping, cutting some sailing times by 40 percent or more. Not surprising, therefore, that interest today in that distant reach of our planet is as great as ever; the place that “God had secreted all for himself” is being ruthlessly penetrated. My hope for this volume is that it will stimulate a greater appreciation for this wondrous and fragile part of our world. As a friend adroitly put it, “The Arctic today is tomorrow’s hot spot.”

  * * *

  Some years ago I was invited to join a group of bus
inessmen flying to Resolute, Canada’s second-most northern settlement at 74°43' N. The place continues as the springboard for scientific research stations and polar expeditions. During the five-day visit, I was invited to accompany a couple of supply flights to isolated meteorological stations, one at Mould Bay in the western Arctic not far from the Beaufort Sea, and the other to Eurika, just north of 80° N, a mere 460 miles from the North Pole (and, it may be noted, 2,581 miles from Canada’s southernmost point).

  At seven thousand feet, our ancient DC-3 seemed to skim over the landscape with unreal rapidity. Clear blue skies and the midnight sun made for perfect visibility. Mountains, dark crevasses, moraines, ancient glaciers, snow — all blended the unfolding landscape into a barrenness of dynamic beauty. Here, melting snow fed streams that cascaded through ruts and gullies; there, stands of dark silt contrasted with sparkling white ice. Expanse, expanse, and on and on … a panorama of pristine landscape and perfect solitude. It’s as though God had indeed secreted this awesomely magnificent place all for himself … and here we were — trespassers.

  On the return flight from Mould Bay, the RCMP constable sitting in the adjacent seat let fly with an idle reflection. “An Arctic expert,” he mused, “is someone who has peed above the Arctic Circle.” Were one to take this definition to heart, I qualify, but to lay serious claim to such is no small presumption. I’m merely one of the Arctic’s countless lovers and my fidelity to her remains constant. Above all, I stand in wonder of the indigenous peoples who for millennia have been at home in those distant and inhospitable reaches. I’m equally awed by tales of the early Europeans who brought the Arctic into our world — be they stories of courage and conquest or of folly and error, they were all men of high resolve and wondrous strength of character.