by Ice! [V2. 0]
Eric the Red, who had the fortune to be "in with the media," which in those days consisted of the saga-singers, was born near Stavanger, Norway. He, too, arrived too late for the great Icelandic land-grab, and, having heard the tales of Gunnbjorn's much earlier voyage, sailed west.
On the shores of Greenland, which he reached in 981, he found willow, birch, and juniper, and short stubby grass in the valleys between the rocky morains. The summer was warm and kind. He returned to Iceland and spent the next four years mustering up twenty-five ships and five hundred settlers. With these, in 985, he established three colonies: one on the west coast of Greenland, which lasted three hundred and sixty years; one on the east coast, which survived a little longer; and one at the southern tip. The last trace of the Norse colonies of Greenland was found, 555 years later, by a German Hanseatic merchant, Jon Greenlander, of Hamburg. He sailed his ship into a fiord near Cape Farewell in 1540. There on the beach he found a man, one lone man, lying face down, dead. The corpse was small and thin, yet dressed in European-style clothes. In his hand he clutched a wooden harpoon with an iron tip.
This was the last descendant of the Viking Norsemen of Greenland. The last of a race of strong, tall, robust people who had scourged all the known seas of the western world. This stunted dwarf, holding a primitive iron weapon, was the last of the Iron Age men. They had existed only a thousand years.
The Norse colonies died out for two reasons. First, around the early 1500s, the Little Ice Age began, which would last for two centuries; and second, unlike the Eskimo, the Viking refused to come to terms with the change in nature. He insisted on wearing European-style clothes. The skin of a caribou or a musk ox was beneath the notice of the proud Norsemen. Yet it would have saved them. They had encountered the Eskimos, whom they named Skraelings (screamers), many times over the centuries, and bloody battles had been fought. They would have done better to have learned how to dress from the Eskimos, who have survived ten thousand years.
During the centuries of Norse occupation of the coasts of Greenland, or at any rate small sections of them, trade into and out of the country by any ships but those of the Danish-Norwegian federation was strictly forbidden by edict from the court of Copenhagen. This, of course, led to the arrival of the Bristol ships, and in short order there was a flourishing trade in walrus tusks, caribou skins, bearskins, sealskins, whale blubber, and bone. Then, in the late 1500s, with the disappearance of the Norse colonists, the trade in slaves began. It is on record that in most years during the late 1500s anything up to one hundred Bristol ships were on the coast, many of them dealing in Eskimo slaves. Where these slaves were taken is a mystery, but I suspect they were used for seal hunting in the Arctic.
Arctic exploration in modern times began with the search by European mariners for the northeast passage to China, in the mid-1400s. Then, with the "discovery" of North America, the focus of exploration was changed to probing for the northwest passage to China. Voyages in pursuit of this elusive goal went on for the next four and a half centuries. Many, such as the Hudson voyage and the Franklin expedition, resulted in tragedy. In the latter, 129 men, in two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, stuck in the ice and ran out of food. Not knowing how to get to the food which was swimming under them, they starved to death, with the survivors eating the bodies of their comrades, then gradually starving again until there were more deaths, and so on, until finally the last man expired after eighteen months on a sparse diet of human flesh. This was in 1846. A gory story of brave, steady men driven to desperation. The mental state of the last man, huddled in the ragged tatters of a makeshift tent against the bitterly cruel blasts of the Arctic blizzards, knowing he was all alone in the black, everlasting night, contemplating his home and family and the dead comrades he had eaten, is beyond human imagination.
The summer in Greenland is short, only three months' duration. The shore ice and pack ice take all spring and one month of summer to thaw. Then leads, or passages, open up between the shore ice, heaped and immobile, piled up to 180 miles out from the shore line, and the pack ice. The moving pack ice floes are anything up to three miles long and six feet thick. By the end of July these leads may be a few miles wide. Between the ice floes the sea is calm, and in a favorable wind the sailing is magnificent.
The difficulty is finding the right leads, because many of them are dead ends, which get progressively narrower and finally, after many miles, wind up in a field of solid ice. The main risk is being caught in the passage between the shore ice, which is fixed and solid, and the pack ice, which might be moving at a great rate, carried south on the southerly running Greenland current. If the pack ice forces a small craft against the shore ice, she will be ground to bits in a matter of minutes.
But in nature every situation has not only disadvantages, but advantages, too. In the arctic summer it is broad daylight for most of the clock around; and in the twilight, which lasts for only an hour before the sun again rises, the sky is usually so clear that with the starlight alone it is possible to see many miles and even read a newspaper.
The shore ice, frozen across the mouths of the fiords in the cold winter, begins to break up in early June, and by mid-July there are clear entrances and long leads between the pack ice. It was for this reason that I delayed sailing for Greenland until July 2.
As I took my farewell of Alpi and his wife, together with some of their friends, they said to me, "Now don't forget, if you get to Ella, look up Mr. De Limos. He is a very good man and will help you."
"I'll be sure to do that when I reach Ella. So long, Alpi, don't take any wooden kronor!"
I sailed out of Reykjavik in the early morning, the last town of any size bigger than half-a-dozen huts that I would see for another twenty-two months.
Cresswell was soon out of the fishing fleet, heading across the Denmark Strait, which is probably, after the Mozambique Channel of Africa, the widest strait in the world, about eight hundred miles. The first five days were lively, with a northeaster blowing over my starboard quarter, but then the wind died and for two days I was becalmed. By this time maverick ice floes had become a common sight, and, sitting there fishing, waiting for a wind, I would sometimes have to start the engine to move out of the way of a floe. They were moving very slowly, about half a knot, to the south. On the second day, becalmed, I motored over close to one of them. The sides of the floe were not protruding underwater, so I tied the boat up to two spikes which I drove into the ice. With the boat safely secured, I took Nelson for a walk in the sunshine. It was warm enough to wear only a shirt, with the sleeves rolled up, shorts, and my British army boots. I felt rather like a Lancashire collier on the beach at Blackpool.
The seas were calm, almost Mediterranean blue, and looking over the sides of the floe, down into the green depths of the Arctic Ocean water, I saw thousands of shrimp floating around. There was no other sign of life. After an hour's stretch, I untied the boat, withdrew the spikes, and set off again, clear of the floe. Once well away from it, I set to making a shrimp net from a plastic mosquito net and some box-wire lashed onto the end of the harpoon handle.
"Well, old mate," I said to Nelson, "one thing's for sure—if it's like this all the way, first of all we won't starve for fresh food, and secondly we won't get very far to the north!"
By this time I was at latitude sixty-nine. I remember it quite well, because that evening I caught a halibut, a big one. He weighed on my hand scales exactly sixty-nine pounds. Again, he was much too oily to eat, so I boiled up his fins, which I ate for supper, while Nelson had his head. I tried giving him the head raw, because I wanted to see if I could persuade him to eat uncooked fish and thus save on cooking oil, but he turned his nose up at it. Then I cut off the best bits of the halibut flesh and pickled it in lemon juice made from pure lemon crystals. After a week of marinating, the halibut had given off a lot of oil, and the tang of the lemon detracted from the greasy feel of the meat.
After three days of calm, dodging the ice floes, which were passing more
frequently, the wind piped up again, this time from the southwest, and soon we were off, under all working sail, in a calm sea, with a good breeze.
On July 9, I was sailing due west along a wide gap between two great fleets of pack ice. They were moving south, which meant that my actual course was to the southeast. I was concerned about this, because to the south of Scoresby Sund, my destination, there is no possible haven for a couple of hundred miles. Nothing except the high-cliffed, barren, inhospitable coast of King Christian IX Land, with the well-named Cape Cruel jutting out into the shore ice.
But on the eleventh a lead to the north opened up and I changed course, with the gentle breeze astern of Cresswell. There was a mist on the western horizon, hiding the land, which otherwise I would have seen, even from fifty miles off. Although I knew my position from the sun sights, which, despite the lack of a clear horizon because of the pack ice floes, were reasonably accurate, I did not realize that I was actually sailing up the so-called shore lead—that is, the gap between the fixed shore ice and the moving pack ice. But, luckily, there was a very wide shore lead, and so I had no problem, apart from fatigue and eyestrain, in reaching Cape Brewster on the fourteenth of July. There, the wind dropped, and I spent almost a whole day motoring between gleaming, gigantic icebergs passing through the mouth of Scoresby Sund on their way out to sea from the ever moving glaciers.
The colors were fabulous. All around us the mountains and glaciers reared up to the blue sky—greys, greens, and silvers of every shade. The Sund itself was sparkling blue, as we always imagine the Mediterranean to be and as it so rarely is. Proceeding majestically through all this were great white, gold, pink and green, yellow and pale blue mountains of floating ice, some of them a mile or more in length and up to a thousand feet high!
Soon, under the gossamer, spider-web, cirrus sky that presages the aurora borealis and a high wind, I sighted, away to the north, the wireless aerials of the radio station at Scoresby Sund hamlet, a little collection of wooden buildings, neat and tidy in the Danish fashion. By supper time I was at anchor, awaiting the arrival of the powers-that-be.
"Good evening, where have you come from?" He was a slender, yet big-boned man dressed in a lumber jacket and khaki trousers with sealskin water-boots. His florid face had the broken blue veins of a European who has spent many years in a cold climate, an appearance very similar to the symptoms, in more southerly latitudes, of alcoholism.
"Hello, pleased to meet you. I've come from Reykjavik."
"Have you permits to navigate in Greenland?"
"Well, no. I cleared for Jan Mayen, but as I was becalmed and lost my way, I decided it would be best to head in here!"
"O.K., it's a good story. I'll believe it. But don't stay here too long, in case one of the inspectors arrives from Denmark, or there'll be hell to pay. As soon as you're ready, make out again for Jan Mayen, yes?"
"Yes."
"Meanwhile, welcome to Greenland!"
"Mange tak!" I mustered up one of my few Danish phrases.
"Hey, that's good, come for supper later on! But don't bring your dog ashore."
"Don't tell me you have quarantine regulations here?" I said. "It's not that. All the dogs here have tapeworm, and he'll soon catch it from them."
"Thanks for the tip. I'll be over in an hour, as soon as I've squared everything away. No shore leave for you, old son," I said to Nelson.
That night I ate with the wireless crew, who had been on this tour of duty for almost two years and still had another year to go before returning to Denmark. One of them, who was to be married upon his return home, said that he loved the land so much he intended to return with his wife and settle down.
I spent two days in Scoresby Sund cleaning out the bilges, decarbonizing the engine cylinder heads, checking the rigging and sails, and storing onboard fifty pounds of charcoal fuel for the small solid-fuel heating stove. In the late afternoons I went climbing over the rocly hillsides among the brilliantly colored, lichen-mossed rocks, along the shores littered with great boulders brought down by the ancient icefalls, watching the musk ox, with its straggly black hair, like a horse's mane, the large bearded seals and the smaller hair seals basking on the flat rocks at the water's edge of the deepest fiord in the world—Scoresby Sund, 4,600 feet deep, with vertical walls of rock around it rising straight up to heights of 6,500 feet. Beyond the sheer cliffs on the high plateau, the great snowy mass of Petermanns Peak reared its head 10,000 feet above the fiord! A giant's playground. Over to the west, the Stauning Alps rose 9,000 feet, and this seemed low, for the icecap around the base of the mountains is 6,000 feet deep!
This part of the Arctic, on the east coast of Greenland, is unique in that it has short, intensive summers, when the temperatures rise up to nine degrees centigrade. For this reason, among others, the tremendous, seemingly limitless glaciers of the country are among the most productive in the world, calving off many thousands of huge bergs all year round, but especially in the warm summer. And for this reason, also, the waters off east Greenland are among the most dangerous to shipping of all the Arctic seas.
At the head of the northwest fiord of the Sund is one of the fastest moving ice-masses on earth—which calves off anything up to fifty bergs a day in the warmest days of summer. And these can be over a mile in length! What a source of energy if only it could be harnessed! As I climbed over driftwood washed up on the shore after floating on the currents all the way from Siberia, I reflected that the first strikes, the first probes north, into the East Greenland ice by sailing craft had been made by a British expedition from Liverpool, in the year 1824. They had reached Shannon Island, named after one of their leaders. I intended to penetrate the ice fields further north, if possible to latitude eighty-four north, which is the furthest that the great Norwegian Nansen reached in the Fram sixty-six years earlier. The odds were against this, but if I didn't outdo Nansen, at least I'd beat the Liverpool expedition! Scoresby Sund is on latitude seventy-two north. There were only thirteen degrees between me and the furthest north under sail! Only 80 miles! By ocean sailing standards, a mere eight days' sailing!
Our of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbow'd.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate; lam the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley, "Invictus."
17
Tooth and Nail, Head-On!
My aim, upon departing from Scoresby Sund, was to sail north as hard and fast as possible through the ice fields, along the shore lead, between the shore ice and the pack ice. My destination was Kap Bismarck, on the coast of Queen Louise Land, approximately 380 miles north, on latitude seventy-six degrees, forty-five minutes north. If I made a swift, easy passage, I should arrive within two weeks. If, on the other hand, the passage was slow because of ice obstacles and hazards, and I arrived late in the northern summer, I would winter near the Danmarks Havn wireless station, in a small bay which might or might not be ice free. Then, when the ice broke up the following summer, I would press on north up the coast of Germania Land and attempt to buck the current and the ice to a point north of latitude eighty-four, the furthest north ever reached to date by a sailing ship.
If the passage was fast, I would call briefly at Kap Bismarck, then press on further north while the ice was still fairly loose, hoping to reach the magic eighty-four-degree point that same autumn. Then, the ice would seize the boat and, on the current, carry Cresswell south again over the winter, back to civilization. If the drift back south was sl
ow, I still had a good chance of weathering it out, for there was two years' supply of food onboard, and plenty of seals around.
The yearly inspector's ship was expected to arrive any day, and as I was eager to beat the coming winter in late September, I sailed out of Scoresby Sund anchorage with few regrets, apart from losing the fine company of the Danish radiomen and meteorologists, who had been hospitable and informative.
I motored out of the Sund through the loosening pack ice, dodging mountainous icebergs floating out into the Arctic Ocean. Once clear of the shore ice, which extended about forty miles, I found a wide-open lead to the north, though well dotted with isolated ice floes of all sizes. I was headed for the radio station at Myggbukta, on the coast of Hold with Hope peninsula, about 160 miles north. After three days and nights of hard sailing, in a flat sea, with the south wind dead astern, I was off the island of Bontekoe, where I moored onto an ice floe which had found its way around to the southern side of the island and gone aground. Here I slept fitfully for one "night." I was concerned in case another floe should come around the island and trap Cresswell against the one she was already moored to. After a few hours' sleep I decided to stay at Bontekoe for one more day, carrying out the necessary chores which had been neglected during the three-day passage north, when I had been on the wheel practically the whole time.
After the work was done, I took a good look around, though I did not leave the boat. I could have climbed over the piled up ice on the southern shore, but I was wary of possible accidents and also of the boat's breaking loose from the floe, if the wind shifted. During the day, it was warm enough to wear my normal sailing clothes—jersey, sheepskin jacket, long cotton underpants, and blue jeans, with long stockings and sea boots. But at night it turned cold, and I was glad to be in the sleeping bag for the short "dark" hours.
