Ny Ålesund houses about 80 ‘-ologists’ of various degrees and disciplines during the summer, but only a dozen or so researchers and caretakers stay over winter. Beside the hotel, there is a post office with a store attached, selling dusty rolls of toilet paper, writing paper and toiletries. A small souvenir shop sells T-shirts (‘I’m on top of the world’ etc.) and trinkets to people from the cruise ships that occasionally stop there, but by and large, tourists are definitely not welcome.
Travelling in a small boat, we often consider ourselves to be adventurers — explorers even — but never tourists. It is a term which, for some reason, implies poor taste and tackiness. It was a real blow to our egos, therefore, to find ourselves being lumped in with the brightly-clad clones who streamed off cruise ships and jet aeroplanes.
Most of the workers at Ny Ålesund were billeted in long barrack buildings, and before too long we had made friends with a few of the lesser orders of ‘-ologists’. Our friendship culminated in a rather riotous party in one of the barracks the Friday evening after the monthly liquor ration had been doled out. Lookouts were posted in case any of the hierarchy decided to investigate the ruckus.
Elkouba had to respond in kind, of course, so a few days later we had a gathering aboard. About 20 people crammed around the coal stove, in the yacht’s poky saloon, drinking whisky, vodka and home-brewed liquor while we played cassette tapes and talked of the Arctic. We took turns meanwhile to go on deck with the boat hook and fend off bus-sized bergy bits of ice which, propelled by the tide, crunched back and forth along Elkouba’s topsides.
Later still, our friends came across some dust-covered band instruments in a disused store room, and this sparked off an impromptu concert in the town square. None of this hilarity escaped the attention of the town administrators, and we began to feel that perhaps we were overstaying our welcome. Laughter does not go hand in hand with the serious business of science at Ny Ålesund.
Irish sailor John Gore Grimes visited Ny Ålesund in 1980, and he was so disturbed by the imperturbability of the inhabitants that he shaved off the starboard side of his beard to see if it would provoke a reaction. ‘Nobody batted an eyelid — they just kept on ignoring us,’ he said. Nevertheless, Ny Ålesund was good to us, right down to the large Faroese trawler that came into the dock one night to fill her tanks from a pre-arranged fuel stock. Her crew left a large bag of cod fillets on our deck before they left the next morning.
Opposite Ny Ålesund, on the north shore of Kongsfjorden, is the former English settlement of London. This forlorn place, consisting of one very decrepit building, has very little in common with its English namesake. English entrepreneurs discovered good-quality marble deposits on the site in the 1920s, and founded a settlement and quarry there to mine them. They touted the marble as being far superior to any in the world, suitable for only the most salubrious buildings and the most famous architects. Miners were employed and a network of railway lines and mining equipment installed.
Finally, amidst much fanfare, the first shipment of this famous rock arrived in England — but when watersiders removed the ship’s hatch covers, they found that the ice which had kept the marble together in Svalbard had melted en route to England, and now all they had was a ship full of marble crumbs. Over the years, most of the buildings from London had been moved across the fjord to Ny Ålesund, and only a few pieces of machinery and rusty railway lines were left.
Tied alongside the dock at Ny Ålesund, we began the train of thought that rode our minds for the rest of our stay in Svalbard: ‘Why don’t we winter-over?’ Ny Ålesund seemed ideal — it had a nice secure anchorage, we could pick up all of the coal we needed from the beach, we could have the society of other people (and perhaps their supply lines if we needed them), and we could make ourselves useful around the research station. Kapp Wijk shared many of these attractions, but we had not wanted to impinge on Harald. We began eyeing every anchorage and weighing its suitability as a winter base.
A week or so after we arrived in Ny Ålesund, I was woken one morning by loud pinging and snapping noises echoing through the hull. I leapt out on deck to find Elkouba surrounded by automobile-sized bergy bits which had been calved from Kongsbreen (‘breen’ means glacier) at the head of the fjord. While we had slept, the wind had turned easterly and blown the field of ice down on to Elkouba. We were hemmed in by ice at last — real Arctic hero stuff.
In the Antarctic, huge tabular icebergs calve off the edge of the massive ice pack, and these have been recorded up to and over 160 kilometres long. Nothing like this is seen in Svalbard, however, where icebergs generally calve from the faces of the glaciers and are eroded by the relatively warm water before they get far offshore. There is still something awesome, though, about a mammoth block of ice, weighing up to 100 tonnes, parting from its parent glacier with a ripping roar and plunging into the sea.
A party of Frenchmen were capsized in their inflatable boat, a month or so before we arrived, by the huge wave created by just such a ‘calving’. They were fortunate to be rescued by their mother ship before they died from exposure. Survival time in the water varies here; some people die instantly when shock stops their heart. A crewman who fell off a research vessel while we were there died within the seven minutes it took the ship to recover him.
I had had fun rowing our plywood dinghy, Taff, around among the bigger bergy bits, but in hindsight I realized it wasn’t a very clever pastime. Many of the bergy bits were unbalanced and unstable, and if they chose to capsize while I was nearby they could have sunk the dinghy. To polar bears, or even walrus, someone in a dinghy is fair game, and a bear can swim faster than I could row Taff. I had become over-confident and cocky and, in the Arctic, that can cost you your life. It pays to remember, in the polar regions, that there is only one quick step between life and death.
From Ny Ålesund we did a series of day sailing trips, exploring the many little fjords which branch off the massive Kongsfjorden, and finally, on our way north from the fjord after deciding not to winter-over after all, we poked Elkouba’s hard steel bows into Krossfjorden.
The Admiralty’s Arctic Pilot says this about Lilliehookbreen, the massive glacier at the head of Krossfjorden: ‘From this glacier large bergs are frequently calved, many with a height of 40 to 50 feet and a length and breadth of over half a mile. These are the only real icebergs calved on the west coast, for the masses of ice that break from the smaller glaciers in the fjords are very much smaller. The reason for the larger size of the Lilliehook bergs appears to be the greater depth of water at the front of the glacier. None of the Lilliehook bergs reach the open sea, because having too great a draught (depth), they ground either on the banks fringing the fjord or on the shoals at the entrance.
‘Small vessels should keep well clear of the front of Lilliehook glacier as it calves frequently and the waves then raised are sufficiently high to be dangerous for a considerable distance,’ the pilot advised.
As we sailed down Kongsfjorden, after having spent some time taking photographs right under the face of Blomstrand glacier, we saw one of these huge bergs drift slowly out of Krossfjorden. The jagged steeple of ice, about 20 metres high and slightly opaque, looked like the Ice King’s castle. As we approached, it split in half with a loud crack, rolled over, and submerged. It then reappeared as a bunch of bergy bits, many as large as Elkouba, which hurtled up to three metres into the air as they re-surfaced. I had been about to manoeuvre Elkouba closer to the iceberg so we could get better photographs — a direct hit would have sunk the boat and killed us.
An iceberg is commonly conceived of as a giant version of the cube that cools your cocktail — but this is not the case. We marvelled at the variety of sizes, shapes and colours of the bergs. Some were black and some clay red, depending on the terrain their mother glacier was carving its way through, and others were all shades of blue, green and sometimes yellow, colours caused by reflection of the light through air, water and ice.
Old Arctic hands maintain
a wariness of the environment, a sort of scenic cynicism. It is when you become over-confident and drop your guard that the deadly nature of this awe-inspiring place is most likely to kill you.
IX AMONG THE ICE
Idling out from Ny Ålesund, with bergy bits and brash ice rattling and gnashing at Elkouba’s waterline, we caught a sizeable chunk of ice between the propeller and the hull. It stalled the engine, with an ominous clunk, and slightly bent the propeller shaft. Ice had also knocked some blades off our log impeller, making it unreliable, so between that, and the compass deviation caused by our proximity to the North Pole, navigation was becoming an increasingly haphazard business.
Because of the vast amount of glacial ice drifting around the Svalbard shoreline, the inshore water is too cold to support many species of fish life. Further out, where the influence of the warm Gulf Stream is more pronounced, there are rich trawl grounds which yield a lot of cod.
On our way out of Kongsfjorden, we stopped at an indentation in the coastline that the locals call Haugen Bay. One Mr Haugen, a coal-company foreman at Ny Ålesund, came across a solid teak deckhouse from a wrecked sailing ship and set it up in the bay as his summer retreat, and there it still stands. The next bay north, on the shore of Krossfjorden, is Signehamna, the site of a World War Two German weather station. There is a bar at the entrance with about six feet of water over it, but once inside it is almost land-locked with a good ice-free anchorage in 3 to 5 metres of water.
The coastline, from Kongsfjorden north, is known as the Coast of Seven Glaciers. This makes navigation, for anyone who can count to seven, a simple matter — you just count the steep and ragged glacier faces as they slide by to determine your position. A relatively warm and gentle southerly breeze blew Elkouba up the coast, with our huge yellow and blue spinnaker (cashiered from a Swedish racing yacht of our acquaintance) billowing from the masthead. As each new glacier and/or mountain became visible we boggled anew, and I wondered about the capacity of the human brain to be able to absorb so much majesty.
We were sorely tempted to spend the night at Hamburgerbukta, an almost land-locked little bay which was named by German whalers and not, as I am sure some people would think, after America’s favourite fast food. But instead we sailed on to Magdalenefjorden, neither of us feeling energetic enough to douse the spinnaker until we absolutely had to. Boggling at such spectacular scenery is remarkably fatiguing.
It is a sobering experience to sit and contemplate the feats of the whaling skippers who worked this coast on a regular basis without the aid of today’s comprehensive charts or navigational tools. I remembered the Norwegian yachtsman who called me a fool for not taking a satellite navigator to Svalbard, and then thought about the whalers, in clumsy, square-rigged ships with little windward sailing ability, their sextants and reduction tables much less accurate than mine, and without reliable timepieces to use in establishing their longitude. A breed of men, like the whaling skipper Ernest Dahl, that our society will not see again.
Yachtsmen are no newcomers to this coastline, either. During the Victorian era, when voyaging by yacht really was a gentlemanly pastime, an Englishman, one Leigh Smith, brought his yacht, a 300-tonner called Eira, with a paid crew, on several voyages to Spitsbergen, Nordaustlandet, and as far east as Franz Josef Land.
Hunting was considered a gentlemanly thing to do, too, in those days when the English aristocracy considered that all the lower orders, most humans included, had been expressly provided for their own pleasure. Mr Leigh Smith made serious reductions to the walrus and bear populations on his trips to the archipelago. A cape on Nordaustlandet bears his name, a tribute to the sketches he made of that hitherto unknown coastline in his voyage of 1871. In 1881 Eira was crushed by ice. Leigh Smith and his party of 25 overwintered in a hut on the shore made from wreckage. They maintained good health with stores salvaged from the stricken yacht, and with 24 walrus and 34 polar bears, which they shot and ate. The following summer they took the ship’s boats, which had been saved from the wreck, and sailed to Novaya Zemlya, about 750 kilometres to the south-east.
During the winter they had made sails for the four boats, and freshly shot meat was boiled and canned by the blacksmith. They sailed on 21 June. Each boat had a chronometer, sextant and compass, and the crews made one hot meal daily and brewed tea twice a day until they arrived at Novaya Zemlya and were rescued by the relief ship Hope on 3 August.
Another Victorian yachtsman with a liking for the far north was James Lamont, a Greenpeace campaigner’s nightmare. He sailed to Spitsbergen in 1858, and again the following year, expressly to shoot as many walrus and seals as he possibly could. I cannot condone his tendencies in that respect, but Lamont must have been a reasonable seaman. After the 1858 trip he wrote, ‘I am perceived on this occasion that nothing could be more impractical for ice navigation than a long fore-and-aft-rigged schooner yacht, as in threading the intricate mazes of the ice there was no way of stopping her to avoid collisions, as is done by backing the topsails of a square-rigged vessel, and her frail planking and thin copper were exposed to constant destruction by the ice. Her dandified painted gigs were also totally unsuited for the rough work of pushing in amongst the ice in pursuit of seal and walrus; indeed it is very fortunate that we did not succeed in harpooning one of the latter mighty amphibiae from the yacht’s boats, for my subsequent experience of the strength and ferocity of these animals leads me to believe that he would infallibly have pulled us all to the bottom of the sea.’ In doing so the walrus would have probably had the whole-hearted support of most 20th-century Western ecologists.
The following year, 1859, Lamont stopped on his way north at Hammerfest, in Norway, and chartered a boat similar to the ones used by Norwegian sealers: a 30-ton sloop with a small, square topsail. He left his own luxurious schooner yacht, Ginerva, in the relative safety of Isfjorden, while he cruised further north in the Norwegian boat to Edgeøya and Storfjorden, leaving the name Ginervaboten on a small island near the head of the fjord. On this voyage he and a friend, Lord Kennedy, bagged 46 walrus, 88 seals, eight polar bears, one white whale (beluga) and 61 reindeer. Another 20 walrus and 40 seals were shot, but sank before they could be recovered.
Polar bear hunting expeditions seem to have been in vogue about that era. Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, which was crushed by Antarctic pack ice in 1915, was originally named Polaris, and was built for a Norwegian whaling magnate, Lars Christensen, to carry hunting parties to Spitsbergen. Typically, she was barquentine rigged, with square sails on the foremast and fore-and-aft sails on the other two masts. Her keel was 2.2 metres thick, solid oak, and planking was 80 centimetres thick with a sheathing of extrahard green heart-timber to resist ice damage around the waterline. Steel or iron was considered to be too frail a medium for ice-ship construction in those early days. She was built by the famous Framnaes yard in Sandefjord, Norway, and bought by Shackleton in 1914 for $67,000. Framnaes were approached in the 1960s to build a replica, and estimated that to build a ship of similar scantlings would cost well over $US1,000,000.
The ultimate ice ship, though, was Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram, designed and built in Norway by an expatriate Scotsman, Colin Archer. Archer left his stamp on Scandinavian yachting, and is responsible for most of the strong, heavy, double-ended designs people in that region favour to this day. Fram’s oak stem was 1.2 metres thick and her frames or ribs were 52 centimetres square and 25 millimetres apart. Her planking consisted of two layers of oak, the inner one 7.5 centimetres thick and the outer one 10 centimetres. The outer skin of rock-hard green heart timber, 15 centimetres thick, was fastened along the waterline. The total thickness of her hull was 1 metre, and metal chafing sheets protected her bow and stern.
In September 1893, Fram was allowed to freeze in to the polar ice pack at 77 degrees, 44 minutes north, and by October 1895 she had drifted to 85 degrees, 57 minutes north. In August 1895 she had battered her way free of the ice near north Spitsbergen, and sailed home to Norway to a rapturous he
roine’s welcome. A few months later Fram was returned to Archer’s shipyard for a survey and refit and, in an especially rigorous inspection of the ship, Archer could find only one malady — a bolt had been torn out of the rudder post. Otto Sverdrup, skipper for Nansen’s voyage, took Fram back to the Arctic, and in four years charted over 100,000 square miles of hitherto unexplored coastline.
Roald Amundsen, fresh from being the first man to transit the North-West Passage, obtained the use of Fram for an attempt to be the first man to the North Pole. He was beaten by an American admiral, Robert Peary, in 1909, however, and instead set his sights on the South Pole. Fram was fitted with a diesel engine and a windmill generator to charge batteries, and penetrated deep into the Ross Sea to disembark Amundsen and his sled dogs and drivers for their successful trek to the Pole.
Amundsen next planned to head for the Bering Strait to enter the Arctic ice drift, but en route Fram was invited to be the first vessel to transit the almost-completed Panama Canal. While the ship anchored off Colon, awaiting completion of the canal, rot spread through her deck timbers and caused serious damage to the doughty little ship. A few months in the tropics had wrought more damage than years in the storms and ice of the high altitudes. Fram was sailed home to Norway, where Otto Sverdrup began a campaign to raise funds for restoring her. She now rests ashore at a museum in Oslo.
Sailing in her wake, Elkouba was now abeam the sixth glacier on the coast of seven glaciers, when the wind dropped completely. We doused the spinnaker, coaxed the Volvo to life and motored on northwards. Suddenly, around the point ahead of us, a large red spinnaker ballooned into view and, as the gap between us rapidly closed, we recognised the steel hull and wheelhouse of the German yacht Freydis.
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