The yachts passed metres apart, and we stood and excitedly yelled our news to each other. Bearing in mind the considerable language difference, and the short time that two boats sailing in opposite directions are within hailing distance of each other, nothing very comprehensive actually came out of this exchange.
Later on I spoke to the skipper, Eric, on the radio. Freydis had passed through Hinlopen Strait on the eastern coast of Spitsbergen, he said, by approaching from the south via Hopen Island. Hinlopen had been largely uncharted and breathtakingly beautiful, and they had seen many polar bears and walrus on the floe ice they had been dodging the whole way. One bear they had scared off an ice floe had then tried to climb aboard Freydis. ‘I think that he thought we were just a big red ice floe full of seals,’ Eric said.
I asked him if he thought we would be able to make it through Hinlopen Strait. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘two days ago we were anchored at Verlegenhuken’ (the cape at the north-east corner of Spitsbergen) ‘and the pack ice came towards us, into the wind and current, at about two knots. We just got out in time — I think you have left it too late.’
Sarah and I had provisioned Elkouba for an extended stay in the ice in case we were trapped and had to winter-over, but we would try to avoid that at all costs. From what Eric said, the edge of the pack ice was moving south fast, squeezed down by the hundreds of miles of polar pack ice steadily accumulating behind it.
With Elkouba’s shape — almost plumb topsides and about a 50-degree deadrise inwards from the waterline — I thought that she would pop up out of the ice as it squeezed around her, and then by shovelling snow all around her for insulation we could have a cosy winter igloo. The only drawbacks to this snug theory are the pressure ridges that move rapidly across pack ice like tidal waves of solid ice. One of these could flatten Elkouba. She would be like a beer can in front of an elephant stampede. If that happened, we would have to radio the Sysselmannen to helicopter us out (a possibility that countered all our ideas of oceanic and Arctic travel), pay the $3000-an-hour charge for his helicopter (which also countered not only our ideas of Arctic and oceanic travel but also our economic reality), and work for however many years it took us to be able to afford another Elkouba — a gruesome prospect at best.
Wintering-over would be viable in a sheltered area, without wind or sea motion to move the ice around and with plenty of time to settle in and get organized, but not here, pinched between the ice pack and the north-eastern end of Spitsbergen, miles from the nearest community. A stronger boat would also help our peace of mind. Elkouba, stout though she is, is plated with only 4-millimetre-thick steel, which would stand up to serious ice movement like crepe paper to a bulldozer. If we did decide to winter-over in the ice, we would come back better equipped and better prepared to do so.
With the seventh glacier astern of us, we rounded up into the entrance of Magdalenefjorden and sighted the magnificent Waggonwaybreen, an ice wall 110 metres high and 1.6 kilometres wide, opening up before us. Many locals had told us that Magdalenefjorden is the most beautiful of all Spitsbergen’s fjords, and one of the attractions, no doubt, is the perfect anchorage near its head at Trinityhamna. Trinityhamna is encircled by a gravel spit, called Graveneset, where several whale-men are buried. The fjord is a frequent stop for cruise ships, and the Spitsbergen people’s intolerance of tourism has been aggravated by cruise-ship passengers who use the graves for barbecue pits.
In 1596 Barents apparently anchored there, and named it Tusk Bay after some walrus tusks he found on the beach. Most of the Admiralty’s Arctic Pilot information on the fjord, though, comes from a survey made by Lieutenant Beechey who visited there in 1818. Hangebreen, a glacier not far from Trinityhamna, is described by the Arctic Pilot as ‘the most remarkable of the glaciers visible. It is situated at an elevation of about 200 feet, on the slopes of a mountain, in such an apparently precarious position that it looks as though a slight shock would precipitate it into the sea. Large portions of the glacier do occasionally fall away down the mountainside, making that part of the fjord hazardous to approach in a small boat.’ Blame global warming, perhaps, but since 1818 Lieutenant Beechey’s glacier has shrunk so much that it is hard to imagine any ice breaking off it, ever.
‘Landing is also difficult anywhere in Magdalenefjord,’ the Arctic Pilot reports. In actual fact, it is easily available to anyone with the energy to drag a dinghy up the shingle beach of Trinityhamna. The cruise ships have mass disembarkation down to a fine art. As soon as they are anchored, a boat-load of seamen is despatched to assemble a floating pontoon dock and this is used to berth the boats full of tourists that shuttle from the ship to the beach.
On the northern side of Magdalenefjorden recently, a French climber was eaten by a polar bear. One cannot help but wonder what sort of epicurean delight dozens of plump tourists must appear to a hungry bear. Perhaps they sit in the foothills like children in a sweet shop, licking their lips and not knowing where to start.
X A WHALE OF A TIME
Although the Dutch claim that Barents discovered Svalbard in 1596, it seems that an Englishman named Hugh Willoughby, on a voyage to investigate the possibility of a north-east sea route around North Cape in Norway to Russia, first sighted the islands in 1553. An unnamed Englishman is reputed to have spotted the islands four years later in 1557, on a voyage to Muscovy in Russia. He wrote: ‘About the island of Zenam we saw many whales, very monstrous, about our ships, some by an estimation 60 feet long and being the engendering season they roared and cried terrible.’ ‘Island of Zenam’ probably refers to Spitsbergen, although the British, believing it was connected to Greenland, called it ‘East Greenland’ right up until the 1800s.
This anonymous voyager of 1557 really let the cat out of the bag among the whaling industry, still going strong in Brittany and Holland in the North Sea at that time, but beginning to look further afield as they depleted whale stocks off their own coasts. The first English whale ship to hunt in Spitsbergen, according to the records, was Mary Margaret, captained by Steven Bennet. Bennet must have thought he had stumbled on a gold mine. In 1611 he killed 500 walrus and one whale in Thomas Smyth’s Bay, but the ship was lost with all hands on the return trip to England so word about his windfall was slow in leaking out.
Another English ship, Elizabeth, of 50 tonnes, whaled successfully in Deer Sound, Spitsbergen, that year. The agent on board must also have had very little faith in their ability to survive the homeward trip, as he wrote an account of the privations they had suffered in Spitsbergen and left it under a stone cairn ashore for later discovery.
The English had been pre-empted by Dutch and Basque whalers, and these three nations geared up for a whale slaughter around Spitsbergen that has probably only ever been equalled by the factory-ship whaling fleets in the South Atlantic centuries later. Scoresby estimated that 58,000 whales were killed off the Spitsbergen coast during the summers of 1611 to 1775, and reading the history of this massacre is like reading the story of the development of the whaling industry itself.
At the height of the whale fishery in Spitsbergen, quarrelling and even more forceful forms of dissension broke out among the whale-men vying to be in on the blubber bonanza, until eventually an agreement was drawn up and harbours and islands on the coast apportioned to the whalers of each nationality. Hence English Bay on Prins Karls Forland, and, further north, Danskøya (Danish island) and Amsterdamøya (self-explanatory). The Dutch whale-men, who in their own country had used shore stations to process whale products since time immemorial, moved their base from Jan Mayen to Amsterdamøya and set up a township called Smeerenburg (blubber town) on the south side of the island. In its heyday, between 1633 and 1643, Smeerenburg accommodated about 1200 people plus the crews of up to 100 whale ships, which were anchored in the bay. Most of the people were involved with the rendering down of whale products, but there is reported to have been a thriving brothel and most of the other trappings of a bustling, waterfront community.
The cause of all t
his burgeoning development was the Greenland whale, also known as the bowhead or Arctic whale. This species (Balaena mysticetus) averages 13 to 16 metres in length, though an unusually large one, 23 metres long, was speared off Spitsbergen in 1900. Along each side of the Arctic whale’s mouth there are 350 to 370 baleen plates: long, flexible lengths of bone which are used by the whales to filter food from the sea, and by humans to form ladies’ corsets and umbrella ribs. These black baleen plates range from 3.05 to 3.9 metres long. An average whale yields about 2000 pounds (900 kilograms) of baleen, and a large whale up to half as much again. This baleen fetched about $8000 to $10,000 per whale — enough, in those days, to fit out a whaling ship for an entire season in the north.
Ivan T Sanderson, in his book Follow the Whale, says: ‘The bowhead is an excessively timid animal and even slight sounds or a bird alighting on its back will send it rushing off in a frenzy. It is one of the, if not the, slowest swimmers of all whales, wallowing along at about four and a half knots and being able to raise only nine knots in extremis. When unalarmed and travelling, bowheads stay below the surface for about ten minutes, or when feeding for about twenty minutes, but in either case they usually breach (surface) three or four times in quick succession before going below again. Wounded specimens have, however, stayed below for over an hour and a half. They are enormously powerful creatures and have been known to dive with such force in comparatively shallow water, that they smashed their jaws on the bottom.’
These, then, are the creatures that sparked off the whaling industry in north Spitsbergen. Now they are virtually extinct and sightings are rare. Beluga, or white whales, were also hunted but cannot have been as lucrative, or perhaps they were warier than the gentle bowhead, because they still inhabit the region in moderate numbers.
A day or so after we had left Fridtjofhamna, Louis told us there was a pod of beluga in the bay. ‘They visit me every autumn,’ he said. Black right whales, which were harvested on the western side of the Greenland Sea almost to extinction, were also taken in large numbers off Spitsbergen, and they soon became rare in the area.
By 1625 the British had more or less given up whaling in Spitsbergen, and were looking even further afield for new grounds. But the Dutch stayed at Smeerenburg for another 50 years. Between 1675 and 1721 they employed 5886 ships in the fishery, taking 32,907 whales which, at an average value of $5250, works out to a gross income of $172,761,750 — pretty good going for the times.
The average Dutch whale ship was about 34.5 metres long, of about 350 tons, and generally barque-rigged. According to Sanderson, though, ‘Dutch were early addicted to sundry odd fore and aft sails for close and rapid manoeuvring after their shallops (boats) when in pursuit of whales or because they had to duck in and out of the narrow bays, fjords and sounds.’
It is interesting to note that Dr David Lewis, a very experienced Antarctic navigator, went for a similar sail plan when outfitting his ‘ideal’ ice boat in Australia in the 1980s.
Western Europeans, and even the Norsemen at that time, had little experience of ice navigation when they first went to Spitsbergen, and their ships were hardly suited to penetrating the pack ice. The Dutch whalers, however, tackled the problem with typically dogged perseverance and were the first to come to grips with sea-ice navigation in general and the Arctic ice raft in particular.
When a lead opened up in the ice they sailed right in after the whales, and, if it closed behind them, they set to with pickaxes and crowbars to dig a basin around the ship so that she would stay afloat and not be crushed by the ice. They also hauled, winched, warped and generally manhandled their ships through the ice wherever it hindered their progress.
The Dutch dominated the whaling industry until the early 1700s, mostly because of their efficient processing methods, and it was Hollanders who first discovered and harvested the high glycerine content in whale skin, and rendered different parts of the cetaceans’ anatomy to produce different grades of oil which sold for often greatly enhanced prices. Much of this rendering and processing took place in Smeerenburg.
The site (it can no longer be called a town) is now a rich harvesting ground for archaeologists, historians and anthropologists. Many people were buried there, for offshore whaling is a hazardous business, and the permafrost has rudely thrust their preserved skeletons up out of the ground. Smeerenburg is an eerie place. It is a bleak scatter-ground for the weathered bones of two mammal species — the largest on earth; and the greediest, who hunted them.
The Norwegian government in 1904 banned inshore whaling and this led to a brief resurgence of interest by Norwegian whale-men in the Spitsbergen grounds. A base was built on mainland Spitsbergen, but then most of the Norwegian energies were transferred to Argentina for the newly discovered South Atlantic whale fishery. In 1910 two Norwegian companies worked all year round in Spitsbergen, and in 1911 one of the world’s first two factory ships spent a season there. But the bumper harvest had been reaped, and the ships moved on.
Ernest Dahl, of Svolvaer, is among the last of the Arctic whalers. He, and a dozen or so like him, steam their little wooden boats into the pack ice every spring to take a relative handful of minke whales for hvalbiff, a former staple of the northern Norwegians’ diet.
XI PACK PERIMETER
Heading north from Magdalenefjorden we entered Sørgattet, the passage between Danskøya and Spitsbergen. The passage is marked by a varde on a rock called Me Steinane near the middle of the channel and, favouring the Spitsbergen side, one can line up with another varde and it will lead you into Bjørnhamna, an almost perfectly land-locked harbour on the Spitsbergen coast. During one of those frequent departures from rational thinking, which I hope everyone else has too, we sailed past Bjørnhamna and anchored in Danskeneset, an open bay on the other side of Danskøya.
The barometric pressure was beginning to plummet, and threatening grey masses of cloud tumbled across the sky. We attempted to anchor, and, for the first time, found the anchoring conditions that we had expected to be widespread in the archipelago — a deep, rocky bottom with an impenetrable layer of thick kelp on it. We anchored … and dragged; anchored … and dragged. Each time the 20-kilogram Bruce anchor came up with long, rubbery tendrils of slimy seaweed hanging from it. The poor Bruce, a tenacious anchor in all other conditions, could not quite get a grip on the situation. I knew that the anchor for the job, a 30-kilogram Admiralty pattern, was interred with a ton of odds and ends, under the bunk in the aft cabin, and it would be a major operation to extricate it. A brisk north-west wind, straight from the Pole, swept across the island and funnelled towards Elkouba. Small waves made up in the bay, and the freezing spray from their tops slashed across the foredeck, stinging like a whiplash. Still the Bruce grappled for a hold on the weedy bottom, and dragged. Finally the anchor held, and brought Elkouba’s bows up into the wind with a heartening jerk. I sat in the cockpit for half an hour, warming my hands on hot cups of chocolate and checking our position by compass bearings on the shoreline to make sure we were not still dragging the anchor.
Elkouba carries five anchors, none of which weighs less than 20 kilograms. We also carry about 1000 metres of anchor rope and about 100 metres of chain. To insure the boat would make too great an inroad into our cruising budget and, for many of our voyages, insurance is unobtainable anyway. I would much rather invest the cost of insurance premiums in anchors and radar. Insurance is prohibitively expensive for cruising boats, and the policies generally have more loopholes than a rat has hairs, so I consider it to be unnecessary. It is a little bit like wearing a safety harness. If you remember that you haven’t got one, you are much more careful and less likely to need one.
We kept an anchor watch all night while the wind roared in the rigging. Elkouba pulled and snatched at the anchor rope like an angry dog on a leash. In the morning Danskøya and Elkouba both glistened under a thick coat of fresh snow.
Danskøya’s claim to fame is based on yet another ill-fated attempt to reach the North Pole by air. On 1
1 July 1897, a balloonist named Andrée and his two companions, Strindberg and Fraenkel, left the island by balloon. Nothing more was ever heard from them. In 1930, a Norwegian sealer happened to anchor off a small island east of Nordaustland, and a shore party found the remains of a camp and the balloonists’ bodies. Andrée’s diary was in his coat pocket, and revealed that the flight had lasted 65 hours before the balloon set down on the ice about 350 miles north of Spitsbergen.
In the cold air over the ice pack, the gas in the balloon had contracted, and although they threw everything that was not absolutely essential over the side, the three explorers could not keep the balloon aloft. When they reached the island, on 5 October, they had enough bear and seal meat to last the winter. And that is where the diary ended. Strindberg also kept some notes, but he died on 17 October, and how long his companions survived after that is not known.
On this sobering note, we took our rifle and survival pack, inflated the dinghy and headed for the shore. The beach was thick with flotsam. Fishing buoys rattled and bounced in the surf; huge tree trunks that frequently float just below the surface, and are, I think, as great a hazard as ice, had been flung up the beach. A small herd of reindeer browsed on the point, nuzzling determinedly in the snow for moss and lichen. I thought about shooting one, but ended up just watching them instead, until they caught on to my presence and trounced off over the hill. We did not see any bears, but we were very well aware that they were exactly the same colour as our environment. For this reason, perhaps, our plan to walk across the island to Virgohamna, the embarkation point for Andrée’s tragic flight, never developed beyond the discussion stage. An American balloonist had also used Virgohamna for a planned flight to the Pole, and had erected a huge hangar and backup operation there, but he never really got off the ground.
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