Arctic Dreams Read online

  In pursuit of answers I traveled with people of differing dispositions. With Eskimos hunting narwhals off northern Baffin Island and walruses in Bering Sea. With marine ecologists on hundreds of miles of coastal and near-shore surveys. With landscape painters in the Canadian Archipelago. In the company of roughnecks, drilling for oil on the winter ice in high winds at –30ºF; and with the cosmopolitan crew of a freighter, sailing up the west coast of Greenland and into the Northwest Passage. They each assessed the land differently—the apparent emptiness of the tundra, which ran out like a shimmering mirage in the Northern Ocean; the blue-black vault of the winter sky, a cold beauty alive with scintillating stars; a herd of muskoxen, pivoting together on a hilltop to make a defensive stand, their long guard hairs swirling around them like a single, huge wave of dark water; a vein of lead-zinc ore glinting like tiny mirrors in a damp, Mesozoic wall beneath the surface of Little Cornwallis Island; the moaning and wailing in the winter sea ice as the ocean’s crust warped and shattered in the crystalline air. All of it, all that the land is and evokes, its actual meaning as well as its metaphorical reverberation, was and is understood differently.

  These different views make a human future in that northern landscape a matter of conjecture, and it is here that one encounters dreams, projections of hope. The individual’s dream, whether it be so private a wish as that the joyful determination of nesting arctic birds might infuse a distant friend weary of life, or a magnanimous wish, that a piece of scientific information wrested from the landscape might serve one’s community—in individual dreams is the hope that one’s own life will not have been lived for nothing. The very much larger dream, that of a people, is a story we have been carrying with us for millennia. It is a narrative of determination and hope that follows a question: What will we do as the wisdom of our past bears down on our future? It is a story of ageless conversation, not only conversation among ourselves about what we mean and wish to do, but a conversation held with the land—our contemplation and wonder at a prairie thunderstorm, or before the jagged line of a young mountain, or at the sudden rise of ducks from an isolated lake. We have been telling ourselves the story of what we represent in the land for 40,000 years. At the heart of this story, I think, is a simple, abiding belief: it is possible to live wisely on the land, and to live well. And in behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.

  Crossing the tree line to the Far North, one leaves behind the boreal owl clutching its frozen prey to its chest feathers to thaw it. Ahead lies an open, wild landscape, pointed off on the maps with arresting and anomalous names: Brother John Glacier and Cape White Handkerchief. Navy Board Inlet, Teddy Bear Island, and the Zebra Cliffs. Dexterity Fiord, Saint Patrick Canyon, Starvation Cove. Eskimos hunt the ringed seal, still, in the broad bays of the Sons of the Clergy and Royal Astronomical Society islands.

  This is a land where airplanes track icebergs the size of Cleveland and polar bears fly down out of the stars. It is a region, like the desert, rich with metaphor, with adumbration. In a simple bow from the waist before the nest of the horned lark, you are able to stake your life, again, in what you dream.

  1 For a summary of specific arctic problems, see note 1.

  Prologue

  Pond’s Bay, Baffin Island

  ON A WARM SUMMER day in 1823, the Cumbrian, a 360-ton British whaler, sailed into the waters off Pond’s Bay (now Pond Inlet), northern Baffin Island, after a short excursion to the north. The waters of Lancaster Sound, where she had been, were supposed to be a promising “new water,” but the Cumbrian hadn’t struck a whale in two weeks of cruising. Worse, in her captain’s view, the forty-odd ships that had chosen instead to dally at the mouth of Pond’s Bay had met with spectacular success in her absence. “Several ships,” lamented Captain Johnson in his log, “had captured upwards of 12, one or two [ships] 15 apiece, and one had got full….”

  But the Cumbrian did not have long to wait. The newly discovered waters of western Baffin Bay, the West Water, teemed with the men’s special prey, the Greenland whale. On the very next day, July 28, they killed three. In the days that followed they took another twelve, for a total of twenty-three for the season. On August 20 the Cumbrian sailed for ice-free waters off the coast of Greenland and then doubled Cape Farewell for England. The whale blubber she carried would render 236 tons of oil to light the street lamps of Great Britain and process the coarse wool of its textile mills. Also in her hold were more than four and a half tons of whalebone (baleen), to be turned into umbrella staves and Venetian blinds, portable sheep pens, window gratings, and furniture springing.

  The Cumbrian made port at Hull on September 26, to dock-side cheers. Young boys from town swarmed her rigging in quest of the traditional garland of sun-bleached ribbons, halfway up the main-topgallant mast. The ship’s owners beamed with pleasure. The year before the Cumbrian had taken but half this many whales, for no ship that year had been able to breach the ice in Davis Strait. And in 1821 the Cumbrian had returned with grim news—three ships from Hull, and at least four others from British ports, were lost, crushed in the ice.

  The season of 1823 eased these awful memories. The West Water off Pond’s Bay seemed most promising. And the Cumbrian had also brought back walrus hides and ivory, traded from the Eskimos of West Greenland and northern Baffin Island. And also several narwhal tusks. If the prices for oil and whalebone held, if there were a few good ice-years back to back, and if London didn’t rescind the industry’s price supports or abolish the protective trade tariffs….

  None of this had been much on the minds of the men of the Cumbrian. In the West Water, they had worked the odd hours of men who knew no night, who jumped for the whaleboat davits whenever a “fish” was sighted. They slept sprawled on the decks and ate irregularly. Their days in the ice were heady, the weather splendid. The distant landscapes of Bylot and Baffin islands at Pond’s Bay were etched brilliantly before them by a high-tempered light in air clear as gin—an unearthly sight that filled them with a mixture of disbelief and pleasure. They felt exhilaration in the constant light; and a sense of satisfaction and worth, which came partly from their arduous work.

  The summer of 1823 marked a high point in the halcyon days of British arctic whaling, which followed the close of the Napoleonic Wars. The discovery of the West Water came at a time when the market for whale products was resurgent, and it made the merchants and investors of Hull and Peterhead, of Dundee and Aberdeen and Whitby, a rich bounty between 1818 and 1824. In 1825 it would begin to unravel—technological advances and British economic policy would weaken the home and foreign markets for oil and whalebone, and the too-frequent and expensive loss of uninsured ships would dry up investment capital. With 2000 whales killed in 1823 alone, overfishing, too, would begin to be a problem.

  The object of all this attention was a creature the British had been hunting commercially for 212 years, first in the bays of Spitsbergen and in the loose pack ice of the Greenland Sea, then in the southern reaches of Davis Strait, and finally in the North Water and West Water of Baffin Bay. Long slats of blue-black, plankton-straining baleen hung from the roof of its mouth in a U-shaped curtain, some of the blades nearly 15 feet long. The stout body, with a massive head one-third the animal’s length, was wrapped in blubber as much as 20 inches thick—a higher ratio of blubber to weight than that for any other whale. The blubber of a good-size animal might yield 25 tons of oil; its 300 or more baleen plates might mean more than a ton of whalebone. The 45-foot carcass—minus baleen and its flukes (taken to make glue) and flensed of its blubber—was cut adrift as a “crang” underneath ever-present, mobbing clouds of seabirds.

  Because it was a slow swimmer, because it floated when it was killed, and because of the unusual quantity of bone and oil it yielded, it was the right whale to take—the Greenland right. The polar whale. The whale. Later, in the western Arctic, it would be called “bowhead,” after the outline of its jaw.
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  The skin of this animal is slightly furrowed to the touch, like coarse-laid paper, and is a velvet-black color softened by gray. Under the chin and on the belly the skin turns white. Its dark brown eyes, the size of an ox’s, are nearly lost in the huge head. Its blowhole rises prominently, with the shape of a volcano, allowing the whale to surface in narrow cracks in the sea ice to breathe. It is so sensitive to touch that at a bird’s footfall a whale asleep at the surface will start wildly. The fiery pain of a harpoon strike can hardly be imagined. (In 1856 a harpooner aboard the Truelove reported striking a whale that dived so furiously it took out 1200 yards of line in three and a half minutes before crashing into the ocean floor, breaking its neck and burying its head eight feet deep in blue-black mud.)

  Its strength is prodigious. A bowhead harpooned in the Greenland Sea took out 10,440 yards (7000 pounds) of line, snapping two 2¼-inch hemp lines (one of 1560 yards, the other 3360 yards) and pulling an entangled 28-foot whaleboat down with it before it was subdued. On May 27, 1817, thirty hours after it had been harpooned, another Greenland right whale was still towing a fully rigged ship at two knots into a “moderate brisk breeze.”

  The pursuit of this animal was without restraint. A month before she entered Lancaster Sound in 1823, the Cumbrian killed a huge Greenland right, a 57-foot female, in Davis Strait. They came upon her while she was asleep in light ice. Awakened by their approach, she swam slowly once around the ship and then put her head calmly to its bow and began to push. She pushed the ship backward for two minutes before the transfixed crew reacted with harpoons. The incident left the men unsettled. They flinched against such occasional eeriness in their work.

  Precisely where they then stood in Davis Strait, off the northern west coast of Greenland, an odd whistling sound was sometimes heard by whalers in calm weather like this—a high note that eventually faded away to a very low note. It was the sign of a gale coming, from the direction most feared in that quarter, the southwest. The louder the whistle, the harder the winds would blow. They heard no whistling that year as they worked their way through the ice streams—but they had not liked the whale pushing against them, as though urging them to go back.

  Many were ill at ease with arctic whaling, because of the threat to their lives presented by the unpredictable sea ice; but also in the regions where they hunted they found a beauty more penetrating and sublime than any they had ever known—so they said in their journals. Glaciers collapsed into the dark green sea before them like cliffs of marble as high as the Cliffs of Dover. Winds tore water from melt ponds atop icebergs, to trail off in sheets of rain-bowing mists. Pods of white belukha whales glided ghostlike beneath their keels. A thousand auklets roared through the ship’s rigging in a wildshower of sound. Walruses with their gleaming tusks and luminous whiskers swam slowly across calm bays in water burning like manganese in the evening sun. Men wrote in earnest, humble prose that they were overwhelmed by the “loveliness and grandeur.”

  What they saw made the killing seem inappropriate; but it was work, too, security for their families, and they could quickly put compassion and regret aside. “The object of the adventure,” wrote one captain, “the value of the prize, the joy of the capture, cannot be sacrificed to feelings of compassion.”

  On the 27th of July, still lamenting the wasted days cruising in Lancaster Sound, the Cumbrian was bearing south along landfast ice east of Bylot Island, past the gruesome evidence of other ships’ successes. “Here and there,” the log reads, “along the floe edge lay the dead bodies of hundreds of flenched whales … the air for miles around was tainted with the foetor which arose from such masses of putridity. Towards evening, the numbers come across were ever increasing, and the effluvia which then assailed our olfactories became almost intolerable.”

  The northern fulmars and glaucous gulls wheeled and screeched over the crangs. It was the carnage of wealth.

  At the southeast tip of Bylot Island that year the local Eskimo, the Tununirmiut, had established a narwhal hunting camp. They traded informally with the British whalers, whom they called upirnaagiit, “the men of springtime”—offering polar bear skins, walrus hides and ivory, and sealskin mitts for tin pots, needles, steel knives, and other useful or decorative items. In later years this trading would become a hedge for shipowners, a commercial necessity when the whaling alone no longer paid. Ships’ captains would turn to furs, hides, ivory, and the collection of zoo animals to make ends meet. But those years, years of exploitation and social change for the Eskimo, lay ahead. For the moment the Tununirmiut were still aboriginal hunters, their habits largely unchanged by an availability of trade goods. They moved nomadically over the sea ice and the land, according to the itineraries of the animals they pursued for food, clothing, tools, and utensils.

  If one were to generalize about this early trading relationship, it would be to say that the Eskimo were trying to accommodate themselves—in carefully limited ways—to an unfamiliar culture that could produce whale meat with ease, in astonishing quantities in little time, and that also made available a number of extremely useful items, such as canvas and saws. The Europeans, looking largely to their own ends, enjoyed the primitive and exotic aspects of these encounters. They were eager for souvenirs and sexual contact with the women, and hoped to trade for a profit. On those salubrious summer afternoons off Pond’s Bay, then, young native women returned from the whaling ships to tell their husbands that the white men lived in tiers of hammocks like appaliarsuit—dovekies on a sea cliff. The husband wiped seal grease from his fingers with a ptarmigan wing and waited to see if she had brought, perhaps, some tobacco. The Eskimo put a great value on the basic fact of their own long survival. They were not nearly as taken with the men and their ships as Europeans liked to believe.

  The sophistication the whalers felt next to the Eskimo was a false sophistication, and presumptuous. The European didn’t value the Eskimo’s grasp of the world. And, however clever Eskimos might be with ivory implements and waterproof garments, he thought their techniques dated or simply quaint next to his own. A ship’s officer of the time wrote summarily that the Eskimo was “dwindled in his form, his intellect, and his passions.” They were people to be taken mild but harmless advantage of, to be chastised like children, but not to be taken seriously. The Europeans called them yaks.

  As for the Eskimo, they thought the whalers strange for trying to get on without the skills and companionship of women. They gave them full credit for producing “valuable and convenient articles and implements,” but laughed at their inability to clothe, feed, and protect themselves. They regarded the whalers with a mixture of ilira and kappia, the same emotions a visitor to the modern village of Pond Inlet encounters today. Ilira is the fear that accompanies awe; kappia is fear in the face of unpredictable violence. Watching a polar bear—ilira. Having to cross thin sea ice—kappia.

  By the summer of 1832, after only a few years of commerce in the region, the whalers were already beginning to find the silent villages of spring—places where everyone had died during the winter of European diphtheria and smallpox. The apparently timeless Arctic, they saw, was in fact changeable. And the vast and particular knowledge of the Eskimo, garnered from hundreds of years of their patient interrogation of the landscape, was starting to slip away.

  Far to the northeast of Pond’s Bay, west of Cape York on the Greenland coast, was a remarkable phenomenon whalers at the time called the Crimson Cliffs, red-tinged snow they variously explained as due to fungal growth or to the red mute of guillemots feeding on shrimp.1 At an unknown spot to the east of those cliffs, a place the local Eskimos called Savissivik, was a collection of meteorites that the British heard about for the first time in 1818. (The Polar Eskimo chipped bits of iron-nickel from them for harpoon tips and knife blades, and for use in trade with other Eskimos. Among them savik meant both “knife” and “iron.”) In 1823 even officers of the British whaling fleet had little idea where a meteorite might come from. They couldn’t say, either, whether
Greenland was actually an island. Nor at that time had anyone been within 500 miles of the North Pole. For all they knew, it was what Henry Hudson believed it was when he sailed for it in 1607, a massive boulder of black basalt sitting in the middle of a warm, calm sea. They were unaware that the Greenland right actually “sang,” like the humpback whales they heard in the North Atlantic en route to the arctic fishery. The life history of the Greenland shark, an “unwholesome and lethargic brute” upon which the Danes would build Greenland’s first commercial fishery (for the oil from its liver), was unknown to them. The existence of a culture that had preceded the Eskimo’s in the Arctic was unsuspected, though they traded, unawares, for its artifacts.

  In 1823 the North American Arctic was still as distant as fable, inhabited by remarkable animals and uncontacted peoples, the last undiscovered complex ecosystem on the planet. A landscape of numinous events, of a forgiving benediction of light, and a darkness so dunning it precipitated madness; of a cold that froze vinegar, that fractured whatever it penetrated, including the stones. It was uncharted, unclaimed territory, and Europeans had perished miserably in it since the time of the Norse—gangrenous with frostbite, poisoned by polar bear liver, rotted by scurvy, dead of exposure on the ice beside the wreckage of a ship burned to the water line for the last bit of its warmth.

  The confidence and élan of the whalemen at Pond’s Bay were tempered with this macabre knowledge; and they suspected that their own ignorance of the place, even the ignorance of those among them who made such erudite notes about the biology of whales or the colors of plankton in the current, was extensive. They were overcome, however, by neither fear nor ignorance. Their vessels, for the moment, were “safe as a life boat and tight as a bottle.” In two months they would be home to their families, with a year’s pay and perhaps a pair of polar bear trousers to show, or a flint-blade knife for a son. And with stories to hold a neighbor enthralled, stories of a breathtaking escape from drowning, or of having collected 6000 eider eggs on a coastal flat one morning. Or of sleeping with an Eskimo woman.