But we’re not ill-prepared, and we’re not out of our depth.
And no matter how many stories he tells, I’m not afraid of what’s in store for us at Gruhuken. I’m looking forward to it.
3
29th July, the Barents Sea
Now I know I’m really in the Arctic.
Until this morning, it’s been two days of rain, followed by fog. We kept bundling up and going on deck, but there was nothing to see except grey sky melting into grey sea. We haven’t seen much of Mr Eriksson, either. Since dinner that first night, he’s had most of his meals in his cabin, and on deck he seems preocupied. The sea has been calm, with only a gentle swell, and Hugo and Algie have found their sea legs. We’ve got used to the smell of blubber, and no one’s been sick; but we’ve all been a bit subdued.
And now – the ice.
According to Mr Eriksson, it’s a belt of drift ice a few miles wide, and nothing to worry about; the Isbjørn can take it in her stride. But that doesn’t begin to convey what it’s like.
It was eerie, peering through the fog at the sea turned white. Huge, jagged floes like pieces of an enormous jigsaw, dotted with pools of meltwater, intensely blue. I hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful. It brought a lump to my throat.
Mr Eriksson cut the engines, and I leaned over the side and gazed down at the rocking, jostling shards. Then I became aware of an odd, rapid popping sound; a brittle crackling, very low, but continuous.
The others came to see what I was looking at, and I said, could they hear it? Hugo said, ‘Oh, that’s just air bubbles in the ice, being popped by the slapping of the waves.’
‘Sounds as if it’s talking to itself,’ I said.
Hugo shook his head and grinned. Fat Algie goggled at me as if I’d gone mad.
Gus threw me a curious glance. ‘I was thinking the same thing.’
The others drifted away, but Gus and I stayed.
Gus leaned over the edge, his fair hair lifting in the breeze. ‘Our first ice,’ he said fondly.
I nodded. ‘It’s OK, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s grand.’
‘Sorry. That’s what I meant.’
He sighed. ‘You know, Jack, sometimes you can be a tad oversensitive.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, really. I don’t care what words you use.’
‘You might feel differently if you were me.’
‘Perhaps. But Jack.’ He turned to me, and his blue eyes were troubled. ‘Jack, do please believe me. I really don’t care what words you use, I care what you mean. And doesn’t all this’ – a sweep of his arm – ‘make all that irrelevant?’
‘It’s a bit more complicated than that,’ I said. ‘Class matters because money matters.’
‘I know, but—’
‘No you don’t. You’ve got a twenty-five-bedroom house in the West Country and three cars. How can you know? How can you know what it’s like to come down in the world, to miss your chance?’
‘But you haven’t missed your chance.’
‘Yes I have.’ Suddenly I was angry. ‘My family were all right once. Not like yours, but all right. My father was a Classics teacher. He was gassed in the War and couldn’t work, so we had to move, and I had to go to a school where they say ‘‘OK’’ instead of ‘‘grand’’. Then he got TB and died, and the Army wouldn’t give Mother a pension because he hadn’t got TB from being gassed. Then the slump came and I had to give up physics and be a sodding clerk . . .’ I broke off.
‘I didn’t know,’ said Gus.
‘Well you do now. So don’t brush it aside as if it doesn’t matter.’
After that, we didn’t talk. Gus stood twisting the signet ring on his little finger, and I felt embarrassed – and furious with myself for blurting things out. What’s got into me?
Later
All day we’ve been making our way through the ice. I love it. The purity. The danger.
A man in the crow’s-nest calls directions, and Mr Eriksson steers the Isbjørn slowly through. At one point, he cut the engine, and some of the crew lowered a boat and went fishing. Others let down a ladder and climbed on to a floe the size of a football pitch, which abutted the hull. While they were filling a barrel with meltwater, the dogs jumped down on to the floe and raced about. We quickly followed.
I couldn’t believe it. A few days ago I was in London. Now I’m standing on an ice floe in the Barents Sea.
While the others were playing with the dogs, I wandered off to the edge. According to the ship’s thermometer, it’s only a couple of degrees below freezing, but it was colder on the ice. My breath rasped in my throat. I felt the skin of my face tighten. And for the first time in my life, I was aware of cold as a menace. A physical threat. The ice was solid beneath my boots – and yet, I thought, a few inches below me, there’s water so cold that if I fell in, I’d be dead within minutes. And the only thing that’s keeping me away from it is . . . more water.
Moving closer to the edge, I peered down. The water was glassy green, extraordinarily clear. I experienced the feeling I sometimes get when I’m on a bridge or a railway platform. Rationally, you know that you’ve no intention of stepping off the bridge or the platform – or this ice floe – but you’re aware that you could, and that the only thing stopping you is your will.
Something slid through the water and vanished under the ice. I thought of all the lives hunting in the dark beneath my feet.
As I write this, it’s nearly midnight, and we’re still not through the ice. I can feel each turn the ship makes. The shudder of impact, the change in the engine as we reach a clear patch, the subdued roar as we push the smaller floes aside. I think of those great shards rocking, talking to themselves.
I suppose what Gus was trying to say is that here in the Arctic, class doesn’t matter. I think he’s wrong about that, class always matters.
But maybe up here it doesn’t matter so much.
31st July, Spitsbergen
By morning we were clear of the ice, and Mr Eriksson said we’d already passed the Sørkapp, the southernmost tip of Spitsbergen. But the fog wouldn’t let us see. All day we huddled on deck, waiting for a glimpse. It got colder. We kept running down to our cabins to pull on more clothes. And still nothing.
Some time after midnight, our patience was finally rewarded. The fog thinned, and although the sky remained overcast, the midnight sun behind the clouds cast a subdued grey radiance on an alien wilderness.
The Dutch whalers of the sixteenth century gave it the right name. Spitsbergen: the pointed mountains. I saw jagged peaks streaked with snow, looming over the mouth of a fjord where the black water was mirror-smooth, and dotted with icebergs. Further in, a vast, tormented glacier spilled into the sea. And all so incredibly still.
Hugo was shaking his head in disbelief. Even Algie was impressed.
Gus said quietly, ‘Do you realise, it’s nearly one in the morning?’
I tried to speak but I couldn’t. It was utterly unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was – intimidating. No, that’s not the right word. It made me feel irrelevant. It made humanity irrelevant. I wonder if Gruhuken will be like this?
Hugo, the keen glaciologist, asked Mr Eriksson to head into the fjord to get nearer the glacier, and we craned our necks at fissured walls of ice and caverns of mysterious blue. From deep within came weird creaks and groans, as if a giant were hammering to get out. Then came a noise like a rifle shot, and a huge segment of ice crashed into the sea, sending up spouts of water, and a wave that rocked the ship. Shattered ice turned the sea a milky pale-green. The hammering went on. Now I know why people used to believe that Spitsbergen was haunted.
But as we headed north up the coast, I realised that despite all my reading, I’d made the classic mistake of imagining the Arctic as an empty waste. I’d thought that since it’s too far north for trees, there wouldn’t be much else except rocks. Maybe a few seals and sea-birds, but nothing like this. I never expected so much life.
Great flocks of gulls perching on icebergs, rising in flurries, diving after fish. An Arctic fox trotting over a green plain with a puffin flapping in its jaws. Reindeer raising antlered heads to watch us pass. Walruses rocking on the waves; one surfaced right beneath me with an explosive, spraying huff! and regarded me with a phlegmatic brown eye. The sleek heads of seals bobbed on the surface, observing us with the same curiosity with which we observed them. Algie shot one, but it sank before the men could retrieve it. He would have shot a reindeer, too, if they weren’t protected by law. He seems to enjoy killing things.
We passed a cliff thronged with thousands of sea-birds. Gulls screamed, and the rockfaces echoed with the strange, rattling groans of black birds with stubby wings which Gus said were guillemots. He said what I’d taken for gulls were kittiwakes, and that the Vikings believed that their cries were the wails of lost souls.
Many of the beaches are littered with driftwood, borne from Siberia by the Atlantic current, and weathered to silver. And bones: huge, arching whale ribs many decades old. According to Mr Eriksson, we’re so far north that ‘dead things’ last for years.
But there are other, less picturesque remains. Abandoned mines, and the broken-down cabins of prospectors long gone. In an inlet I saw a post rising from a cairn of rocks, with a plank nailed across the top. I assumed it was a grave, but one of the seamen told me it was a claim sign.
I don’t like these human relics. I don’t want to be reminded that Spitsbergen has been exploited for hundreds of years. Whalers, miners, trappers, even tourists. Thank God there’s only a handful of tiny settlements, and we’re not going near any of them.
Just before dinner, Mr Eriksson spotted something on an island, and brought the ship in closer.
At first I couldn’t see anything except a pebbly beach strewn with driftwood. Then I made out the blotchy, pinkish-brown carcass of a walrus, lying on its back. Its yellow tusks jutted upwards, and its body looked curiously deflated, like a giant, kicked-in football. Then I realised why. Something had gnawed a hole in its belly and eaten it from the inside.
The polar bear rose from behind a boulder and stretched its long neck to catch our scent.
It was my first glimpse of the king of the Arctic. But this was nothing like the snowy giant of my imagination. Blood and blubber had stained its pelt a dirty brown; its head and neck were almost black. I couldn’t see its eyes, but I sensed them. Until that moment, I’ve never felt like prey. Never been so intensely watched by a creature who would kill me if it got the chance. I stared at it, and I felt death staring back.
A shot rang out. The bear turned its head. Algie took aim again. Before he could shoot, the bear had ambled out of sight.
Kill or be killed. That’s what it comes down to. And yet somehow, I don’t find that appalling. There’s truth in it. A kind of stark beauty.
I think that’s what the Arctic means to me. I think that up here, I’ll be able to ‘breathe with both lungs’, as Mr Eriksson says: to see clearly for the first time in years. Right through to the heart of things.
4
1st August, Advent Fjord, near Longyearbyen
Disaster. Hugo tripped on a coil of rope and broke his leg.
Everyone went into emergency mode, very calm and stiff upper lip. ‘Buck up, old chap, we’ll soon set you to rights.’ The consequences were too huge to be voiced out loud.
The first mate splinted the leg, and we carried Hugo down to his cabin. Mr Eriksson, his face inscrutable, turned the ship about, and set course for Longyearbyen.
The first mate did what he could for Hugo, and then Gus, Algie and I squeezed into his cabin and tried to convince him that he hadn’t let us down and endangered the whole expedition.
‘Stupid, stupid, bugger bugger bugger!’ He pounded the mattress with his fists. His dark hair was plastered to his temples, his cheeks flushed after a dose of cocaine from the medicine chest.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Gus said tonelessly.
‘ ’Course it isn’t!’ Algie robustly agreed.
I chimed in too late, and Hugo noticed. I didn’t care. I was furious with him.
Algie gave an uneasy laugh. ‘We seem to be jinxed, don’t we? First Teddy, now Hugo.’
‘Thank you for stating the blindingly obvious,’ said Gus.
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Hugo said, ‘Right. Here’s what we do. You’ll drop me off at Longyearbyen, where I’ll get myself patched up, and wire the sponsors and find a berth on the next boat home. And you chaps,’ he lifted his chin, ‘will carry on without me.’
Silence. No one wanted to admit that they’d been thinking the same thing.
Perplexed, Algie ran a hand through his carroty hair. ‘But – you’re our glacier fellow. Who’ll man the camp on the icecap?’
‘We’ll have to scrap it, of course,’ snapped Gus.
‘What?’ cried Algie. ‘But the dogs . . .’
‘Are now completely unnecessary,’ said Hugo. ‘God, Algie, you can be dim.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Algie. ‘What do we do about the dogs?’
Gus flung up his arms.
‘It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that we’d be better off without them. I asked Mr Eriksson if we could sell them in Longyearbyen, but he said the mine manager’s already got a team. He said . . .’ I hesitated. ‘He thinks we should put them down.’
A chorus of outrage. How could I even contemplate such a thing? The dogs would be useful in all sorts of ways: taking Algie about on his geological survey, warning us of bears. Suggestion emphatically overruled.
‘Right, then, we’re agreed,’ said Hugo, suppressing a wince as he shifted position. ‘I go home, and you three carry on without me. With the dogs. Yes?’
Nobody wanted to be the first to agree.
We left poor Hugo an hour ago in the ‘Sykehus’ at Longyearbyen. Tomorrow he’ll board the tourist yacht and head back to Tromsø. I’ll miss him. I think we could have been friends. I wish it was fat Algie who’d broken his leg.
Hugo didn’t want us to stay, which was a relief, because in Longyearbyen I felt as out of place as the tourists from that yacht.
God, what a dump. A ramshackle settlement of some five hundred souls, it’s all that’s left of the great Arctic ‘coal rush’. A few decades ago, a clutch of prospectors reported huge deposits, and greed took over. Nations scrambling to stake claims, companies sprouting like mushrooms, raising millions on expectation alone. Most have gone bankrupt, or were bought for a song by the Norwegians, who now run what remains.
According to the books, Longyearbyen boasts electricity and water piped from a glacier, as well as a billiards hall and a bathhouse. What I saw were ugly miners’ barracks cowering at the feet of stark grey mountains. A cable railway strung along their flanks like a grimy necklace, its buckets dumping coal on the jetty in clouds of black dust. A single street strewn with rubbish and mobbed by screaming gulls. A wooden church and a cluster of grave-markers on a hill.
On our way back to the ship, we passed a group of miners heading for ‘town’. One turned his head and stared at me. His face was black with soot, his eyes angry and inflamed. He looked scarcely human. Capable of anything. I felt obscurely menaced. And ashamed.
It feels wrong that there should be such places on Spitsbergen. I’m glad Gruhuken is far away from all this. I don’t want it sullied.
2nd August, near Cape Mitra, north-west Spitsbergen
First Hugo, now this. Damn Eriksson. He’s cast a pall over the whole expedition – and for what? He hasn’t even given us a reason.
This morning, Algie and I were on deck when Gus called us down to the saloon.
We knew at once that something was wrong. Eriksson sat in stony silence, his hands spread flat on the table. Gus’ face was set, his blue eyes glassy with anger.
‘Ah, gentlemen.’ He greeted us in clipped tones. ‘It seems that Mr Eriksson here refuses to take us to Gruhuken.’
We stared at the skipper. He wouldn’t
meet our eyes.
‘He says,’ Gus went on, ‘that he’ll take us as far as Raudfjord, but no further . . .’
‘But that’s forty miles short!’ cried Algie.
‘. . . and he says,’ continued Gus, ‘that these were always his orders. That he’s never heard any mention of Gruhuken.’
The blatancy of the Norwegian’s lie astonished me. And he didn’t back down. In fact, he put up quite a fight. He insisted that he’d been chartered to take us to Raudfjord and no further. We said this was nonsense, our goal had always been Gruhuken. He said there was good camping on Raudfjord. We pointed out that Raudfjord has no icecap, and we’d hardly have gone to the trouble of bringing a sledge and eight dogs if we didn’t need them. He said he knew nothing of that. His ship had been chartered for Raudfjord, and to Raudfjord she would go.
We reached stalemate. Algie muttered something irrelevant about legal action. Gus seethed. The Norwegian crossed his arms and glowered.
Behind his granite demeanour, I sensed unhappiness. He hated reneging on his charter. So why was he doing it?
Before I could say anything, Gus placed both palms on the table and leaned towards the skipper. His usual genial manner was gone. In its place I saw the assurance which comes from generations of command. ‘Now look here, Eriksson,’ he said. ‘You will carry out the job for which you were hired. You will take us to Gruhuken – and there’s an end of it!’
Poor Gus. Maybe that works on his father’s estate, but not with a man like Eriksson. The Norwegian sat like a boulder, immovable.
I decided it was my turn. ‘Mr Eriksson,’ I said. ‘Do you remember our first night on board? I asked you why you chose to overwinter on Spitsbergen, and you said it’s because there a man can breathe with both lungs. I took that to mean that you felt free. Free to make your own decisions. Was I right?’
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