by Philip Roy
It wasn’t as though I had anything else to do. We were getting more deeply frozen in the ice all the time and the hours were starting to drag on. But since it wasn’t getting dark it was hard to remember how long we were here.
I pulled on the suit, put the harness on over that, tied it to a twenty-foot length of rope and tied that to the hatch. I went out on the hull with the gaff and shut the hatch. The hull was so slippery I had to crawl to the stern on my hands and knees. I reached down and jabbed at the ice with the gaff until the propeller was free. It was hard work. Then I went back inside and took off the suit. That was a lot of work too, getting in and out of the suit. I decided to do it only every two hours; that ought to be enough. But what about sleeping? What would I do then? And what if the ice opened up while I was asleep and we missed our chance to escape?
I decided I had to stay awake.
Well, I tried. It was easier to stay awake when we were sailing. Sitting still like this, with nothing happening and nothing changing, was the most boring thing in the whole world and I couldn’t stay awake. I tried everything: I made tea, rode the bike, did chin-ups, read books, checked equipment, but the moment I sat still, I started to fall asleep. So, I decided to go to bed and set my alarm for two hours. Every two hours I’d get up, put on the wetsuit, go out and clear the ice.
The first two hours felt as though I had slept for days, except that I didn’t feel rested at all. It just felt like a lot of time had passed when it hadn’t. I woke even more tired. I hated putting on the suit and considered going out without it, but knew I couldn’t do that.
After the second two hours I felt kind of sick. I was really hoping to find that conditions had changed and we were free. We weren’t. The ice was harder to clear and I felt deeply frustrated.
The third time I climbed out of the portal I felt like a zombie. I slipped on the hull, fell over the side and hit the ice hard. That hurt a lot and a jagged piece of ice cut my wetsuit at the shoulder. It was like hitting concrete. I couldn’t imagine this ice ever clearing. What were we going to do?
After what seemed like forever, a day passed. We were still stuck in the ice like a frozen fish. I knew a day had passed only by watching the clock. I had stopped going out to clear ice from the propeller. I figured if we ever got free, I’d just rush out and do it all at once. It would be hard to do but I’d have a lot of energy because I’d be so excited to get the heck out of here.
One day turned into two. Never before in my life had I watched time pass so slowly. It felt like we were shipwrecked on an island. Seaweed was afraid to go out because of the snowy owl. He just hung around on the hull and slept. Hollie didn’t feel like running on the treadmill and I didn’t feel like pedalling. Everything seemed so pointless. I didn’t want to read anymore. I didn’t want to do exercises. I didn’t want to do anything. I just sat and twiddled my thumbs. Now I knew why people twiddled their thumbs. When there was absolutely nothing else to do, when you couldn’t even sleep, you could somehow still twiddle your thumbs. You just spun one thumb around the other. Then you spun the other one. Then you changed direction from clockwise to counterclockwise. Then you picked at your nails. Then you twiddled your thumbs again. Twiddling your thumbs was probably invented to keep people from going insane.
What I didn’t want to admit was that I was afraid. Ziegfried had told me that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. He said he believed that too—even though he couldn’t always practise it. He was afraid of drowning, for instance. I sensed he was also afraid of Sheba, or afraid that she wouldn’t like him. But of course she did. Fear wasn’t a rational thing. I already knew that. I also knew that we were good and stuck and that our situation was more serious than I wanted to admit. I should have been trying to reach Ziegfried by shortwave to let him know what was happening, but I couldn’t yet. I didn’t want him to worry. I could have tried to reach the coastguard and ask them to come and rescue us, but how I would have hated that, just hated it. I couldn’t make that call. Not yet.
Finally, I forced myself to read. I picked up a book on the Franklin expedition. We weren’t far from where the Franklin ships went missing. I read out loud so Seaweed and Hollie could hear it too.
The most famous ships ever to sail into the Northwest Passage were the Erebus and Terror, the two ships of the fatal Franklin expedition of 1845. They sailed into the Arctic and never sailed out. All of the crew of a hundred and twenty-eight died. They sailed from England with a three-year supply of food, tools, medical supplies, and over a thousand books. After their ships became trapped in the ice, historians believe the crew went crazy from lead poisoning, from poorly canned food. They tried valiantly to escape overland but couldn’t survive the harsh conditions of the Arctic. Researchers found piles of bones on King William Island over a hundred years later. Cut marks on the bones suggest the crew had practised cannibalism.
“Hey, they ate their own crew! Can you believe it?”
Hollie and Seaweed just stared at me blankly.
“They ate their own crew! Isn’t that terrible?”
Hollie dropped his head and continued chewing his rope. Seaweed looked at me with an expression that seemed to say: so?
I would never eat my crew, no matter how desperate I was. I would die of starvation first. I bent down and held Hollie’s furry little head in my hands. “Would you eat me if I died, Hollie, and you were starving?”
He looked up at me with devotion in his eyes. Nope. No way. He would curl up beside me, whine and die of starvation too. He was such a loyal dog.
“How about you, Seaweed? Would you . . .?”
Absolutely! I didn’t even have to finish. He glared at me with his icy seagull eyes and I knew that he would. He wouldn’t wait long to do it either.
Chapter 8
ON THE THIRD DAY, I was woken by a loud noise. It echoed across the sky like thunder. There was a crack in the ice. I jumped to my feet and climbed the portal. In the distance I saw a dark spot. I grabbed the binoculars, strapped on the harness and stood tall on the hatch. About a mile away I saw an icebreaker clearing a path for a tanker. She was cutting through the ice like a chisel. The ice was breaking up around her and a crack had crept all the way over to us. I wondered: did they see us? Would they know we were here? I looked down at the hull. Nope. Not a chance. We were caked in ice. From that distance we would have looked like any other bergy bit.
The ice began to whine and shake. The sub was shifting. I hurried to put on the wetsuit, grabbed the gaff and went out with the rope and harness. I poked and jabbed as hard as I could to clear the propeller, which took a lot of work. But the ice was breaking up around us and I was excited. Finally, I freed the prop, climbed back inside and hit the dive switch. As we went down, the sides scraped tightly against the ice. Then the scraping stopped and we were free. Yippee!
We followed the tanker, which followed the icebreaker, which broke ice all the way to Boothia Bay. But it was slow: seven knots. And it was noisy. The engines of the tanker echoed underwater with a sound that I imagined a landslide would sound like: a loud roar and continuous rumbling. There was no escaping it. It wouldn’t have been a problem if we were able to sail on the surface. But we couldn’t. The ice rushed in to fill the open water of the tanker’s wake. We would have smashed into growler after growler, and even at seven knots that was more punishment than we could bear.
So, we stayed submerged, but fell farther behind to lessen the roar of the engines. A few hours later the sound came from starboard and grew weaker. That was the only way I knew we had entered the Gulf of Boothia. The ships were heading north. I tried to surface but failed. We were too far from the tanker’s wake. I turned to starboard, cranked up our speed and chased the sound of the engines. After three more tries we surfaced into the path of broken ice and spotted the tanker. The Gulf of Boothia was just as ice-locked as the Fury and Hecla Strait. If we had not recharged the batteries on our way through the strait we would have been in trouble now. I ran the engine for twe
nty minutes then submerged to catch up.
It was another whole day before the ice started to break up. The farther north we sailed, the freer it flowed, which was kind of odd. Then, rather suddenly, we came upon open water. There were growlers lurking still but we were able to sail on the surface again. Seaweed took to the air. Hollie and I climbed the portal and felt the cold wind on our faces. It felt as though we had just broken out of jail.
A few hours later I was leaning against the portal, sleepily following the tanker at eight knots when I felt I was being watched. Turning around, I saw three huge dorsal fins in the water following us. It spooked me. I raised the binoculars. Killer whales!
I had never seen a real one before. They were about the same size as the sub, twenty feet or so, but they looked so powerful. They followed for a little while, which felt weird, as if we were part of a pack or something. I wondered what they thought of us. And then, I saw something I wished I had never seen.
With an unbelievable burst of speed the killer whales shot past us, all three of them. They charged ahead just like dolphins. I followed them with the binoculars. They went up, down and around growlers but kept charging until they crashed into something. That’s what it looked like. I was so curious. What did they run in to? What were they doing?
A few minutes later I knew. Pools of blood came swirling through the water, as if somebody had dumped red dye into the sea. Five hundred feet to starboard the killer whales were attacking, killing and eating another whale. It was twice their size. Water splashed high into the air. The killer whales rose out of the water as if they were jumping from trampolines. They twisted round, turned sideways, backed up and charged over and over, biting chunks out of the whale. Blood darkened the water everywhere. It was awful. I wished I could have saved the whale but that was impossible. I felt so bad for it my heart was breaking. There was absolutely nothing I could do. The worst of it was that the whale’s tail was still moving. It was alive. They were eating it alive. I dropped my head. I didn’t want to see it anymore.
This was nature. I knew that. I kept telling myself that. And yet I felt such a sadness that I didn’t want to accept it. And that sadness stayed with me for a long time.
The water seemed to come alive with the break in the ice, especially as we approached the Bellot Strait. There were more whales and there were dolphins, seals, walruses, polar bears and fish. The seafloor was rising. The shallower mouths of rivers and straits were always good feeding grounds for creatures of the sea.
The icebreaker and tanker left us behind at the Bellot Strait. They went north; we went west through the strait. The Bellot Strait was like a washing machine. I had never seen anything like it. It was twenty-five miles long, a mile-and-a-half wide, was framed by two enormous cliffs and had a current of eight knots! It would be fun to ride through on a rubber tube, except that you’d freeze to death if you fell in.
The current changed direction like the wind, and I had to time our trip to avoid sailing against it and the ice that the wind pushed in our way. I dropped anchor outside the mouth and watched as growlers and bergy bits came spinning out in whirlpools. Then, when they stopped, and I felt the wind shift, I weighed anchor, motored out and let the current pull us through. We bumped into ice on our way but never hit anything dead-on because everything was moving in the same direction at the same time. How I wished the whole Arctic worked like that.
When we came out, we were in the Franklin Strait, and for the very first time made a southward turn. Soon we would pass King William Island, where the Erebus and Terror had been icebound and bones from Franklin’s crew had been found. I was kind of excited. Could we maybe find the ships that nobody else could find?
Not a chance! I had barely picked up King William Island on radar when the growlers began to gather. Within a couple of miles we ran into heavy ice again. No wonder no one could find the Franklin ships; the Arctic was guarding them in an icy grave. You would probably need a nuclear-powered sub to find them.
As I stood in the portal and took a last look before going under the ice once more, I tried to imagine the Franklin ships sailing in here. I couldn’t imagine anything on earth more impossible.
It took us two weeks to sail into the heart of the Arctic and two weeks to sail out. It was the longest, slowest, most difficult month of my life. I wasn’t sure how we would return to Newfoundland from the Pacific, but it wouldn’t be through the Arctic.
Chapter 9
“HELLO, ANGEL. I hope you can hear me. I never know for sure if you can, but I will read this letter to you anyway. I hope you and your mom are feeling great. Please say hi to your mom from me. Hollie and Seaweed are here and they say hello too. Hollie is sitting on my lap. Do you want to say hello to Angel, Hollie? He is sniffing at the transmitter. You probably can’t hear him. Seaweed is watching. We finally came through the Northwest Passage two days ago. It was pretty tough and I’m glad it is over. We saw lots of animals that you would like: polar bears, walruses and snowy owls. We got really close to a polar bear. He stuck his nose inside the hatch. The Arctic is very cold but pretty. There is too much ice and you have to sail way too slowly. It drives me crazy.
“We can’t wait to sail south and run around on a warm, sunny beach somewhere. We’re in the Beaufort Sea now, which is full of ice too, although there’s open water next to the beach for about a mile out. There are growlers though. Growlers are chunks of ice that growl at you. Just kidding. The nice thing about where we are now is that we can walk on the beach anytime we want to. That makes Hollie happy. But we have to watch out for polar bears. There are a lot of polar bears in the Arctic. There are communities up here too but nobody seems to care that we are passing by. Maybe they can’t see us, I don’t know. I think we are in Alaska now, even though I didn’t see border guards or anything. I think we must be. In a couple of days we’ll turn south, finally, and sail towards warmer water. That is exciting. I hope your new school year is going well. Please say hi to our father when you see him next, and tell him that I am writing him a letter, slowly, and that I will mail it to him when I am finished. I will read this letter to you two more times now in the hope that you will hear all of it. Take good care of yourself, Angel. Love from Alfred, Hollie and Seaweed.”
My sister, Angel, had a shortwave receiver that we had sent to her in Montreal. She could only receive messages; she couldn’t send them. We agreed that I would send her messages on Friday nights at nine o’clock her time. Reception was better at night. If it was storming on Friday I would try on Saturday or Sunday. It always felt a little weird to send messages when nobody was answering, but I knew she would be sitting at her receiver waiting for me to call. A whole bunch of other people around the world would be listening too. That’s how shortwave radio works. That’s why I never mentioned where we were exactly or where we were from. And that’s why I never used the word “submarine.”
When we rounded the northwestern corner of Alaska, we made a sharp turn to port and started sailing due south through the Bering Strait, the shallow waterway between Alaska and Russia. If there was any waterway in the world watched closely by sonar, radar and satellite, I figured it was here.
There was lots of traffic though, and that was a good thing. There were freighters offshore sailing north and south, and smaller boats hugging the shore. Those were likely fishing boats and pleasure craft. I was hoping to blend in with them and sail unnoticed, though I didn’t really think the Alaskan coastguard would let an unknown submarine sneak by, not even a small one.
The smartest thing was to stay on the surface and fly the Canadian and American flags from the portal. So long as we did that we were allowed safe passage by the Law of the Sea. They could stop us and inspect us for sure, and they could demand we sail into port if they wanted to, but they’d probably only demand that if we looked suspicious. We were pretty good at not looking suspicious.
If we were going to be inspected, I’d much rather it was by the Americans than the Russians or Canadians. It w
as kind of ironic to be less worried about being inspected by a country other than your own. But the Canadian government would expect the sub to meet all kinds of fussy standards of construction, and be insured, and for me to have sailing papers—all things I didn’t have. Another country would only want to see a valid passport. Of course it would be different if we sailed into a foreign port and actually tried to moor. Then they would want to see registration papers and everything else.
The flags flapped loudly in the wind as we sailed south, hugging the Alaskan coast. It wasn’t long before a helicopter flew overhead and took a close look at us. I waved and tried to look as friendly as possible. I carried Hollie up. Half an hour later, a small coastguard vessel approached. It was a very sleek motorized dinghy. It had two engines like rockets on the back, and three men on board. They came alongside us in a very no-nonsense manner. Two of the men were holding machine guns and the other was at the wheel. He held up a megaphone and barked at us.
“Canadian vessel?”
I shouted back loudly and obediently. “Yes, sir.”
“Are you planning to dock your vessel in the United States?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you carrying weapons?”
“No, sir.”
“Will you grant us permission to inspect your vessel?”
I nodded my head. “Yes, sir.”
They motored closer. The two officers with machine guns climbed onto the sub. They were official but friendly. One of them stood on the hull with me while his partner climbed down the portal and had a look around. He was smiling when he came out. “Take a look, John.”
They switched places. “Where are you heading, son?”
“To Micronesia first. Then, I’d like to sail to the South Pacific.”
The other man came up. He patted Hollie on the head. “This is quite the sub you’ve got. Did you sail this through the north?”