The Library of Ice

by Nancy Campbell

  Unlike foxes, carrier – or homing – pigeons have been used as messengers since classical times. The pigeons supporting polar expeditions provided their keepers with companionship and entertainment before being despatched, and were given special status, despite a poor record of success. On 8 April 1851, Erasmus Ommanney advised Sir John Ross, ‘Pray take care of the Pigeons, may they be “Messengers of glad tidings.” ’ The pigeons were released into the sky in baskets attached to balloons, each with a portion of split peas to sustain them. Ross told the secretary of the Hudson’s Bay Company that he had great faith in the birds, hoping that if released into a fair wind they would be carried into the path of whaling ships, where they would alight for a free passage to England. Unfortunately, the few birds which survived the long flight only did so by virtue of having shaken the heavy papers they had been entrusted with out of their tail feathers.

  In 1852 Edward Belcher took command of the search expedition aboard HMS Resolute. His ship carried a novel airborne message delivery system which did not require birds. On 16 August 1852, Resolute was in relatively unknown waters near Dealy Island when it was struck by an enormous ice floe, which leaned it to port, so that it struck a second floe. After over a week trapped between the floes, with the nights lengthening, the thermometer starting to drop, and with ice as far as the eye could see, the crew decided to test the system. Officer Emile de Bray noted in his journal that the weather had been squally, but the wind fell towards evening. ‘At 7 o’clock we released our first balloon, which carries with it about a thousand little squares of paper spaced along an iron wire with a slow match.’ The balloon was a couple of metres wide, and filled with gas – presumably hydrogen. Printed on each piece of paper was Resolute’s precise position. De Bray continues: ‘As the balloon was released, the match was lit so that the pieces of paper would fall at well-spaced distances; distributed at various points in the arctic landscape they may fall into the hands of some travellers and thus give Franklin or his companions news of us.’ The first balloon rose high, and headed north-north-west. As they watched it disappear, the crew knew they must soon ship the rudder and make preparations to winter in the same ice pack which they believed had destroyed Franklin’s ships.

  Resolute was never released from the ice. It was still beset in the spring of 1854, and by May the crew had decided to abandon ship. They were luckier than Franklin’s men. They were rescued. The government printed a formal announcement in The London Gazette that the ship was still Her Majesty’s property, but there was no attempt at salvage. Resolute found her own way out from the pack ice. The following year, an American whaler spotted her adrift off Baffin Island, over a thousand miles from where she had been abandoned. Captain Buddington boarded and found everything stowed away according to the rules for desertion – spars hauled up to one side and bound, and boats piled together. The hatches were closed and the hold was silent.

  The ship was returned to England, where Queen Victoria ordained that its timber should be used for commemorative objects, including a magnificent desk. The original design of the desk called for carvings of the Arctic and Antarctic circles at each corner, but it seems these were never added. In 1880 the unadorned ‘Resolute Desk’ was presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes; in 1961 First Lady Jackie Kennedy transferred it to the Oval Office. There it remains, and is still the desk at which the president sits to write letters and sign bills into law.

  Qivittut or ‘mountain wanderers’ are heartbroken individuals who leave society and become wild and solitary in the mountains, never to be seen again. They are often said to acquire supernatural powers, or adopt the language of the creatures they eat, such as ravens and grouse. In Greenland, wildness is an emotional state, often symbolic of rejection by a community; it is defined by loneliness as much as geographical isolation. There are many tales of qivittut. One tale from the south of Greenland, tells of Alinnaata, who would have been a near contemporary of Franklin. She ran away from a cruel husband, who would not let her eat. ‘It was impossible to find her’. After a long and fruitless search her community had to give up looking for her. No one was able to claim the finder’s fee, which had been offered by local missionaries – even though the sum was increased several times. This was a person who wished to leave no traces for others to follow. Later, some hunters were kayaking in a remote fjord when they noticed that the water was no longer clear and the breeze sounded like ‘a swarm of bees’. On the shore they found items of female clothing, turned inside out, and then discovered Alinnaata’s naked body: ‘At first sight she looked just like an animal’. Her arms were bent at unnatural angles, and her head was craned back over one shoulder.

  They lifted Alinnaata’s distorted body on a piece of sealskin and took it for burial:

  When they came to the burial place, they laid the paper with a text from the holy scriptures that the missionaries had given them, on her, over her poor clothes. When they had buried her, they covered her completely with stones. The missionaries had forbidden them to sing hymns, so no hymns were sung for her. They just heaped stones on her grave.

  Alinnaata’s mourners may have been silent, but the grave was not. After the burial, sounds were heard from the grave whenever there was a change of weather: sounds like the calling of great black-backed gulls.

  Although the fate of her husband was unknown, Lady Franklin continued to write to him for eight years after his departure. Some families of the crew shared her persistence. John and Phoebe Diggle decided to send a New Year’s message to their son John, the ship’s cook on board HMS Terror. It is dated 4 January 1848, almost three years after his departure: ‘Dear Son, I wright these few lines to in [sic] hopes to find you and all your shipmates in both ships well as it leaves us thank God for it but we fears we shall never see you again . . .’ The letter was carried to the Arctic by one of the expedition search party ships and returned with a brusque stamp over the copperplate address: ‘RETURNED TO SENDER THERE HAVING BEEN NO MEANS OF FORWARDING IT.’

  Meanwhile, Franklin’s party had also written messages which there was no means of forwarding. In May 1859, towards the end of their two-year mission, the search party led by Francis McClintock found a boat moored by the shore of King William Island in the archipelago north of Hudson Bay. In the boat, they discovered a copy of Christian Melodies: Home and its Scenes, a tiny book of verses that fits in the palm of the hand. An inscription on the flyleaf indicated that it belonged to Lieutenant Graham Gore, HMS Erebus. McClintock searched the island, finding a cairn which contained a small, sealed tin. The rust-stained document inside was the standard Admiralty accident form, printed with delivery instructions in six languages: ‘WHOEVER finds this paper is requested to forward it to the Secretary of the Admiralty, London, with a note of the time and the place it was found.’ On the form were two messages written a year apart which offered conflicting messages from different members of Franklin’s party. The first appears optimistic, but there are already signs of trouble. The writer, Gore, gives their bearings and notes: ‘H.M. Ships Erebus and Terror Wintered in the Ice in 1846–7’. But he gets the date wrong: this should read 1845–46. The error has been ascribed to memory loss, indicative of the lead poisoning which was to kill many of the party.

  One year later, the remaining crew had left the icebound ships and returned to the cairn to update the form, before setting off overland into the tundra. Their message was ominous: ‘HM’s Ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on 22nd April, 5 leagues N.N.W. of this, having been beset since 12th September 1846. The Officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of F.R.M. Crozier, landed here . . .’ The manuscript rambles on, but fails to provide any information that would have been of use to a rescue party. The only clue as to where the men were headed is an afterthought, the incomplete and almost illegible sentence: ‘And start tomorrow, 26th, for Back’s Fish River’. Cramped copperplate fills the margin, imprisoning the original text; a calligraphic metaphor for the claustrophobic ship frozen in
pack ice for two winters. The signatures run around the edge of the page at a contrary angle to the intended Admiralty layout: to read them the document has to be turned upside-down. There could have been little pride for the deserting officer who placed his signature on the official Admiralty stationery. The erratic arrangement of text made necessary by the limited paper stock recalls the circuitous lines on charts of lost expedition routes, which show forward progress hampered by the unpredictable drift of ice. In the Arctic, even official correspondence was governed by environmental rather than social laws.

  We don’t have Irving’s account of those long last weeks. But stories from survivors of other icebound ships reiterate the discipline and camaraderie, the attempt to pursue a rational, familiar existence amid apparently boundless ice and faced by an uncertain future. Regular readings from the Bible and hymn-singing satisfied some, while games of football and rations of spirits on festive occasions gave others something to anticipate. William McKinley, who was iced-in with the Karluk in the Beaufort Sea above Alaska during the same years that the Northern Party were exploring the southern hemisphere, recalls the pleasure of discussing horticulture with Bartlett, the ship’s skipper, on a rare visit to his private cabin. The Glaswegian writes, ‘I noticed on his table a copy of Dean Hole’s A Book About Roses, with its glorious chromolithographs of the softly shaded petals. As I picked it up he asked, “Do you grow roses?” ’ The two men sat for a while, in freezing temperatures and 24-hour darkness, miles from the nearest garden, talking about roses. And the ice offered its own soft colours, a less comforting but more transcendent beauty. I hope that before Irving and his companions abandoned ship they had a chance to observe such scenes as this one, described by McKinley:

  One night when there was a full moon I went for a walk on the ice and stopped about a hundred yards from the ship. The larger hummocks of ice stood out in all their weird shapes and sizes, casting fantastic shadows in the moonlight. The winds had swept their tops clear of snow, exposing glare-ice, which glistened like giant emeralds. All over the pack, the smaller lumps of ice scintillated in dazzling brilliance, like diamonds scattered in all directions as far as the eye could see . . . As I turned round to face the ship, old Karluk seemed to be doing her best to outdo nature. Her deck covering of snow shimmered like tinsel. Every rope and spar was magnified by a fluffy coating of frosted rime.

  Ice had trapped Franklin’s ships just over a hundred miles from the Northern Magnetic Pole. Irving’s remains were discovered not far from the cairn on King William Island and were brought home to the Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh. He was given a fine tombstone. A carved lanyard border surrounds a bas-relief of two distant ships, their sails furled as if for winter. In the foreground, there’s a sea of splintered ice, almost as regular as the cobblestones on the Royal Mile. The ice has parted like the Red Sea, forming a path down which the crew – warmly wrapped in winter coats – walk towards the viewer. Of the figures nearest the grave, one carries a spade. The next pulls a sledge. A third man stands looking back towards the ship. His eye travels that part of the image most deeply carved into the stone: the fissure in the ice that was never to come.

  IV

  I’ve been invited to show my work at an arts centre on the west coast of Denmark. In Greenland, people told me Denmark was a small country, but the five hours it takes to journey westwards from Copenhagen seem to suggest otherwise. It’s a relief when the train crosses the brackish reaches of the Limfjord and draws into Hurup Thy, almost the last stop on the line. I reach up to the luggage rack and pull down my suitcase.

  My exhibition accompanies a book festival called ‘On the Margins’, making a virtue of the fact that the town is almost as far from Copenhagen as it is possible to be. The nineteenth-century American painter William Morris Hunt called the margins ‘the best part of all books’, adding that a blank margin had ‘the soothing influence of a clear sky in a landscape.’ He could have been thinking of the clear spring skies over this waterway that runs the length of the Danish peninsula, from the small town of Agger in the west to the city of Aarhus in the east.

  Mette-Sofie picks me up at the station. As we drive to the gallery she recounts a folktale about the creation of the Limfjord. In the distant past Limgrim, a witch’s hog-like son, used his snout to plough a furrow through the land from east to west and water flooded in. Mette-Sofie is a rationalist, and suspects Limgrim might have been a glacier. Glacier or hog, the boundary between land and water is not clearly defined here. The land is low-lying, and the water is deep. The bedrock of the peninsula is still slowly rebounding from the weight of glacial ice. Some land has been reclaimed from the waves for farming, but the water is encroaching again – the whole town flooded last year, and roads turned to rivers. New artificial breakwaters and locks have been constructed to stem the damage to the coast from an increasingly wild North Sea.

  Meanwhile, the fjord is a playground for boat-loving retirees. Lars lends me his nautical charts, but I don’t use them to travel – I hang them up to block out the sunshine coming through the venetian blinds in my hostel room. When the windows warm in the morning, the charts fall to the floor as if under the weight of light. On the last Saturday in April, the boats that have rested in gardens and garages all winter are wheeled out onto the narrow jetty. The hulls have been repainted, red or black, up to the waterline. I watch as one by one Adriane, Anni, Elfrida, Louié, Malajka, Falsang, Silver, Ballerina, Kleopatra, Laribé, Out Skerries, Inge-Marie and Emilca are girdled in a belt sling and chained to the hook of the hired crane, which hoists them high and winches them out over the water. Moored in the air, the dark hulls swing uncertainly, but they touch down safely on the water and sail away up the fjord.

  There’s a local idiom for strolling to the end of the jetty and turning round, returning: at vende bro, literally, to turn the bridge. Over the years, as more and more boats have sought moorings here, the jetty has grown longer, and there are new bridges to turn. The timber extensions crook across the fjord, pinching vessels between their planks. It takes four and a half minutes to walk from the gallery to the very end of the jetty. I make the short journey several times each day. Black eelgrass sways in the water, seeming to float from the surface downwards, as well as from the sand upwards. Further out, there’s a hint of eel nets in the water, a line of floats and a black flag. By the time the exhibition opens to the public, I have spent as much time looking out across the fjord as in the gallery.

  The festival falls on a beautiful May weekend. Even so, Lilli Riget is red-nosed from a cold caught at another book fair in Aalborg. She rarely misses these events, Mette-Sofie tells me, touring Denmark to promote the winners of the annual Danish book design awards. I admire her continued enthusiasm for books, her lifetime’s dedication to them. And I’m curious about the heavy silver pendant in the shape of an Inuit hunter that swings against her heart. Lilli starts to tell me her own Arctic story.

  Many years ago, shortly after the birth of her daughter, Lilli’s husband had left her, and she found work as a cataloguer for the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen. In early 1968 a colleague suggested a transfer to the National Library of Greenland, then part of the Danish Commonwealth of the Realm. Lilli did not hesitate: she left her daughter with her ex-husband and his new girlfriend, and set off for the north.

  Greenland’s governors had established a small public library in a former school building in the capital, Nuuk, during the 1930s. This initiative was followed by even smaller branch libraries in towns up and down the coast. An ambitious extension of the Nuuk library was being completed just as Lilli arrived, but on 10 February 1968 a fire reduced the new building to ruins.

  Lilli may have been cataloguing the collection before the fire started – or perhaps she was sent to help restock the library in the aftermath of the disaster. The chronology changes each time she tells the story, Mette-Sofie tells me later. Does a month or two matter, when these events happened almost fifty years ago? Although it’s been revised over de
cades, Lilli’s story takes place on just one night. I don’t remember her exact words, which were frequently interrupted by customers wanting to look at books, but these are the pictures I see in my mind: a dark night; a flickering light visible through the broad panes of a wooden building typical of the Arctic. It’s winter. The sash windows are usually shut against the cold, but someone has flung them open. Smoke pours out; pale hands appear and papers tumble from them. The fire hoses direct water through the windows, drenching burning furniture and books alike. The air grows warmer, heat dances before the glass. Papers fall like giant snowflakes onto the ice. The books that are thrown out after them are black: carbonized bindings, charred fragments of paper. Over 26,000 of the library’s volumes were burnt that night and others were irreparably waterlogged. The night was so cold that water from the fire hoses froze around the debris on the snow.

  It is the habit of conservators to preserve things in the condition in which they are found, just as you do not move an accident victim if you think their neck is broken. When the charred papers were collected and flown to Copenhagen for conservation, they travelled in cold storage still surrounded by blocks of Arctic ice.

  The rescued documents included some of the earliest writings on the Greenlandic language. Their author, Samuel Kleinschmidt, was born in Greenland in 1814 and trained with the Herrnhut mission in Germany. On his return to Greenland he was posted to the mission at Lichtenau (German for ‘light water’), which had helped in the search for the missing woman Alinnaata and later buried her with a holy text which no one but the missionaries could read. At the Lichtenau mission Kleinschmidt was required to make his congregation recite religious texts by rote. But he didn’t approve of rote learning, and he knew that the few books printed in Greenlandic for the missionaries’ own use were riddled with errors. He was more likely to be found wandering the hills and talking to his neighbours than undertaking duties prescribed by the mission such as brewing and labouring. His appreciation for the landscape and its inhabitants led him to preach the very first sermon in fluent, everyday Greenlandic, rather than the outdated idiom approved by the religious community. At last the whole congregation could understand the preacher’s message.