The sea is moving. I picture the massive gray back disappearing toward the bottom, with our hook in its jaw, plus twenty feet of chain dangling below. The life of this particular Greenland shark will never be the same after its encounter with us.
Everything is very still. In the background the beam from the Skrova lighthouse flashes. Several black-headed gulls have gathered near the boat. They can tell we have nothing for them, so they move off with the wind and the waves. Slowly and patiently the sea rolls onward, as it has always done before we were here, and as it will continue to do long after we’re gone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My biggest thanks go to Mette Bolsøy and Hugo Aasjord. As all readers can see, this book could never have been written without our friendship. Thanks also to Anniken Aasjord. And thanks to others who have offered help, both big and small: Arnold Johansen, Leif Hovden, Frode Pilskog, Bjørnar Nicolaisen, Torgeir Schjerven, Inger Elisabeth Hansen, Sverre Knudsen, Anne Maria Eikeset, Håvard Rem, Inge Albriktsen, Hilde Linchausen Blom, Tora Hultgreen, Knut Halvorsen, and the team of Ronald and Kari Nystad Rusaanes (who often provided me with lodgings when I was in Bodø). To all those whom I haven’t mentioned here but who deserve my thanks: Thank you so much!
My thanks to my Norwegian editor Cathrine Narum, whose enthusiasm, linguistic talent, and professional skills in general have greatly impressed me. That said, any factual errors are my own. Thank you to my fiancée, Cathrine Strøm. She has helped by giving me literary tips, by reading the manuscript, and by offering her support through the entire project. Finally, I send a greeting to our as yet unborn child, who was conceived between trips to the north and who will be born just about the time this book is published in Norway. May the sea treat you well.
NOTES
Summer
1. As a student I took a seminar about Rimbaud’s poem, taught by the Norwegian poet Kjell Heggelund. When I quote from “Le bateau ivre,” I’ve made use of the original French and a number of translated versions, without relying exclusively on any of them. The poem has been translated into Norwegian by Rolf Stenersen, Kristen Gundelach, Jan Erik Vold, and Haakon Dahlen (who has produced a Nynorsk version). These translations, in addition to several others, such as one by Samuel Beckett, are collected in Å dikte for en annen. Moment til en poetikk for lesning av gjendiktninger. Berman, Meschonnic, Rimbaud by Cathrine Strøm (thesis in comparative literature, University of Bergen, spring 2005). The English translation quoted here is by Wallace Fowlie (2005, as found online).
2. In 2003, the biologist E. O. Wilson initiated an Internet encyclopedia about life on earth, secretly hoping that all species would have been described within twenty-five years (www.eol.org). But Wilson had to admit that neither he nor anyone else had any idea how many species would be involved. Today science has identified only 1.9 million species, on land and in the sea, and most of them are tropical insects.
3. Much of the information about the shark’s biology and social life is from Juliet Eilperin’s book Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks (Pantheon Books, 2011), and Sharks of the World by Leonard Compagno, Marc Dando, and Sarah Fowler (Princeton Field Guides, Princeton University Press, 2005).
4. Or was there something hiding behind the ritual? Maybe the important thing was not to kill but to eat what you killed. In that case, the sacrifices can be interpreted as a celebration of the collective group. The ritual re-created the order and hierarchy of the universe. It strengthened and confirmed the sense of community. The people not only shared food with one another, but also—through the sacrificial ritual—with the gods. The gods at the top, human beings in the middle, the animals at the bottom. Yet certain discoveries have been made that indicate cannibalism may have been involved in the culture that existed on Engeløya. These discoveries involved pots containing sawed-off bones. That immediately makes things much more complicated.
5. This information is from the BBC TV series Blue Planet, DVD no. 2, titled “The Deep,” in which the TV crew follows a scientific study about the decomposition of a whale carcass.
6. Jonas Lie’s story “Svend Foyn og ishavsfarten,” published in Fortællinger og skildringer fra Norge (1872). Collected Works, vol. 1 (Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1902), p. 148.
7. The quote is from Inge Albriktsen’s article “Da snurperen ‘Seto’ forliste—et lite hyggelig 45-års minne” in Årbok for Steigen, 2006.
8. Later I found out enough about the life history of this boat to write a sort of obituary for it. It was built as a fishing boat by the Unterweser shipyard in Wesermünde in 1921 and christened the Senator Stahmer by the owner, Cuxhavener Hochseefischerei. In 1945, the boat was commandeered by the wartime German navy as an “outpost ship.” It was sunk during a sabotage action in the harbor of Ålborg, Denmark. That same year, on Christmas Eve, it was raised from the sea. In 1947, the boat was put in service as the MS Elsehoved (Copenhagen), then sold to Govert Grindhaug in Åkrehamn, Norway, near Kopervik, in 1950, whereupon it was rechristened the Seto. In 1952, the boat went down near Gulleskjærene, forty-four nautical miles north of Bodø. In other words, it sank outside of Steigen. It was then that Johan Norman Aasjord, son of Norman Johan Aasjord (Hugo’s great-grandfather), saw his chance and bought the boat as it lay underwater. He raised it out of the sea himself. Aasjord repaired and rebuilt the boat as a herring seiner. Off season, when the herring fishing was over, the Seto served as a freighter to the Continent, returning to Steigen with its holds filled with liquor. On February 26, the boat capsized and sank in deep water outside Runde, during the winter herring season. And that is where the boat still lies, since this third sinking proved to be its last. Http://www.skipet.no/skip/skipsforlis/1960/view?-searchterm=norske+skipsforlis+1960.
9. Not to be confused with his ancestor Gerhard Schøning (1722–1780) from Lofoten, who became a teacher at Trondheim Cathedral School, professor at Sorø Academy, and the director of National Archives and Records in Copenhagen. Some consider this Gerhard Schøning to be Norway’s first historian because of the academic works he wrote.
10. The names reveal where the fishing village owners were from. Many came from southern Norway, but at this time it was also typical for Norwegians to be of Danish, German, or Scottish heritage—with names like Walnum, Dybfest, Zahl, Rasch, Dreyer, Blix, Lorentz, Falch, Bordevick, Dass, Kiil, and others. They regarded themselves as members of the European upper class and frequently went on shopping trips to the Continent, where they purchased everything from large quantities of Bordeaux wine to chandeliers, grand pianos, carpets, and draperies. Their birthright gave them certain privileges, and they were entitled to decide where the common people could fish, how much debt could be heaped upon others, and which servant girls they would bed. A minority of these men were compassionate patriarchs who, during times of crisis, held a protective hand over their subjects. The parish priest Petter Dass (1647–1707), author of the famous Nordlands trompet (The Trumpet of the North) and other works, was not one of them.
11. Christian Krohg, “Reiseerindringer og folkelivsbilder,” in Kampen for tilværelsen (Gyldendal, 1952), p. 306.
12. Claire Nouvian, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss (University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 18. This is an amazing coffee-table book with hundreds of photographs of life-forms that live in the deep.
13. By the age of twenty-four, Michael Sars had already self-published a scientific treatise titled Bidrag til söedyrenes naturhistorie (Bergen, 1829).
14. Truls Gjefsen, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen—Digter og folkesæl (Andresen & Butenschøn, 2001), pp. 236–42.
15. Norsk biografisk leksikon.
16. Quoted from Norsk biografisk leksikon, https://nbl.snl.no/Michael_Sars.
17. Four years later, G. O. Sars published several of his father’s discoveries, as well as his own, in the book On Some Remarkable Forms of Animal Life, from the Great Deeps off the Norwegian Coast. Partly from the Posthumous Manuscripts of the Late Professor Dr. Michael Sars (Brøgger & Christie, 1872).
18. Jonas Collin (ed.), Skildringer af naturvidenskaberne for alle (Forlagsbureauet i København, 1882).
19. Ibid., “Havets Bund,” P. H. Carpenter, p. 1111. The English was translated from the author’s Norwegian.
20. Wendy Williams, Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid (Abrams, 2010), p. 83. Williams’s excellent book on squid is my main source for facts on this species.
21. See Tony Koslow, The Silent Deep (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
22. Jonathan Gordon, Sperm Whales (World Life Library, 1998).
23. Philip Hoare, The Whale (Harper Collins, 2010), p. 67.
24. Torgeir Schjerven. This contribution to the description of wonderment is a verse from Harrys lille tåre (Gyldendal, 2015).
25. LynneRose Cannon, ed., Herman Melville: The Dover Reader (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2016), p. 296.
26. Ibid.
27. The whole story of commercial whaling, including the role played by science, is described in detail in D. Graham Burnett’s book The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2012). The Russian navy alone took twenty-five thousand humpback whales in two seasons, in 1959 and 1960. Even before whaling became mechanized, the whale populations were so heavily exploited that they almost disappeared for good. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, Dutch, British, German, and Danish ships caught tens of thousands of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) in Svalbard, until there were very few individuals left by 1670. This whaling endeavor was effectively described by Frederick Martens, a surgeon from Hamburg who served on a whaling ship in 1671. His book about his experiences became well known when an anonymous English translation was published in 1694, titled A Voyage into Spitsbergen and Greenland. The bowhead whale, which can weigh up to eighty tons, belongs to the right whale family (so named because they were the “right” whales to catch). To impress the female bowhead whales, the males sing polyphonically, and they never repeat the same song two seasons in a row.
Over the course of about sixty years, up until 1967, as many as 450,000 blue whales may have been caught in the Antarctic Ocean alone. The Russians did not report all their catches, so it’s impossible to know how many blue whales they took. Whaling was also the basis for the creation of many Norwegian fortunes.
28. In 1920, the Danish doctor Aage Krarup Nielsen sailed on a whaling ship from Norway to Deception Bay. The voyage is described in En hvalfangerfærd (Gyldendal, 1921). Nielsen claimed that the smell of poisonous gases used by the Germans in World War I was like a “plaything” compared to the stench in Deception Bay.
29. New Scientist, December 10, 2004, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6764.
30. George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in Essays (Penguin, 2000), p. 127.
31. Lars Hertervig. Lysets vanvidd, documentary film shown on Norwegian TV, 2013.
32. From the poem “Bølgje,” by Halldis Moren Vesaas.
33. From Rimbaud’s “Le bateau ivre.”
34. Fridtjof Nansen, Blant sel og bjørn (Jacob Dybwads Forlag, 1924), pp. 238–39.
35. Levy Carlson, Håkjerringa og håkjerringfisket, Fiskeridirektoratets skrifter, vol. 4, no. 1 (John Griegs Boktrykkeri, 1958).
36. Erik Pontoppidan, Det første forsøg paa Norges naturlige historie, forestillende dette kongerigets luft, grund, fjelde, vande, vækster, metaller, mineraler, steen-arter, dyr, fugle, fiske, og omsider indbyggernes naturel, samt sædvaner og levemaade. Oplyst med kobberstykker. Den vise og almæktige skaber til ære, såvel som hans fornuftige creature til videre eftertankes anledning (Copenhagen, 1753; facsimile edition, Copenhagen, 1977), vol. 2, p. 219.
Autumn
1. Perhaps appropriately enough, a certain confusion exists regarding Aeolus, or Aiolos, Greek god of the wind. He appears in three different genealogies. In one version, he is the son of Poseidon. In The Odyssey (book 10), Aeolus is said to be the “keeper of the winds” and the son of Hippotes. Aeolus gives Odysseus a sack filled with all the winds so he can sail home on a steady west wind. But Odysseus’s men think the sack contains worldly treasures, so they open it and release a hurricane. They are blown back to the island of Aeolia, where Aeolus refuses to help them a second time.
2. A Voyage to the North, Containing an Account of the Sea Coasts and Mines of Norway, the Danish, Swedish, and Muscovite Laplands, Borandia, Siberia, Samojedia, Zembla and Iceland; with Some Very Curious Remarks on the Norwegians, Laplanders, Russians, Poles, Circassians, Cossacks and Other Nations. Extracted from the Journal of a Gentleman Employed by the North-Sea Company at Copenhagen; and from the Memoir of a French Gentleman, Who, After Serving Many Years in the Armies of Russia, Was at Last Banished into Siberia (first published ca. 1677). In John Harris Collection of Voyages and Travel, vol. 2 (Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, London, 1744).
3. This information is from Arne Lie Christensen’s book Det norske landskapet (Pax, 2002), p. 75.
4. Not all water on earth comes from space. We know this because the chemistry of meteor water is slightly different from the rest of the water. The hydrogen is of a heavier isotope. Only half of our water could have come from comets and other objects that have crashed on earth. The rest was probably here from the very beginning, in material that formed what would become our globe. In other words, a large part of the water on earth is more than 4.5 billion years old.
5. Robert Kunzig, Mapping the Deep (Sort of Books, 2000), ch. 1, “Space and the Ocean.”
6. It is estimated that there are approximately five hundred billion galaxies in the universe, each having billions or many thousands of millions of stars. In 2013, astronomers at the University of Auckland, using new technology, increased the number of “earthlike” planets in the Milky Way. The old estimate was seventeen billion. The new estimate is more than five times that number (one hundred billion).
7. NASA, and the scientist teams with whom they cooperated on this project, analyzed the data from the Kepler space telescope over a period of four years. They were looking for a planet orbiting around a sun at a distance that would make the planet habitable. So far, the planet that most resembles the earth is in the constellation Cygnus, which is fourteen hundred light-years away from our solar system. It was christened Kepler-452b.
8. The history of Norwegian lighthouses during this period, including the role of the Mork family, is best described in Jostein Nerbøvik’s book Holmgang med havet, 1838–1914 (Volda Kommune, 1997).
9. Ny illustreret tidende, Kristiania, June 26, 1881, no. 26, pp. 1–2.
10. Christoph Ransmayr, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, translated from the German by John E. Woods (Grove Press, 1991), pp. 113–14.
11. Gunnar Isachsen, “Fra Ishavet,” Særtryk av det norske geografiske selskabs årbok 1916–1919, p. 198.
12. Jostein Nerbøvik, Holmgang med havet, p. 312.
13.Frode Pilskog of the Dalane lighthouse museum identified Wiig as the designer of the Skrova lighthouse. He also sent me copies of the original drawings that are signed “Wiig.”
14. The quote is taken from Alexander Kielland’s novel Garman & Worse, originally published in Norway in 1880.
15. Bjørn Tore Pedersen, Lofotfisket (Pax, 2013), p. 109.
16. The English is translated from the author’s Norwegian, based on the Swedish translation (the work was originally written in Latin). Historia om de nordiske folken (Michaelisgillet & Gidlunds Förlag, 2010).
17. The source of this story is a Welsh cleric by the name of Giraldus Cambrensis (1146–1223). He supposedly saw little geeselike birds hatch from the fruits of trees in Ireland near the sea.
18. During the battle of Actium, echeneis fish, or sharksuckers, reportedly seized hold of the ship belonging to Mark Antony’s admiral. That was why Gaius Octavius (who became the emperor Augustus) was able to attack him so quickly. On another occasion, the fish were said to have stopped a ship with four hundred rowers. In addition, eating a “ship holde
r” can prove fatal. Olaus Magnus, book 21, ch. 32.
19. Ibid., book 21, ch. 41.
20. Ibid., book 21, ch. 5, pp. 987–88.
21. Ibid., book 21, ch. 35.
22. The “big Norwegian serpent” or dragon, which Norwegian fishermen had described to Olaus Magnus, may have been inspired by the Midgard Serpent. According to Norse mythology, Odin threw the Midgard Serpent out of Åsgard, home of the Æsir gods. At the bottom of the sea, the serpent grew so big that it eventually encircled the entire earth—just as Oceanus did in early Greek mythology. Thor once caught the Midgard Serpent on a hook when he was out fishing. According to the Elder Edda, when Ragnarok occurs, Thor and the Midgard Serpent will fight in a battle of the giants, from which no one will emerge alive.
23. Erik Pontoppidan, Det første forsøg paa Norges naturlige historie, forestillende dette kongerigets luft, grund, fjelde, vande, vækster, metaller, mineraler, steen-arter, dyr, fugle, fiske, og omsider indbyggernes naturel, samt sædvaner og levemaade. Oplyst med kobberstykker. Den vise og almæktige skaber til ære, såvel som hans fornuftige creature til videre eftertankes anledning (Copenhagen, 1753: facsimile edition, Copenhagen, 1977), vol. 2, pp. 318–40.
24. Ibid., p. 343.
25. Kongespeilet (author unknown), from the mid-thirteenth century, is considered perhaps the most significant work from the Middle Ages in Norway. In the book, a father tells his son about everything that exists in the world. The father says that in the sea off Greenland, there are both mermaids and sea trolls called havstramb (mermen). “Whenever these trolls have been seen, people have also been convinced that a storm at sea will follow…If the troll turns toward a ship and dives, people have known for certain [that they are in for a storm]. But if the troll turns away from the ship and dives in another direction, then there is hope that the crew will not be harmed, even if they encounter huge waves and a violent storm.” De norske bokklubbene, 2000, pp. 52–53.
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