Arctic Obsession

by Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

  With its scientific mission completed and the ship freed from its winter ice lockup, the Gjøa continued on its journey west. Fogs, drift ice, and shallow waters made navigation difficult — at one point, the water beneath the keel was reportedly one inch deep. After three such weeks, Amundsen finally entered known waters, regions that had been navigated and chartered in Alaska by explorers entering from the west. That which had been denied travellers for half a millennium, had at last been gained: the traverse of the passage. Amundsen nonchalantly described the milestone accomplishment:

  … the final accomplishment of the North West Passage by ship. I had hoped to have a little festivity to mark the notable event, but the weather did not permit. The event was celebrated by a simple toast, nothing more. We could not even hoist the flag, as it would have been blown to tatters.

  This seemingly casual attitude toward his success was not altogether genuine; in fact, the explorer itched to inform the world of the triumph. Unfortunately for him, however, the Gjøa became frozen in by early winter and contact with the outside world was denied. Undaunted, Amundsen set off on October 5 with a native companion by dog team to reach Eagle City, some five hundred miles inland where, he was assured, there was a telegraph station. He reached his destination two months later, after a laborious passage through a mountain range with peaks as high as nine thousand feet. Eagle City, it turned out, was a hamlet of 130 isolated inhabitants, but it did have a telegraph connection — and the news went out. Shortly thereafter he returned home where he was rejoined by his companions of the Gjǿa.

  Umberto Nobile’s dirigible, the Italia. On May 28, 1928, the Italian adventurer set out for the North Pole, but the airship soon crashed. In search of his former colleague, Amundsen lost his life when his own plane crashed somewhere into the Barents Sea.

  Soon after Amundsen’s return, his one-time flight companion, Umberto Nobile, found himself in mortal Arctic peril. Determined to make another dirigible flight over the North Pole, he enlisted a sixteen-man crew and set off from Svalbard on board the airship Italia on May 23, 1928, and headed north. Within twenty-four hours, the dirigible crashed and most of the crew was killed or severely injured. Nobile, himself, sustained a broken arm, a broken leg, and a broken rib, as well as head injuries. Fortunately, the ship’s signals operator was able to repair the damaged radio and his SOS signals were picked up by an amateur in Russia. Word of the tragedy quickly spread and in short order search parties set off to locate the survivors. By the time it was all over, thirty different rescue teams from six countries had become involved with the operation one way or another. Putting aside his differences with Nobile, one of the first to volunteer in the search was Roald Amundsen. In quick order, he organized a rescue flight aboard a French seaplane with a four-man crew. On June 18, the aircraft took off from Trømso into the timeless white yonder beyond and it was not heard from again. More than likely it went down, possibly in heavy fog, somewhere in the Barents Sea — some of its wreckage was found floating, but not the bodies. Amundsen had succumbed to the Arctic Siren’s beguiling song.

  * * *

  The fame of Knud Rasmussen, the so-called “father of Eskimology,” rests on his studies of Inuit culture. In 1902, he participated in the Danish Literary Greenland Expedition in a two-year study of native folklore and legends. Since he was born and raised in Greenland he was totally at home with the Inuit and fluent in their language. “My playmates were native Greenlanders; from earliest boyhood I played and worked with the hunters, so even the hardships of the most strenuous sledge-trips became pleasant routine for me.” On this particular journey, the twenty-three-year-old served as translator and interpreter to the academics from Copenhagen.

  In 1910 Rasmussen was joined by others — including his friend, the accomplished Arctic traveller Peter Freuchen — in establishing the Thule Trading Station on the island’s far northwest coast, opposite Ellesmere Island, the most northern outpost in the world. A flourishing trade with the Inuit blossomed there with pipes and tobacco, knives, rifles and ammunition, and other manufactured items being exchanged for Arctic furs. So successful was the enterprise in the following two decades that Rasmussen was able to help finance seven Thule Expeditions between 1912 and 1933. The object of these missions was to study intensively the culture, traditions, and history of Inuit everywhere, from Greenland to the Bering Sea. The most notable of the expeditions was the fifth, undertaken from 1921–24, which set out to “attack the great primary problem of the origin of the Eskimo race.” Upon its completion, a ten-volume account was published of the collected ethnographic, archaeological, and biological data, an important record of native folklore and history at a time when the Inuit still remained in their primitive state, unaffected by the introduction of commercially produced foods, Christianity, and European laws and ways.

  While seven experts continued the work of interviewing, recording, excavating, and collecting specimens, Rasmussen, with two Inuit hunters, left the expedition’s main body, and travelled by dogsled across the North American continent. For sixteen months the trio coped with all the hazards such a journey might entail and with whatever the elements might throw their way, all the time living off the land or sharing the hospitality of Inuit met along the way. The passage was completed with their arrival at Nome, Alaska — the first crossing of the Northwest Passage by dogsled. One might have thought that Rasmussen would have been content to rest on his laurels, but that was not to be. He immediately began planning for a continuation of his path, across the Bering Strait and Siberia, but was thwarted by Soviet authorities, who denied him the requested visa.

  The sixth and seventh Thule Expeditions were continuations of the earlier ones, always in the furthering of knowledge and recording the ways of the admirable indigenous people of the North. On the final tour in 1933, he fell ill with food poisoning and, transferred to Copenhagen, he contracted influenza and pneumonia and died. The crossings of Greenland and America and his insightful studies of Inuit form the basis of his fame. By his work the “father of Eskimology” is also largely responsible for establishing Danish sovereignty over that huge island.

  * * *

  To encourage settlement in its west, in 1877 the Canadian government persuaded 250 Icelanders from the north of the island to quit their country and move outside of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and it was there that Vilhjalmur Stefansson was born in 1879. An anthropologist by training and an advocate of the Arctic by vocation, he came to be known as “The Prophet of the North” — so reads the epitaph on his tombstone near Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. At age eighteen he left home to study at the University of Iowa, then moved on to the University of North Dakota and finally ended up at Harvard where he became affiliated with the department of anthropology and also the Peabody Museum. In 1905, he undertook the first of his Arctic expeditions, one of three journeys into northernmost Canada and Alaska, each lasting from sixteen months to five years. By the end of his career, he had published twenty-four books and more than four hundred articles on his travels and studies of native peoples.

  But even at age twenty-seven, Stefansson had already become recognized as a serious anthropologist, having published the results of his one-year study in Iceland of the relationship between diet and health. Harvard took him on as a teaching fellow where he was valued by the department of anthropology as an authority on the Arctic. In 1906–12 he worked with the Peabody and the American Museum of Natural History, living with and studying the Mackenzie River Indians and the far north Inuit. Like Rasmussen, Stefansson believed that the most efficacious way of acquiring knowledge of the Inuit was to live among them and to fully embrace their ways — their dress, their shelter, and their diet. “Living with [the Inuit] was much better from an ethnological point of view than merely living amongst them, as other white men had done,” he declared. One statement of mission by the American Museum clearly sets out that “the present expedition … differs essentially from ordinary Arctic ventures in this, that where it is usual to
take along with the party everything that the party is expected to need during their stay in the field, in this case there will be taken neither food, clothing nor housing materials, and there will be complete dependence on local resources.”

  On his first venture into the Canadian North, Stefansson heard of the rumoured existence of a mysterious tribe of blond-haired Inuit living west of the Coppermine River in a region supposed by geographers to be uninhabited. It was said that these people were exceptionally primitive and that they had never known white men, yet themselves looked like white men. If true, the finding of such peoples would be sensational not only for the scientific world, but for the general public — tales of lost tribes invariably excited imaginations. In 1908, with the backing of the American Museum, Stefansson embarked on his second Arctic expedition, this one lasting four years, during which he did in fact come across the “lost tribe” of blond Inuit. The small community consisted of primitive peoples who until then had had no contact with Europeans — rifles and butchering knives proved to be objects of amazement. He was struck not only by their physical appearance, particularly the light-coloured hair of some, but by their manner of speech that sparkled with philological similarities to Icelandic. “These are two points,” he notes, “that suggest, as far as they go, the possibility of some connection with the three thousand lost Greenland colonists.”

  In 1913–18, on his final expedition into the Arctic, Stefansson spent five-and-a-half years living with the Inuit, during which time he expanded further his studies of them. Equally impressive, however, were his other achievements, best described by Major-General Aldophus Greely, himself an Arctic explorer, in a tribute before the National Geographic Society:

  [H]e has made inroads into the million square miles of unknown Arctic regions, the largest for many years. His hydrographic work is specially important, in surveys and in magnetic declinations. His numerous soundings not only outline the continental shelf from Alaska to Prince Patrick Island, but also disclose the submarine mountains and valleys of the Beaufort Sea.[12]

  From the unknown regions of Arctic lands and sea he has drawn areas amounting to approximately 100,000 square miles … three large islands and other small islands were discovered … [which] unquestionably fill in the last gap in the hitherto unknown seaward limits of the great Arctic archipelago in the north of the continent of America.

  These accomplishments notwithstanding, the “prophet of the North” is best remembered for his advocacy of the North. Stefansson consistently regarded the Arctic as a benign place — witness the fact that one of his books is entitled The Friendly Arctic. “It is human nature to undervalue whatever lands that are distant and to consider disagreeable whatever is different,” he wrote, and he chastises southerners for viewing the North as hostile. In his life’s work, he took satisfaction in having brought the Arctic and its inhabitants closer to the world and to having made it look more like “a commonplace country … like Michigan or Switzerland.” The Arctic, he argued, is misunderstood chiefly through “our unwillingness to change minds that prevents the North from changing into a country to be used and lived in just like the rest of the world.”

  * * *

  “The place that God had secreted for himself,” the pristine land of the peaceable Inuit had taken sizeable steps in the twentieth century to becoming “just like the rest of the world” … including defilement by war. One might have thought that major powers in conflict with one another would have little cause to bring war to those remote, largely uninhabited northern regions. This was not the case, however, and as early as 1854, during the Crimean War, gunfire was exchanged between the British and the Russians well above the Arctic Circle along the Kola Peninsula and the White Sea. In the earliest stage of the war, a small squadron of British ships rounded North Cape to bombard and put a torch to the town of Kola, thirteen miles east of the Norwegian border. They then moved on to the White Sea where they fired on Solovetsky Monastery. Some rounds were returned from the feebly fortified stronghold without major damage to the ships, but with casualties among the crews. The British withdrew, sailed for home, and that was the extent of it. Among the felled attackers was a certain Seaman Ordenz from Jamaica — it might be said therefore that one of the earliest casualties of the world’s most curious and unnecessary struggles was not a white man on the Black Sea, but a black man on the White Sea.

  But it was the Second World War that saw meaningful incursion of warfare into the Arctic, including actual combat. As early as 1941, the Allies had committed to the policy of supporting in any way possible Soviet armies fighting on the Eastern Front — a two-front division of Hitler’s resources was fundamental strategy. War material of every sort flowed east from America under the Lend-Lease program, principally tanks, fighter planes, and trucks, and, to bolster infrastructure, locomotives and railway cars. Convoys of ships assembled at staging areas along the North American coast, sailed northeast under naval protection to Iceland, and continued north of Jan Mayen Island to arrive at Murmansk or, in adverse ice conditions, at Arkhangelsk. In the four-year period, August 1941 to May 1945, seventy-eight convoys made the “Murmansk Run,” and by the time it was all over 1,400 vessels had been escorted to the USSR by British, American, and Canadian naval vessels.

  Germany quite naturally made strenuous efforts to stem the flow of Allied materiel from reaching its Soviet enemy; its cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and aircraft harassed and engaged the Allies at every point. In July 1942, the convoy that suffered the greatest losses of the entire war was the seventeenth to make the crossing. As it entered Arctic waters it came under heavy attack by German aircraft and submarines. As the fighting progressed, a signal was received that a battle group was on its way to intercept the convoy and that among the ships was the fabled battleship Tirpitz. The ships were ordered to scatter, and in the confusion that followed, twenty-four of the thirty-five transports were sunk. The eleven that made it through barely limped into port and carried hundreds of the dead or wounded. Five months later, the Allies won a victory of sorts at the Battle of Barents Sea when the enemy suffered punishing losses and was driven off by a combined force of destroyers and cruisers.

  The “Arctic front” insofar as the Navy was concerned, was not exclusively a matter of convoy duty. A successful war effort is much dependent on authentic weather prediction. The supply convoys on the Murmansk run relied heavily on them, as did most land and air operations in northern Europe — Allied or German. (Never more so than in early June 1941 when General Eisenhower signalled the launch of D-day invasion.) To feed military experts data with which to make weather predictions, a number of meteorological stations dotted the Arctic, which, understandably, one side or the other was determined to destroy or take over — in Greenland, on Jan Mayen Island, in Spitzbergen, and even on Bear Island. Following the capitulation of Denmark and Norway in April 1940 the “war of the weather stations” began in earnest.

  Typical of that “war” was a relatively minor incident, but one that is illustrative of the sort of engagements that occurred in various corners of the Arctic. With Norway’s fall, Spitzbergen became vulnerable and under threat of German attack. The Allies sent in a flotilla of ships and evacuated some three thousand Norwegian and Russian coal miners from the vicinity of Longyearbyen. No sooner had the evacuation been completed, than the Germans rushed in to set up a meteorological station supported and supplied by U-boats. As soon as British intelligence informed the Norwegian forces in exile in Britain of the station’s existence and approximate location, a select team of ten men was dispatched to deal with it. The hut with a high radio mast was quickly spotted and the commandos approached it cautiously to find it unoccupied, but well-equipped and provisioned. The Norwegians then withdrew to await the enemy’s appearance — in The Arctic, a History, Richard Vaughan picks up the story — just as they were concealing themselves:

  A man came walking toward them. It was Heinz Köhler, second-in-command of the German weather station, returning
from photographing the bird life in the neighboring marsh. As soon as he came within earshot, the Norwegians shouted for him to put his hands up and surrender. But Köhler turned and ran off, zig-zagging and firing a pistol at the pursuing Norwegians, who returned the fire with their rifles. Then he disappeared, and later the Norwegians heard a single shot. After waiting an hour, two of them warily approached, covered by the others. They found that Köhler had crouched behind a rock, pointed his pistol at his temple, and shot himself.[13]

  Köhler’s five colleagues discovered what was going on and radioed for assistance. A U-boat arrived the following day, boarded the surviving Germans, and then opened fire on the station and on the Norwegian motorboat, killing one man.

  In the scale of things, the skirmish was a relatively trifling incident, incomparable to one that followed five months later when the Tirpitz appeared off the coast to shell Norwegian positions with its heavy guns. It then landed troops to attack the 152-man garrison and in the exchange that followed, six defenders were killed and forty-two taken prisoner while the remainder took to the mountains.

  As noted earlier, during the Cold War, the Soviets used the North for nuclear testing. Not only was the Tsar Bomba detonated in 1969, but scores of other detonations took place. Estimates have it that since 1949 more than two hundred nuclear detonations or accidents have occurred inside the Arctic Circle with quantities of nuclear waste being deposited in the region. It is known, for example, that at least six nuclear reactors have been dumped into offshore waters, off the coast of Russia and tales of Russian nuclear submarines sinking in Arctic waters are not unfamiliar to the modern reader.