by Donovan Hohn
The air up there may be warm; the water, I’ve been assured, will be plenty cold—below zero in some places, since the freezing point of seawater is two degrees lower than that of fresh. Hence the survival suits. Supervising the safety drill is First Officer Cathy Lacombe. A French Canadian, when speaking English, Lacombe tends to aspirate words beginning in vowels. “In Harctic water you’re not going to last two minutes,” she informed us when we mustered on the hangar deck. “It’s going to cut your hair and you are going to die.” She held up her own survival suit. “In this you can last four howers.”
Listening closely to Lacombe’s speech was a safety inspector dispatched on short notice. “Whatever you do,” he added when she’d finished, “if you’re wearing a hooded sweatshirt, get the damn thing off, because that hood is like a wick. It will suck the cold water in, and, again, you’ll die.”
These aren’t the only warnings we’ve received today. We’ve been told not to visit the crow’s nest without permission because in rough seas we could tumble to our deaths. We’ve been told not to squeeze, Indiana Jones-style, through a watertight door that has begun to close; do so and the watertight door could amputate a limb, or slice you in half. Once a watertight door has begun to close there’s no shutting it off. We’ve been told that “it’s not a good idea to get drunk on a ship.”
Even if you’re sober, even if the sun is shining and you’re on the helipad of an icebreaker still tied up at the docks and yachts are sailing picturesquely around on Halifax Harbor, putting on a survival suit, I now know, can reduce you to a toddlerlike state of haplessness. While I tug at my suit’s recalcitrant zipper with fingers gloved in spongy rubber, across the helipad, trying to extrude his right hand through the elastic cuff of a watertight sleeve, Gerd Braune, the Swiss reporter for the German wire service—balding, bespectacled, mustachioed, looking clerical—is muttering under his breath what I assume are German profanities. Other people are stumbling about like clumsy contortionists, tipsy Houdinis, yellow sleeves flapping. In the manner of a preschool teacher readying her wards for an outing in the snow, Lacombe assists us one by one, the Coast Guard inspector following after her, scribbling observations on a clipboard and checking his watch.
Lacombe, though she has the high voice and haircut of a choirboy, is a big woman, almost as tall as I am, and considerably wider and stronger. When she reaches me, she yanks my suit’s zipper to my chin, pulls the yellow hood over my head, and clasps the Velcro face mask across my mouth like a gag. Only my eyes and nose are left exposed to the warm, midsummer Nova Scotian afternoon. I feel like a cosmonaut, or astronaut, or aquanaut—some sort of naut. A cryonaut, I suppose you’d call someone equipped for a dip in the ice. Mummified in yellow neoprene, poaching in my own body heat, waiting to be inspected by the inspector with the clipboard, I find myself thinking that, overboard in a survival suit, if one wished, one could reenact the Arctic journey of the toys, or at least four hours of it. “When seamen fall overboard” in Arctic waters, Melville writes, “they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber.”
The first leg of our voyage will take us to Resolute (population 229). There, the Snapper, the Australians, and Gerd Braune will all disembark, and several new supernumeraries will come aboard. Among them will be this expedition’s architect, a visionary oceanographer named Eddy Carmack. At Woods Hole, whenever I asked about the mystery I was trying to solve, those who didn’t summarily dismiss the journey of the toys as “folk science” and me as a fool in possession of an errand, John Toole among them, almost always said the same thing: the person you should really talk to is Eddy Carmack. This turns out to have been good advice.
Carmack, I was pleased to discover, is a believer in driftology. Last January, the day after the Hanjin Ottawa tied up in Seattle, I paid a visit to his office at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia. A fan of Beachcombers’ Alert! Carmack had known Ebbesmeyer since his graduate school days at the University of Washington, where the young Dr. E. was Carmack’s teaching assistant in an advanced physical oceanography course. “I just find it fascinating,” he said of Ebbesmeyer’s flotsam studies. “High-tech aside, this is telling us stuff million-dollar instruments can’t tell us—where stuff really goes.”
Although Carmack has spent much of his career studying the ocean the high-tech way, with conductivity-temperature-depth rosettes, geochemical tracers, and expendable bathythermographs, he’s also, every year since the year 2000, studied it the old-fashioned way, by setting bottles adrift. The Drift Bottle Project, he calls this ongoing Lagrangian experiment. With the help of sailors and scientists and Nova Scotian schoolchildren, he’s scattered more than four thousand bottles in icy water. Replies have come in from Alaska and Nunavut but also from exotic destinations—Russia, Brazil, England, France, Norway. “Norway, the Faroes, Orkney—those places are bottle magnets for bottles dropped in the eastern Arctic or the Irminger Sea,” Carmack told me.
It’s thanks to Carmack and to the Drift Bottle Project that I’ve been offered a cabin aboard the Louis. Officially speaking, I’m not a member of the press corps. Officially speaking I’m an unpaid research assistant, a volunteer bottle tosser. We’ve all been given a list titled “Crew on Board” and beside my name appear the words “Scientific Staff,” words that I would like to photocopy and send—triumphantly or perhaps vindictively or perhaps, come to think of it, pathetically—to my eleventh-grade chemistry teacher, Ms. H——, who snuffed out, as if they were the blue flames of so many Bunsen burners, the fanciful, marine biological dreams I’d once entertained. In fairness to her, my idea of a marine biologist was a romantic one, influenced far more by Doc from John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row than by the Krebs cycle or the table of the elements or the melting point of magnesium. As it so happens, Doc, whom Steinbeck based on his friend Ed Ricketts—marine biologist, pioneering ecologist, founding father of fish-boat science—also happens to be one of Eddy Carmack’s heroes.
At three points along our route (I’ve been furnished with a map, one far more detailed than the one Curtis Ebbesmeyer gave me), I am to fetch from the Louis’s wet lab one of three cardboard boxes. Inside each of these boxes are forty-eight corked beer bottles, all carefully numbered. Inside each bottle is a form letter addressed to beachcombers. “This bottle you have just found was dropped from the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker that travels the Arctic Ocean from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia,” the letter reads. “We have received reports from all around the world.” This year a freckle-faced, frizzy-haired fifteen-year-old oceanography enthusiast named Bonita LeBlanc is assisting Carmack with the project. She collected the bottles from a Canadian brewer. She spent weeks corking and sealing them. Before sealing them she recruited Nova Scotian schoolchildren to illuminate the letters in crayon and, if they wished, to add their own messages—messages like, “Bonjour, je m’appelle Mélanie Maillet. J’ai 12 ans et je joue la flûte, le piano, et le violon.” (Personal touches, especially those of schoolchildren, increase the response rate, Carmack has found.) Unfortunately for Bonita LeBlanc, minors aren’t permitted to travel aboard Coast Guard ships—unfortunate for her, good for me. I’m her substitute, her proxy. From the stern of the Louis, I am to lob the bottles overboard and record assorted data—latitude, longitude, bottle numbers, time—in a logbook. It should be an easy job, but after my lackluster performance on the Knorr, I’m already anticipating ways in which I might mess it up—sleep through my alarm, send a box of bottles tumbling down a flight of slippery stairs or a bottle hurtling into a bulwark.
In return for my bottle-tossing services, I get to remain aboard the Louis for the voyage’s second leg, which will take us from Resolute even deeper into the labyrinth, to the Canadian Arctic’s sanctum sanctorum—a town called Cambridge Bay. A few weeks ago, late one night in Manhattan, I looked up Cambridge Bay in my Atlas of the World. There it was, 2,000 miles due north of Denver,
Colorado, 1,444 nautical miles south of the North Pole, 3,139 nautical miles from the site of the toy spill, a little dot on the south coast of Victoria Island, at the very heart of the Northwest Passage.
Much as, seated in a taxiing jumbo jet, you can sense the precise moment when the wheels lift from the tarmac and the big steel machine takes improbably to the air, so too you can sense, standing on the bridge of an icebreaker—or for that matter at the taffrail of a ferry, or on the deck of a research vessel, or in the copilot’s seat of a homebuilt cabin cruiser—that moment when, loosed from the bollards, a boat or ship goes adrift. Even in calm seas, you can feel it, the sensation of float.
Under hazy skies—the provisions all stowed, the safety drills all conducted, the gangway raised—the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent departs. Up on the bridge, officers stand before levers and buttons and instruments and computer screens. The quartermaster sits at the helm, beside the gyro, a compass encased in a glass sphere. I stand before the windows, a paleochemist named Robie Macdonald to my left, and to my right, Captain Marc Rothwell, looking appropriately nautical in a navy blue sweater with gold epaulets. Neale Maude, the Australian cameraman, is shooting footage, panning this way and that. Over Maude’s shoulder, his soundman, Daniel O’Connor, a lanky guy with a splendidly Victorian mustache, is holding up what looks like a feather duster on a stick, a gray, furry microphone.
Captain Rothwell radios the engine room and commands the engineers to test the bubblers. The bubblers are nozzles spaced along onethird of the Louis’s hull. Icebreakers were invented about 150 years ago but only perfected in the last century. Mariners aboard the earliest models discovered that broken ice adheres to the cold steel of a ship like glue. Bubblers, Captain Rothwell tells me, “put a little air under the ice.” The air, like grease, makes the ice slip past.
Over the radio, from the engine room, four decks down, crackles the voice of an engineer: “Bubbles, roger, bubbles.” A moment later, the bubblers fire up, screaming. From the bridge they sound like a choir of damned souls.
“And that’s the end of the first period,” one mariner says.
“The Canadiens are winning!” another adds. (The Canadiens, evidently, are an ice-hockey team.)
The Louis’s helicopter, parked until now onshore, comes flying out, and Neil Maude swivels in its direction. The pilot, Chris Swannell, circles the ship then nimbly sets his pretty red mechanical dragonfly onto the helipad. Once word arrives from the hangar deck that the helicopter has been safely stowed inside its hangar, away we steam. The industrial districts of Halifax pass by.
By nightfall, we are out on the high Atlantic, making sixteen knots, and by first light, we’ve reached the subpolar front. There, where the warm water of the Gulf Stream meets the cold air flowing out of the Arctic, thick fog banks form. It’s like steaming through a cloud. Our speed drops to 13.9 knots. Visibility drops almost to zero. Every three minutes, the foghorn of the Louis bellows out its two-tone song.
Late the following morning, the fog clears and there, to port, is the pale, mostly barren Labrador coast. Up on the bridge, I talk to Dave Fifield, the expedition’s ornithologist, who is conducting a census of seabirds, one long-term aim of which is to assess the impact of global warming on populations and migration. To take a census of seabirds, what you do is station yourself in front of the thick windows, a pair of binoculars at hand, a pair of hiking boots on your feet, a pair of jeans on your legs, a pair of glasses on your face, a pair of ornithological field guides perched on the windowsill beside you, and spend all your waking hours gazing out at the ocean. And most of the time all you see are the same gray waves. The same encircling horizon. The same wedge of bow, pitching up and down, ever onward. Then, every so often, you spy a seabird and scribble something down in your logbook.
Considering myself an amateur bird-watcher of sorts, having gone bird-watching in the annals of folklore and myth, I borrow the second mate’s binoculars, stored in a little box under the window, and give it a try. In the Strait of Belle Isle, with both Newfoundland and Labrador close by, seabirds are not uncommon. Before long, one appears to starboard, swooping down, skimming the waves, foraging for plankton and squid. Fifield’s trained eyes spot it first. It has a snow-white underbelly, a dove-gray back. If forced to guess, I’d call it a gull. “Fulmar,” Fifield says, and notes it in his log. A northern fulmar, to be exact.33
“The thing to distinguish fulmars from gulls is the wing stroke,” he explains. “The gull will flap its wings slowly and continuously. A fulmar will hold its wings straight out and go flap, flap, flap—glide; flap, flap, flap—glide.” As he speaks, the fulmar demonstrates the accuracy of this description. There it goes, three quarter notes of flapping and then, wings locked, a long, whole note of glide, the waves sparkling beneath it. Although I have no use for such ornithological information, I admire it. I’d like to be able to read all the world so closely; to distinguish fulmars from gulls not by their coloring but by the subtleties of their aerodynamical styles.
In addition to fulmars and gulls, we spy gannets, and black-legged kittiwakes, and storm petrels. But no ducks. No plastic ducks. No real ones either. Ducks do frequent Arctic and subarctic waters. In fact many of the earliest and bravest Arctic explorers were fortuneseeking prospectors who went in search not of silver and gold but of ducks, eider ducks. Fowlers, these feather hunters were called. Female eider ducks line their nests with breast feathers—known to those shopping for an excellent parka or an excellent quilt as eiderdown. The plumage of eider ducks, whether newborn or juvenile, male or female, is never yellow. The females are brown. The striking black-and-white patterning of the males makes them recognizable from afar. Like the northern fulmar, the eider duck nests on Arctic cliffs. Eider ducks are by nature docile and defenseless birds. Hence their preference for cliffs.
To harvest eiderdown, you had to rappel down on a braided seal-hide rope, coax the mother duck from her nest, and then, dangling hundreds of feet above the icy, rocky surf, plunder her feathers, pocketing a few of her pale green eggs for tomorrow’s breakfast, being sure to leave at least one, so that she would pluck more feathers from her breast, which you could come back to harvest later. Then you’d wad the harvested feathers into balls and lob these down to a boat pitching around in the rocky shallows below. Fowling was a perilous and often fatal form of avian husbandry that speaks both to the magically insulating properties of eiderdown, properties the manufacturers of synthetic down have attempted to simulate, and to the desperation and courage of fowlers, of whom one nineteenth-century journalist wrote, “We who have been brought up in comparative ease and luxury can scarcely picture to ourselves a more wretched lot than that of these poor islanders, compelled to undergo such toils, and expose themselves to so great dangers, for acquiring the mere necessaries of life.”
“Minke whale,” Dave Fifield says, pointing to port. As soon as I spot the black fin, it disappears. Ten seconds later it surfaces again, this time directly ahead of us, at twelve o’clock. Then ten seconds later it’s to starboard, at two o’clock, headed south. Then it’s gone. Then we are emerging from the Strait of Belle Isle into the frigid waters of the Labrador Sea, where for all I know an Irminger Ring is churning secretly beneath us, a yellow float or a sun-bleached duck caught in its watery coils. The next day, after passing through a gale-force storm, we’re farther north than I’ve ever been.
THE UNKNOWN NORTH
In 2008, a British cell phone company launched an ad campaign inspired by the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea. There were print ads, billboards, television spots, all of which prominently featured ducks—yellow, of the classic sort, with clownish lips and cherubic cheeks and that innocent look of wonderment in their eyes—drifting merrily along through a digitally enhanced landscape of glaciers, icebergs, dark-blue water, sky-blue skies.
It’s a compelling image, at once ironic and enchanting. After many lucubratory hours spent in spellbound contemplation, I am prepared to hazard an interpretation of the ima
ge’s magic: The rubber duck is an icon of childhood, and of hygiene, and of domesticity, whereas the Arctic—or at least the Arctic of the mind, the Arctic as those of us who’ve spent our lives in temperate latitudes tend to imagine it—is everything that the rubber duck is not, the ultimate Ultima Thule, the most otherworldly place that is in fact of this world. The place where, before the space age began, virile men went to test their manhood, or, failing the test, to die.