Tristan Jones

by Ice! [V2. 0]

  "Yes, but the Maury wind charts indicate a pretty regular shift of wind around the end of June, and I can get to the North East Cape, off Thistilfiord, easily with this southwest breeze. Then I'd wait for a wind shift from southwest to the north, slide around the eastern shore, and be on a nice flat sea south of the island all the way back here."

  I was trying my best to make it sound like a weekend cruise around Catalina Island.

  "But supposing the wind doesn't shift to north; you might be waiting there for a month and miss the short Greenland summer, or at least one precious month of it, and it only lasts until the end of August." He unfolded a chart of the Iceland coast.

  "Well," I said, pointing my finger at the island of Grimsey, sitting all alone in the Arctic Ocean about thirty miles off the north coast, "I will wait here. If the wind doesn't shift by the end of June, then I will head direct northwest for Scoresby Sund from Grimsey!"

  Alpi frowned. "Hmm, and what about permits to visit Greenland? You know the Danish government is very particular about who visits their colony, and it sometimes takes weeks to get all the permits approved in Copenhagen."

  "Bugger the Danish government!" I said, remembering Keanan the Postman. "Anyway, if I clear Reykjavik for Jan Mayen Island and the wind happens to take me into Scoresby Sund, what can they do about it? If they get snotty, I'll plead force majeure and then they can't refuse my entry, and in those latitudes they can't very well chuck me out of the port until the weather and I are ready for sailing, can they?"

  "You bloddy crazy Valisaman. Don't tell anyone I heard that!"

  "Handsome is as handsome does, Alpi."

  "Well, have another sandwich, anyway." He passed the tray.

  The next two days I spent preparing the boat for a fast sail around Iceland, as well as the estimated year in the Arctic. That's where I would be heading if the winds did not shift to schedule. I took in an extra twenty gallons of diesel oil, ten gallons of kerosene, extra cold weather lubricating oil and antifreeze, and a full set of arctic clothing. Alpi introduced me to one of his friends who had returned the previous year from working with a Swiss geophysical expedition in Greenland. Jokki had a complete set of Eskimo clothing, mostly made of caribou skin.

  The suit all together—boots, socks, undervest, underpants, gloves, trousers, and jacket—weighed only about ten pounds! Only the socks were not caribou skin. These were of blanket material, or duffle. The undergarments were of caribou fawn skin, softer, warmer, more pleasant to the skin than the finest silk or man-made fiber. The boots were of bleached young sealskin. Jokki also threw in a sleeping bag, the real arctic kind, with a short-fiber sheepskin lining. "And mind you sleep naked in this," he warned, "otherwise, if your sweat freezes you might get frostbite."

  I got the whole rig for just twenty pounds (fifty dollars then), a real bargain.

  With a good forecast of steady southwesterlies, I motored out of Reykjavik. I had cleared the engine fuel lines of sea water, so that my engine was working well, and I had checked and rechecked all the rigging, running and standing.

  The first hop, of about 120 miles, was to the deep inlet of Arnarfiord, up in the northwest peninsula, and we had a steady, but rough, passage across the wide mouths of the Faxafloi and the Breidafiord. The coast was very busy, with a continual coming and going of fishing craft large and small, so there was no sleep for me on this passage. By the time I entered the Arnarfiord, I was, as I always am after a few days in harbor, weary. I sailed right into the far end of the fiord, along the blue water, with great high stony mountains reaching up either side of the fiord, to where the icefalls of the mighty massif of Glama reach down to the sea.

  I guided Cresswell in a little further towards the shore at the end of the fiord and dropped the hook. The first thing that struck me, in the clear air of the sub-Arctic, was the clarity of vision. The snow-clad peak of the Glama was all of ten miles away, yet it seemed to be only a mile. The second thing was the range of hearing, especially on the water. A voice speaking in normal tones two miles away, on a calm day, could be heard quite distinctly.

  The next morning, early, there was such a palaver and blowing of sirens as the fishing boats took off out to sea that I could not help but be at my breakfast and have the anchor up and the sails hoisted before even the early rising Icelanders were out milking the cows in the green meadows of grassland rising between the Glama's rough, clenched knuckles.

  As Cresswell sailed north, past the twin guardians of the Isafiord, the grey glowering heads of the Stigahlid and the Grunahlid, the wind increased, and with it, the clouds. Low, dirty, black, and menacing. But the weather held below gale force that night, until I had rounded the Horncap, the northernmost point of Iceland, and was sailing over comparatively calm waters, with a good stiff wind, southeast, to make the Hunafloi before dark on the morrow.

  There are two islands called Grimsey off Iceland, one way out in the Arctic Ocean, and the other sitting just inside the Hunafloi, which is a very extensive inlet biting deep into the north coast of Iceland. With the help of the tide, I beat steadily all day until I could slide Cresswell in very cozily 'twixt the island and the mainland. There I rested, for there was not a living soul around, only birds and a few seals lying around on the pinkish rocks of the shore. To the northwest, as I let go the anchor in clear, clean water, shone the ice cone of the Drangajokull, all of thirty miles away; yet with the evening sun shining on the snows almost horizontally, it seemed as if I could reach out and touch it with my hand. My fishing line yielded a great fat halibut that night, but I found it very oily, and the only part I could eat with relish was the fins. It was a pity, because he was a giant, about forty pounds. I boiled up the head for Nelson, and he loved it.

  At sunset, around ten-thirty in the evening, the sky turned a mottled green, a soft, pale green, tinged with brilliant orange over the far-off peaks of the Eiriksjokull far to the south. In the rushes and driftwood washed up on the stony beach, eider and harlequin ducks rustled their wings, while from the Arctic Ocean a low, cold sea-ice fog slowly crept in with the night breeze. This sea-ice fog was so low, yet so dense, that, standing in Cresswell's cockpit, with my head in dear, fresh air, looking down I could not see my waist. It was like being afloat in a blanket of cloud. Above, the stars shone much bigger, much brighter than they appear in any shoreside southerly latitude (with the outstanding exception of Lake Titicaca, I was to find out much later). The Great Bear was almost directly overhead, pointing its tail at Polaris, a massive mammal leading a chubby cub over the deep, dark blue velvet of the polar night sky. Polaris was only about twenty degrees north of the vertical. I was about forty miles from the Arctic Circle. The ice floes I saw were far out on the northern horizon, low and gleaming on the grey green sea, but with the wind in the southwest, they were being held back from the shore, or at least their southerly progress was being impeded.

  I sighted the seaward Grimsey Island on the evening of the fifth day out of Reykjavik, and I was feeling both pleased and lucky as it hove into view through a low-lying mist. I had had good winds, none over thirty knots and all fair, coming from abaft the beam, pushing Cresswell, heavily loaded, at a good rate through the seas.

  Coming into the lee of the stark, barren island, I was not happy with the anchoring prospects. The swell all round the island would not make for a comfortable anchor, so, after a short sleep in the forenoon, I weighed anchor and headed for Thistilfiord, on the northeast corner of Iceland.

  The sailing was splendid, and, making good time through the night, I decided to press on to the southern side of the Fontur peninsula, where we would be protected not only from the southwest, but also from the north. The following day, after beating hard to windward all afternoon and most of the evening, we at last went to anchor in the lee of high land at the root of the fiord.

  I waited there for four days, in a flat calm, until the wind started to ease down from the north. The change of wind was right on time, just like clockwork, and I decided to sail immediate
ly, even though it was night. The four days at anchor were spent resting and tending the gear, repairing a split No. l jib and listening to the cries of thousands of skuas and guillemots nesting on the cliffs, watching, again in delight, the magic wonder of the fulmar petrel's flight. The way out of the fiord was, as I had verified on the way in, clear of any obstacles, and I wanted to make a good fast run south, down the east coast of Iceland before the seas worked up from the north. Once past the Vestra Horn, the Western Horn, I would again be in the lee of the land, with the wind coming offshore and relatively calm seas. Temperatures dropped sharply with the coming of the north wind, and I wrapped up well. Now we were off again, bowling along, with the wind dead astern, sailing fast in the offing of the great bay of Vopnafiord; then, as dawn filled out the sky with light, past Seydisfiord.

  That evening the great rocky plateau of the Vatnajokull, the ancient refuge of the Celtic Christians from the savage, overbearing Vikings, hove into sight, and I determined to make the next day for anchorage under Oraefajokull, where their original settlement had been fifteen hundred years before.

  I had charts for the narrow entrance to the Skeidarafiord, so made my way in without too much bother and anchored behind the island, which almost blocks the river fiord from the sea. I arrived there about four in the afternoon and went ashore, taking Nelson with me, for he had seen rabbits on the shore, and despite his missing leg, the hunter instinct of the Labrador was strong in his blood. I spent the daylight hours of the evening climbing over the rocky ground, looking for traces of the Gaels, but found none except what might have been a flint ax-head. There were a number of piles of stones which, standing alone on grassy slopes, could have been the remains of huts or storage sheds, but there was nothing obvious to my untrained eye. Disappointed, I returned onboard and, after a meal of burgoo and bacon, turned in. It was a warm evening; Iceland in the summer, especially in the southeast, can be as climatically mild as England.

  Early the next day, I slid out of the Skeidarafiord and, with the wind still blowing from the north, laid a course for the islands of Vestmannaeyjar, about a hundred miles to the west. The scenery on this sail was magnificent. The seas were quiet compared to what they usually are when the wind blows the long rollers of the Gulf Stream straight up against the wild shores, but now it was ideal sailing, with a good wind and an almost flat sea. To the north, to landward, the tremendous heights of the inland volcanic plateau stood out clearly in the sunlight against the dark clouds interspersed with patches of blue sky. In the northwest the great, volcanic, snow-covered cone of Hekla rose into the sky from a heaving rock plain.

  During the night, we passed through a fleet of fishing craft, and I was wide awake the whole time. There must have been a thousand out there, fishing the south coast, taking advantage of the ideal conditions. Their engines thudded, their lights twinkled all around, and often, as I passed about two miles away to avoid their nets, I heard them talking and singing as they tended the nets. On one occasion, I even heard the clashing of cooking pans on the galley stove as supper was served. It is always a worry, navigating under sail through a fishing fleet. The answer, of course, is always to make sure that your navigating lights can be clearly seen, yet are not in a position where they dazzle the helmsman. Also, have an efficient radar reflector.

  In the late morning the Vestmann Islands came into view, their high cliffs sparkling in the sun, the green seas heaving around the bases of the cliffs. Green for the Irishmen who, long, long ago, escaped from their cruel lord, Leif Amarson, and, finally starved into defeat by Leif s avengers, threw themselves over the high cliffs onto the rocks below, rather than surrender to the berserk Norse savages.

  Here I anchored again and in the lee, or calm, side of the islands, with a great swell heaving the boat, spent a fitful night. I caught a cod and fried his liver. Nelson had the head, as dogs evidently do not need vitamin C to the same extent as humans. Anyway, he got enough out of the great staring eyes, which to him were a tasty morsel.

  I left the Vestmann Islands the following day—it was too uncomfortable an anchorage to consider staying there any longer, and, besides, the month was passing and the north was calling. By evening of the next day, I had passed my earlier track from St. Kilda, and on the night of 30 June, 1959, the first recorded single-handed circumnavigation of Iceland was completed. It had taken twenty days, with eight nights at anchor.

  As I beat against the northeast wind into Faxafloi and Reykjavik, I reflected on how fortunate I had been that the wind-shift had come so propitiously at the northeast cape. I was tired and determined to rest for two days before making off to Greenland and the north.

  Alpi was on the jetty to meet me. His house overlooked the harbor, and he had recognized the old-fashioned gaff rig of Cresswell.

  "I knew you did it" were his first words, as we shook hands. "My friend Jokki sighted your boat off the Homafiord on Thursday, from his ship heading for Copenhagen, and he sent a radio message."

  "Christ Almighty, Alpi, the bloody sea's getting like Piccadilly Circus these days. Can't go nowhere without someone breathing down your bloody neck and sending bloomin' telegrams—"

  "Not where you're going," he said, mysteriously.

  We headed for his house to scoff smorgasbord and quaff schnapps.

  "I won't enter you in this time," said Alpi. "You've already got clearance for Jan Mayen. Well let it stand at that."

  "Thank God for that, Alpi. All I need now is a heap of forms to fill in."

  "You like writing forms, eh, Tristan?" he grinned. "Yeah, like a hole in the head!"

  She's a tiddly ship, through the ice floes she slips,

  She's sailing by night and by day.

  And when she's in motion, she's the pride of the ocean.

  You can't see her fanny for spray.

  Side, side, Cresswell's ship's side.

  Nelson looks on it with pride.

  He'd have a blue fit if he saw any shit

  On the side of the Cresswell's ship's side!

  The Arctic Ocean song. 1959-61.

  16

  Mysterious, Misnamed, and Misunderstood Greenland

  Aeons ago, when all the continents of the world were joined together, before they started to drift apart at the stately rate of two inches per hundred years or so, the miniature continent of Greenland was directly under what was then the equator. Thousands of millions of years before, when the earth was only one-fifth of its present age, the first rocks of Greenland had spewed forth out of the molten core of the world, forming a nucleus around which the five other vast continents, Europe, Asia, Africa-Australia-Antarctica, India, and America huddled, like young cubs feeding off their mother.

  This one-time hub of the world's continents, now known as Greenland, eventually was covered by an immense blanket of tropical vegetation inhabited by nightmare monsters like the dinosaur and brontosaurus. That this was so is indicated by the unimaginably vast deposits of coal lying under the two-mile-thick layer of ice. The release of the pent-up power of the ice and coal of Greenland could provide the whole earth with energy for untold generations.

  Gradually the miniature continent drifted away, towards what is now the Arctic. By some process which is not yet understood, the nature of the sun changed, and for many centuries the phenomena known as sunspots were very active, shooting great streamers of hydrogen hundreds of thousands of miles into space. This caused a cooling of the earth, especially at the poles. The great Ice Age was upon the earth, and Greenland was covered with a thick, thick blanket of ice. The mother continent of the world was frozen and remained so, entirely, for many thousands of years. It is still thawing out, slowly.

  Once the sun, a variable star like all the others, again calmed down, the Arctic regions began to warm up. Eventually the island of Manhattan, which during the depths of the great Ice Age, with a vast amount of the world's sea water frozen into great sheets of ice, had been forty miles inland, had a harbor once more.

  Around three thousand y
ears ago one of the periodical warm-ups of the world was in full swing, and the Arctic regions were basking under a climate much milder than is now the case. This happy state of affairs continued until the early sixteenth century, when what we know as the Little Ice Age, which lasted about two centuries, began. Until a few thousand years ago Greenland was a land completely empty of humans. Birds and fishes had arrived thousands of years before, with the first warming. Then the animals—the musk ox, the polar bear, the Arctic fox—had entered the country over the eighteen-mile-wide strait which separates western Greenland from the Canadian islands. After many, many centuries, the Eskimos, a hardy race of people who had learned over untold generations of suffering to come to terms with the cruelest climate on earth, crossed the Smith Sound from Ellesmere Island to Etah, and slowly spread down to the south of Greenland, then up the east coast. When the first wandering Norse sea rover found the shores of Greenland, the Eskimos had just reached the southern tip.

  The history of the Norse settlement of Greenland was, after a very promising start, a story of unmitigated disaster.

  Contrary to the history I was taught in school, Eric the Red was not the first Norseman to sight Greenland. This dubious honor belongs to a landless, penniless itinerant who first arrived in Iceland about A.D. 919. Too late to grab a piece of real estate for himself, he called together his companions, checked the hull and rigging of his knarr, embarked sheep and pigs for food, and sailed further west. His name was Gunnbjorn, and he returned to Iceland in 920 with tales of the great shore seven hundred miles towards the sunset, which he called Gunnbjornarker. This was a very human thing to do, just as it had been for Gardar to call Iceland Gardarholm, as it would be later for Columbus to name Colombia, Amerigo Vespucci to name America, Abel Tasman to name Tasmania, and for Cecil Rhodes to call a great chunk of Africa Rhodesia. This is nothing more than graffiti on the grand scale.