After the Ice

by Alun Anderson

  Then I land at Longyearbyen. A giant factory chimney is the first thing to catch my eye on the bus into town; then I see ramshackle industrial buildings and old docks and lines of wooden towers cutting across the hills. I’ve taken a two-hour flight from the very top of Norway and across the wild sea to visit an Arctic wilderness, but instead I seem to have arrived in a rustbelt industrial heritage park.

  That first impression turns out to be correct. The docks were used to export coal brought from mines scattered around the area by a network of ropeways; the wooden towers are all that remain of them. The valley sides behind the town are still scarred by old workings and enormous heaps of spoil. Longyearbyen grew out of a nineteenth-century Norwegian mining town, although mine tours for tourists are now bigger business than the one small local mine. The yellow apartment buildings I saw from the air were real, too: they belong to a large and active coal-mining settlement called Barentsburg, twenty miles away. The settlement is Russian and the architecture is Soviet, although most of the miners come from Ukraine. The Norwegians have another big mine at Svea, farther to the south.

  The radar domes are part of a satellite tracking station.1 A little farther out of town are large radar dishes used to study the aurora.2 Less easy to spot is a simple concrete structure just outside town that marks the entrance to an old mine which has been converted into a seed vault where samples of the world’s most important crop species are stored against global catastrophe. All are symbols of another Svalbard oddity: the islands are overrun by scientists. Four hours farther to the north by ship, the scientists even have a town all to themselves. A former mining community called Ny Alesund is now entirely inhabited by scientists from around the world (plus, I was to find, a colony of Arctic foxes that live right under the scientists’ cafeteria). Here, among other odd buildings, you’ll find a Chinese research station with an entrance flanked by traditional stone lions.

  There is an excess of wildlife and wilderness here, too. Longyearbyen may be a mining town but the wilderness penetrates into its center. Everywhere there are the bright white flashes of the snow bunting’s erratic flight, Arctic terns mob you aggressively if you step off the road into their territory, and purple sandpipers run around like little clockwork toys, chased by tiny chicks desperate to keep up with their parents. Even reindeer wander about, searching among the houses and old mine towers for patches of green-brown grass to eat. They are probably safer here than on the tundra: signs warn you not to stray without a rifle to protect yourself from polar bears. The rule is that you must unload your gun when you reenter the town.

  I have come here partly to hike in the mountains and travel around the coast to see some of the prodigious wildlife of the Arctic close up, and partly to explore Svalbard’s often violent history and learn how it has led to the strange system under which Svalbard is now governed. It might provide a lesson in how competition and conflict in the Arctic can turn into cooperation—or that at least is the good-news story I was told by researchers who work at Ny Alesund before setting off.

  A good place for a short course in the region’s past and present is Longyearbyen’s new little museum, built alongside the University Centre in a long low building with the fjord and mountains behind it. You have to observe a local custom of taking off your (usually very muddy) shoes to enter. Inside, a maze of wooden floors leads you around exhibits set inside a large hall. Here the view is subtly Norwegian; although I didn’t know that the first time I visited. Later, at the Russian settlements, I was to hear a slightly different view. And once back home, I was to find that several European nations had yet another opinion of Svalbard and the international treaty that granted a peculiar form of sovereignty to Norway. But let’s begin at the beginning.3 I am glad that the museum ignores Henry Hudson, the English explorer who came to Svalbard in 1603 and unwittingly unleashed a wave of death and destruction, which soon spread across the entire Arctic and eventually down to the Antarctic too.4 The natural world has never forgotten him.

  Henry Hudson did not discover the islands, but he arrived here just seven years after William Barents, the Dutch navigator who did. (Although Russian historians say that’s all wrong and Russians were here first.) 5 He then sailed back to London and broadcast tales of the enormous numbers of fat bowhead whales swimming lazily in the islands’ untouched waters. Within a few years, scores of whaling boats from all over Europe arrived. Hudson himself knew nothing of the slaughter he had set in motion; he was already dead. Just four years after visiting Svalbard his crew mutinied and abandoned him, his son, and some loyal shipmates in an open boat in the Canadian bay that still bears his name. He was never seen again. (Unless, that is, you believe an old Inuit tale of a hunting party that found a boat full of dead white men and a living boy who they took away.)

  The fat bowhead whales did not stand a chance against the European onslaught. The whalers killed them, stripped them of their blubber, rendered it to oil, and returned home as quickly as they could. They were there to get rich quick, and before long they were robbing one another as well as killing the whales.

  At first the rivalry was between the British and the Dutch, but they soon agreed it would be more profitable to divide the area up and keep everyone else out. So the Dutch took the area north of the Magdalenfjorden, a stunningly beautiful fjord surrounded by steep mountains, and built a whaling station they called Smeerenburg. Blubbertown, as its name translates, was briefly home to 200 people who worked at giant cauldrons of whale blubber. The English took the area to the south. The French tried to muscle in. On their first attempt to plant their flag in 1613, they were set upon by six armed English vessels and sent packing.

  In less than fifty years, the whales were wiped out in inshore waters. Whaling vessels followed them offshore, and once the whalers had learned how to strip whales of their blubber at sea, they took their ships and their skills to the North American Arctic and on to the Antarctic, wiping out the world’s whales everywhere they went. (Between 1610 and 1915, 39,251 voyages were made in the Arctic to hunt bowhead whales; the peak decade of the 1720s saw 3,001 voyages.) 6 The Longyearbyen museum records how in 1610 an English whaling captain wrote that he found it hard to sail into the nearby Isfjord becasue it was so crowded with whales.7 Standing by the same bay now, I can see only cold, gray water. Scientists in Svalbard told me that they think there are still eight bowhead whales in the area. They can’t be sure if they are the last descendants of Svalbard’s whales or a few strays that have wandered over from the Canadian Arctic.

  Although the whales were gone, Svalbard’s bloody seventeenth century was not at an end. It remained a whaling base and in 1693, the French were back again to chase the Dutch to Sorgfjord and confront them in what remains the most northerly naval battle ever fought.8 I passed by Sorgfjord in August, just a few days after the 315th anniversary of the battle; it is a lonely spot, truly at the end of the world. The entrance to the fjord is quite hard to pick out as it is partly hidden by a curving promontory of low land. Farther back, the promontory melts into a plain which leads in among the mountains and back to the enormous ice cap that covers the interior of Spitsbergen. It is not a place to linger even in August, as the northern pack ice is drifting only a few miles offshore. If the wind changes and the ice edge advances, you may be trapped until summer comes around again.

  The Dutch had set up a battery of guns on the promontory, with forty whaling ships arranged in a crescent formation just beyond the narrow entrance. The French had just two frigates, but a daring commander and heavier cannon. Five hours later, the French ships had each fired around 1,600 rounds from their cannon, captured thirteen ships, and killed a great many Dutch. Some were buried here. A lonely cross stands on a low hill nearby, silhouetted against the snow. It is a long way for two nations to come to kill one another over whales.

  I dwell on this history because in Svalbard the past lingers on into the present, both in its political arrangements and in a way that directly confronts your senses. In Svalba
rd it is cold and dry, and the ground is frozen just beneath the surface. For half the year, it is dark. Decay slows almost to a halt. Where the whalers operated in the seventeenth century, hundreds of graves of men and many more bones of the animals they hunted still remain. Men died in the quarrels between nations, of scurvy, and by the whales they hunted. Some still lie in their graves remarkably unchanged. Archaeologists have found them still clothed in well-preserved jackets and knee-length trousers with little knitted hats on their skulls.9 They have learned much about the clothing fashions of the early seventeenth century.

  There are piles of whale bones too, lying almost engulfed in moss and still gradually giving up their form to the tundra even though they died 400 years ago. The larger bones provide a little shelter for wildflowers that nestle alongside them and pick out their fading shape in spots of bright color. Elsewhere, well above the shore, there are scatterings of ancient walrus bones. It is not too hard to imagine the grim scene. An exhibit back at the museum in Longyearbyen explains that walrus aren’t easy to kill because of their thick skins and even thicker skulls. A blow from a wooden club that will finish off a seal merely makes a walrus angry. Inhuman ingenuity devised long lances to stab the walrus through a weak point in the neck instead. To kill as many as possible, the trick was to attack a colony of walrus from the water’s edge. Unable to flee to the sea across the mounting piles of the dead, the panicking herd would clumsily stampede inland where they could be completely wiped out.

  Walrus were hunted especially by the Pomors of the White Sea, Russians who stayed on in Svalbard long after the whalers had set off across the Arctic in search of bigger profits. Later, Norwegians arrived and began hunting seals, Arctic fox, and polar bears. By the late nineteenth century, Norwegians were killing more than 400 bears a year, many at unmanned sites where any animal that tugged on a baited gun would trigger a blast that killed or more often maimed it (a technology invented in Svalbard and copied around the world).

  The last phase of Svalbard’s history now arrives, the one that confronted me the moment I touched down at the airport: the coming of the mines. A little over a hundred years ago, a rush for coal and minerals began, with hundreds of newcomers of all nationalities trying to establish claims. With Svalbard an international no-man’s-land, that often meant little more than putting up a sign asserting ownership: the museum has a colorful collection of them. English, Norwegian, and American entrepreneurs all opened large mines in the 1900s. The American John Longyear established Longyearbyen alongside the Norwegians. The Russians later bought Barentsburg, where they remain, from the Swedes.

  For just over 300 years the islands had been exploited, fought over, and occupied by citizens of a dozen nationalities, but never ruled by anybody. Nowhere else in the world was quite like this no-man’s-land. Finally, in the aftermath of the First World War when so many maps were redrawn, the Svalbard Treaty was signed in Paris in 1920,10 giving Norway sovereignty over Svalbard. But it is a very odd form of “absolute and unrestricted sovereignty” that continues to connect Svalbard to its unruly past.

  While Norway is in control, all other signatories to the treaty acquire rights to fish, hunt, trap, set up mines and commercial enterprises, and acquire mineral rights in Svalbard. Anyone from the now very long list of treaty signatories—including nations such as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Venezuela with no particular links to Svalbard—can go and live there and start work. Norway has the right to regulate their activities but not to profit from them. Any taxes collected in Svalbard must be spent there, which makes taxes lower than in Norway proper. No one is allowed to use Svalbard for any military purpose and, finally, under a special treaty obligation, Norway must preserve the natural environment.

  One other peculiarity of the treaty matters to some. As I was told firmly on a visit to one of the Russian mining towns, “The Soviet Union was not invited to the Paris conference.” In 1920 the Europeans still hoped the Bolsheviks might be defeated. Although the Soviet Union signed the treaty in 1934, that was part of a larger set of diplomatic moves that gained it recognition from the United States. The Russians still don’t believe the treaty was truly fair to their long connection to Svalbard and its proximity to their shores. Svalbard’s current population of 2,400 is 55 percent Norwegian and 45 percent Russian and Ukrainian, with the Russian government committed to increasing its activity on the islands.

  Still, it is thanks to this odd form of sovereignty that I was able to see scientists of every nationality working happily together at Ny Alesund and to pass Russian mining communities around the islands. Thanks to the treaty, there are nature reserves everywhere and no one would dare think of shooting a bear. And there is no sign of the military, although the islands were briefly occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II.

  So has Svalbard’s history of competition between nations and the unsustainable exploitation of wildlife been transformed into its opposite: a model of cooperation between nations and environmental protection? That is what my scientist friends at Ny Alesund like to think. But as I stayed a little longer, I found tensions below the surface.

  A chat with long-term local residents in a Longyearbyen bar is revealing. Normally I wouldn’t enter a bar in Norway because of the risk of bankruptcy, but the Paris Treaty provides tax-free shopping. Conversations with a representative 0.5 percent of the town’s population (seven people) brought up the same points again and again. Illegal fishing by Russian boats always comes first.

  “The Russians are much poorer than us. That’s why we are constantly arresting their fishing boats for illegally fishing here. They have nowhere else to go to make money quickly, and anyway they don’t believe it’s illegal,” says one part-time fisherman.

  A man who works as a mountain guide complains: “If the Russians break the rules, not much happens even if they are arrested. The fines don’t get paid. As soon as any problems go high up, politicians don’t want to hear about it. Norway is really run by StatoilHydro [the giant oil company], and they need to get a share of Russia’s Shtokman field. Everything will be sacrificed to plans for Arctic oil. Norway is a petrostate just like Saudi Arabia.”

  His companion adds: “We Norwegians pretend to have real sovereignty here but we know we don’t. Instead we use the treaty to blanket the islands with nature reserves. That is the only way we can keep people out and stop the Russians building more mines and roads. It’s a trick.”

  A quick trawl through the local newspaper’s database puts some substance behind these opinions. Sixty percent of Svalbard is covered by nature reserves—and they are patrolled more strictly than in Norway proper. Arrests of Russian trawlers operating illegally in Svalbard’s waters are quite frequent. In one case in 2005, two trawlers were stopped and brought into Longyearbyen, while another just sailed off with two Norwegian inspectors on board. They were later returned by the Russian Navy, but charges of “kidnapping” were simply abandoned three years later.

  When I visited in August 2008, five Russian ships had already been detained that year. Earlier, Russia’s own fisheries inspection vessel, the Mikula, put in at the Russian mining town of Barentsburg. The Norwegian coast guard and police promptly showed up and told the ship to get out of Norway’s waters. The Russian captain accused the Norwegians of violating the Treaty of Paris. He had a point. That 1920 treaty states that signatories “shall enjoy equally the rights of fishing and hunting.” So what is going on?

  Norway’s position is that the treaty applies only to the islands and their immediate waters: the wider 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone (laid out in the Law of the Sea) belongs to Norway because it is an extension of Norway’s own continental shelf. The fisheries surrounding the islands and rights to the sea bottom thus belong to Norway. Russia does not recognize this claim—and other treaty signatories do not exactly agree either.

  In a nutshell, the argument is that when Norway was given sovereignty back in 1920, Svalbard’s territorial waters extended only three miles from the sh
ore. If Norway wants to extend Svalbard’s territorial waters under the much more recent Law of the Sea, then those waters should fall under the terms of the treaty, and all signatories enjoy equal rights to what is there. Norway wants Svalbard itself to be dealt with under the treaty but wants the surrounding waters to belong exclusively to Norway. Of course, none of the diplomats will put it all quite so plainly (no one dares make an on-the-record statement) as no one wants to start a quarrel over an issue that might be better left alone.

  The search for oil and gas in the Arctic threatens to raise the stakes. In 2008, Russia unexpectedly announced that it was planning to send survey ships to start exploring Svalbard waters for hydrocarbons. Jonas Støre, the Norwegian foreign minister, replied with a statement that neither Russia nor any other signatory to the treaty had any right to carry out industrial activities in the area. He repeated the argument that this offshore area is part of Norway’s continental shelf and the Svalbard Treaty is not relevant. Meanwhile Norway’s own oil exploration companies are demanding access to the Svalbard waters. Nations have argued over Svalbard’s whales, bears, walrus, and coal—is oil next? Those survey ships have not appeared yet, but when the price of oil goes up again, no one can be sure. The diplomatic situation is delicate and carefully balanced. Norway is very anxious to keep good relations with its large and ambitious neighbor. As the denizens of the Longyearbyen bar understand, StatoilHydro has taken a 25 percent stake in the ambitious Russian Shtokman gas field project not far away and sees success as key to getting a cut of further riches in Russia’s Arctic waters. Not far to the east of Svalbard, there is that still troublesome and unsettled maritime border with Russia that makes Norway cautious. Of course, Norway has many cooperative initiatives with Russia in their shared Barents Sea, and you can certainly say that relations are at their best since the Cold War.