Vadim has other regrets about his career. “I became chief mate too late,” he told me. “I was thirty-five. At that age, some people are already captains.” Vadim was a captain just once in his career. He had joined the crew of a Greek bulker in South Korea, which set out for Seattle to get yellow corn. Before the trip began, he had a bad dream: he was naked, and when he looked down he saw that he was a woman, not a man. A bad omen. A week into the trip, the captain said he had a pain in his side. By the morning he had died. Vadim was now acting captain of the ship, and he called the home office in Athens. “The Greeks asked me if I had a captain’s license,” he said. “If I’d had one, I think they would have told me to keep going. Imagine showing up in the U.S. with a body on board? I’d have spent weeks filling out paperwork. I’d probably still be there!” In the event, Vadim did not have a captain’s license. The ship returned to South Korea, a new captain flew in, and Vadim went back to being chief mate.
Vadim has a lightning-quick mind for arithmetic and a fondness for record keeping. He has a folder on his laptop called “1,001 Songs,” containing his favorite songs from all over the world, with not a single artist repeated. He keeps statistics, independently of the newspapers, for the Odessa soccer club, the Chernomortsi, and he sometimes has occasion when he’s on land to send a correction to the papers when they’ve made a mistake. He has a file called “History,” in which he lists every country he’s ever visited, every major canal he’s passed through, and every time he’s crossed the equator. Vadim is forty-three, divorced, and has a daughter in college. He has kept a color-coded chart, month by month since 1993, of when he’s been home in Odessa and when he’s been at sea. The chart indicates that he’s been at sea for twelve of his last twenty birthdays. In most of his photos from home, the chief mate is drunk.
On July 15, in the Laptev Sea, Vadim was in midsentence on the bridge when he suddenly stopped, walked over to a pair of binoculars, and looked through them north-northeast. “Iceberg,” he said. I thought he was kidding. The third mate, Eliseo, had taken to saying “Titanic” to me every time we saw a more or less healthy piece of ice. But Vadim wasn’t kidding. About 8 miles from us, well out of our way but within sight, a giant piece of ice sat regally in the water. It had most likely calved off one of the glaciers on Severnaya Zemlya. Vadim estimated that it was about 65 feet high and perhaps 300 feet long.
We continued on our way through the Laptev Sea. In September 2007, when the ice receded to what was then its all-time minimum, the Northern Sea Route was still very difficult to navigate, because a 300-mile belt of drift ice remained bunched up in the Laptev. But now the Laptev was nearly empty of ice.
Each day we received reports on weather and ice conditions in the Arctic, but aside from that our information was limited. We had no Internet access aboard the ship. The captain was able to send and receive e-mails from a computer on the bridge, and others were theoretically allowed to send e-mails from the same computer, with the captain printing out the replies and slipping them under your door, but none of the crew members seemed to avail themselves of this service. Contact with home was confined to the satellite phone in the ship’s office, which charged 50 cents a minute. “It’s hard without the Internet,” Vadim said. “You don’t know who got blown up, who got assassinated. A few years ago, I came home and it was months before I found out that Yeltsin had died!”
Some of the crew wanted news of their families and called home weekly; some did not. The second mate, Felimon, claimed that he never did. “If I call from sea and there is problem,” he said, “and then I call from port—it is same problem. There is nothing I can do.” Able Seaman Edison Vocal told a story about a friend from a previous contract. The friend had received word from home that his wife was seeing someone else. For several weeks he kept himself from calling—what was he going to do out at sea?—but finally he called. His daughter answered. Mommy had a guest over, she said, and couldn’t come to the phone. Edison’s friend became depressed. He stopped eating. Then he jumped overboard. The ship went back and found him, but that was the sort of thing that could happen if you called home.
The crew entertained themselves as best they could. At six P.M. each day, four of the Filipinos would play doubles Ping-Pong in the gym. The level of play was erratic. The mess boy, Reynaldo Dalinao, the youngest crew member, always tried to slam the ball, with mixed success. Ordinary Seaman Michael Arboleda, whose day job mostly consisted of washing the ship and who was tall and broad-shouldered and always wore a basketball jersey with his last name on it (his cousin is a professional basketball player in Manila), tended to hit the ball casually into the net, then laugh. The star player was the third mate, Eliseo, who used a strange, possibly experimental grip, placed the ball wherever he pleased, and waited to pull you out of position. This was unquestionably the most fun I ever saw the crew have.
Mealtimes were at seven A.M., noon, and five P.M. All the Filipino crew who weren’t on shift would fill up the crew mess tables and eat and talk—though they rarely tarried over their meals, sometimes wandering over to the TV at the other end of the room if they had time to spare. The officers’ dining room was different. Reynaldo, the mess boy, set out everyone’s food—usually some form of cabbage soup, followed by fried beef and potatoes—and covered it with plastic wrap. The Ukrainians came and scarfed it down when they could, almost always alone. At most times of the day, you could find four or five plastic-covered meals sitting on the tables in the officers’ dining room, growing cold.
In the evenings, a group would gather in the crew rec room to watch an American action film, though the Manny Pacquiao–Timothy Bradley fight, which ended in a controversial decision for Bradley, was also popular. The crew had learned about the decision in Hamburg, then bought a DVD in Antwerp. The third mate had seen the fight about six or seven times by his estimate, whereas Able Seaman Generoso Juan had seen it “every time,” which he believed was closer to a dozen. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, all had their own laptops and tended to stay in their cabins in the evenings and watch Russian television serials that they had downloaded from the Internet before shipping out.
At 75 degrees latitude, the circumference of the Earth is a quarter what it is at the equator, which means that one’s time zone changes every 269 miles. On the Odyssey, the ship’s time was at the discretion of the captain, and in a sense it didn’t much matter what the local time was, since the sun never set. But the captain figured that it would be better to adjust the clocks gradually, by increments of an hour, than to move them ahead eight hours when we finally reached the Bering Strait. And so one slowly lost a sense of what time it “actually” was somewhere else. The ship’s time was the only time that mattered.
On July 17, as we passed north of the New Siberian Islands (where nineteenth-century explorers had found well-preserved mammoth remains) and entered the East Siberian Sea, our captain turned forty-five. Toward evening the Ukrainians and the ice pilot huddled in the captain’s cabin for a small party. The captain opened some pickled vegetables he’d picked up in Murmansk, and Reynaldo brought up some bread and cheese from the galley. The ship’s ban on alcohol was temporarily lifted, and we drank to the captain’s health.
The captain came from a long line of captains. His grandfather had been a captain in the NKVD, and his father was a captain in the Soviet merchant marine. Young Igor began his career on a reefer off Antarctica, as Soviet fishermen harpooned their last whale before the international ban on whaling went into effect in 1986. After the Soviet Union fell apart, he’d remained with the old company. Those years were full of adventures, as Ukraine sold off its inheritance from the USSR. While still in the employ of a reefer company, Shkrebko towed an old warship to Turkey. A few months later, the authorities called him in: “They said, ‘You sold a warship to Turkey.’ I sold a warship to Turkey? ‘I was hired to tug a ship to Turkey. Here’s the contract. It went out of Sevastopol port in full view of your military, with all the proper papers and permissions and everyt
hing. I sold it?’” Eventually, there was nothing left to sell. Shkrebko began his first contract with an international shipping company in 2000. He was given his first command in 2006.
The other men had similar stories, which they told when the captain—who didn’t necessarily like other people talking when he was talking—was distracted. They had been to hundreds of ports among them; they had met women from all over the world, had wooed them or paid them; they liked working for better money, for an international company, and with a mixed crew. (With an all-Soviet crew, there was always too much drinking: “At first, it’s fine, but then guys start hitting each other in the face,” Vadim said. “Then they wake up and can’t remember who hit who in the face. It causes problems.”) But they missed the Soviet merchant marine. The pay was worse but the friendships lasted longer. And the crews were coed. There was never any trouble finding companionship aboard the Shota Rustaveli or the Maxim Gorky.
Later that night I went down to the galley to get a drink of water. Someone was watching an adult movie in the crew rec room. On my way back up, I ran into Vadim coming out of the ship’s office. The crew’s satellite phone was in there, but whom would he have been calling? He was estranged from his ex-wife, and I knew he didn’t have a steady girlfriend. The next day he admitted that he’d been calling a friend in Odessa to learn the latest scores of his beloved soccer team, the Chernomortsi.
The Russians, led by Vitus Bering, mapped the contours of the Northeast Passage, largely by land, in the 1730s and ’40s, but it was only in 1878–1879 that anyone sailed the entire route, and it wasn’t until the summer of 1932 that a ship, the icebreaker Sibiryakov, made the navigation in one season. Steel and coal, not high atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, were what initially conquered the ice.
But what was happening now was unprecedented. When Mads Petersen, the cochairman of Nordic Bulk, first sent his cargo of iron ore from Norway through the Arctic in 2010, he did so in September, the month when the ice is at its minimum; he did that again in 2011. Never before had he sent a ship in July. But we were making decent time. And when the Odyssey came back through here in August, there would be less ice. When it came back again in September, there would be hardly any ice at all.
Yet Mads Petersen was the only person I talked to in the Arctic who believed in man-made global warming. The deputy head of Rosatomflot smiled when I asked him about it (“This stuff is cyclical”), and so did my friend Vadim, who thought that the theory of global warming was a Western hoax. Captain Shkrebko conceded that monsoons had grown stronger in recent years and that the tides and currents he encountered were not the ones indicated on the British Admiralty charts, but that was as far as he would go. And the ice pilot, Cherepanov, claimed to be especially tickled at the thought that the Earth was warming and the ice was melting. “So the UN did a study, huh?” he kept saying of the 2007 IPCC climate report, which I had made the mistake of citing. “Well, if the UN says it’s true, it must be true.” I gave Vadim a copy of a book I had brought with me about global warming, but I don’t think his English was up to it, and it lay unread on the bridge until I took it back to my cabin.
Post-Soviets tend to be skeptical about global warming. But there are notable exceptions. Earlier this year, Vladimir Putin hosted a team of scientists from the Vostok Research Station, Russia’s leading research station in Antarctica. In the 1980s researchers at Vostok were the first to extract an ice core covering a full glacial-interglacial cycle, which was crucial for confirming the hypothesis that carbon-dioxide levels and temperature are connected. So when President Putin asked Vladimir Lipenkov, from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute of St. Petersburg, whether the scientist really believed that human-made greenhouse gases were a significant factor in global climate, Lipenkov did not back down. “No one denies that,” he said.
“No, no,” Putin said. “There are experts who believe that the changes in the climate are unrelated to human activity, that human activity has just a minimal, tiny effect, within the margin of error.”
Lipenkov’s answer was categorical: “It is not within the margin of error. If you look at the last five hundred thousand years, according to the data from Vostok Station, it turns out that the level of carbon dioxide and the change in temperature are correlated; that is to say, they have always moved practically together. Right now, according to atmospheric measurements, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is significantly higher than at any time in the last five hundred thousand years.”
In the East Siberian Sea, we encountered a different kind of ice from any we’d seen before. It was thicker and older, and, most impressive of all, it stretched north as far as the eye could see. The ice we’d encountered thus far was drifting along—it had become detached from the great polar ice pack—whereas the ice here was part of the pack, and it looked almost like land. It wasn’t land, of course, and in fact it wasn’t even stable; all the ice in the Arctic, since it lies atop the ocean, is subject to the currents of that ocean and is therefore always in motion. Because of the Transpolar Drift—which takes ice from the Russian side and past the pole, where it eventually floats by Greenland and into the Atlantic—the oldest ice in the Arctic is rarely more than ten years old.
But this system has been here continuously for millions of years, developing during that time a complete ecology, from the algae that bloom underneath the ice and the copepods that thrive on its edge, to the cod that eat them, to the seals that eat the cod, to the white bears, kings of the Arctic, whose great paws have widened over time so the bears can walk on ice that would seem too thin to support their weight. And seeing the ice that is at the center of this ecosystem, we smashed right into it.
We went slowly, at times very slowly. Looking out, you’d have thought we were in a snowfield—it was white in all directions, save for the black-and-red stern of the Yamal. It was now clear that we would make it through the ice. We were just too big not to. Yet at some point in the East Siberian Sea I began to hope that we would lose. Here was a landscape that we were simply causing to disappear. We carried 67,000 tons of iron ore. Add to this about 37,000 tons of coking coal, some limestone, and a lot of heat, and you could forge about 50,000 tons of steel—enough steel for three ships just like the Odyssey. And each of those ships would beget three more ships. We would breed ships like rabbits, and I wondered why. The owner of our ship, Mads Petersen, was in daily e-mail contact with our captain, and one time he called the satellite phone on the bridge to say hello. “Mr. Mads!” Captain Shkrebko exclaimed into the phone, and eventually passed the receiver to me. Petersen asked, Was it a great adventure? Yes, I said, it was a great adventure. And the ship, I added, was a powerful ship, which needed to fear no ice. “Yeah,” Petersen agreed. “It’s a lot of steel.” He didn’t yet know where we were docking in China, but he was pleased that the ship was on its way.
I found it impossible to dislike Mads, who had sent us on this journey as much out of curiosity as cupidity and who was not blithe about the circumstances. “On the one hand, yes, more shipping,” he had said in Murmansk. “On the other hand—global warming.” But I found now that I wanted him to fail, to be turned back, to have to address the next Arctic shipping conference he attended with a tale of woe. It was hard to see how this could happen. The only thing out here as big as us was the lonely iceberg we saw in the Laptev Sea.
On July 20, we reached Pevek, a small, sad port city in far northeast Russia, and parted ways with the cargo ship Kapitan Danilkin and the icebreaker Yamal. With the Vaygach in the lead, we continued eastward, now much closer to the shore, which was hilly, green, and snowy. This was Chukotka, land of the Chukchi. When the Swedish professor A. E. Nordenskiöld, the first man ever to complete a passage through the Northern Sea Route, met the Chukchi people in 1878, he found that they knew no Russian but could count to ten in English. They had more contact with the American whalers who had started coming through the Bering Strait than they did with the Russians. We were pretty far
east.
I spent hours looking for polar bears. The bears were white, and the ice cover was white, so they weren’t going to be easy to see. One night Vadim saw a walrus in the water and took a blurry photo of him. But bears do not typically hunt walrus, which are as big as bears and have huge, scary tusks. Bears prefer the smaller ringed seal. In recent years, as the ice has started melting earlier and receding faster, polar bears have been missing their chance to get on the ice for their summer hunting and have been forced inland, close to human beings, where they have a tendency to get shot.
I was beginning to count the days. I enjoyed not having to check my e-mail, but I wanted a beer and I was tired of the ship’s loose-leaf tea: in the absence of a strainer, the leaves inevitably got into my mouth. Even the ice—so remarkable, so perishable—was starting to be a bit much. “Okay, we saw the ice, it was interesting” is how Vadim summed up the feeling. “But enough is enough.” If it had been more difficult; if it had been more dangerous; if the passage were not already, in some ways, routine, perhaps we would have felt differently. I had lunch with Dima Yemalienenko, the electrician, and announced to him my view that we were just twelve days from China. (This turned out to be optimistic.) Dima shrugged. “I don’t count the days until there’s a month left on my contract,” he said. “So we get to China, so what? It’s just another city. When there’s a month left on my contract, then I’ll start counting.” Vadim, for his part, admitted that when he got home from a contract he usually went to see a shrink.
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