By Corey Sandler
We’ve made it to August, usually the hottest month of the year in the part of the world we call home base.
But my mind keeps drifting back to mid-June when our ship was swarmed by icebergs in and around Greenland.
Ships and icebergs are not natural buddies. It was, of course, a large chunk of ice–almost certainly moving in the East Greenland Current–that brought about a night to remember for the S.S. Titanic near midnight on April 14, 1912.
Today, modern ships have satellite monitoring, radar, radio reports, and GPS and other technologies that pinpoint location to within a few feet. And in our case, we also brought aboard two Danish ice pilots who knew the local waters like the back of their refrigerator-freezer.
But we’ll get to the icebergs in next month’s blog post. I promise.
First, let’s resume our voyage from the top of the mainland of Norway to the last significant piece of occupied land short of the North Pole.
I know this part of the world pretty well; I spent several years researching my book about the four known voyages of Henry Hudson and in the process I made several voyages–on a much more comfortable vessel than the one captained by Hudson–to the Svalbard archipelago which reaches to 81 degrees North latitude.
My role on this trip was as a featured speaker on a luxury cruise line and one of the talks I gave was about Hudson. At the conclusion of the talk, I told guests I would be heading up to the ship’s navigation bridge to give commentary as we made a sail-by of Bear Island.
When Hudson and the other explorers of the 17th century were headed north to Svalbard in search of a passage to Japan and Asia they were navigating with only the most basic of instruments.
They had a compass which could tell them the direction of the Magnetic North Pole, although the further north they went the less valuable a compass becomes. At the top of the world, every direction becomes north.
Sextants and astrolabes had been in use by mariners for centuries, but there is a huge problem in using them in the summertime of the far north: the sun never sets and the stars are not visible. The Midnight Sun is a very disorienting experience.
GPS? Satellites? Radio? Radar? Nope.
All that Hudson had were some very crude, mostly inaccurate hand-drawn charts and some written orders: sail out of London on the River Thames, cross over to find Norway and then head North from its top. And then: look for the unusual signpost in the middle of the Arctic Sea.
The Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz had noted the island on his voyage in 1596, and now Hudson was in the same waters in 1607.
That signpost is Bear Island, at 74 degrees North. It is a strange place, a big rock in the middle of nowhere with an instantly recognizable feature, a large pointed rock at its bottom like a finger pointed upward.
The Dutch gave it a name: Stappen, (Step) a 625-foot-tall needle that can’t be missed. The instructions: find Bear Island, and then continue north and you’ll arrive at Svalbard.
That’s what I told the guests on Viking Mars before I went to the Bridge.
And this is more-or-less what we saw:
The signpost in the middle of the Arctic Sea was there. We could see it on the ship’s radar, and we could feel its presence. But the fog in June–a combination of cool air over a finger of the warmer Gulf Stream, or warmer air over the still-cold ocean–gave us a complete and total whiteout.
For the record, here is what the island looks like in a photo I took on a previous, luckier voyage:
Two days later we made landfall in Svalbard at the only significant settlement in the islands, Longyearbyen.
The town was given its name by the un-modest American John Munro Longyear, who first visited Svalbard in 1901 aboard one of the first cruise ships. Longyear, already very wealthy from iron ore and other mineral deposits he exploited in the American Midwest, saw industrial-scale whaling stations in Svalbard boiling whale blubber in trypots that were fired by coal.
Longyear returned in 1906 and bought up the majority of the coal mine claims in the islands at the top of the world.
For centuries, Svalbard was Terra Nullius, a no-man’s land. Since the 1920 Treaty of Svalbard, the archipelago has been under the sovereignty of Norway. But any of the signatories of the treaty have the right to send their citizens their and to engage in trade and mining. Russia still maintains several small communities on the main island of Spitsbergen including a few small mines.
The isolation and cold of Svalbard also brought about the establishment of another strange operation: The Global Seed Vault, also known colloquially as The Doomsday Vault.
Contained within an excavated shaft in a mountainside just outside of Longyearbyen, the vault holds millions of seeds sent there by nations around the world. The idea is to preserve plants of all sorts for the future in the event of climatic or other disasters.
Next month: icebergs off Greenland and sunrise over the isle of Manhattan.
All text and photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you want to obtain a copy of one of my photographs for personal or commercial use, please contact me using the link on this page.
If you’d like to order a copy of my book, “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” you can obtain a Kindle or PDF version by clicking here: HENRY HUDSON DREAMS AND OBSESSION
Or if you would prefer to purchase a printed book in hardcover or paperback (personally autographed if you’d like) please send me an email for details. Click here to contact me.
