In the Ice, South of Edgeøya
Last night we rounded the southern cape of Spitsbergen, Sørkapp, and after our own nightkapp, retired to our bunks. We came up on deck this morning to a different world: mauve and cream sky and pewter sea split by a gleaming white band of sea-ice. We have sailed due east since the cape and are now within the icy waters of the Barents Sea, named after the Dutch sea captain who made the same journey in 1596, but perished in the ice. He died a scary, scurvy, nervy, navy kind of a death but left an account of his adventure which resonates to this day.
As we skirted the outer edge of the ice, peering into the jumbled pack from the safety of open water, a weaving escort of fulmars were constant outriders. But, to the delight of our eagle-eyed naturalists, intrepid Captain Karl Lampe turned his ship into the ice and we manned bow, bridge wings and crows nest. Those below decks could feel the thump and slither of our passage through floating plates of ice. As they cracked and crumpled before the bow, kittiwakes stooped for polar cod between the floes. Pied guillemots paddled between ice pans like ducks in tuxes. In one open patch there was the swirl of a dozen harp seals, surging forward like Olympic swimmers. Then a tiny swarm of dovekies whirred away. And all at once the cry "Bear ahead!": a polar bear right on the bow, surprised by our sudden appearance, slipped quickly into the water and swam strongly away between the scattered ice floes, tilting his black muzzle from left to right to scent pursuit. We let him retreat, still swimming and now virtually invisible among the pack, every seal's nightmare. Our next treat was a walrus sprawled on a floe, which raised a tusked head to give us a bleary-eyed glance, guaged us harmless and collapsed back into comfy contentment. But even walri have bad dreams, of the kind made flesh an hour later. Noticing a dark lump on a level floe to starboard, we slowed to take a closer look: the grim remains of a seal, muzzle and flippers intact, but the body flayed. In the frozen fiefdom of the Icebear, fat is favourite: we were gazing at the abandoned dinner table of a polar bear which had stripped the blubber from its favourite prey, the ringed seal, and left the remains to be fought over by Glaucous and Ivory gulls.
This icy tableau would have been familiar to Wilhelm Barents. But today, four hundred years on, as our own adventure unfolds, we debate the very future of the Arctic ice. What account can we leave that may resonate beyond this fragile, frozen wonderland?
Last night we rounded the southern cape of Spitsbergen, Sørkapp, and after our own nightkapp, retired to our bunks. We came up on deck this morning to a different world: mauve and cream sky and pewter sea split by a gleaming white band of sea-ice. We have sailed due east since the cape and are now within the icy waters of the Barents Sea, named after the Dutch sea captain who made the same journey in 1596, but perished in the ice. He died a scary, scurvy, nervy, navy kind of a death but left an account of his adventure which resonates to this day.
As we skirted the outer edge of the ice, peering into the jumbled pack from the safety of open water, a weaving escort of fulmars were constant outriders. But, to the delight of our eagle-eyed naturalists, intrepid Captain Karl Lampe turned his ship into the ice and we manned bow, bridge wings and crows nest. Those below decks could feel the thump and slither of our passage through floating plates of ice. As they cracked and crumpled before the bow, kittiwakes stooped for polar cod between the floes. Pied guillemots paddled between ice pans like ducks in tuxes. In one open patch there was the swirl of a dozen harp seals, surging forward like Olympic swimmers. Then a tiny swarm of dovekies whirred away. And all at once the cry "Bear ahead!": a polar bear right on the bow, surprised by our sudden appearance, slipped quickly into the water and swam strongly away between the scattered ice floes, tilting his black muzzle from left to right to scent pursuit. We let him retreat, still swimming and now virtually invisible among the pack, every seal's nightmare. Our next treat was a walrus sprawled on a floe, which raised a tusked head to give us a bleary-eyed glance, guaged us harmless and collapsed back into comfy contentment. But even walri have bad dreams, of the kind made flesh an hour later. Noticing a dark lump on a level floe to starboard, we slowed to take a closer look: the grim remains of a seal, muzzle and flippers intact, but the body flayed. In the frozen fiefdom of the Icebear, fat is favourite: we were gazing at the abandoned dinner table of a polar bear which had stripped the blubber from its favourite prey, the ringed seal, and left the remains to be fought over by Glaucous and Ivory gulls.
This icy tableau would have been familiar to Wilhelm Barents. But today, four hundred years on, as our own adventure unfolds, we debate the very future of the Arctic ice. What account can we leave that may resonate beyond this fragile, frozen wonderland?
