At seven thousand feet, our ancient DC-3 seemed to skim over the landscape with unreal rapidity. Clear blue skies and the midnight sun made for perfect visibility. Mountains, dark crevasses, moraines, ancient glaciers, snow — all blended the unfolding landscape into a barrenness of dynamic beauty. Here, melting snow fed streams that cascaded through ruts and gullies; there, stands of dark silt contrasted with sparkling white ice. Expanse, expanse, and on and on … a panorama of pristine landscape and perfect solitude. It’s as though God had indeed secreted this awesomely magnificent place all for himself … and here we were — trespassers.
On the return flight from Mould Bay, the RCMP constable sitting in the adjacent seat let fly with an idle reflection. “An Arctic expert,” he mused, “is someone who has peed above the Arctic Circle.” Were one to take this definition to heart, I qualify, but to lay serious claim to such is no small presumption. I’m merely one of the Arctic’s countless lovers and my fidelity to her remains constant. Above all, I stand in wonder of the indigenous peoples who for millennia have been at home in those distant and inhospitable reaches. I’m equally awed by tales of the early Europeans who brought the Arctic into our world — be they stories of courage and conquest or of folly and error, they were all men of high resolve and wondrous strength of character.
Pausing for a moment at my work, here in our Laurentian cottage, I gaze out the frosted windows at the winter countryside. Snow and ice mercilessly blanket the slumbering landscape while overhead an inverted bowl of darkened sky hangs heavy. Communities of skeletal birches blend effortlessly into the white panorama while pines, heavily burdened by season’s weight, sag in welcome contrast. Gusts of wind give rise to wispy billows of snow. Far out on the frozen lake, two tiny figures on snowshoes plod along doggedly. Outside, the thermometer reads -21°F; inside, it’s warm and cozy. Uncanny stillness envelopes the room, broken only by the gentle flickering from within the wood stove; I’m bathed in silence. Then the soft sound of the wind outside. It seems more like a drone, an enticing sound — perhaps not the wind at all. Is it possible that what I’m really hearing is the soft hum of the Arctic Siren’s beguiling song?
A.S. Troubetzkoy
Labelle, Québec
1
Earliest Explorations
THE EARLIEST WRITTEN record of possible Arctic exploration is that of Pytheas, a fourth-century B.C. Greek astronomer and geographer from Massilia (Marseilles) — “one of the most intrepid explorers the world has seen.” Without a doubt, this was a scientist of notable accomplishments, not the least of which, it is thought, was an estimation of Great Britain’s circumference to a 2.5 percent accuracy of twentieth-century figures. Additionally, he calculated the distance from Marseilles to northernmost Britain as being 1,050 miles, a figure 6 percent off modern calculations. Among his earlier discoveries was a method for the determination of latitude, and many credit him for having been the first to define the relationship of tides to moon phases.
In his book Περίτ ου Ώκαυού (On the Ocean), he recorded the events of a voyage undertaken by him to the far North around 325 B.C. Regrettably, the volume was lost in the seventh-century burning of the Library of Alexandria and all that has come down to us are garbled quotations and commentaries by Greek and Roman scholars. Pytheas’s account has it that he sailed out of Massilia (Marseilles), bypassed the blockades set up by the Carthaginians of the Straits of Gibraltar, circumnavigated Great Britain, and reached a place called “Thule,” or Ultima Thule, a six-day sail north of Britain. What the place actually was continues to baffle scholars, but a number of possibilities present themselves: the coast of Norway, the Shetlands, the Faroe Islands, or possibly Greenland. The most probable guess is that Pytheas reached Iceland, and if he did not actually penetrate the Arctic, he certainly attained a high latitude. His descriptions of the midnight sun and the “congealed sea” indicate that he might well have gotten to, or closely reached, the Arctic Circle.
What are we to make of Pytheas’s journey, particularly as scholars and commentators of the ancient world seem divided on the veracity of his account? The Greek geographer Strabo, for example, made no secret of his contempt for his countryman and he poured derisive scorn on the claimed voyage — jealousy, perhaps? In his seventeen-volume Geographica, penned some three centuries after the voyage, he writes, “Pytheas, by whom many have been misled … asserts that he explored in person the whole northern regions of Europe as far as the end of the world — an assertion which no man would believe, not even if Hermes made it.” As for Thule, he went on to comment:
[O]f all the countries that are named, [it] is set farthest north. But that the things Pytheas has told about Thule, as well as the other places in that part of the world, have indeed been fabricated by him … any man who has told such great falsehoods about known regions would hardly, I imagine, be able to tell the truth about places that are not known to anybody.[1]
Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist and encyclopedist, on the other hand, endorsed Pytheas positively and he wrote of him as an authoritative figure. The commentary in Historia Naturalis is illuminating:
The most remote [point] of all is Thule, in which as we have pointed out there are no nights at midsummer when the sun is passing through the sign of the Crab, and on the other hand no days in midwinter. Indeed some writers think this is the case for periods of six months at a time without a break … Pytheas of Marsailles writes that this occurs in the island of Thule, six days voyage north of Britain … One day’s sail from Thule is the frozen ocean called by some the Cronian Sea …[2]
That Pytheas appears to have experienced the midnight sun is one thing — the phenomena is universal of Arctic regions and affects all of Thule’s nominated locations. Of the place he writes that there is “neither sea nor air but a mixture like sea-lung … binds everything together,” a reference perhaps to the ice packs or possibly to dense sea fog. All told, it is likely that the explorer had come in contact with drift ice, if not icebergs, and this gives Iceland greater credibility in the search for the real Thule. It cannot be discounted, furthermore, that Pytheas sailed the ice-strewn waters of Greenland’s east coast. An impressive journey it was, made all the more so by the primitiveness of the vessels at the time. The explorer’s broad-beamed, wooden boat of two, possibly three, masts could not have been more than 150 tons. Whether he had came to Iceland or not, the point is that the first Europeans apparently reached, or nearly reached, the Arctic Circle as early as about 325 B.C.
It may be supposed that Pytheas’s book and the commentaries on him were sufficiently controversial to discourage further interest in Arctic exploration for quite some time. Subsequent texts by Roman and early medieval scholars for the most part speak of the Arctic in speculative or fanciful terms. A widespread ocean surrounded the habitable world — beyond that, nothing. The polar region was the kingdom of the dead. It was a bottomless pit where perpetual darkness reigned. It was the dwelling place of the Cyclops. The pole was a gigantic magnetic rock rising out of the ocean. It “is a place of chaos, the abysmal chasm.” A place inhabited by people with swine heads, dog’s legs, and wolf teeth. And so on.
A fanciful 1606 map of the greater Arctic region produced by the Flemish cartographer, Gerhard Mercator. The North Pole is shown as a vast rock surrounded by open seas, while the magnetic pole is pictured as a mountain protruding through the waters separating Asia and America. The Northwest and Northeast Passages are clearly visible.
One tradition has it that the first of the medievals to venture into the far northern waters were Irish monks and it is they who discovered Iceland — or, if you want, rediscovered it. One such monk, Dicuil by name, in his book De mensure orbis terrae (Concerning the Measurement of the Globe), written in 825 A.D., tells of meeting up with fellow monks who claimed at one time to have lived in that same unidentified spot called Thule. Their descriptions of the place are vivid, for