It was a long flight. To be heard we had to shout a little over the sound of the engines or draw things on pieces of paper. Somewhere over Melville Island the pilot, Duncan Grant, turned around in his seat to listen. The copilot flew on. Grant began to tell us about the history of arctic exploration, a subject upon which he was keen and knowledgeable. We were approaching Dealy Island on the south coast, where Kellett and his crew wintered in 1852 aboard HMS Resolute. He wanted us to see that, and, farther on, the winter quarters of Parry at the bay now called Winter Harbor.

  As we crossed from Melville Island to Banks Island we looked down on massive pressure ridges, the jumbled, very heavy ice of M’Clure Strait. As we neared the coast, Grant, shouting, tried to get us to see what Pim had seen as he approached Banks Island, when he made a dash from Dealy Island in the spring of 1853 to rescue M’Clure and the men aboard the Investigator. Even though it was July, a different cast of light entirely, you could see what Grant meant and how the event loomed for him as we approached. We all stopped talking. For the last half hour we just looked out the windows.

  We flew over herds of muskoxen. The slanting light was so bucolic in its effect on the hillsides that they looked like herds of black angus grazing in English pastures. We crossed the mouth of the Thomsen River and then circled while West and Dawson surveyed the terrain and decided where to camp. Grant landed on a gravel ridge, where only a few plants were growing—a good exposure of the Eureka Formation. We unloaded their gear and then stood there, just looking around. It was a beautiful evening. We were all smiling with an unspoken hope that their work would be successful.

  Dawson handed me a packet of letters they had written to their families and asked me to mail them when we got back to Resolute. We waved, a mixture of regret and good wishes at parting. I rode for hours with the letters on the seat beside me. I thought about the great desire among friends and colleagues and travelers who meet on the road, to share what they know, what they have seen and imagined. Not to have a shared understanding, but to share what one has come to understand. In such an atmosphere of mutual regard, in which each can roll out his or her maps with no fear of contradiction, of suspicion, or theft, it is possible to imagine the long, graceful strides of human history.

  I thought about it all the way back to Resolute, watching Melville Island and then Bathurst disappear beneath the clouds, as weather moved in from the west.

  1 The world we perceive around an animal is its environment; what it sees is its Umwelt, or self-world. A specific environment contains many Umwelten, no two of which are the same. The concept, developed by Jakob von Uexküll in 1934, assumes that the structure of the organs of perception, the emphasis each receives, the level of their sensitivity, and the ability of each to discriminate, are different in all animals.

  2 In practice, the two methodologies usually differ. The Eskimo’s methods are less formal than those of the scientist, but not necessarily less rigorous. By comparison, Western scientists often fall far short on hours of observation; and they usually select only a few aspects of an animal’s life to study closely. The Eskimo’s ecological approach, however, his more broad-based consideration of an animal’s interactions with many, some seemingly insignificant, aspects of its environment, is increasingly becoming a Western approach. Western science is better informed about the life history of migratory animals, especially distribution and movement. Eskimos, on the other hand, show a marked reluctance to extrapolate from the individual to include all other animals of that type, as Western scientists do. In recent years some scientists have come to learn more than many Eskimos about specific animals. The last generation of highly informed, broadly experienced native hunters is passing away.

  3 So do some people. It is relatively common in the Arctic to meet a person in a village who seems clumsy, irresponsible, lethargic, barely capable of taking care of himself—and then to find the same person in the bush astoundingly skilled, energetic, and perspicacious.

  4 Gravel deposits are second only to hydrocarbon (gas and oil) deposits in their importance to arctic villages. Vast quantities of gravel are needed to prepare airstrips and construction pads because of the difficulty of building over permafrost.

  5 Oodaaq was born in 1878 or 1879 and lived until the mid-1950s. He assisted a number of explorers and scientists, most of whom introduced different spellings of his name into the historical records—Ootah (Peary), Odârk (Mylius Erichsen), Odaq (Rasmussen), and Ûtâq (Jean Malaurie). Oodaaq Island was discovered on July 26, 1978, by Uffe Petersen during a Danish Geodetic Institute survey of regional topography in northern Greenland. “It is a rather small [patch of gravel],” a colleague of Petersen wrote me, “only 30 m (98.4 feet) in diameter and less than 1 m (3.28 feet) over sea level at its highest point. Its position is 83°40´32.51˝N 30°40´10.12˝W.”

  6 Further enhancing a sense of the region’s natural homogeneity is the fact that the native people of half the Arctic, from Bering Strait to northern Greenland, speak nearly the same language. A linguistic continuity like this is not known anywhere else in the world. The mutual intelligibility of Eskimo dialects has facilitated the formation of a political body, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which now assists Alaskan, Canadian, and Greenlandic Eskimos in the settlement of land claims and in their pursuit of self-determination.

  7 Mapmaking in the Arctic presented Europeans with several problems. The season for ship travel, to begin with, was very short, and during these summer months much of the coastline was either shrouded in fog or blocked by ice. Alternately, the same conditions that created mirages distorted the coasts and caused inconsistent readings when the ship tried to fix its own position. The sheer length of the coastline, and the barrenness and ruggedness of the land where survey parties had to put ashore, made this formidable task even more daunting.

  8 A distant body of open water in the sea ice will often cast a dark shadow in the clouds above, producing a “water sky,” while ice lying over the horizon often produces a soft white reflection in the air above it called “ice blink.” The term “sky map” refers to either phenomena or to the pattern of light and dark they create together in the sky. A very discerning eye can distinguish among several sorts of ice blink. Snow-covered land appears yellowish white in the sky. Field ice is a lucid white, tinged with yellow. Pack ice is a pure white. Sea ice in embayments is a grayer white.

  Eight

  The Intent of Monks

  WE LEFT OUR CAMP on Pingok Island one morning knowing a storm was moving in from the southwest, but we were not worried. We were planning to work in open water between the beach and the edge of the pack ice, only a few miles out, making bottom trawls from an open 26-foot boat. The four of us were dressed, as usual, in heavy clothes and foul-weather gear.

  You accept the possibility of death in such situations, prepare for it, and then forget about it. We carried emergency and survival equipment in addition to all our scientific gear—signal flares, survival suits, a tent, and each of us had a pack with extra clothing, a sleeping bag, and a week’s worth of food. Each morning we completed a checklist of the boat and radioed a distant base camp with our day plan. When we departed, we left a handwritten note on the table in our cabin, saying what time we left, the compass bearing we were taking, and when we expected to return.

  My companions, all scientists, were serious about this, but not solemn or tedious. They forestalled trouble by preparing for it, and were guided, not deterred, by the danger inherent in their work. It is a pleasure to travel with such people. As in other walks of life, the person who feels compelled to dramatize the risks or is either smugly complacent or eager to demonstrate his survival skills is someone you hope not to meet.

  Our camaraderie came from our enthusiasm for the work and from exhilaration with the landscape, the daily contact with seabirds, seals, and fish. We rarely voiced these things to each other; they surfaced in a word of encouragement or understanding around rough work done in unending dampness and cold. Our mutual regard was founded in the accomplishment of our tasks and was as important to our survival as the emergency gear stowed in a blue box forward of the steering console.

  We worked through the morning, sorting the contents of bottom trawls and vertical plankton tows. Around noon we shut the engines off and drifted under overcast skies, eating our lunch. The seas were beginning to slap at the hull, but we had another couple of hours before they built up to three or four feet—our match, comfortably. We decided, then, to search for seals in the ice front before heading in. An hour later, by a movement of the ice so imperceptible it was finished before we realized it, we were cut off from the sea. The wind, compacting the ice, was closing off the channels of calm water where we had been cruising. We were suddenly 200 yards from open water, and a large floe, turning off the wind and folding in from the west, threatened to close us off even deeper in the pack. Already we had lost steerageway—the boat was pinned at that moment on all four sides.

  In those first hours we worked wordlessly and diligently. We all knew what we faced. Even if someone heard our distress call over the radio, we could not tell him precisely where we were, and we were in pack ice moving east. A three-day storm was coming on. The floes might crush the boat and drive it under, or they could force it out of the water where we would have it for shelter.

  We took advantage of any momentary opening in the ice to move toward open water, widening the channels with ice chisels, pushing with the twin 90-horsepower engines, the four of us heaving at the stern and gunnels. We were angling for a small patch of water within the pack. From there, it seemed, after a quick reconnoiter ahead on foot, we might be able to get out to the open sea. Thirty feet shy of our patch of water, we doubted the wisdom of taking ice chisels to one particular chunk of weathered pressure ice that blocked our path. Fractured the wrong way, its center of gravity would shift and the roll could take the boat under. The only way around it was to pull the boat, which weighed 3000 pounds, completely out of the water. With an improvised system of ice anchors, lines, and block and tackle, and out of the terrific desire to get free, we set to. We got the boat up on the floe, across it, and back into the water.

  Had that been open water, we would have cheered. As it was, we exchanged quick glances of justifiable but not foolish hope. While we had been winching the boat over the ice toward it, this patch of water had been closing up. And another large floe still separated us from the ocean. Where the surf broke against it, it fell a sheer four feet to the sea. Even if we got the boat over that ice, we could never launch it from such a precipice.

  Two stayed in the boat. I and one other went in opposite directions along the floe. Several hundred yards to the east I found a channel. I looked it over quickly and then signaled with the upraised shaft of my ice chisel for the others. It was barely negotiable to begin with, and in the few minutes it took to get the boat there, the channel closed. We put the prow of the boat against the seaward floe and brought both engines up to full power, trying to hold it against the wind. The ice beside it continued to move east. The channel started to open. With the engines roaring, the gap opened to six feet. With a silent, implicit understanding each of us acted decisively. The man at the helm reversed the engines, heeled the boat around, and burst up the channel. We made 20 quick feet, careened the boat over on its port gunnel, and pivoted through a 120° turn. One ran ahead, chopping swift and hard at the closing ice with a chisel. Two of us heaved, jumping in and out of the boat, stabbing at chunks of ice closing on the props. One man remained at the throttles. Suddenly he lunged away, yanking the starboard engine clear of fouling ice. The man ahead threw his ice chisel into the boat and jumped across to help lift at the port gunnel. We could feel how close. The starboard side of the boat slid off the ice, into the water. The bow lifted on the open sea. There was nothing more for our legs to strain against. We pulled ourselves over the gunnel and fell into the boat, limp as feed sacks. Exhausted. We were out.

  We were out, and the seas were running six feet. And we were miles now from a shore that we could not see. In the hours we had been in the ice, the storm had built considerably, and we had been carried we did not know how far east. The seas were as much as the boat could handle, and too big to quarter—we had to take them nearly bow-on. The brief views from wave crests showed us nothing. We could not see far enough through the driving sleet and spray, and the arctic coast here lies too low, anyway. We could only hope we were east of Pingok, the westernmost of the barrier islands, and not to the west, headed down into Harrison Bay, where the wind has a greater fetch and the shore is much farther on.

  We took water over the bow and shouted strategy to each other over the wind and the sound of engines screaming as the props came out of the water. We erected a canvas shelter forward to break the force of the sea and shed water. We got all the weight we could out of the bow. A resolute steadiness came over us. We were making headway. We were secure. If we did not broach and if we were far enough to the east, we would be able to run up on a leeward shore somewhere and wait out the storm.

  We plowed ahead. Three of us stood hunched backward to the weather.

  I began to recognize in the enduring steadiness another kind of calmness, or relief. The distance between my body and my thoughts slowly became elongated, and muffled like a dark, carpeted corridor. I realized I was cold, that I was shivering. I sensed the dry pits of warmth under my clothes and, against this, an opening and closing over my chest, like cold breath. I realized with dreamlike stillness that the whole upper right side of my body was soaked. The shoulder seams of my foul-weather gear were torn open.

  I knew I had to get to dry clothes, to get them on. But desire could not move my legs or arms. They were too far away. I was staring at someone, then moving; the soaked clothes were coming off. I could not make a word in my mouth. I felt suspended in a shaft in the earth, and then imagined I was sitting on a bare earthen floor somewhere within myself. The knowledge that I was being slammed around like a wooden box in the bottom of the boat was like something I had walked away from.

  In dry wool and protected by a tarp from the seas, I understood that I was safe; but I could not understand the duration of time. I could not locate any visual image outside myself. I concentrated on trying to gain a sense of the boat; and then on a rhythmic tensing and loosening of my muscles. I kept at it and at it; then I knew time was passing. There was a flow of time again. I heard a shout. I tried to shout myself, and when I heard an answer I knew that I was at the edge of time again, and could just step into it. I realized I was sitting up, that I was bracing myself against heavy seas.

  The shouts were for the coast. We had found Pingok.

  We anchored the boat under the lee shore and went into the cabin and changed clothes and fixed dinner. Our sense of relief came out in a patter of jokes at each other’s expense. We ate quietly and went to bed and slept like bears in winter.

  The storm blew for two days. We nearly lost the boat when an anchor line parted, and got wet and cold again trying to secure it; but that seemed no more than what we had chosen by coming here. I went for a long walk on the afternoon of the second day, after the storm had become only fretful gusts and sunlight threatened to break through the low clouds.

  I still felt a twinge of embarrassment at having been reduced from a state of strength to such an impassive weight, to a state of disassociation, so quickly. But I did not dwell on it long. And we would go out again, when the seas dropped. We would go into the ice again. We would watch more closely; but nothing, really, had changed.

  With the experience so fresh in my mind, I began thinking of frail and exposed craft as I walked down the beach, of the Irish carraughs and Norse knarrs that brought people across the Atlantic, bucking pack ice streaming southward on the East Greenland Current. My God, what had driven them? All we know is what we have deduced from the records of early historians. And the deference those men showed to their classical predecessors, to Ptolemy, Solinus, and Isidore, their own nationalism and religious convictions, their vanity, and the shape of the ideas of their age—all this affected what they expressed. And when it was translated, or when they themselves translated from others, interpolations, adaptation, and plain error colored the historical record further. So the early record of arctic exploration is open to interpretation. And this refined history is less real, less harrowing than what had happened to us in the boat. It is events mulled and adjudicated.

  I wanted to walk the length of the seaside beach on Pingok, knowing the storm was dying away. I brooded over the fates of those early immigrants, people whose names no one knows, who sailed in ships of which there are neither descriptions nor drawings, through ice and storms like this one—but so much farther from a shore, with intentions and dreams I could only imagine.

  The earliest arctic voyages are recorded in the Icelandic sagas and Irish imramha. But they were written down hundreds of years after the fact by people who did not make the journeys, who only heard about them. The Norse Eddas and Icelandic sagas, wrote the arctic explorer and historian Fridtjof Nansen, are “narratives somewhat in the light of historical romances, founded upon legend and more or less uncertain traditions.” The same can be said of the imramha and the records of Saint Brendan’s voyage, though in tone and incident these latter are different from the sagas.