Exploring the Northwest Passage in the Franklin Expedition’s wake aboard Russian ice-class cruiser MV Lyubov Orlova .
photo: Masa Takei
Our experience thus far has been marked by a distinct lack of suffering. But the trip isn’t over yet.
It’s 13:35, September 2nd and we’re ensconced in the glacier blue swivel chairs and plush bench seats of MV Lyubov Orlova’s forward lounge. Outside, the 328-foot Russian ice class cruiser is making 12 knots through Queen Maud Gulf, about 200 kilometres above the Arctic Circle and 2,400 kilometres from the North Pole. We’re sailing back toward King William Island and a key section of the fabled Northwest Passage.
But here, cocooned inside, we’re taking in a presentation about early northern exploration and drifting somewhere between intellectual engagement and an inevitable afternoon nap. Our bellies are still pleasantly full from a four-course lunch to which some of us still add a glass of wine or cup of tea. Our lullaby, tales of the quest for fame and fortune, marked by grand ascensions to glory, falls from grace, and epic, lingering death.
It is this lore surrounding the search for a shortcut between Europe and the Orient that’s drawn many aboard Cruise North’s nine-day Northwest Passage tour. A deep rumbling from the hull below, a glancing blow from an ice floe, reminds us of the harsh polar world we travel through. We burrow a little deeper into our seats and go back to relishing the serious privation endured by those who plied these waters before us.
We don’t need to hear the term from the Germans among us, schadenfreude has already entered the North American lexicon. Conscious of it or not, our current pleasure is most certainly amplified by the misery of the largely British suffer-meisters who’d groped their way to bitter ends here. Sir John Franklin’s expedition being perhaps the most famous. And when we hear that our sister ship, operated by a different company, had run aground a few days earlier, we get a fresh bump of schadenfreude and our own journey seems deliciously more perilous.
But times have changed, and thanks to global warming so have summer ice conditions. ”Six years ago we couldn’t have done this trip as an open water passage,” says Dugald Wells, Cruise North’s CEO, who has joined us on this trip. Indeed, this is only the second summer that this passage has been possible. An upside of climate change, if there is any. Given our pleasant travels it’s easy to forget that the receding ice may spell the imminent end for an unknown number of Arctic species and for the Inuit, many aspects of their traditional life.
Past the mid-point of our journey now, we’ve fallen into a routine of sorts. A typical day starts at 07:00 with the distinctive echoey clatter of the ship’s comms kicking in. Followed by the dulcet tones of Jason Annahatak, our young Inuit expedition leader telling us to wake up. By this point, we’ve developed a Pavlovian response to the sound that precedes an announcement, as it usually means we’re about to eat again or perhaps go walkies.
Today though, it will be more of the former, since we have a full day of sailing to get to our next destination. Something of a relief since our previous days had been relatively full. Most are on vacation after all and the average age of passengers on the ship is not too far from Sir Franklin’s when he set out for his last voyage at age 59. We’d paid visits to the towns of Usqsuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven) and Iqaluktuuttiak (Cambridge Bay).
At each we’d been treated to performances by throat singers, dancers and displays of Inuit games. Some traditions are being kept alive, even as dog sleds are largely replaced by skidoos and some ‘country food’ (wild game) with ‘southern food’ (store-bought). One amiable elder we met, Tommy Anguttitauruq, 65, spoke about the vast amount of change he’d seen in his life. “I was born in a snow house, an igloo,” he’d said, “All my clothes were caribou hide.”
He remembered how his father had once spent two days crouched over a hole, hunting for seal. But working as a translator for the RCMP, Tommy had gone from a nomadic life to one using computers. Or as one of our guides, Liz Bradfield puts it, from igloo to Internet in one lifetime.
In between meals, our time is filled with informative lectures, walking excursions, and zodiac cruises. We nudge our way through labyrinths of turquoise blue sea-ice or stoop to inspect delicate purple saxifrage and the remains of a whale bone sled runner. We tromp, amble, and waddle across surprisingly lush tundra often shrouded by many moods of fog. And I use the little girl’s pink skipping rope in the ship’s gym, in a frantic attempt to burn calories.
That evening in the dining room, between the starter (crab and lobster stuffed tomato, flavoured with citrus and chives) and the main course (beef tenderloin crusted with black pepper in a red wine demi-glace, blue cheese mashed potatoes, wild mushroom with caramelized pearl onions), the voyage’s historian, Aaron Spitzer, spices up dinner with harrowing tales of Franklin’s first overland expedition.
On the Coppermine River, more than half his men had died and Franklin barely survived. They’d eaten lichen, their boots, and at least one, ate an officer. Over dessert (pot du crème), Aaron waves his fork off to starboard. “We should be passing Starvation Cove around now” he says, referring to where the remaining survivors on Franklin’s final voyage made their last stand. He’d lost a few men his first winter. But after his ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, became stuck in the ice for two more, all 129, roughly the same number as are on our boat, had eventually perished.
In our final few days, someone flips the large mammal switch. We’re treated to a close sighting of a muskox, a shaggy, prehistoric-looking creature who lumbers past, as good natured as Mr. Snuffleupagus. And polar bears, the world’s largest land-based carnivores. One day, it’s a classic mother and cub scene on an ice floe. A day later we take multiple passes by one lazing on the shore, it having finished a rather bloody meal of narwhal.
Upon our return to our launching point, at the town of Resolute Bay we get a reminder that it wasn’t only westerners who had suffered in their designs to claim the High Arctic. The Federal government, in a push to establish sovereignty, had relocated Inuit families thousands of kilometres north to this unfamiliar and inhospitable polar desert. Luring them with lies about plentiful game, they’d stranded them with unfulfilled promises that they could return to their original towns. But these Inuit adapted and survived. Now they’ve made this place home and today it echoes with the sound of construction. We ourselves leave reluctantly. Having suffered nothing more than a little extra pudginess, for a privileged view of this rapidly changing land.