Arctic Obsession. Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

      To my former students at Bishop’s College School,

       Selwyn House School and Appleby College, in gratitude

      The Song of the Siren

      “And now they saw a firm island, Anthamaessa,

       where the fair-voiced Sirens beguiled with their sweet songs

       whoever cast ashore there, and then destroyed them …”

      The Argonautica by Apollonus

      Introduction

      The Arctic: Who Is She?

      ON BOARD THE RUSSIAN Arctic research vessel, Akademik Fedeorov, and the nuclear-powered submarine Rossya on that bright summer day in 2007, the moods were distinctly jubilant. And there was every reason to celebrate, for they were headed home to Murmansk; their mission completed.

      Following weeks of planning and exhaustive trial runs, the expedition had launched the 18.6-ton submersible, Mir-1 on its momentous underwater assignment in the high Arctic. Eight hours and forty minutes later, the tiny vessel returned to the surface, its task accomplished. After a fourteen-thousand-foot descent through inky darkness of those frigid waters, a “soft landing” had been made on the ocean’s floor — a perfect landing at the precise terrestrial point of the North Pole.

      With their vessel resting on the bottom, the crew went quickly to work scooping up samples of sand, collecting vials of water, and making observations of the rock formation. Artur Chilingarov, chief of the three-man crew, radioed the mother ship above. “It’s lovely down here with yellowish ground all around us,” he said, before adding, “there is no sign of sea dwellers.” The most perilous part of the journey was the return to the surface. Had the navigation been even slightly off, the tiny sub might easily have missed the exact gap in the ice through which it had entered; possibility of entrapment in the Arctic ice sheet was real. All went well, however.

      But the sensational aspect of this risky journey to “a point no one had so far been able to reach” was the planting of the Russian flag at the North Pole, a one-metre-high construction of corrosion-resistant titanium. “If in a hundred or a thousand years from now someone goes down to where we were, they will see the Russian flag,” Chilingarov gushed enthusiastically. A symbolic claim had been made to that significant spot; insofar as the expedition’s elated crew was concerned, the North Pole was now Russian.

      The story of the underwater conquest on that August day made headlines around the world, creating a flurry of excitement in many capitals. Not unexpectedly, the most vociferous outcry came from Ottawa, where foreign minister Peter MacKay condemned the achievement. “This isn’t the fifteenth century,” he thundered. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming your territory.’” In a more reflective moment he later declared, “There is no threat to Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic … we’re not at all concerned about this mission. Basically it’s just a show by Russia.” Nevertheless, the true terrestrial pole had been reached.

      The expedition was a costly venture for Russia, but the country was prepared to assume it in the interest of making a strong statement. Russia is a northern nation and the Arctic is an integral part of its inheritance — beware, those making claims there. Whatever the country’s political and economic vicissitudes since the days of Sputnik, its scientific and technological capabilities remain robust. Russia is not only ineluctably wed to the Arctic, but it possesses the wherewithal to realize its full destiny in those far reaches.

      But for Chilingarov, the passage to that unique dot on the earth’s surface transcended any political statement. His voyage was a personal triumph, one for the record books; he had achieved what for centuries many had deemed improbable. The call of the North had been well and truly answered – the Arctic Siren had sung her beguiling song, as it were, and he had successfully ignored her. Not so, the scores of others who over the centuries found themselves lured by her call, drawn as if by a magnet into a deadly embrace.

      The Arctic seems to forever cast a spell over man’s imagination, with the North Pole being a particularly tantalizing draw. A corner of the world of ice-encrusted shores and unbounded frozen tundra, of endless days or continuous nights and of scarcity and want. A land that is as unpredictable and dangerous as it is alluring and wondrously beautiful.

      Although barely populated, the Arctic is rich in history and tales of its explorers, adventurers, and competitive entrepreneurs are legion. Since early medieval times, man has ventured into those hostile expanses for one purpose or another. The outcomes for these early gallants invariably proved disappointing — mirages of sorts. The passage seemed just beyond the next point, but it wasn’t there; the binding ice packs are certain to give way, but they only grow firmer; the objective will be reached tomorrow, but the tomorrows kept passing by — like chasing rainbows. Some survived to tell about it while others perished and left the telling to their chroniclers.

      The early thrusts were ever plagued by defiant ice, deprivation, haunting solitude, and above all, by unimaginable cold. Listen to one nineteenth-century explorer, George Kennan:

      Our eyelids froze together while we were drinking tea. Our soup taken from a hot kettle froze in our tin plates before we could possibly finish eating it, and the breasts of our fur coats were covered with white rime while we sat only a few feet from a huge blazing campfire. Tin plates, knives and spoons burned the bare hand when touched, almost exactly as if they were red hot, and water spilled on a little piece of board only fourteen inches from the fire, froze solid in less than two minutes The warm bodies of our dogs gave off clouds of steam, and even the bare hand, wiped perfectly dry, exhaled a thin vapor when exposed to air …1

      What