Arctic Obsession. Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

      A polar bear attack on one of Barents’s crew members during his second expedition into Arctic waters. His frightened colleagues reacted at first by running away, but soon returned and found the animal “devouring the man … the beare bit his head in sunder and sucked out his blood.”

      Consider also the likes of the Dutchman, Willem Barents, “the most distinguished martyr to Arctic investigation,” who more than two centuries before Franklin set out no less determinedly in the opposite direction, to uncover the Northeast Passage. And like Sir John, he too made three journeys, on the last of which his small vessel became decisively ice-bound. The crushing packs continued to press, and eventually the vessel was heaved up like a toy and broken beyond repair. Barents and his tiny crew came ashore and with no small effort constructed a shelter from material of the wrecked ship. They thus become the first Europeans to pass an entire Arctic winter — long, dark days in constant fear of intruding polar bears. Once, the horrified crew witnessed such a beast attacking and killing one of their numbers and then gorging itself on brain matter that spilled from the split skull. Some of the crew returned home to tell the tale of the incredible adventures, but others, Barents included, forfeited their lives in futile missions.

      One of the most compelling tales of man’s resourcefulness and endurance in the Arctic is that of the four Pomori hunters who in 1741 found themselves accidental castaways on one of the Arctic’s most inhospitable islands, in Spitzbergen. For six years they managed to survive in isolation on what little they happened to have carried originally: the clothes on their backs, a musket and twelve rounds of ammunition, a knife, an axe, a small tea kettle, a tinderbox, twenty pounds of flour, and a pouch of tobacco. That and later, a hunk of driftwood which had washed ashore — providentially, with a spike driven through. What sort of men were these, and what force was within them that allowed for survival?

      Franklin, Barents, and Kennan: three among scores of others who over the centuries answered the call of the North. These valiants came from England, Russia, United States, and Denmark, from Norway, Sweden, and Canada, from Germany, Italy, and Hungary. Most were spurred on in search of fame and fortune while others, by hopes of discovery or simply through a sense of adventure. However one might view them, they were all outsiders not belonging to the Arctic, interlopers really. These Europeans form one of two stout threads that are woven into the fabric of Arctic history. The other thread finds its strength in the scattering of indigenous peoples who arrived to those far northlands centuries before any European and settled there — the Inuit of Canada and Greenland, Aleuts of Alaska, Yakut and Chukchi of Siberia or Lapps of Scandinavia, to name but a few. It was their homeland that suffered European incursion, but it was they who ultimately showed many of the outsiders how to cope with those inhospitable environs. These were the children of the Arctic Siren, who smiled benevolently upon them. Two distinctive threads that share a commonality — their histories are equally framed in display of courage and stubbornness, in conquest and failure, and in death and survival.

      So, for starters, how to define the region known as the Arctic? Where does it begin and end and what exactly is the North Pole, the so-called “top of the world”? Simply put, the pole is that point on the surface of the northern hemisphere through which passes the tilted axis of earth’s rotation. This geographic North Pole is not to be confused with the magnetic North Pole, the globe’s constantly-moving point where the earth’s magnetic field tips vertically downward and from which the compass finds its bearing.

      Strictly speaking, anyone laying claim to having stood at the pole is in error for, as we have seen, such person was positioned some four kilometeres above it, on the ice-covered ocean surface. Of the world’s five oceans, the Arctic is the smallest, yet in linear terms from one shore to the opposite, distances exceed 3100 miles. The nearest landfall from the pole is the obscure island of Kaffeklubben 440 miles away, off the coast of Greenland. Had the same claimant been challenged to point east or west, he would have been unable to do so, for at the pole all directions point south. Had the adventurer looked directly above at the night sky, he would have found the most telling celestial body in the northern hemisphere, Polaris, or the North Star. From ancient times, astronomers and navigators took their bearings from this apparently stationary star, around which the night sky seems to revolve. The star is also known as “the Great Bear,” and the word for bear in Greek is arktos — hence, “arctic”.