“I'm thinking about the little captain on the bridge up there,” says Lukas. “He no longer sails a ship. He no longer exercises any authority. He's just a link in the coupling that transmits impulses to a complex mechanism.”
Lukas is leaning against the railing of the bridge wing. In front of the bow of the
Kronos
a skyscraper of red polyenamel grows out of the sea. It looms over the foredeck and well beyond the tops of the masts. If you tip your head way back you can see that somewhere high in the gray sky even this phenomenon comes to an end. It's not a building; it's the stern of a supertanker.
When I was a child in Qaanaaq in the late fifties and early sixties, even the European clock moved relatively slowly. Changes occurred at a rate that allowed people time to register a protest against them. This rebellion first took form in the concept of the “good old days.”
Nostalgia for the past was then a completely new feeling in Thule. Sentimentality will always be man's first revolt against development.
The times have made this reaction obsolete. Now a different kind of protest is needed than the lachrymose mourning for native soil. Things are happening so rapidly now that at any moment the present we're living in will be the “good old days.”
“For these ships,” says Lukas, “the rest of the world doesn't exist anymore. If you meet them on the open sea and try to raise them on the VHF to exchange weather reports and positions, or to ask about the ice conditions, they won't answer. They don't even have their radio on. When you displace 340,000 cubic yards of water and produce horsepower like a nuclear reactor and have a computer as big as an old-fashioned ship's chest to calculate your course and speed and maintain them or diverge from them slightly if necessary, then your surroundings cease to interest you. The only thing left in the world is your departure point and your destination and who's paying you when you reach it.”
Lukas has lost weight. He has started smoking.
He might be right. One of the syndromes of development in Greenland is that everything seems to have happened recently. The Danish Navy's new heavily armed, high-speed inspection ships were recently introduced. The vote to join the Common Market and the narrow majority to withdraw as of January 1, 1985. Not long ago the Defense Ministry restricted entry permits to Qaanaaq for military reasons. And at the spot where we're now standing, everything has been newly built. The large floating oil platform, the
Greenland Star
, outside of Nuuk, consists of 25,000 linked metal pontoons anchored to the sea floor 2,500 feet below us. A quarter of a mile of desolate, windblown, green-painted metal, ugly as sin, twenty sea miles from the coast. “Dynamic” is the word the politicians use.
It has all been created with the goal of coercion in mind.
Not the coercion of Greenlanders. The presence of the army and the direct violence of civilization are almost at an end in the Arctic. It's no longer necessary for development. The liberal appeal to greed in all its aspects is sufficient today.
Technological culture has not destroyed the peoples of the Arctic Ocean. Believing that would be to think too highly of culture. It has simply acted as a catalyst, a cosmic model for the potentialâwhich lies in every culture and every human beingâto center life around that particularly Western mixture of greed and naivete.
What they want to coerce is the Other, the vastness, that which
surrounds human beings. The sea, the earth, the ice. The complex stretched out in front of us is an attempt to do that.
Lukas's face is haggard with distaste.
“Previously, up until 1992, there was only Polar Oil at Færingehavn. A little place. A communications station and a fish cannery on one side of the fjord. The plant on the other. Managed by the Greenland Trading Company. We could dock stern-fast, up to 50,000 tons. When we got the floating hoses out we would go ashore. There was only one building for living quarters, a galley, and a pumphouse. It smelled of diesel. Five men ran the whole place. We always had a gin-and-tonic with the manager in the galley.”
This sentimental side of Lukas is new to me.
“That must have been nice,” I say. “Did they have clogging and concertinas, too?”
His eyes grow narrow.
“You're wrong,” he says. “I'm talking about power. And about freedom. In those days the captain was the highest authority. We went ashore, and we took the crew along with us, except for the anchor watch. There was nothing at Færingehavn. It was just a desolate, godforsaken place between GodthÃ¥b and FrederikshÃ¥b. But in the midst of that nothingness, you could take a walk if you wanted to.”
He gestures toward the complex of pontoons in front of us, and toward the distant aluminum barracks.
“Here they have three tax-free shops and regular helicopter service to the mainland. There's a hotel and a diving station. A post office. Administrative offices for Chevron, Gulf, Shell, and Exxon. In two hours they can put together a landing strip that can handle a small jet. The gross tonnage of that ship in front of us is 125,000 tons. There is development and progress here. But no one is allowed ashore, Jaspersen. They come on board if you want anything. They check off your requests on a list, and they bring a portable chute and load your order on board. If the captain insists on going ashore, a couple of security officers show up with a landing bridge and hold his hand until he's back on board. They say it's because of the danger of fire. Because of the risk of sabotage.
They say that when the piers are full, there are 250 million gallons of oil here.”
He searches for a new cigarette, but the pack is empty.
“That's the nature of centralization. Under these conditions the shipmasters have virtually disappeared. Seamen don't exist at all.”
I'm waiting. He wants something from me.
“Were you hoping to go ashore?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Even if this was your only chance? If this was the end of the line? If we only had the return trip left?”
He wants to find out how much I know.
“We're not taking on any cargo,” I say. “We're not unloading anything. This is nothing but a rest stop. We're waiting for something or other.”
“You're guessing.”
“No,” I say, “I know where we're going.”
His body is still relaxed. But now he's on guard. “Tell me.”
“If I do, you have to tell me why we're docked here.”
His complexion doesn't look robust. It's quite pale and chapped in the relatively dry air. He licks his lips. He's been counting on me as a form of insurance. Now he's confronted with a new, risky contract. It demands a trust in me that he doesn't feel.
Without a word he walks past me. I follow him inside the bridge. I shut the door behind us. He goes over to the slightly raised navigational table.
“Show me,” he says.
It's a map of Davis Strait on a scale of 1:1,000,000. Toward the west it shows the outermost point of Cumberland Peninsula. To the northwest it includes the coast along Great Halibut Banks.
On the table, next to the sea chart, is the Ice Center's map of ice formations.
“Since November the field ice has stretched 100 sea miles out and no farther north than Nuuk,” I say. “The ice forced farther north by the West Greenland current has moved out to sea and melted because Davis Strait has had three mild winters and is relatively warmer than normal. The current, now free of ice, continues up along the coast. Disko Bay has the world's highest concentration of icebergs. During the last two winters the glacier at
Jakobshavn has moved 130 feet a day. That produces the largest icebergs outside of Antarctica.”
I point to the map of ice formations.
“This winter the icebergs were forced out of the bay as early as October and directed out along the coast with a ridge of turbulence between the West Greenland current and the Baffin current. Even in sheltered water there are icebergs. When we leave here, Tørk will set a northwesterly course until we're free of this belt.”
His face is expressionless. But there is the same air of concentration about him that I saw at the roulette table.
“Since December the Baffin current has carried western ice down to the 67th parallel. It has frozen together with the new ice somewhere between 200 and 400 sea miles out in Davis Strait. Tørk wants us somewhere in the vicinity of that edge. From there we'll be given a course due north.”
“You've sailed here before, Jaspersen?”
“I have hydrophobia. But I know something about ice.”
He bends over the map. “No one has ever sailed farther north than Holsteinsborg this time of year. Not even in sheltered waters. The current packs field ice and western ice into a floor of cement. We might be able to sail north for two days. What does he want us to do at the edge of the ice?”
I straighten up. “You can't play without chips, Captain.”
For a moment I think that I've lost him. Then he nods.
“It's like you said,” he replies slowly. “We're waiting here. That's what they've told me. We're waiting for a fourth passenger.”
Five hours earlier the
Kronos
shifted course. Outside the mess a dull sun hung low in the sky; by its position I could tell we had changed course, but I had already noticed.
In the dining hall of the boarding schools, students seemed to take root in their chairs. In any unstable situation, the few fixed points take on special meaning. In the mess of the
Kronos
, we sit glued to our chairs. At the other table Jakkelsen is eating, introspective and wan, his head bowed over his plate. Fernanda and Maria try to avoid looking at me.
Maurice is eating with his back to me. He's only using his right
hand. His left hand is in a sling around his neck that partially covers a thick bandage on his shoulder. He's wearing a work shirt with one sleeve cut off to make room for the bandage.
My mouth is dry with a fear that won't let up as long as I'm on board this ship.
On my way out the door, Jakkelsen comes up behind me. “We've changed course! We're on our way to GodthÃ¥b.”
I decide to clean the officers' mess. If Verlaine follows me, he'll have to pass the bridge. If we're on our way to Nuuk, he'll have to come. They can't permit me to go ashore in a large port.
I stay in the mess for four hours. I clean the windows and polish the brass trim and finally rub the wooden paneling with teak oil.
At one point Kützow comes by. When he sees me, he hurries off.
Sonne appears. He stands there for a while, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. I'm wearing a short blue dress. Maybe he takes that as an invitation to stay. He has misread me. I've put on the dress so I'll be able to run as fast as possible. When he gets no encouragement, he leaves. He's too young to make a move, and not old enough to be pushy.
At four o'clock we drop anchor behind the red wall. Half an hour later I'm called to the bridge.
“At this time of year,” says Lukas, “there's only one way to get farther north. Unless you have an icebreaker along. And even then it might not be possible. What you have to do is go farther out to sea. Otherwise you'll get caught in a bay, and suddenly the ice will close around you, and there you'll sit.”
I could lie to him. But he's just about the only straw I have left to cling to. He's a man on his way down. Maybe sometime in the near future, he'll end up down there where our paths could cross.
“At 54 degrees west longitude,” I say, “the ocean floor drops off. That's where a branch of the western current turns away from the coast. There it meets the relatively colder northern current. West of the great fishing banks there is an area of unstable weather.”
“âThe Sea of Fog.' Never been there.”
“A place where the largest chunks of ice from the east coast are
carried and can't escape. Similar to the Iceberg Cemetery north of Upernavik.”
With the corner of the ruler I find a dark area on the ice map. “Too small to be clearly marked. It often takes the form of a long bay, like a fjord in the pack iceâmaybe it looks like that now. Risky but navigable. If the journey is important enough. Even the small Danish inspection cutters occasionally went in there, chasing British or Icelandic trawlers.”
“Why sail a 4,000-ton coaster with a couple of dozen men up toward Baffin Bay to enter a dangerous opening in the pack ice?”
I close my eyes and call up an image of a magnified plant embryo, a little shape curved around its own center. The same images that were superimposed on the sea chart on the boat deck.
“Because there's an island. The only island that far from the coast before you reach Ellesmere Island.”
Under my ruler it's a dot so small that it's almost invisible.