They were serious men, their beards spilling over their smart jackets, who all left England between 1870 and 1900, sounding the Thulian mantra, beguiled by the early stories of the far north. For them, even then, Thule was a metaphor for a receding worldâan innocent world, where nature was unadulterated by human inventions, by the cranking pistons of industrialism. Everything was being dragged into the light, as technology moved relentlessly towards a world of rules and visible processes. But Thule remainedâa place where the brute forces of the natural world were so unbridled that they threw up wild entertainments, inexplicable and extraordinary.
And the journey to Thule was a next-best to the Pole for Victorian women like Mrs. Alec Tweedie. Mrs. Alec Tweedie, sometimes known as Ethel, was a second string on the polar stage. She had a fashionable list of explorer friends, Nansen among them, and she waved off Frederick Jackson from Cannon Street Station, when he set off for the North Pole in 1894. Jackson was even carrying a letter when he met Nansen, from Mrs. Alec Tweedie, addressed in waggish style to Dr. Fridtjof Nansen at the North Pole. Mrs. Alec Tweedie had waited for Nansen, looking forward to waltzing around ballrooms in London with the triumphant explorer, as he had promised. Tweedie's Ultima Thule, Burton's Ultima Thule, was a holiday in emptiness for the Victorians, the northern lands a playground for summer trippers in crinolines and smart collars. âThe next best thing to being at the North Pole itself, and far more comfortable!' wrote Mrs. Tweedie, like a brochure. The Victorians in search of something a little extraordinary set off on steamships, preparing themselves for the discomfort of the crossing, the surliness of the ocean, and the inevitable bouts of seasickness. It was voyage enough for the Victorian afflicted with the nature craze, accessible for society types, in search of a retreat from their satin shoes and their long white gloves.
Everything was processed through a wild chorus of hyperbole, every detail of the voyage laced with myth and interest. Feeling the epic past, the Victorians made much of the journey up the coast of Britain, even though they travelled along a tourist trail. They took steamers from Edinburgh. Edina, Dun-Edin, Quebec of the Old World, the Grand Chartreuse of Presbyterianism, Modern Athens they cried, passing out of the port. Adieu, O Edinburgh! they sighed, looking out towards the ocean, the ocean wearing an azure and gold robe, they wrote. Smoke was rising from the many steamers ploughing a path through the sea; smoke was forming a thin canopy, drifting across the pale blue waters. Their steamships were crowded, carrying dozens in a state of misery, making slow progress through the waves. The passengers complained bitterly, finding that their ships had no bath and the food was greasyâand they listed it all, writing it all out in their immaculate diaries: giant tureens of oleaginous soup, fish which could not be kept quite fresh, and chunks of greasy meat. Like an explorer, checking supplies, Mrs. Alec Tweedie provided a list of the clothing required for the journey: a thick serge dress, short and plain for rough wear, with a cloth one as a spare; a tight-fitting thick jacket, good mackintosh, and very warm fur cloak; one pair of high mackintosh riding boots (like fishermen's waders), necessary for crossing rivers and streams; a yachting cap or small tight-fitting hat, with a projecting peak to protect the eyes from the glare; blue glasses, a great comfort; and thick gauntlet gloves.
The steamships passed along the Scottish coast, the passengers were hypnotized by the sea, feeling slightly sick and apprehensive about the crossing. They steamed past Fifeness, past the fjord-like gaps in the cliffs, past a coast fretted into shallow bays, fronted by stunted sandy beaches and vistas of yellow shingle. They stood on deck, listening to the wheezing of the wind. There were ruin-shaped rocks of brown sandstone streaked with white layers of guano. Daylight blazed until 10 P.M., the smoke from the chimneys of the boat obscured the view, and they lost the outlines of the rocks. They stood in the raw and rainy morning, looking at the steep and frowning headlands. They passed the edge of Scotland, admiring the grand profile of the cliffs, their sides streaked by golden sunshine. When the weather was warm they sat on deck watching the sea; when the winds grew stronger they became squeamish and lay below-decks, prostrate but resigned. In the nights they took chlorodyne and tried to sleep, but the lurch of the ship made them nervous; they thought it was about to sink, they lay awake smelling the sweet smell of the bilge water.
They stopped at Kirkwall on Mainland, the largest island of the Orkneys. They visited a curious small museum, where there were exhibits of natural stone knives, specimens of pots, a two-handed scraper of whale's bone, and a human skull with four rabbit teeth. They admired the old cathedral, staring up at the rude and ponderous Norman-Gothic, the red sandstone mixed with whitey-grey
calcaires
. One of the finest remains of Catholicism in the north, they wrote, unduly neglected by strangers. Then they returned to their boats, and prepared to sail further north.
I took the ferry from Aberdeen to Lerwick, on Shetland. Like a belated hanger-on, unpunctual by more than a century, I sat in the bar listening to the grinding of the ferry as it prepared to leave Aberdeen, as the bloated gulls circled above the decks. These ferries are even less picturesque than the crowded Victorian steamships. Mostly empty, at the time I sailed. Rows of quiet corridors, silence slung like a winter canopy across the ship. I was meant to be sharing a cabin, but no one arrived to claim the other beds. I wandered along the deck. A few tourists with video cameras were filming the wash of the wake behind the ship. I heard the sound of laughter, distant on the wind. I sat at the bow, feeling the lunge of the boat, watching the sea. The ship was called the
Hrossey
, the Norse name for Orkney, and it was a lumbering ferry, licensed to carry hundreds in neat cabins, licensed to serve them champagne over dinner in the luxury restaurant, to wash down the salmon steaks. The scattered passengers were those who had chosen not to fly, taking the slow route across the sea. They were travelling on weekend breaks to the austere beauty of Shetland, lugging cameras and binoculars. The church spires and grey terraces receded; the ferry passed through a narrow stretch of water and moved along the wreckage of the docks. The ship moved out into the northern ocean.
In the chiaroscuro hours, a fog swept across the sea, and coiled around the boat. The horizon disappeared into the matted whiteness. The waves were full-bodied, crested with white flecks. But the mist made them monochrome; the whiteness fell on the waves, blurring the distinctions between sea and sky. The ship moved slowly through the swirling fog, juddering to a halt in the harbour of Kirkwall, the town a string of lights, dim in the mist, with the greyness of the fog mingling with the dark blue of nightfall. The night was thick and damp; the mist sank onto the deck of the ship. I watched the deckhands uncoiling the ropes, sliding them onto the quayside. The cars drove off in a long line, their wheels bouncing over the ramps. There was a pause while the cars disappeared into the mist, and the water churned around the ship. Soft sounds came from the quayside, subdued motion, dulled in the whiteness. The engines began to rise in pitch, the walls juddered, and the ship moved out again into the mist-ocean. The lights of Kirkwall faded into the darkness.
The Victorian steamships made a detour to Shetland, so their passengers could see the peat island, the cliffs blasted by gales. There was a possibility that Shetland was the island Pytheas found, when he sailed north from Britain in the fourth century B.C. and brought back the name Thule. A Greek ship might have found the crossing to Shetland arduous, and the mists sweeping across the ocean might have made Pytheas think the sluggish tides had congealed. It was unlikely, because Pytheas seemed to have mentioned a frozen ocean and the midnight sun, attributes not readily available in Shetland, but if you were really determined that Shetland was Thule you could argue that Pytheas had only heard about these aspects and had added them to his story of Thule, spicing up a trip to a rocky archipelago with bizarre elements. More certainly, northern Britain had been Thule to the Romans, when they moved around Britain after the invasion of Caesar in 55 B.C. Tacitus, writing in the first century A.D., seemed to have named Shetland Thule, or somewhere like Shetland. The conquest of the last land of the world was the culminating triumph of Caesar's reign, wrote Florus: âHaving traversed all land and seas, Caesar faced Ocean and, as if the Roman world were no longer enough, contemplated another.' In a satire, Juvenal scoffed at it all, at the relentless marching towards the barren wastes of the north, and at the attempts to Romanize the natives, suggesting that the Britons were beginning to learn eloquence, and even Thule was thinking of hiring a rhetorician. The conquest of Britain was a triumph, the poets agreed, but it brought the Romans to a gruesome place, where the terrible tribes of Britons lived.
The ship moved slowly through the matted whiteness of the North Sea, which the Romans had called Ocean, after the mythical Ocean of the Greeks. The briny sea, the resistant waves, convinced them they had found Thule, when they arrived in Britain. It was near Thule, they thought, that Pytheas saw the sea congeal, and become a thick paste. There was a poem by Pedoâa man admired by Senecaâwhich described the sinking of the Roman Germanicus's fleet in the North Sea, a fleet that had dared to pass through the shadows towards the final shores of the world. The fleet had been destroyed, Pedo thought, by the force of Ocean, a sea scattered with sea beasts. Tacitus agreed: Germanicus had succumbed to Ocean, a sea so wide and deep that it was thought to be the final one, unbounded by land.
On the maps of the Ancient Greeks the inhabited world was drawn in the shape of a dinner plate, surrounded by water. An idea more ancient than Thule, Ocean surrounded the known world. Beyond Ocean, the Hesperides, the progeny of Dark Night, tended the golden apples, and their trees. Ocean spilled out offspring, beginnings and ends; it was the origin of life and the nothingness surrounding the boundaries of the known world, the creating force and the void. A people called the Cimmerians lived a miserable life on the shores of the deep and endless stream of Ocean, near the entrance to the Underworld, their city covered with mist and cloud, constantly under dismal night. One of Ocean's daughters was Styx, the river the dead crossed to reach Hades; Ocean was a force of nature incorporating foul decay and blackness, as well as generation and lightness. In the
Odyssey
, the path to Hades went through Ocean, to a narrow strand where there were tall black poplars and willows with wasted fruit on their branches.
Even after Pythagoras proposed that the earth must be a sphere, the idea of the gaping emptiness of Ocean was not dispelled. Water was a powerful and prohibiting element to the Greeks; they devised maps depicting a vast sea crossing the world like a belt, running through both the Poles, and another belt of water round the earth between the tropics. But there were Greeks, like the early historian Herodotus, who denied the existence of Ocean altogether. Herodotus thought Homer or some earlier poet had invented the name Ocean. It was absurd, he wrote, that the mapmakers added a fiction to their maps, showing Ocean running like a river round a perfectly circular earth.
The Romans believed that nothing could be beyond the reach of their empire, even the strange land of Thule. It was inter-civilizational one-upmanship, thinking they had outdone the Greeks by solving the mystery of Thule. But the Romans stopped too soon, at the first remote land they found in the torpid ocean. As the Victorians sailed through the stormy northern ocean, Shetland seemed too far south to be Thule. It was too much like home for the Victorians, who were sailing north in search of the
unheimlich
âthe German word which means uncanny but which contains within it the sense that the uncanny is anything âunhomelike,' anything unfamiliar. Shetland was a beautiful island of cliffs and peat scapes, but the Victorians found it insufficiently strange to be Thule. They were brutal where Thule was concerned, refusing to let national sentiment intervene in a myth trail. But they were thorough, so they enjoyed the detour, as a nod to former empires.
They arrived in Lerwick, the main town on Shetland; they walked dutifully around the port, looking at the houses with crow-stepped gables. They made careful notes in their diaries. The bogs stretched across the low hills; the snowy quartz-veined rocks shone against the yellow fields of oats and barley. There were willows and maple planes, hanging their shade over the broken ruins of cottages. There were ducks and geese everywhere, gulls more numerous than the cocks and hens, and salt-fish lying piled on the sands. The industrious women crowded the markets, some carrying crates of peat, some spinning yarn and knitting stockings.
I arrived in Lerwick under a cold sky, the wind blasting through the sallow streets. The town was a series of stone houses, a main street and a road snaking towards the harbour, where the sea splashed against the docks. Beyond the outskirts stood the dark green cliffs, and the long valleys stretching inland. The mist hovered low on the rocks around the town, on the matted grass hills, breathing across the plains. There was an old fort at the end of the main street, with a set of cannons pointing out to sea, pointing towards the passenger ferry I had arrived on, still looming above the buildings, waiting to leave. The wind whipped in from the sea, racing between the buildings, ripping at the awnings on the boats in the harbour. A gaff-rigged boat moved past, its sails stretched by the wind.
There was a bar called Thule by the quayside, which looked like an extension to a prison, its exterior dank and salt-stained. It sat on the harbour road, a torn notice taped to the window, addressed to Norwegian sailors. VELKOMMEN TIL THULE! the notice read. Welcome to Thule. An ancient land, and now a bar, far more convenient for the weary sailor recently arrived on a ship from Norway. Inside were chrome walls and stools, in Scando-minimalist design. A Nordic home-from-home. Hammering on the window, I persuaded the barman to open the door, and asked him why the bar was named Thule. He propped himself up against the frame, looking tired. Perhaps it was too early in the morning, perhaps the wind was whipping my words away, but he was reluctant to talk. âDon't ask me, I just work here,' he said.