The call of the north and the voyage of the Vega

I grew up in the Orkney Islands, a place which is further north than most people live. As a schoolboy I had a map of the world on my bedroom wall and I was fascinated by faraway places and travel. A natural consequence of my place of birth is that when I heard about people I knew travelling they were almost always travelling towards the south. For this reason the north seemed to me to be the direction which was most exotic. At one time I started reading books about arctic exploration. One of the first of these, and probably the best, was the book of Fridtjof Nansen about his voyage with his ship Fram. It was a perfect book to capture my imagination about the far north. On the basis of the fact that wreckage from a ship which sank in the Bering Strait was found in Greenland Nansen was convinced that there was a flow of ice in this direction. He decided to let a ship get frozen into the ice near Siberia in the hope that this current would carry it near the North Pole. The Fram was a ship specially built so that when it was squeezed by the surrounding ice it would be lifted to the surface of the ice instead of being crushed and sunk. His plan worked and the Fram was eventually released by the ice near Spitzbergen. He himself left the ship at what he judged to be the most northerly point of its trajectory in an attempt to be the first to reach the North Pole. He did not reach the pole and turned around to reach Franz Josef Land. There he met another expedition which was able to bring him back to civilisation.

Recently a book came into my hands about another arctic explorer, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld. It is called ‘Nordostpassage’ [northeast passage] and is by Friedrich-Franz von Nordenskjöld, a descendant of the explorer. As the title indicates, the most famous achievement of Nordenskiöld was that he led the first expedition through the northeast passage, i.e. this was the first time that someone had travelled by ship from Europe to the Bering Strait along the north coast of Siberia. This was something which was a worldwide sensation at that time. For instance at the end of his journey he was invited to visit the emperor of Japan. The success of an expedition of this kind depends a lot on luck but I think this particular expedition depended essentially on the personal qualities of its leader. At the same time I had the feeling that he was often stubborn in an unreasonable way. At least he was apparently a lot more competent than Scott on his attempt to reach the South Pole. (Of course once I had started to read about arctic explorers I also had to read about antarctic ones. Cf. my post on my trip to Ushuaia.) The Vega was the ship which successfully achieved the northeast passage. In fact almost the whole voyage was completed in one summer. Unfortunately, when already close to the Bering Strait the ship got caught in the ice and had to spend the winter a short way from its goal. It was necessary to wait until late July before further progress was possible. On the expedition nobody died and no ships sunk, which is not to be taken for granted for an expedition of this kind.

The starting point for the voyage (and for other arctic expeditions of Nordenskiöld) was Tromsø. It was interesting to read that during one visit to Tromsø Nordenskiöld saw the Admiral Tegethoff, an Austrian ship on an unknown mission. I read an account of that expedition a long time ago but I think it was more of a literary work than a documentary one. I do not remember the title. What that expedition actually did was that it discovered Franz Josef Land. I visited Tromsø myself on my first trip to the far north in 1986. In that year I attended my first international conference in Stockholm as a PhD student and the temptation was great to use the opportunity to travel to the north afterwards. I took an overnight train to Kiruna and then travelled further to Abisko. I had a tent with me and camped there, being almost eaten by mosquitoes during the night. After that I switched to youth hostels despite my limited finances. My best memories of Abisko are numerous Bluethroats (I do not think I have seen another one since) and my first Long-Tailed Skuas. I travelled on to the end of the train line in Narvik. From there I took a bus to Tromsø. At midnight I boarded the Hurtigrute and crossed to Svolvaer in the Lofotens. In 1997 I passed Tromsø again on a cruise after visiting Iceland and Spitzbergen but did not spend any time there. I previously wrote something about that cruise here. That cruise also brought me to the most northerly point I have reached up to now in my life which is the Magdalenenfjorden at the north-west corner of Spitzbergen, about 79.5 degrees north. There was a picnic there for the passengers from the ship with sausages and mulled wine. It was not exactly a sublime experience but I was excited to have set foot on Spitzbergen. Another high point of that trip was Jan Mayen. That island is notorious for being covered with fog and I did not expect to see much of it. When we arrived about midnight the fog rose and we had excellent views. The conditions were so good that the ship circled for an hour to let us enjoy it. Most of Jan Mayen is a huge volcano rising straight out of the sea, the Beerenberg which is more than 2000 metres high. It is spectacular sight. The cruise was also due to pass close to Bear Island but I did not realise that. Nordenskiöld was one of the first to make scientific observations on Bear Island. Now Bear Island is probably much less spectacular than Jan Mayen, also usually covered in fog and I would probably have had to get up some time in the middle of the night to see it. Despite that, if I had known I had a chance of that type I would have taken it. The far north exerts an irresistible attraction on me. I have been in Iceland again and spent time in Vardø in the extreme north east of Norway, where I saw a White-Billed Diver. Maybe I will return to the north this summer.