A narrow weather window opened just long enough for us to fly to a place we were never supposed to be. Inclement combinations of wind and pack ice meant that to board the AE Expeditions ship Sylvia Earle, we had to fly to Resolute Bay rather than our intended point of embarkation further south.
Within a few hours other ships were being told the worsening conditions were delaying, then cancelling, their trips through the Northwest Passage, the historic sea lane between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Yet more journeys had to be scrapped when wildfires swept across the tundra, through boreal forests towards Yellowknife, a city vital to the resupply of polar ships.
All of which is to say: between the ice and the fire, even a partial transit of the Northwest Passage was, in August 2023, not easy. When we boarded the expedition leader Susan Adie went through the usual caveats reminding us that weather would ultimately decide our route as we took two weeks to travel east through the Canadian province of Nunavut and then to Greenland. In expedition cruising this is inevitably a lesson some passengers refuse to learn, yet even novice eyes could understand slides showing unhappy tangles of ice and dramatic wind charts the colour of fresh liver. Outside, white horses were at full gallop as we pushed out into the roaring tumult of Lancaster Sound.
“Ice is never the same way twice, and all of these channels are narrow, so it can be really challenging, even now,” said Adie, who has completed 13 transits of the passage. “Between the conditions and the local laws set by Transport Canada, of course it can be frustrating — for us as much as the passengers.”
The Sylvia Earle
JAMIE LAFFERTY
Sylvia Earle is barely a year old and is one of the most technologically advanced ships sailing in the polar regions, but we were just as much at the mercy of the elements as any of the antique explorers who reached these near-mythic waters centuries earlier. The onboard historian, Nina Gallo, made the most of our extra time on the ship, presenting a series of excellent talks on the passage’s untamed past, its political present and its unknown future.
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For 400 years men impotently tried to find a way through the high Arctic from the Atlantic to the Pacific, all in the name of rapacious commerce. It rarely went smoothly. Scurvy was an ever-present concern. There were violent interactions with native peoples; mutinies; starvation; madness; death; cannibalism.
Quite how many of those boxes were ticked aboard Sir John Franklin’s Erebus and Terror can never be known, but since they disappeared in 1845, every conceivable piece of speculation has been proffered by learned scholars and amateur sleuths alike. Of all the ill-fated attempts to conquer the Northwest Passage, theirs is perhaps the most infamous, and accepting that we may never know what happened to the 129 men aboard those two ships is maddening for some, even today.
“While the mystery of what befell the men has attracted a lot of scholarly attention, what interests me most is how we can tell their stories in ways that bring the people and the time to life,” Gallo told me in the ship’s library, surrounded by books carrying the grim visages of Franklin, Scott, Shackleton and the rest. “If we can do that, then hopefully we can understand why they made certain decisions. And why they ended up in the situations they did. Why did they attempt those grand quests and suffer so much?”
Humpback whales off the Greenland coast
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Conditions prevented us from accessing any of the sites known to have been visited by the Franklin expedition. The weather no doubt impacted the wildlife, or at least our ability to spot it, too. Nonetheless, in a fortnight we did see a couple of distant polar bears, a far-off walrus, three other species of seals and, later, humpback whales. We also saw a group of narwhals, the collective noun for which is, appropriately, a blessing.
For some guests, particularly those who had been to Antarctica on other trips, this was still not enough. A couple of times I tried to point out that the differences were surely not a surprise. We were, after all, having a polar opposite experience. As Adie put it: “I try to tune out the comparisons. Bears and whales are both mammals, but you can’t compare them. They’re simply different things. So are the Arctic and Antarctic.”
Travelling through Nunavut meant travelling through the home of the Inuits (it means “Our Land” in Inuktitut). The Sylvia Earle was sailing with the local guides Mariah Erkloo and Geela Qaqqasiq, who had grown up in the settlements of Pond Inlet and Arctic Bay respectively and had been brought on board to help interpret their singular homeland for us tourists. Most nights they stood before passengers and gave short lectures or answered questions on Inuit culture. Some of the queries were so inane or insensitive I wanted to fold my bottom lip over my face and swallow my head, but the guides answered them with good grace and honesty.
“Sometimes I ask people to repeat their question, just so they can hopefully hear what they’re asking,” Erkloo said on her final night on the ship. “It’s kind of weird seeing your home with so many people. It feels like I’m opening a part of myself, so I sometimes feel a little vulnerable. I get a bit nervous each time I go up to talk, but I’m getting more used to it.”
Outside, the weather continued its petulance, but eventually — after dropping off Erkloo in Pond Inlet in conditions that were unsafe to unload passengers — we pushed out into Baffin Bay. Here the landscape changed completely. Mighty silent fjords were waiting for us, kidnapped mountains briefly appearing as tentacles of cloud gripped and released them. Rain and glacial melt created hundreds of waterfalls, making the mountains look as though they were perspiring under interrogation. Just a week previously this entire coast had been blocked by fast ice and the ship hadn’t even attempted to enter. Now rare and lonely looking icebergs were all that remained.
After a couple of days without another ship in sight we crossed Baffin Bay to Greenland. Tourism is a nascent business in Nunavut but has been evolving in this autonomous Danish territory for several years. Before reaching any port, however, our first stop was at an unnamed isthmus. Here the topography flattened out and the sky grew larger. It also grew clearer. At last we had some sunshine.
Icebergs near Ilulissat, Greenland
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From a distance it was impossible to tell whether glimmering detritus on the shore was bleached whale bones or shards of ice. When we landed we found footprints of arctic foxes and hulking musk oxen. Next to them we left many prints of our own, the majority of passengers delighted to stretch their legs after days on board the ship.
The trip ended with us working our way down the west coast of Greenland, visiting a handful of towns and villages. The largest of these was Ilulissat, which after our time in the wilderness felt like a hectic metropolis. In fact it had a population of fewer than 5,000 and a working fish factory, the rank smells of which drifted out to meet our ship while we were still at anchor. Beyond the pungent harbour the town itself was much more appealing, with quaintly painted buildings, restaurants serving Greenlandic dishes (including some of the animals we’d come to see) and more huskies than I have ever seen in my life.
At both ends of the Earth, Greenlandic dogs were used for polar exploration, renowned for their durability and their ferocity. Outside Ilulissat hundreds of them were on the chain, patiently waiting out the summer until snow and the chance to run returned. As I walked past them to visit the vast Ilulissat Icefjord, bold, free-running puppies came up to say hello. We might not have spotted vast quantities of wildlife on the trip, but I was glad that these dusty, musky huskies at least spotted me.
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Jamie Lafferty was a guest of AE Expeditions (aexpeditions.co.uk) and Explore Worldwide, which has 16 nights’ full-board from £14,222pp on a Northwest Passage voyage on board Sylvia Earle, including excursions, departing on August 3, 2024 (explore.co.uk). Fly to Toronto and from Calgary
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