True North
True North
Gavin Francis was born in Fife and now lives in Orkney, where he works as a GP. His interest in history and travel has seen him pass through Europe, India, Africa and South America, as well as spending a year on a remote base in Antarctica. He is currently writing with his wife, Esa, a book based on their journey from Orkney to New Zealand by motorbike.
From reviews of True North:
‘True North is a wonder-voyage – an immrama – out into the landscape of the northern regions, but also down into the mindscape of those many travellers who have been drawn irresistibly northwards over the millennia – Gavin Francis among them. Fluent, subtle, tough and often beautiful, True North stands alongside Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North and Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum, as a significant recent addition to the Arctic canon.’
– Robert Macfarlane
‘A deep empathy with the land and its history runs like a golden thread through every chapter of True North.’
– Sara Wheeler, The Spectator
‘Returning from a frostbitten world, Gavin Francis describes landscapes few of us have seen and narrates stories almost none of us have heard. He is a true traveller.’
– Daniel Kaldor
‘Thank goodness for people like Gavin Francis who are prepared not only to visit our northerly neighbours, but write about them in a way that shows how much of their history is our history too.’
– Roger Cox, The Scotsman
TRUE NORTH
Travels in Arctic Europe
GAVIN FRANCIS
This eBook edition published in 2011 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
First published in 2008 by Polygon,
an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.
Reprinted with a new introduction in 2009
This second edition published in 2010
Copyright © Gavin Francis, 2008, 2010
The moral right of Gavin Francis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-110-1
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.
This book is dedicated to Esa,
who doesn’t mind sleeping on the ground
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prologue
Note to the Reader
Shetland: Ultima Thule
The Faroe Islands: A Desert in the Ocean
Iceland: The Great Heathen Host
Greenland: The Wild West
Svalbard: Merchant Adventurers
Lapland: Tourism and the End of Europe
Epilogue
Chronology
Notes on Sources
Index
Illustrations
Frontispiece: Mercator’s Septentrionalium terrarum descriptio, based on his world map of 1595
Following page 140:
1. The journey begins: Muckle Flugga, Shetland
2. Shetlanders in Lerwick prepare for Up Helly Aa
3. The view west from Enniberg Cliffs, Faroe Islands
4. The children of Gjógv, Faroe Islands
5. Hekla National Park, Iceland
6. A farm in the west of Iceland
7. The author on Nuuk foreshore, old Moravian burial ground, Greenland
8. Jukku, Maria and Sarah in Nuuk, Greenland
9. Nunataks of East Greenland from the air
10. The old Moravian mission station, Uummannaq, Greenland
11. The Russian settlement of Barentsburg, Svalbard
12. Parhelia over Svalbard
13. The Nordstjernen in the bays of the whalers, Svalbard
14. The Ice Hotel, Jukkasjärvi, Lapland
15. The Norwegian-Russian border, Pasvik Valley, Lapland
16. Čapek’s ‘bouquet of mountains’, Lofoten Islands, Lapland
Maps
Overview map of Arctic Europe
Shetland Islands
Faroe Islands
Iceland
Greenland
Greenland (the Western Settlement)
Svalbard
Lapland
Acknowledgements
THIS BOOK HAS had a long and stuttering gestation. If it had not been for a whole series of patient midwives it might never have been delivered. My parents, Jack and Jinty, helped to nurture my interest in travel, history, and literature, and without that encouragement I never would have dreamed of starting this project. Seán Costello, my editor, immediately saw what I was trying to achieve with this book and patiently guided it through to publication despite my inconvenient absence for the whole period of preparing the first edition. Tom Johnstone oversaw the book’s transition to Polygon, and made a potentially rough crossing slide smoothly. Thanks to Annie Tindley for her support, advice, acting as my agent, and having an incomparable sense of the importance of a good index. Will Whitely edited the first draft with a child on each knee, and somehow provided his unapologetically honest and always welcome opinions. Michelle Lowe did a lot of the logistic legwork before publication. Alan Francis has kept my wheezing, crashing computers going over the years, and in that has perhaps done more than anyone else to keep me writing. Sara Wheeler gave me the support and encouragement to embark on the writing of True North, all the while having an Arctic book on the boil herself. The British Antarctic Survey Medical Unit were kind enough to give me a job at Halley Research Station with enough time and space on my hands to get the book drafted. Paul Torode read the earliest drafts down there and gave me some valuable suggestions. The late Gunnie Moberg and Tam MacPhail in Orkney gave me the benefit of both their knowledge of the Faroes and their ideas about the typescript. Phil Stewart in Islamabad, and Donald and Philippa Johnson in Perth, Australia, opened their homes, computers, and refrigerators to my wife and me, allowing me to get the first edition of True North completed in time for the printers.
Most of all my thanks must go to the many generous people that I met all over Arctic Europe, from Shetland to Greenland to Svalbard and back to Shetland again. They invited me into their homes, drove me hundreds of miles in their cars, and talked to me of their lives, their histories, their hopes and their worries for the future. Without their kindness this book might have become a dry history of Arctic exploration, and I hope the reader, to whom I owe my final note of thanks, will be able to take more away from it than that.
Introduction
THE WORD ‘ARCTIC’ takes its roots from the Greek arktos, meaning ‘bear’. It was originally used to indicate all those lands that lie beneath the constellation of the Great Bear. To the society that coined the phrase those regions represented the very limits of the earth. When the ancient Greek mariners looked north into the night sky they grounded themselves by Polaris, the Pole Star, hanging motionless far in the north. Spraying out from it like shards of ice were the stars of the Great Bear (Ursa Major, as it was later called in Latin) and the Little Bear (Ursa Minor). In the dark, cold winter nights the very immobility of Polaris, the slow roll of the Bears around it, spoke of a region so frozen that space itself seemed to slow down, become gelid.
According to one of the Greek mythologies, those Bears that had been cast up into
the northern skies were not polar bears, but Gods transformed. One of Zeus’ many lovers, Callisto (‘the most beautiful’), was turned into a bear by Zeus’ long suffering and perennially jealous wife Hera. Callisto’s son Arcas, the founding father of Arcadia, accidentally shot his mother while out hunting and he too was duly turned into a bear. The pair were immortalised in stars perhaps as a warning, perhaps as compensation for their fate.
Greek ideas and Greek mythology still influence Western cultural ideas about the North. Our romanticisation of the Arctic as a place of desolate beauty and primal forces may be rooted, at least in part, in that tradition. But it was not only the Greeks who saw bears in those constellations; ancient Hebrew astronomers too saw bears above the Pole, and several Native American cultures. Europe has no monopoly on Arktos.
If the Arctic consists of those lands that lie beneath Ursa Major then we might be forgiven for thinking that it should represent a polar bear. It is unlikely that those first Greek mariners ever saw polar bears, but to Europeans of later centuries they have come to represent something of the wild beauty and ferocity of the Arctic. We want polar bears to be wild and fierce, as much as we want the Arctic to be. The Arctic traveller Robert Brown commented over a century ago ‘I cannot help thinking. . . that the impressions which we have imbibed regarding the polar bear’s ferocity are due more to old notions of what it ought to be than to what it is.’ To the Scandinavians it is Isbjørn, the Ice Bear, and it can spend its whole life between ice and water, having no need of land. Zoologists agree that it is not a land animal at all and class it as a marine mammal, something reflected in the arcane intricacies of Linnaean taxonomy (which calls it Ursus Maritimus, but I prefer the old name, when the polar bear was given the dignity of its own deliciously descriptive genus: Thalarctos Maritimus.) To the Inuit it is not its habitat that names it, but its habits; it is pisugtooq, the Great Wanderer. Bears tagged in Svalbard have been known to turn up a year later over 2,000 miles away in Greenland. Its colour, its immensity, its range, its ferocity, its endurance, its dignity, have all contributed to it becoming emblematic of its habitat. And it is a habitat in peril.
The first edition of True North was published in June of 2008. It aimed to fill what was for me an unexpected gap in the canon of history and travel writing, that of the Arctic regions of Europe. I had realised that literate Europeans discovered and wrote about the northern limits of their world in a step-wise fashion; uncovering, settling, and then reporting back on a new archipelago every few centuries. It was a process of gradual revelation that I wanted to rediscover for myself. I was fascinated by how that process reflected on Europe’s own evolving awareness of itself, and its understanding of its limits. If the historical scope for the journey was the written record of Europe’s journey northward, its geographical scope was Europe as it lay beneath the sign of the Great Bear. The regions of the polar bear itself I reached only towards the end of my journey, and all too briefly at that.
While a few books in English about the cultural and historical significance of the Arctic have appeared over the last few years, there have not been many travel books. Those that there are seem to have been outnumbered on the same shelves by books dealing with its opposite extreme, the Antarctic. Perhaps the very proximity of the Arctic to the centres of European and North American culture have led to it being overlooked, a literary blindspot. The dream-like place the polar regions occupy in the collective imagination may mean that we have traditionally preferred to keep them distant. But there are notable exceptions. Over twenty years old now, Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez remains the seminal exploration of the emotional and ecological value of the Arctic (dealing largely with the northern parts of North America). Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North was a Wunderkammer of art, poetry and prose, guiding the reader through a distilled cultural history of the North. More recently Sara Wheeler’s The Magnetic North whirled around the Arctic, taking snapshot views of the circumpolar nations and their problems. Books like these told me that the Arctic was worth writing about, and that there were still a great many stories to be told.
While preparing the typescript of True North for this edition I was asked what shifts there had been in the European Arctic since the book was completed. Had there been changes in geopolitics, ecology, or climatology that would impact on the book’s relevance?
True North is written from a shifting perspective, both historical and contemporary. It is not a history book: flamboyant characters and dramatic stories are pushed to centre stage, while much that was valuable had to be left out or shoved into the wings. The first aim was to keep the narrative from becoming too temporally bound, to allow it to stand as a record of the time when the journey was completed, the first years of the twenty-first century. The second aim was to present a historical tapestry of events and the landscape that shaped them in a way that would maintain relevance. But there have already been some changes in the way that the world, and in particular Europe, perceives its Arctic regions. As a culture we are increasingly aware that the Arctic is changing. We are not quite sure yet what, if anything, we are going to do about it.
Geopolitics and resource exploitation have always featured strongly in the way that states have sought to control the Arctic. Walrus and narwhal horn began to be harvested when the rise of the Middle Eastern Caliphates blocked Europe’s access to elephant ivory. Lapland furs became more commercially important after the Mongol invasion of Kievan Russia. Squabbles over access to Arctic whales and their oil was one of the many goads that provoked the English and the Dutch to war three times in the seventeenth century (it may be that we have not seen the last of Arctic wars over oil). Today Europe’s increasing reliance on Russian gas from the Siberian Arctic is rewriting the diplomats’ rule books.
In the last decade Russia has planted a titanium flag on the sea bed of the North Pole, 4,000 metres below sea level. Vladimir Putin, the president at the time, claimed that this was in order to secure Russia’s ‘strategic, economic, scientific and defence interests’, though the Pole lies outside the 200-mile coastal zone over which it enjoys maritime sovereignty under international law. ‘This isn’t the fifteenth century,’ responded a nervous Canadian foreign minister. ‘You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say “We’re claiming this territory”.’ This muscling in on the Arctic’s resources is tied in with another more worrying and potentially more dramatic trend in the Arctic: the melting of the ice. An ice-free Arctic was the dream of many of the explorers whose stories were followed in True North. They wanted to find free passage for trade from Europe to the Pacific through the north-western or north-eastern passages. Now a European Arctic and climate change research body (ominously known as DAMOCLES – Developing Arctic Modeling and Observing Capabilities for Long-term Environmental Studies) has predicted that their dream is becoming reality: the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in summer by 2080. The melting of the ice will mean much freer access to the Arctic’s resources and greatly improved shipping opportunities, but will mean disaster for many Arctic species that cannot adapt to the new ecology. What will happen to the Ice Bear when there is no ice left? And to the seabirds of Europe when the fish they feed on move north to cooler waters? And will Arctic meltwater reverse the Gulf Stream, paradoxically and dramatically cooling the ocean and the North Atlantic nations?
Europe’s interest in the Arctic is growing, and the geopolitics of Arctic Europe are developing new and complex dimensions. Even the Chinese, excited by the prospect of sea-lanes across the Pole, want to come to the Arctic table. Politicians too are being forced to discover a new balance in a warmer world. They are working hard to adapt to shifting diplomacy and melting ice.
The global economic turmoil of 2008 impacted enormously on the Icelanders. Since I made the Icelandic journey described in this book the country has suffered a financial catastrophe from which it will take many decades to recover. An Icelander I have spoken to since the collapse cursed what she called ‘a few international playboys’
who gambled on international markets capital that Iceland, with a population of only 300,000 people, could not afford when those debts were called in. As a consequence Iceland has now applied to join the European Union, in the hope that adopting the Euro might keep their melting economy afloat. Icelanders have been here before: in an economic recession in the 1260s they voluntarily gave up sovereignty and submitted to the King of Norway in return for a guaranteed market for their goods and some much-needed cash. That time it took them nearly 700 years to re-establish their independence.
Ketil Flat-nose, a Viking who lived in Norway and Scotland in the ninth century, derided Iceland as ‘a fishing camp’ and declared to anyone who would listen that he would never go there. Now that ‘fishing camp’ has had to make some tough decisions. It will turn away from banking and back towards what it knows how to do best – fishing.
The historical narrative of True North develops over a period of millennia, spinning a thread from the Phoenician and Greek explorers of the North through to the twentieth century. Taking these more recent events into such a broad perspective induces a kind of historical vertigo; we can’t know which of them will later be critical in having forged and shaped the future of the Arctic. Perhaps we will look back on this period as the time when the different states involved managed to pull together and act in concert, perhaps as the period when they seemed to draw farther apart into isolationism. Though we have the benefit of over two millennia of European history to pore over for clues, we have become no better at predicting the future.
But these events also have their place in reminding us of the fragility and the value of Arctic ecology, economy and culture. The ice under the Great Bear is melting, and the earth of the arctic archipelagos is warming up. There is a very real possibility that the polar bear, that ancient and most resonant symbol of the Arctic, could become extinct because of man-made climate change. We may not be able to predict what is going to happen at the negotiating table or to the climate in the next few decades, but through a judicious sifting of history we might be better prepared for what might happen and be better informed about the choices that are open to us for the future. As a window onto the history of the European Arctic and a snapshot of its twenty-first century life, I hope that True North can play a part, however modest, in that process.