Sara Wheeler - The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic

Contents

Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, herding reindeer across the tundra with Lapps and shadowing the Trans-Alaskan pipeline with truckers, Sara Wheeler discovers a complex and ambiguous land belonging both to ancient myth and modern controversy. The Magnetic North is a spicy confection of history, science and reflection in which Wheeler meditates on the role of the Arctic: fragmented lands which fed imaginations long before the scientists and oilmen showed up (not to mention desperado explorers who ate their own shoes). The Magnetic North tells of all this, plus gulag ghosts, old and new Russia, colliding cultures and bioaccumulated toxins in polar bears.

Sara Wheeler is the author of five previous books, including the bestselling Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton.

An Island Apart

Travels in a Thin Country

Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica

Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys

Finch Hatton

. An Inuit hunter negotiates the floes in the Canadian Arctic ( Bryan and Cherry Alexander)

. Allakasingwah, the Eskimo lover of Robert Peary (Library of Congress)

. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Arctic had entered the popular imagination in Britain and America: these advertisers used it to sell cocoa (Graphic, 19 September 1896)

. The author pays homage at one of the most sacred sites of polar science: the borehole on the Greenland ice cap that in 1993 alerted the world to the speed of contemporary climate change (Author photograph)

. An unfriendly encounter between Elizabethan buccaneer Sir Martin Frobisher and the residents of Baffin Island, circa 1577 (British Museum)

. A woodcut of a reindeer herder in the Russian Arctic, circa 1860 (The Voyageof the Vega, A.E. Nordenskild, 1881)

. Anadyr (Author photograph)

. A Chukchi carrying a walrus head home, circa 1940 (Les Rites de Chasse, Eveline Lot-Falck, Paris, 1953)

. The Anadyr supermarket: bringing Arctic Roll to the far north (Private collection)

. A Siberian herder and his reindeer ( Chris Linder/Mountain Light)

. An advertisement in the New York Times, 1862. The exotic Arctic was all the rage in America (Arctic Spectacles, Russell A. Potter, Washington, 2007)

. Hudson Stuck, preaching to the flock on a bank of Alaskas Chandalar River (Ten Thousand Miles with a Dogsled, Hudson Stuck, 1914)

The Trans-Alaska pipeline consortium engages the public. One of the two statements on this poster is true (Alyeska Pipeline Services Company)

. The author prepares to cross Alaskas Arctic Divide (Author photograph)

. Fridtjof Nansen (Getty)

. The authors first polar bears (Andrew Kerr)

. Hairstyle of the Year, circa 1925 (Private collection)

. Nee-A-Kood-Loo of Southampton Island goes out fishing on an inflated whale bladder, circa 1820 (from an engraving by Edward Finden)

. Eating fish, circa 1950 (Under Narssak-fjeldet, Niels Fenger, Copenhagen, 1954)

. The caribou that flow across Canadas Barrens were once a bulwark against starvation (Getty)

. A floating pageant (Andrew Kerr)

. Greenlanders fishing, circa 1930 (Getty)

. Tt-Michel Kpomassie arrives at Julianehb, (now Qaqortoq), 1965 (Tt-Michel Kpomassie)

. Captains John Ross and Edward Parry meet the hunters of north-west Greenland in 1818. The artist, known as John Sacheuse, was an Inuit interpreter

. Rockwell Kents Greenlandic lover Salamina (from a woodcut by Rockwell Kent)

. Gino Watkins and team in the east Greenland base hut, with Inuit friends (The Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge)

. A sixteenth-century etching of the Svalbard whaling grounds

. The author in front of spits bergens (Amit Lennon)

. The Swedish Ornen crashlands on pack ice at almost 80 N in 1897. The three balloonists died marching to safety; this ice-damaged roll of film lay undiscovered for thirty-three years (The Andre Diaries, S.A. Andre, Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel, 1931)

. The airship Norge leaves its hangar on Spitsbergen before making the first flight between Europe and North America, 1926 (The Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge)

. Barentsburg (Amit Lennon)

. A seventeenth-century etching of a Lapp at prayer (Lapponia, Johann Scheffer, 1673)

. Smi (Lapp) herder, with child (Fotograf/Jamtli Bildbyr)

The ski is older than the wheel in Lapland (Photo: Ludvig Wstfelt. Copyright: jtte museum, Jokkmokk)

. Lone herder (Getty)

. A Reg on a Sledge. The author and her son, Swedish Lapland (Martina Hoogland Ivanow)

. A berg off the east coast of Greenland (Andrew Kerr)

. Wilf adrift off Franz-Josef Land, with the Kapitan Khlebnikov in the background (Author photograph)

. The Kapitan Khlebnikov cutting ice in the Greenland Sea (Author photograph)

. By Jove! Nansen bumps into Jackson on Franz-Josef Land in 1896 (Mary Evans Picture Library/Illustrated London News Ltd.)

. A plaque marks the burial site of Sir John Franklins lost expedition (Getty)

. The Solovki monastery in the White Sea (The Journals of a White Sea Wolf, Mariusz Wilk, 2003. Photograph Tomasz Kizny)

. A detail from Boyarynya Morozova by Vasily Surikov (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)

. The Solovki monastery (The Journals of a White Sea Wolf, Mariusz Wilk, 2003. Photograph Tomasz Kizny)

: The Arctic: 80 90

: Asian Russia and the Bering Strait

: Arctic Alaska and the Dalton Highway

: Arctic Canada

: Greenland

: Svalbard

: Smi Territory: North-West Russia and Northern Scandinavia

: The authors route across the Arctic Ocean

: The White Sea and European Russia

To mum and dad

Deep was the silence. Then, in the dawn of history, far away in the south, the awakening spirit of man reared its head on high and gazed over the earth... But the limits of the unknown had to recede step by step before the ever-increasing yearning after light and knowledge of the human mind, till they made a stand in the north at the threshold of Natures great Ice Temple of the polar regions with their endless silence.

Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North

The place of greatest dignitie

John Davis, mariner,
1550?1605

HERDS OF REINDEER move across ice and snow. Slim-shouldered Lapps squatting on skidoos nose their animals towards an arc of stockades. A man in a corral holds a pair of velvet antlers while another jabs a needle into damp haunch. I make my way towards the outer palisades, where Lapps beyond working age stoke beechwood fires and gulp from bowls of reindeer broth, faces masked in musky steam. The first new snow has fallen, and the Harr Smi are herding reindeer down to the winter grazing. A livid sun hangs on the horizon. Smi, or Lapps, were the last nomadic people in Europe, and until recently castrated reindeer at this place by biting off their balls. In the stockade I take my baby son from his wooden sledge, prowed like a miniature Viking ship, and wrap him closer in his calf pelts.