The Ice Museum (3 page)

Further reading on the subject revealed another strain to the story, another fantasy cast onto the receptive blankness of Thule. In Munich at the end of the First World War, a sinister group met in secret under the name of the Thule Society. Members and guests of the Thule Society had included Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg and Dietrich Eckart. The uncertain provenance of Thule meant that the word could be used by anyone who found it. It could be tied to any cause, any deranged perspective on the history of the north. For these Germans, Thule suggested the lofty origins of the Germanic race; it was from the mists of Thule that the Germans had come, they thought.

A century of wars and technological revolutions separated my sense of Thule from that of nineteenth-century explorers like Nansen, as they dabbed the word onto the scenery. The former lands of Thule had been invaded by the Germans and the Russians, sparred over in world wars. The ambiguity of the myth had been drawn into interwar hatred and extremism, though Thule was an ancient mystery, thousands of years old, and could never be reduced to a single definition, a single set of ideas. From the age of modern exploration to the contemporary age of mass travel, Thule had lingered on, a potent symbol of empty lands and silence. But what had happened, I started to think, to the idea of remoteness, the sense of magisterial nature embodied in the word “Thule”? In a hundred years explorers had mapped the most remote regions. In a hundred years, it seemed that we had passed from imagining the far north to imagining its future destruction. We had passed from the age of modern exploration—when Fridtjof Nansen, Roald Amundsen and Robert Peary set out for the northern blankness—to the age of scientific warnings about the melting of the polar ice. The subject engrossed me; it kept me in a trance, as the spring sunshine flickered across the London parks and everyone lounged through their lunch hours, reading papers in Soho Square, massing in Hyde Park at the weekends. What had happened in this wild and forceful century to an old idea like Thule? When B-52s flew across the Pole, when nuclear waste rotted in the depths of the Arctic Ocean, what had happened to a dream of a pure place, a place apart from the ambiguities of the world below?

The questions and the northern lands themselves summoned me. Thule was a traveller's account; in its first appearance, Pytheas claimed he had really been there. And though the name became a mystery, it was a mystery intricately entwined with ideas of a particular sort of place, identified in relation to the midnight sun, to the frozen ocean. It was a word suggesting the rocks of the north, whiteness and space. It was a word suggesting innocence, a prelapsarian place. I did a faintly foolish thing. I gave up my job, a job everyone had told me I was lucky to have, and I prepared to travel through the lands that had been named Thule—from Shetland to Iceland, then to Norway, Estonia, Greenland and finally to Spitsbergen.

FORWARD

THE MAN OF BONE CONFIRMS HIS THRONE
IN CAVE WHERE FOSSILS BE
 
OUTDATING EVERY MUMMY KNOWN,
NOT OLDER CUVIER'S MASTODON,
NOR OLDER MUCH THE SEA:
 
OLD AS THE GLACIAL PERIOD, HE;
AND CLAIMS HE CALLS TO MIND THE DAY
 
WHEN THULE'S KING, BY REINDEER DRAWN,
HIS SLEIGH-BELLS JINGLING IN ICY MORN,
SLID CLEAN FROM THE POLE TO THE WETTERHORN
 
OVER FROZEN WATERS IN MAY!

 
“THE MAN OF THE CAVE OF ENGIHOUL,” HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)

 
 
By way of prelude I made a trip to Oslo, to look at Nansen's boat, the boat he made to sail beyond Thule in. I wanted to start my trail with him, with his polar ambitions and his sense of the far north. Of all the polar explorers, he was the most compelling to me. He had lived through a crux time, when a great surge of explorers was coming closer and closer to the unknown edges of the globe: the North and South Poles. Once these points were reached, thousands of years of fantasy and speculation about what lay at the extremes of the earth would be replaced by concrete knowledge. Nansen was born in 1861, when Norway was a poor country, its inhabitants struggling to survive on fishing and farming. Powered from an early age by ravenous ambition, Nansen stared intently out of early photographs, a man with blond hair and a powerful jaw, tall and strong. He looked excellent on a horse; he cut a fine figure in a uniform, but was equally suited to the rags and beards of Arctic exploration. He was a neurologist, he was awarded a doctorate; he hunched himself over microscopes in Norwegian research laboratories, but became restless. Yearning for grand vistas, the empty spaces of the north, he set off for Greenland, making the first known crossing of the ice-bound country in 1888. He returned to Norway a national hero, hailed as an explorer in the Viking tradition. In 1889, still short of thirty, he decided he needed another challenge and opted for the North Pole, a place still taunting explorers, lingering out of sight in the shadows beyond the maps. Nansen decided he would build the perfect Arctic boat, and end the ancient argument about the far north.

Writing an account of his journey towards the North Pole, a brilliant and egomaniacal description called
Farthest North
, Nansen reached for a way to attach his expedition to the ancient history of exploration in the far north. He rummaged in his remembered store of tales, and found the old idea of Thule. He used lines from Seneca as the epigraph to the book, creating a symbolic focus for his journey: ‘A time will come in later years when the Ocean will unloose the bands of things, when the immeasurable earth will lie open, when seafarers will discover new countries, and Thule will no longer be the extreme point among the islands.' The extract from Seneca's
Medea
hinted at it all, entwining the longings and optimism, the silence of the Arctic night and the terrible beauty of the drifting ice with the old story of the land of Thule. Nansen had been much preoccupied with the deathly kingdom he planned to enter and by the presumptuous nature of his enterprise. By opening his account with Thule he claimed a victory against the old superstitions, the dusty old pile of fantasies about the far north. Thule had been the most northerly place for the early geographers, but Nansen was aiming to clear up the lingering mysteries, and sail even beyond Thule.

The mountains were coated in frosted trees and on the streets of Oslo the snow was stacked up. The tramtracks were slender pencil lines on a white page. The pavements were coated in layers of sludge snow and ice, trampled down during the winter. Everyone shuffled on the ice, a city of people wrapped in winter clothes. Snow fell, white swirls from a blank sky. The mountains loomed into the whiteness. There was a castle, glazed with ice, and a port with boats lined along the quayside, secured by frozen chains. The city was smothered, the noises of the cars softened by the snow; the pedestrians were looking down, heads bowed against the wind, preoccupied with the ice beneath their feet. It was a city concentrating on the mechanics of motion, where everyday activities had become absorbing and difficult. I walked from the central station in a cold wind, wet snow falling onto my clothes, into my eyes and mouth.

I slid away from the city centre, over fields and along summer footpaths transformed into a ridge of packed-up snow. The frozen ground stretched up a hill flanked by ice-trees. A dim sun was drifting towards the horizon. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of the pasty waters of Oslofjord, glinting in the afternoon semi-light. Nansen's beached boat was an hour's walk across the Bygdøy Peninsula, a spit of land curving away from the city. It would have been a gentle stroll in any other weather conditions, but I was wishing I had packed crampons, instead of shabby notebooks that weighed me down. I passed slowly up a hill, breathing in cold air, shuddering into my coat. I walked through streets of perfect wooden houses, with elegant old Norwegians sliding past on their daily circuit; glad of the cold, they skied slowly through the tranquil afternoon. The buildings on Bygdøy were the homes of the affluent and influential: ambassadorial residences with security gates, flying Norwegian flags like recent settlers.

Nansen's boat was kept under a roof—a tight-fitting canopy, built above the masts. When I arrived I saw what looked like an enormous icy tent standing in a car park, with the pallid fjord on the other side. Across the fjord container ships were waiting at Oslo's city harbour, while passenger ferries turned slowly to head for Sweden and the Baltic. The Kontiki Museum, a memorial to the resilience of Thor Heyerdahl, stood next to the icy tent. A few families were walking through the doors.

The white compound housed the low-slung hull of Nansen's boat. Pushing inside, feeling the coldness of the room, I saw a boat with its sides swelling outwards, a creation of curved wooden planks, immaculately painted in red and black. I stared up at the relic, a boat cleared of barnacles and debris, its neatness emphasizing its obsolescence, dried out, never to be launched again. And I thought how Nansen had planned the ship, how he had stalked across its polished boards, galvanizing his crew against the long polar night. He named her
Fram
—meaning ‘forward' in Norwegian. It was a challenge—forward into the onslaught of the elements, beyond the land of Thule to somewhere still more distant and strange.
Fram
was fitted for Arctic exploration alone. The tub-shaped hull, the hulking thickness of the sides, had been lovingly crafted by Colin Archer, a Norwegian-Scot, on specific instructions from Nansen. It was the physical weight of the ice that had obstructed previous attempts to reach the Pole, Nansen thought. ‘Everywhere the ice has proved an impenetrable barrier, and has stayed the progress of invaders on the threshold of the unknown regions,' Nansen told his audience at the Christiania Geographical Society in 1890. At the time, he had just returned from making the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap, and he was generally regarded as something of an expert on jagged vistas of ice. Despite the overwhelming evidence that it was impossible to reach the Pole by ship, Nansen thought it was worth continuing to try.

Nansen saw the history of Arctic exploration as an epic quest for knowledge. He laced his own exploration with a sense of myth and mystery. ‘Unseen and untrodden under their spotless mantle of ice the rigid polar regions slept the profound sleep of death from the earliest dawn of time,' he wrote. ‘Wrapped in his white shroud, the mighty giant stretched his clammy ice-limbs abroad, and dreamed his age-long dreams. Ages passed—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. To the south it encountered warmth, to the north, cold; and behind the boundaries of the unknown, it placed in imagination the twin kingdoms of consuming heat and of deadly cold.'

He wrote in unapologetically baroque prose, spilling out references, everything wrapped in poetic phrases. ‘When our thoughts go back through the ages in a waking dream,' wrote Nansen, ‘an endless procession passes before us, like a single mighty epic of the human mind's power of devotion to an idea, right or wrong—a procession of struggling, frost-covered figures in heavy clothes, some erect and powerful, others weak and bent so they can scarcely drag themselves along before the sledges, many of them emaciated and dying of hunger, cold and scurvy; but all looking out before them towards the unknown, beyond the sunset, where the goal of their struggle is to be found.' Ignorant of what they might find, they cast illusions onto the silent ice, patterning the unknown regions with dark fantasies, expectations, dreams of grail treasure.

With this lacy patterning of myth, Nansen had sailed north.

Walking up to the deck I passed through an exhibition of stuffed birds and animals, set against an Arctic stage set—a painted backdrop of craggy Arctic rocks, dotted with pink tundra flowers. A thick sheet of polystyrene represented ice, where a bleached Arctic fox was standing, gazing into space. There was the obligatory polar bear sniffing a path towards a ringed seal. They all stood posed in a parody of motion: paws raised, legs extended. On a fake mountain, balanced on rock ledges, there were fat-bellied kittiwakes, a pair of puffins, an assortment of Brünnich's guillemots, and a scattered collection of little auks. Against another backdrop stood a colony of lost penguins, wings outstretched, standing on a painted plank.

I passed more glass cases, crammed with the flotsam and jetsam of polar exploration—the penknives, matchboxes, violins, dogs' bells, compasses in wooden boxes, the pictures of dour polar explorers staring pensively towards the camera, their features blurred. There were notes scribbled from explorer to explorer, pages torn from diaries, mundane objects rendered interesting by the person who had used them—‘Roald Amundsen's teapot,' ‘Fridtjof Nansen's cufflinks,' no object too small, no function too insignificant for the glass cases. This museum had its freaks and particular sights: a lock of Nansen's hair ‘cut by Mr. J. F. Child at Cape Flora June 1896,' stuck to a piece of card. It seemed to betray a mindset lost to history, the curious world of Mr. Child who, stationed in a frozen Arctic camp, confronted by a renowned explorer, chose to commemorate the meeting by slicing a piece of hair from his visitor and neatly mounting it. There were menus from dinners at 84° N, feastings of cloudberry pie and reindeer steak with coffee and cigarettes to follow. Only lacking were the hypnotic tape recordings of aged explorers, which I had sometimes heard in other Arctic exhibitions, voices repeating themselves on looped tapes: ‘Ice, the cold floes, we walked for hours. The ice around us, a strong driving wind. We walked for hours. Ice, the cold floes. . . .' In the
Fram
museum the exhibition was confined to objects, but these were redolent enough—the tattered bits of cloth and leather, the belt buckles, sledges, pipes, tobacco tins, hardened biscuits and skis—like a white-elephant stall selling curios from the tundra.

Hesitantly, I approached the ship. A gangplank led onto the deck, a piece of dark polished wood. There were masts without sails, their booms neatly tied lengthways down the ship, the rigging stretched out to each side. Ropes hung in coils at the base of the masts. A lantern dangled from the front boom. There was a compass in an ornate brass case, mounted on the deck. I stood by the wheel, a wooden piratical object, with ‘
Fram
—Polarskipet'—‘
Fram
—The Polar Ship'—engraved on it. Everything had been immaculately restored and polished; the ropes hung in meticulous rows, the brass shone brightly. But there was something wretched about the ship. It was made for a purpose never fulfilled: to reach the North Pole. It had done better in the south when Roald Amundsen sailed it down to Antarctica for his successful attempt on the South Pole, in 1911. Now it sat, neatly trimmed and cleaned, awaiting a re-launch that would never happen, its wide wooden belly long deprived of the soothing lick of the ocean. Instead, the shaved planes of its decks supplied a playground for a couple of children, running free of their parents to fumble with its ropes.