Captain James Cook looked at the assembled crew and then addressed his sailors. His clear voice carried a long way. He told them that they had sailed far and wide, so far across the ocean at this latitude that they could no longer expect to see any more dry land, except near the pole, a place inaccessible by sea. They had reached their goal and would not advance an inch further south. They would turn back to the north. No regrets or sadness. He prided himself on having fulfilled his mission of completing his quest for an Antarctic continent. He seemed relieved.
As soon as the captain’s speech was over, a midshipman rushed to the bow. He climbed over the halyards and managed to pull himself up onto the bowsprit. There, balancing himself, he twirled his hat and shouted, ‘Ne plus ultra!’ Cook called the young Vancouver back to order, urging him not to take pride in being the first to reach the end of the world. Screaming thus in Latin that they would go ‘no further!’ made him unsteady over the dark waters. He could fall into oblivion with the slightest gust of wind. The crew burst out laughing. With a smile on his face, the reckless hopeful returned to the bridge like a good boy. Then they turned their backs on me and went back to their tasks, some disappearing into the bowels of the ship while others climbed up to the sails.
Those three words echoed in the sky. I remember it with pride.
Call me ‘The Impassable’.
I am the one who stopped Cook on his second voyage around the world, the happy surprise that cut short his labours at 71° 10’ latitude south and 106° 54’ longitude west.
I am one of the icebergs on which the Resolution, a three-masted ship of four hundred and sixty-two tons, would have crashed if the fog had not cleared. On that day, 30 January 1774, they saw me in all my imposing, menacing volume.
My comrades from Greenland are slender. I am flat and massive. I blocked the way without giving them the chance of going around me. In any case, there is only ice behind me, an infinity in which they would have become lost. I saved them from a fatal destiny.
Thanks to me, an entire era thought that no one before the captain had gone so far south, that he was the sole person, the only one, the incredible one to have achieved this feat. What can I say about the snow petrels that have been landing on my ridges for centuries? I am familiar with these small white birds with black beaks and legs. They are attracted by the tiny algae that cling to my submerged sides.
Cook and his sailors kept their distance. Except for the times when they took picks and boarded fragments of iceberg from longboats. They climbed over them, dug them up and extracted blocks of ice which they left in the sun on the deck of the big ship to melt so they could drink their water.
We were much more than their tired eyes could count, not ninety-seven but thousands, an ice field as far as the eye could see.
We were a whole population.
1 Through the Looking Glass
A painter and a priest are standing at the rail of a steamer, the Merlin, on the way to the coast of the island of Newfoundland. They had left the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the middle of June 1859 and are making their way to one of their destinations, Saint John. Having reached the foot of Cabot Tower, they meander north of the Avalon peninsula, between the Gulf of St Lawrence and Fogo Island, an area where strangely shaped blocks from Greenland are drifting. After about ten days, they embark on a chartered schooner called Integrity and sail towards the Labrador Sea. A rowboat is waiting on deck between the gangways that connect the forecastle and the stern. This will be their way to approach the giants.
Thus begins a chase that lasts several weeks.
A game of hide and seek
They are iceberg hunters.
They are armed with a battery of brushes and pens. Their satchels are overflowing with notebooks and drawing boards. Pairs of telescopic-handled theatre binoculars sit atop crates of paintings. Frederic Edwin Church intends to capture the volumes and colours of icebergs in oil studies and pencil sketches. He has a large work in mind. Louis Legrand Noble, on the other hand, is keeping a chronicle of their expedition. He wants to write a truthful account of it. The two friends play cards with other passengers. They reminisce, discuss the colour of the water and squint at the sky to judge the weather. They wait for the moment when they can see the faces of the ‘islands of ice’, as Captain Cook called them, up close. They are on the lookout, as eager as trappers, for an unusual catch. They are on guard, day and night, sleep poorly and flinch at the slightest sign. The swell makes their stomachs groan.
They made inquiries before leaving. They know that icebergs are a sailor’s nightmare.
For the past ten years or so, the northern latitudes have been the focus of attention. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, the two warships that Sir John Franklin commanded in 1845 in an attempt to open the Northwest Passage, have been lost. Jane Griffin, otherwise known as Lady Franklin, moves heaven and earth to find her husband. She convinces the British Admiralty to mount several search expeditions. Other governments quickly follow suit. The physician and explorer Elisha Kent Kane publishes two first-person accounts of the campaigns organised by the American businessman and philanthropist Henry Grinnell. His descriptions of desolate Arctic landscapes provided a stock of images that inspired an entire generation.1
Everyone wants to know what happened to Franklin. Significant economic and political interests come into play. Curiosity becomes bankable. Public opinion is intoxicated. A nation’s reputation depends on this desire to know. But the research stalls. Until the mystery suddenly becomes clearer. In the spring of 1859, Francis Leopold McClintock, a regular member of the Royal Navy, and his officers collect evidence from an Inuit tribe on King William Island. They add more evidence and eventually find scraps of clothing, guns, bodies, a cairn, a small tent and a tin box on the ground with a clear message: the two ships had been icebound on 12 September 1846 and Franklin had given up the ghost on 11 June 1847. After this fatal winter, the survivors had decided, on 22 April 1848, to set out on a journey over the ice pack in an attempt to reach more hospitable lands. No one returned.2
Apart from a few minor scares, Church and Noble’s journey goes off without a hitch. The skies are clear, the sea is friendly. One fine day, the deckhand calls out: ‘Icebergs! Icebergs!’ Relief and euphoria: their goal is in sight. The passengers move towards the bow. Two elegant masses of unequal size emerge. The ship is slowly approaching the bigger one. The companions’ eyes widen. But a thick fog starts to spread. Clouds fall over the sea like a stage curtain. They cover the horizon and the show comes to an end. Having their final act taken away, the travellers are disappointed, almost offended.
During a stopover on land, fishermen explain to them that iceberg hunters must be patient. It is always a game of hide and seek. In this game, the roles are unequal and the rules are constantly changing. Icebergs know the winds and currents better than humans. They are mischievous and do not let themselves be caught. They disappear as suddenly as they reappear. If you get too close, they run away or get angry. They are more intelligent than their pursuers.
The icebergs have made a pact of friendship with the fog. No one can break it. When the clouds transpire, water droplets become ice crystals that pile up on top of each other. Then these crystals return to the clouds as they evaporate. In the meantime, the blocks take advantage of the moments when the air becomes thick with moisture to escape
