Expedition Svalbard - Lost Views on the Shorelines of Economy

E X P E D I T I O N S VA L B A R D ///////////////////////////////////////////////////

LOST VIEWS ON THE SHORELINES OF ECONOMY

CONTENTS

FOREWORD /// 007 TYRONE MARTINSSON /// 009 EXPEDITION JOURNAL MARIE DESPLECHIN /// 079 PEOPLE OF SVALBARD SOPHIE CALLE /// 087 A PHOTOGRAPHY

URBAN WRÅKBERG /// 157 RE-PHOTOGRAPHY IN NORTHERN INTERDISCIPLINARY FIELD STUDIES: CULTURAL TESTING GROUNDS AROUND ICE FJORD, SVALBARD CHRIS WAINWRIGHT /// 171 WHERE ICE COMES TO DIE HANS HEDBERG /// 187

PER HOLMLUND /// 093

ALONG THE COLD COAST — NOTES ON

GLACIERS IN NORTHERN SVALBARD

THE ARTIC AND THE SUBLIME

IN A GLOBAL CHANGE CONTEXT

GUNILLA BANDOLIN /// 195

JOAN FONTCUBERTA /// 103

PROPOSED WHALE MONUMENT

ICE MEMORIES

AT SMEERENBURG, SVALBARD

REBECCA SOLNIT /// 127

GUNILLA KNAPE /// 201

CYCLOPEDIA OF AN EXPEDITION

MICROLANDSCAPES

AROUND SVALBARD STEVIE BEZENCENET /// 141 POSTCARDS FROM THE ARCTIC

PARTICIPANTS /// 217 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS /// 221

F O R E WOR D

On September 8, 2011, M/S Stockholm sailed out from Longyearbyen, Svalbard.

On board were twelve artists, scientists and writers. The intention with the expedition was to have a dialogue through art and science around environmental issues, wilderness and the wild, narratives of history, place and travel in response to the Arctic landscape.

The project, Art, Science and the Research Journey: Expedition Svalbard 2011, originated from an interest in the possibilities of collaboration across disciplines with regard to environmental narratives. It was a project partly inspired by the book Voyage Into Substance by Barbara M Stafford. A book, long out of print, that with its subtitle, Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel account, 1760-1840 in a very inspiring and substantial way discusses the relation between science and art and our representation of travel and nature in a period that layed the foundation for modernity.

Svalbard, an Arctic desert, with its traces of a human history of exploration, colonisation and traditions along with its natural characteristics is in a unique position to evidence the dramatic and escalating effects of climate change. It is a landscape filled with stories not only in books, images, maps and reports but also preserved and embedded in the physical landscape itself. Svalbard has since its discovery in 1596 been in the midst of political interests in the Arctic. It continues to be a pivotal point at the frontier of change as we seek to address the conflicting needs for conservation and energy generation.

The current state of the northern environments has created a fragile last frontier for exploitation of some remaining pockets of natural resources both

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marine and terrestrial. Historically the Arctic has seen and continues to see, the aggressive expansion of its frontiers for exploitation of earth’s natural resources with consequences ranging from the extinction of animal species and ecological disasters to acts of war between competing nations and colonizing peoples of the North. The political Arctic, with its colonial history is a burning issue in a world where the climate is changing and its declining natural resources have become valued at an economic premium. The Far North can be referred to as both a place and idea with a long history of narratives and representations that continue to influence our current thinking and perception of what we mean by The Arctic.

Contemporary western culture has a complex and somewhat difficult relationship with nature and embracing the notion and value of the wild. The impact of our escalating and energy intensive industrialised culture on nature is the most pressing and urgent issue regarding the quality and future of human existence in a world where we are seeking to produce and consume more and more energy through the extraction of the earth’s natural resources and increase the levels of carbon emissions to dangerous levels.

It is vital that we understand environmental changes to be able to prepare for the future of our planet. The impact of photography, science and writing has a tradition of being able to raise awareness among the public and support and influence policymakers, politicians, researchers, environmentalists and activists. This collection of different responses to the Arctic landscape of Svalbard intends to contribute to and develop that tradition.

TYRONE MARTINSSON ///////////////////////////////////////////////////

EXPEDITION JOURNAL

The land along which we sailed was rugged for the most part, and steep, mostly mountains and jagged peaks, from which we gave it the name of Spitsbergen.

Willem Barents, 1596

On June 3 1818 the British expedition — led by Captain David Buchan on the HMS Dorothea and accompanied by the HMS Trent, commanded by Lieutenant John Franklin — anchored its ships in Trinity Harbour at Magdalena Bay in Spitsbergen. Ice conditions had forced them to turn back from any attempts at penetrating the pack ice towards the north. They entered the bay after sailing through a severe and fearsome storm, with heavy snowfall threatening to bring down the ships when ice accumulated on the planks and ropes, adding tonnes of weight to the vessels. Having made it out of the drift ice and stormy weather, they were quite relieved to be entering the protected cove in the bay. Magdalena Bay was their first port of anchor in the polar regions and they were struck by the grandeur of the rugged and wild scenery — mountains rising from 600 to 800 metres high, immense masses of ice covering the valleys between the peaks and cliffs and glaciers sloping from the summits of the mountainous margins all the way down to the very edge of the sea. With its most remarkable feature (also a landmark for the safe anchor site) being the “Hanging Iceberg”, the bay was to gain a reputation as one of the most beautiful and impressive sites in northwest Spitsbergen.

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The bay is rendered conspicuous by four glaciers, of which the most remarkable, though the smallest in size, is situated, two hundred feet above the sea on the slope of a mountain. This glacier, from its peculiar appearance, has been appropriately termed the Hanging Iceberg. Its position is such, that it seems as if a very small matter would detach it from the mountain, and project it into the sea. And, indeed, large portions of its front do occasionally break away and fall with headlong impetuosity upon the beach, to the great hazard of any boat that may chance to be near.1

Silence in the Arctic landscape We arrived with Captain Per Engwall and his ship the M/S Stockholm at the anchor site of Buchan’s expedition on the morning of September 9 2011. The weather was gloomy, with drizzling rain and fog veils covering the mountain slopes and blocking a full view of the scenery. The Norwegian name, Magdalenefjorden, is now on all contemporary maps. The name Magdalena was introduced during the early 17th century even though the Dutch discoverers of Spitsbergen had named the bay Tusk Bay in 1596 after finding walrus tusks on the beach of what is today Gravneset, an English burial ground from the whaling era.2 The naming

history of places illustrates and indicates how the land has been used, and also the different cultural views that have shaped the perceptions of the region. The names of places and features on maps all have a story to tell.

When chronicling Otto Torell’s 1861 expedition to Spitsbergen, Karl Chydenius described Magdalena Bay as one of the most interesting places in Spitsbergen as, within its boundaries, it has everything that characterises this land’s nature. Chydenius refers back to the survey carried out by Buchan’s expedition that became the most important description of the bay of its time.

I was carrying photographs of the bay taken by British Lieutenant Herbert C. Chermside during Benjamin Lee Smith’s expedition to Svalbard in 1873. Chermside had photographed the famous hanging glacier in Magdalenefjorden and we were determined to try to find the glacier, or what might be left of it. Nils Strindberg also photographed the famous glacier in 1896 during the Andrée Polar Expedition. Axel Goës had previously photographed the glacier during Otto Torell’s expedition of 1861, as part of a panorama of the south side of the bay. The original photographs taken by Goës have yet to be found, but the detailed lithographic drawing included in the 1865 book from that expedition still exists and offers a good reference point for how the bay looked 150 years ago.

1 // Gerhard von Yhlen 1861.

View north from Gravneset with Buchanbreen.

2 // Buchanbreen, inset image Herbert Chermside 1873.

3 // Buchanbreen 2011.

We searched in vain for the hanging glacier but got a good sense of where it had been located on a steep and rocky slope between the Trankollane Mountains.

Nothing was left of it, however, and it is hard to imagine the way this bay looked when Buchan, Goës or Chermside visited. The immense walls of ice covering almost the entire south side — as seen in drawings, photographs and a view described by Chydenius during a climb to a mountaintop on the north side of the fjord — are all but gone. We wondered whether the bay had looked that different from when the Dutch explorers came here in 1596 and from Buchan’s visit in 1818. When did the more dramatic changes occur?

What will this place look like in twenty, fifty, a hundred or even ten years from now? The changes observed in northwest Svalbard are part of the global environmental issues that had taken us to the Arctic regions in the first place.

places I want her to see and be able to visit for the tonic of wildness — that human need expressed by Thoreau. Questions that went unanswered in the light rain, looking at the remains of ice on the mountain slopes and listening to the melting glacier as the only sound in the Arctic stillness. A sound that reminds us of a concept of a frozen north, literally changing while we watch it disappear. The sound of melting water was the interruption that amplified the stillness that “bordered on the sublime — a stillness which was interrupted only by the bursting of an iceberg or the report of some fragment of rock loosened from its hold,” to quote Frederick W. Beechey, who wrote the book on Buchan’s expedition.3 Interruptions that even further amplified the very strange silence in the Arctic landscape. Beechey describes a unique and dramatic landscape featuring a mix of rugged mountain ranges with deep valleys in between, filled either with large beds of snow or with glaciers down the slopes of the mountains and into the sea. The views of these unfrequented places and the remote wilderness described

by Beechey and so many others who came before us, are often gone or dramatically changed. Svalbard, being a rather dry and rocky semi-desert, often reminds me of the American Southwest, albeit with glaciers and ice instead of rivers and washes. Without ice in Svalbard, Spitsbergen would be like a Southwestern

desert deprived of its plants, wildlife and pockets of water — quite unimaginable. How will the concept of a frozen north, and subsequently our perceptions of the Arctic, change in the future of climate change? If the sea ice is gone, seal numbers will decrease, polar bears will be gone, what will then be the characteristics of the Arctic?

The aim of our 2011 expedition was, as a group of artists, scientists and writers, to discuss and encounter issues relating to the environment and our relationship with the land and nature. As I walked around on the rocks searching for a close enough position to rephotograph some of Chermside's images, questions filled the views. Questions of being a father to my young daughter and the future she will inherit. The

The only thing left worth saving Henry David Thoreau knew, as far back as the 1850s — the dawn of the industrial economy, that modernity’s progress was destroying the very foundation of mankind, and the very foundation of our future. The progress of industrialism and technological developments have given us much in terms of an easier and healthier life — here, I think of medical science, effective food production, energy and so forth, and this is not to be forgotten. However, we need to balance that progress. The preservation of the world in the wilderness and the wild that Thoreau called for is the foundation for the history of Mankind. The same hindsight was expressed by John Muir in his endless struggle to make modern society see its connection with nature, to see and experience nature. We need to remind ourselves that, as Aldo Leopold wrote in 1949:

4 // Site of the Hanging Glacier, Magdalenefjorden 2011.

Inset image left, Herbert Chermside 1873 and right Nils Strindberg 1896.

“Wilderness is the raw material out of which Man has hammered the artefact called civilization”. Arguably there is a need always to make sure that some of that raw material is preserved, if only as a sample of what our society derives from. What we were made of. The only sustainable (a word so misused by consumption ideologies) society is one that completely rethinks and recreates the economic system and its attitudes towards progress, consumption and quality of life, as propounded by Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer

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Arne Naess. That would be a society aiming for a balance between Man, culture and nature. A society that is really moving towards an ecological awareness that values nature, biodiversity and a living landscape.

Svalbard is often referred to as one of the world’s last wilderness areas. The concept of “wilderness” is now such a rarity that Edward Abbey’s call for it to be “the only thing left worth saving” sounds more like a hollow echo from past times than a call to arms from the wild, for environmentalist movements.

Climate scientists and academics, as well as writers on nature and environmentalism, keep reminding us that Man has interfered with the Earth in a way that perhaps makes it difficult to argue for any true wilderness in its original sense. In Svalbard the coastlines are literally layered with cultural remains. Its shorelines of cultural heritage are a reminder of our efforts and unique abilities to conquer every corner of the world. Of course there are places that are truly wild and that can be experienced as wilderness areas, but sadly enough Man has interfered with the whole ecosystem of the Earth through atmospheric pollution and toxic waste in the seas and rivers. Svalbard is no exception. The amount of pollution and toxic waste recorded by scientists in the islands’ ecosystem speaks for itself. It is part of the collateral damage of modernity. The whole of James Lovelock’s Gaia is tempered with. Like Arne Naess, Thoreau argues that nature has an inherent and intrinsic value. That value is far more important than the extremely short-sighted contemporary progress ideologies and the material economical values that fit the frames of a mythical global market with its runaway expansion and growth. Paul J. Crutzen, awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has, rather frighteningly, argued that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in Earth’s history.4 The reason being the way that mankind has interfered with the Earth and will most likely continue to do so for a long time to come, despite an urgent need for a strategy for sustainable environmental management and relief of the stress induced by Man on Earth’s ecosystems. Reflections and thoughts provoked by Thoreau, Muir and Crutzen followed us on this journey into the Arctic. The sites on our route along the northern shores of the Polar Sea all have a story to tell, be it natural or cultural.

Potential close bear Our ship slowly approached the Waggonwaybreen at the end of Magdalenefjorden. Once one of the most impressive on the west coast of Svalbard, the glacier is still a remarkable experience of ice, but the scars of its retreat mark the mountain slopes, whereas in the

sighting. Three bears were visible on the mountain slopes of the Alkekongen Mountain. When Buchan visited, the mountain was called Rotge Hill, and Beechey and some of the other expedition members became the first to attempt to climb the mountain in 1818. The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is no doubt an impressive predator. Stories from previous expeditions’ encounters with them are often both sad and horrific. The Dutch discoverers of Svalbard killed bears along their way from Bear Island — where they chased and killed a swimming bear, hence the name — down the west coast when returning from the northern shores of their newly discovered land. Killing the bears seemed to have been the only way to approach them. In 1773, when Commander Constantine Phipps and Captain Skeffington Lutwidge came to Spitsbergen in the HMS Racehorse and Carcass extremely violent and raging bear killings are recorded in their journal of the expedition. The killing of a female bear with her cubs illustrates particularly well the relationship that European explorers had with nature.

5 // Waggonwaybreen, top to bottom, Axel Goes 1861, Herbert C. Chermside 1873, Unknown German photographer 1891, Erling J. Nødtvedt 1960 and a view of the glacier from Gravneset July 2012.

photographs taken in 1873 the glacier filled the entire end of the bay from the north side at the base of Alkekongen Mountain through its connection with Miethebreen and to the south side with its connection with Brokebreen. The colours are intense, with bluegreen water and ice shifting from a brilliant white to dark blue and black, and the rocks and mountains contrasting with hues of brown right down to coalblack in the towering peaks above the glacier. The ship approached to a distance of about 300 metres from the glacial wall. The birds flying in towards the ice provided a much-needed scale for the view. As we turned to follow the northern shore of the bay towards its entrance, we heard the first call of a bear-

Early in the morning, the man at the masthead of the Carcass gave notice, that three bears were making their way very fast over the ice, and that they were directing their course towards the ship. They had without question, been invited by the scent of the blubber of the sea-horse killed a few days before, which the men had set on fire, and which was burning on the ice at the time of their approach. They proved to be a she-bear and her two cubbs; but the cubbs were nearly as large as the dam. They ran eagerly to the fire, and drew out from the flames part of the flesh of the sea-horse that remained unconsumed, and eat it voraciously. The crew from the ship, by way of diversion, threw great lumps of the flesh of the sea-horse which they had still left, out upon the ice, which the old bear fetched away singly, laid each lump before her cubbs as she brought it, and dividing it, gave each a share, reserving but a small portion to herself. As she was fetching away the last piece they had to bestow, they levelled their muskets at the cubbs, and shot them both dead; and in her retreat, they also wounded the dam, but not mortally. It would have drawn tears of pity from any but unfeeling minds, to have marked the affectionate concern expressed by this poor beast in the dying moments of her

expiring young. Tho’ she was sorely wounded, and could but just crawl to the place where they lay, she carried the lump of flesh she had fetched away, as she had done the others before, tore it in pieces, and laid it down before them, and when she saw that they refused to eat, she laid her paws first upon one, and then upon the other, and endeavoured to raise them up. All this while it was pitiful to hear her moan. When she found she could not stir them, she went off, and when she had got at some distance, looked back and moaned; and that not availing her to entice them away, she returned, and smelling round them, began to lick their wounds. She went off a second time, as before, and having crawled a few paces, looked again behind her, and for some time stood moaning. But still her cubbs not rising to follow her, she returned to them again, and with signs of inexpressible fondness, went round and round the other, pawing them, and moaning. Finding at last that they were cold and lifeless, she raised head towards the ship, and like Caliban in the tempest, growled a curse upon the murderers, which they returned with a volley of musket-balls. She fell between her cubbs, and died licking their wounds.5 A similar bear-killing is reported in Chydenius’ accounts of Torell’s expedition to Spitsbergen where they shot and killed a female polar bear and her two cubs on August 12 1861 and seem to have left them behind when returning to their ship. They shot bears and walruses on several occasions, for no reason other than the thrill of the sport. This is, however, a practice that is part and parcel of all expeditions throughout the 19th century, and the habit of shooting and killing does not change until well into the 20th century. In his book on the naval captain Ralph Bergendahl, Swedish polar historian Anders Larsson gives several examples of brutal killings during the Duke of Orléans’ 1905 expedition to Spitsbergen. Here, not only grim tales of “hunting” are described but also unique animal cruelty for the sake of art when a shot and mortally wounded bird and polar bear are kept alive for as long as it takes for the artist on board to finish his drawings!6 Travel in Svalbard is always to be taken seriously in terms of polar bears. You are not allowed to leave the

6 // The Andrée Balloon Expedition sailing north towards Kennedybreen, photo, G.V.E. Svedenborg July 1897.

7 // Kennedybreen September 2011.

vicinity of Longyearbyen, the islands’ main village, without carrying a powerful rifle for protection, and you need to know how to use it or it might do more harm than good. These days, though, the last thing you want is to have to shoot a bear. Statistically, between one and five bears are shot in Svalbard each year, with about half being shot in self-defence, often by scientists doing fieldwork. Polar bears have been protected in Svalbard since 1973 and any bear-shooting is investigated and, if probable cause is not justified, the shooter will be prosecuted and fined. No sane and serious person going into the wild does so without preparation and respect for the environment to be encountered far away from urban safety. Along with rifles, other means of bear-protection are advised and necessary in order to try always to scare away a bear in a potential close bear encounter. The ground rule is never to approach a bear and always to stay at a distance and back off if possible. Working in the field in Svalbard, you might have to shoot a bear in self-defence, but unlike historical expeditions that shot and killed birds, foxes, polar bears, walruses and every animal encountered just for target practice or for the sport of it, shooting a bear is the absolute last resort.

Protecting bears is, for us today, as natural as not shooting each other when meeting in the wild. After all, most polar bear encounters are an amazing expe-

rience of meeting one of the world’s largest top predators in its own environment.

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Every time I see a polar bear I am filled with that joy and spirit that is the tonic of the wild that Thoreau was talking about. It is a reminder of what we are part of, nature in the raw, a reminder of who we are, travellers through time, but also an electricity breakdown from our civilisation and cultures crashing back into the wild we walked out of. Experiencing the glaciers leaving their traces of retreat on the landscape, watching their masses sunken in, seeing bears moving through the harsh landscape in search of food, but being far away from the sea ice they need — these are urgent reminders of the need to find a balance between mankind and the natural world. 2011 was yet another year with the sea ice far above 82°N, and not once during our entire journey towards the northern Seven Islands did we encounter or even see any sea ice.

The country is stony A light rain was still falling when we sailed out of Magdalenefjorden, bound for Smeerenburg in the far northwestern corner of Spitsbergen. We intended to spend the night in a bay on the north side of the island

of Danskøya, named after Danish whalers who used it as a base from the 1630s. The haven we were seeking, Virgohamna, was named after the steamer, the Virgo, that brought a Swedish expedition to the Arctic in 1896 — the Andrée Balloon Expedition that built a base camp and balloon house on the northern shores of the island. They spent the summer of 1896 in the area and returned to Sweden in August that year, only to come back in the summer of 1897 for their attempt at travelling across the Polar Sea and the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. It was an expedition that could have sailed out of the pages of a Jules Verne novel. They left Danskøya on July 11 and disappeared into the frozen unknown. After 33 years they were found on the island of Kvitøya, northeast of Svalbard, and their sad and grim story was pieced together from journals, photographic films and their frozen remains.

There were three men in the balloon that left Danskøya on that sunny day in July 1897: the leader engineer Salomon August Andrée, engineer Knut Frænkel and photographer, navigator and scientist Nils Strindberg.

The latter had, just one year previously, mapped the area using photography and I was now carrying some of the photographs that he had taken of the landscape in the area surrounding their basecamp at Danskøya. The map he produced was focused on Amsterdamøya to

8 // Frambreen July 1873 from Albertøya, photograph Axel Enwall.

9 // Frambreen 2011 from Albertøya. From left to right, Chris Wainwright, Rebecca Solnit and Per Holmlund.

the north of Danskøya. Previous maps had been quite inaccurate and Strindberg produced an updated version that was published in the Swedish scientific journal Ymer in the spring of 1897. Amsterdamøya is one of the most historical places in Svalbard. The Dutch explorers landed on the island in 1596 but did not name it. It later got its name from the Dutch whaling base there from around 1614, and from the whale hunting in the area.

Smeerenburg, the largest whaling station ever built in Spitsbergen, was settled on the southeast of the island.

little island, with its highest point being the rock formation where the cross is standing, is a nesting area for the very aggressive Arctic terns, and landing became quite hazardous on the deeply dark green mosscovered east side. We eventually landed on the northern edge of the island. When we got ashore I noticed that this was the vantage point used by Axel Enwall for a photograph of Frambreen, a glacier on the east side of Smeerenburgfjorden, on July 18 1873. Trying to find his more precise vantage point, we decided to re-enact the photograph, which includes three figures in the foreground of the image. We managed to find a close enough position for the camera, and Chris Wainwright, Rebecca Solnit and Pelle Holmlund became part of the rephotography.

We made Virgohamna in grey, rainy weather with low clouds hanging over the mountains surrounding the cove. To the southeast was a small hope of clearing weather. The light coming down on the mountain tops in that direction was promising. On the shores of Danskøya historical remains are layered in a mix of blubber ovens, graves, planks from a house, Andrée’s filter for his hydrogen machine and the junkyard left from the American explorer Walter Wellman’s airship adventures, including the site of his hangar. The site is now closed and you are not allowed to enter without a permit. We decided to take a journey out to a small island, Albertøya, in Smeerenburgfjorden, east of Danskøya. There is an old iron cross still standing there, raised in 1869 by a German scientific expedition travelling on the Albert, a steamer from Bremen. The

Having adopted this playful approach to some of the historical images, we continued and re-enacted a photograph taken in 1896 at the cross on the island. It is an image where Salomon August Andrée is posing with his rifle together with Nils Ekholm, the latter the meteorologist who left the balloon project. During this session a number of our expedition members happily chatted away while assuming Ekholm and Andrée’s positions. The weather was now clearing and the evening calm, with excellent visibility towards the north and the islands of Fair Haven.

The next morning was sunny and absolutely brilliant with a dead calm sea and chilly crisp clear autumn air. We left the M/S Stockholm in our zodiac for a visit to Amsterdamøya. We crossed Danskegattet and landed on the southeast side of the island, facing the rugged mountainside across the Smeerenburgfjord to the east. Frambreen, named by Nils Strindberg in 1896, is the most spectacular glacier in the mountainous land across the fjord. The bluish colours of the ice coming down the slopes of the black sharp mountains surrounding the glacier are a view characteristic of Spitsbergen. The glacier was photographed in 1873 by Axel Enwall with his view from Albertøya,

by Nils Strindberg in 1896 as part of a panorama from the cross at Albertøya, and by Norwegian photographer Anders Beer Wilse in 1908 from Amsterdamøya as part of a panorama. It is interesting to observe how photographers who almost certainly did not know of each other’s work have photographed a view from almost the same spot. It might tell us something about our cultural baggage when finding what Mark Klett has called “viewpoints in the field”. Frambreen is a dominating view in the area, and this morning it was particularly striking as the light played with the landscape and the sea so calm that it mirrored the scenery. On a similarly clear and calm day on July 13 1773 Phipps’ expedition came to an-

10 // Nils Ekholm, left, and Salomon August Andrée, right at the cross at Albertøya , photograph Nils Strindberg 1896.

11 // Rebecca Solnit, left and Stevie Bezencenet right at the cross at Albertøya 2011.

chor in Smeerenburg harbour where they remained for six days, taking in fresh water and surveying the area.

Phipps’ expedition reports on the remains still visible at Smeerenburg in 1773. The large whaling station was riding the peak of its success in the 1630s, and the location was used by whalers before that and for more than 150 years after the grand days of Smeerenburg. The whalers in Spitsbergen were many, and hailed from different nations. Hunting was gradually declining until the Greenland right whale (or bowhead whale) was exterminated from the seas around Svalbard around the 1850s. Walking among the remains of Smeerenburg it is difficult to imagine what this place looked and smelled like during the whalehunting era. On the beach not far from where we landed, a lone gigantic male walrus, often referred to as a seahorse by earlier travellers, was resting. We approached with great care so as not to disturb it when passing on our way back to the zodiac after our excursion on the island. Atlantic walruses were hunted from the early 1600s and, by around 1870, had been completely eliminated from the marine ecosystem of Svalbard. Unlike the bowhead whale, they made it back to Svalbard around 1970, migrating from Franz Josef Land, and are now once again part of the islands’ ecosystem.

The country is stony, and as far as can be seen full of mountains, precipices and rocks. Between these are hills of ice, generated, as it should seem, by the torrents that flow from the melting of the snow on the fields of those towering elevations, which being once congealed, are continually increased by the snow in winter, and the rain in summer, which often freezes as soon as it falls. By looking on these hills, a stranger may fancy a thousand different shapes of trees, castles, churches, ruins, ships, whales, monsters and all the various forms that fill the universe. Smearinburgh (sic.) harbour, where they landed, was first discovered by the Dutch. Here they erected sheds conveniences for boiling the oil from the whales, instead of barrelling it up to be boiled at home. Here also, allured by the hope of gain, they built a village, and endeavoured to fix a colony: but the first settlers all perished in the ensuing winter. The remains of the village may be traced to this day; and their stoves, kettles, kardels, troughs, ovens, and other implements, remained in the shape of solid ice long after the utensils themselves were decayed. Our voyagers were told that the Russians have lately attempted the same thing, and the ten out of fifteen perished.

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We returned to our ship and sailed north to visit a glacier and small lake on the north side of Amster-

damøya called Gjøavatnet. The lake, with its glacier, is described by Chydenius in the journals of Torell’s expedition in 1861, but had no name at the time. It was given its name in 1988.7 The glacier at the lake is also described by Chydenius as being a remarkable sight, where the leg of a very large system of ice streams climbing down the steep north face of the Hollender Mountain ends in a gentle slope into a lake. The lake is separated from the sea by a small wall of stones and gravel. Back in 1861 the glacier was a wall of ice entering the north end of the lake. When Nils Strindberg photographed this place in August 1896 during his map-making, the glacier still presented a wall of ice into the lake. The photographs of the site resulted in one of the finest panoramas of his work and he also named the glacier Anna’s Glacier after his fiancée.

She who was to wait for him for more than ten years after he had vanished in 1897 in the frozen north, before marrying an Englishman and moving to Devon. She happened to be in Stockholm in 1930 when Strindberg was found and his remains were brought back to Sweden. She died in 1949 and, as agreed with her husband, her heart was removed and on September 4, Strindberg’s birthday, buried beside him in Stockholm. Perhaps the most remarkable love story in the history of polar exploration. We arrived at

12 // Annabreen in northern Amsterdamøya by Nils Strindberg August 1896.

Gjøavatnet on September 10 in a calm, light rain, no wind, absolute stillness, and quite warm weather.

Running water from what was left of the glacier-covered mountain slopes again amplified the silence of the Arctic. The glacier front mirrored in the water in Strindberg’s photograph is gone. The volume of the glacier is sunken into the mountainside and the valley it once filled. The ice streams described in 1861 are gone. This glacier facing the shores of the Polar Sea is soon to be gone. It is a dramatic change in the landscape. The mountains and the rocky ground are soon to be the only things left to be mirrored in the lake.

The story of Anna and Nils is literally fading away from the desolate Arctic landscape, as it will make no sense to have glaciers that no longer exist on future maps. Their sites might be told about in future versions of the book Place names of Svalbard or introduced on maps as former glacial sites, but they are more likely to be forgotten.

A very good landmark In the evening we left the historical grounds of northwest Spitsbergen to sail east in an intensely colourful sunset. With a red sun hanging low on the horizon we made a brief visit to the most famous and well-known

landmark in the area, Klovningen, an island known for the cut in its north corner. It was marked on the map of Willem Barents and the Dutch explorers of 1596.

They came upon it from the east, following the northern coastline of the new land they had discovered.

They had sailed up from Norway and discovered Bear Island, sailed on to the northwest where they had encountered the pack ice and followed it east until they were forced south and came upon the coast of Spitsbergen. On June 21 the Dutch had anchored their two ships in what is today Fair Haven. Willem Barents was chief pilot of one ship, while the captain was Jacob Heemskerke Hendickszoon, and Arend Martenszoon was pilot of the other, with Jan Corneliszoon Rijp as captain. His reputation as pilot has meant that Barents has become the most famous member of the expedition, and his name is attached to the discovery of Svalbard. Barents described the view to the east of their anchor site: “At the east point of the mouth was a rock, which was moreover split, a very good landmark”. In his important history of Spitsbergen, No Man’s Land, Martin Conway remarks that they were probably anchored between Fuglesangen and Klovningen. Very little is left of the notes on the discovery of Svalbard. Barents died of scurvy in 1597 after the expedition had parted when returning to Bear Island, with Hendickszoon and Barents sailing on eastward

and being forced to winter in Novaja Semlja. We landed between the mountain slopes in the cleft. Up there we found what appeared to be an old outlook, perhaps from the whaling era. On the plateau of the cleft we also noticed a pile of stones that initially appeared to be a grave but, on closer examination, was more like the remains of a cairn or the foundations for a pole. It brought to mind the post with the arms of the Dutch upon it that Barents set up somewhere in the area, and that was removed by the English in 1612. The mountain wall on the north side of the cleft was hosting plenty of Atlantic puffins. Some of the party climbed the rocks covered with moss and scurvy grass to get closer to the birds for photographs. The soft moss on the ledges up on the mountain offered a comfortable and rewarding view of the colourful-looking birds that contrasted with the wild and rugged landscape. Despite the ice-covered peaks in the background, the evening setting reminded me of a late summer evening in more southerly latitudes like the Lofoten islands off northern mainland Norway.

The late evening, draped in a red sunset, was spent on deck until it turned to dusk and darkness descended.

The sea was calm and we all remarked upon the strange feeling of watching the sunset on deck in the Arctic sea in September. Even the Northern Fulmars (Ful-

13 // Annabreen in northern Amsterdamøya September 2011.

marus glacialis), characteristic and welcome companions of travellers in these waters, sailing alongside the ship seemed to enjoy the calm and beautiful evening. Klovningen and the western corner of Spitsbergen disappeared into the evening and our course was now set for Sorgfjorden.

Parry’s experience In the morning of September 11 the M/S Stockholm anchored at Hecla harbour in Sorgfjorden. The weather was absolutely calm and the silence was different from most experienced in nature, a silence and stillness that fill one’s entire presence with a heartwarming peace. The bay is a historical site filled with dramatic narratives, ranging from the whalers and acts of war in 1693 to Parry’s 1827 North Pole expedition and the remains of the Swedish base from the Swedish-Russian Arc of Meridian expedition of 18981902. The houses from the Swedish wintering station (only one still standing) are located on the shores of Hecla harbour below Hecla Mountain.

The name of the bay, Sorgfjorden, or on the old maps Treurenburg bay, is believed to have come from a minor battle that occurred in the fjord in August 1693

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when two French frigates attacked a fleet of about forty whalers in the bay. The background to this violent northern drama was the revolution of 1688 that seated William of Orange on the throne of England, and the subsequent war between the Great Alliance and France. Battles of war were subsequently launched against areas with important trade and commerce.

This is why French warships were scouting the seas of Spitsbergen searching for English and Dutch whalers with a view to confiscating their cargo and burning their ships. The French encountered a degree of resistance from the armed whalers that surprised them, and they managed to capture only thirteen of the Dutch ships that were towed in the calm sea past the two French warships blocking the mouth of the bay. As during our visit, the weather that violent day in Sorgfjorden was dead calm, which probably saved the Dutch.

Two French crew members are recorded as killed and several wounded but it is not known how many were killed or wounded on the Dutch side.

Edward Parry had come to Spitsbergen for an attempt to reach the North Pole, or as far north as possible. He had visited Waldenøya searching for a place to anchor his ship, the Hecla, as base for his journey towards the Pole but found no suitable place and on his return finally settled for Sorgfjorden.

On the evening of the 18th, while standing in for the highland to the eastward of Verlegen Hook, which, with due attention to the lead, may be approached with safety, we perceived from the crow‘s-nest what appeared a low point, possibly affording some shelter for the ship, and which seemed to answer to an indentation of the coast laid down in an old Dutch chart *, and there called Treurenburg Bay. * Nieuwe afteckening van Hot Eyland Spits-Bergen, opgegeven door de Commandeurs Giles en Outger Rep, en in‘t Light gebragt en uytgegeven door Gerard Van Keulen, &c

Parry and his Pole party left Hecla Cove on the afternoon of June 21. They headed for Waldenøya in two boats, stopping at Lågøya to set out a store of provisions as an intermediate depot between Waldenøya and their ship. They had been delayed on their journey north and were now racing with time due to a later start in the season than planned. It was a strenuous and particularly arduous journey over the ice, dragging their boats, provisions and equipment. On July 26 Parry realised that going further would only risk the lives of his companions and that they would not make much progress.

It had, for some time past, been too evident that the nature of the ice with which we had to contend was such,

and its drift to the southward, especially with a northerly wind, so great, as to put beyond our reach anything but a very moderate share of success in travelling to the northward. Still, however, we had been anxious to reach the highest latitude which our means would allow, and, with this view, although our whole object had long become unattainable, had pushed on to the northward for thirtyfive days, or until half our resources were expended, and the middle of our season arrived. For the last few days, the eighty-third parallel was the limit to which we had ventured to extend our hopes; but even this expectation had become considerably weakened since the setting in of the last northerly wind, which continued to drive us to the southward, during the necessary hours of rest, nearly as much as we could gain by eleven or twelve hours of daily labour. Had our success been at all proportionate to our exertions, it was my full intention to have proceeded a few days beyond the middle of the period for which we were provided, trusting to the resources we expected to find at Table Island. But this was so far from being the case, that I could not but consider it as incurring useless fatigue to the officers and men, and unnecessary wear and tear for the boats, to persevere any longer in the attempt.

Parry’s experience was very important to future explorations of the Arctic. This was a lesson learned about how hard it is to travel on the drifting ice. Parry and his men turned, but were much safer facing a long journey south to Hecla. Back in Sorgfjorden their ship had been almost destroyed on July 7 when the ice broke in the bay and pushed it up onto land. Lots of hard work and nervous activity from the crew saved the ship. Parry and his men made it out to open water on August 12 and sailed towards Waldenøya.

We had scarcely made sail when the weather became extremely inclement, with a fresh gale and very thick snow, which obscured Walden Island from our view. Steering by compass, however, we made a good landfall, the boats behaving well in a sea; and at seven, P.M., landed in the smoothest place we could find under the lee of the island.

Everything belonging to us was now completely drenched by the spray and snow; we had been fifty-six hours without rest, and forty-eight at work in the boats, so that, by the time they were unloaded, we had barely strength left

to haul them up on the rock. We noticed, on this occasion, that the men had that wildness in their looks which usually accompanies excessive fatigue; and though just as willing as ever to obey orders, they seemed at times not to comprehend them. However, by dint of great exertion, we managed to get the boats above the surf; after which, a hot supper, a blazing fire of drift-wood, and a few hours‘ quiet rest quite restored us.

On August 21 they returned to Hecla Cove and the following day started to prepare the ship for its journey back to England. Having raised a flagpole with a copper plate bearing an inscription of their expedition’s stay on the site, they sailed out of Hecla Cove on the evening of August 28. The expedition had carefully surveyed the bay and Lieutenant Foster had sounded it and produced a chart of the results which was published in Parry’s narrative of the expedition. Parry made an interesting remark in his journal on the possible origin of the name of the bay in respect of the gravesite, located at the western entrance to the bay, that he called Graves Point, today Eolusneset.

The neighbourhood of this bay, like most of the northern shores of Spitzbergen, appears to have been much visited by the Dutch at a very early period; of which circumstance records are furnished on almost every spot where we landed, by the numerous graves which are met with.

There are thirty of these on a point of land on the north side of the bay *. The bodies are usually deposited in an oblong wooden coffin, Which, on account of the difficulty of digging the ground, is not buried, but merely covered by large stones and a board is generally placed near the head, having, either cut or painted, upon it the name of the deceased, with those of his ship and commander, and the month and year of his burial. Several of these were fifty or sixty years old; one bore the date of 1738; and another, which I found on the beach to the eastward of Hecla Cove, that of 1690, the inscription distinctly appearing in prominent relief, occasioned by the preservation of the wood by the paint, while the unpainted part had decayed around it. * Perhaps the name of this bay, from the Dutch word Treuren, “to lament, or be mournful”, may have some reference to the graves found here.

A sound like thunder roared over the bay In July 1898 the Swedish reconnaissance expedition for the Swedish-Russian Arc of Meridian expedition came to Sorgfjorden. They anchored in Hecla Cove and spent a couple of days in the area working on one link in the chain of the triangular positioning for the coming measuring project. They put up one of their signals near Parry’s old flagpole at Crozierpynten on the shores of Hecla Cove. The site of Parry’s old base camp harbour became the site of the wintering quarters for the Swedes when returning in the summer of 1899.

Their work, led by the geodesist and astronomer Edvard Jäderin, became quite difficult during the wintering due to unfavourable ice conditions, and what should have been finished by the end of the season in 1900 was not. During the stay at the site the family of Knut Frænkel, the young engineer who had died on Andrée’s expedition, almost lost another member. It was Knut Frænkel’s brother Hans who, by luck alone, survived a solo attempt to hike to and climb into the Chydenius Mountains south of the fjord. Initially believed to have been one mountain, the mountains actually proved to be a large mountain range stretching south and including the highest peak in Svalbard, Newtontoppen, at 1,717 metres. Frænkel had slipped on his way up into the mountains and suffered a serious fall. He had to spend a night in the open with a broken hipbone watching the lights of the base camp huts glimmer in the valley below across the fjord. He was found alive by a rescue party the following day and managed to keep his frostbitten toes, but had to spend weeks in bed at the wintering station. One of my most striking thoughts when wondering about the remains of the Swedish houses is: Why we have not taken care of this cultural heritage? What has made Sweden such a bad caretaker of its own cultural heritage remains in Svalbard? These houses could have been saved and taken care of. They could have been not only historical reminders of Swedish research activities in Svalbard but also active and living parts of our cultural heritage as platforms for contemporary researchers or photographers, writers and artists wanting to work in the area. Seeing the rubble of planks is seeing wasted opportunities and land-based

14 // Remains of the old Swedish house in Hecla Harbour, September 2011.

15 // The bottom of the bay Sorgfjorden and Hecla Harbour, September 2011.

16 // M/S Stockhom, September 2011.

research platforms on the northern shores of Svalbard to dream about.

look as we approached the glacier and the fulmars came on a close inspection-round of the strangelooking figure with a video camera in a small basket above the ship’s deck. The views from up there were rewarding: the glacier looked impressive and the colours ranged from the black mountains through the white and bluish tones of the glacier to the hues of sunset reds reflecting in the sea and on the ice. The water was sometimes a shimmering green and deep blue, and then a murky brown. The ship went through glacial ice with its characteristic fizzing sounds from air bubbles being released from the melting ice. Suddenly the glacier calved, a sound like thunder roared over the bay and the wave coming towards the ship looked more serious from up where I stood. I realised that it might cause a bit of swell and held on to the basket as it passed. The force of the masses of ice falling into the sea is not to be underestimated even on a ship like this. We were at a safe distance of a couple of hundred metres away and the wave had lost most of its energy as it rolled past us. Serious accidents have occurred with smaller boats too close to glacial fronts being overturned by waves hitting as hard and fast as ice-breaks from the glacier. As we turned and the Stockholm was sailing out of the bay the sun had set and the dusk of evening was replacing it. In front of us, the sea to the north was ghostly calm

and a thick fog was forming around the ship as we sailed for night harbour in Beverlysundet. Approaching our anchor site close to Chermsideøya at 80°N, with its heavy black mountain slopes striped with patterns of icy channels, we were surrounded by a night of fogbanks over the sea that can only be described as magical. It was the Arctic sublime that materialised in the stillness of that night. It was not the roaring storms or howling blizzards, nor was it the extreme cold or vast fields of ice or massive, rugged and wild mountains that got me thinking of Mary Shelly and “Frankenstein”, Edwin Landseer and his “Man Proposes, God Disposes” or Kaspar David Friedrich’s “The Arctic Sea” for the first time on this trip. It was the hard-to-define light and stillness of this Arctic night.

We packed ourselves into the zodiac and, as the calm sea permitted, crossed the fjord towards its entrance and the gravesite described in Parry’s journal. With a cross raised on a cairn up on a rocky hill above the fjord, the foreland was a strange experience of a palette of dark colours, glacial light in the end of the fjord enhancing the sometimes black rock, with the only sounds being the calls of some birds, increasing the solitude of the place. We rejoined the M/S Stockholm and decided to sail for Lady Franklinfjorden and Søre Franklinbreen.

The September evening was almost too good to be true, with the sea still calm and the sun setting slowly in a light that only visuals can come close to describing. I was just about to climb the lookout on our ship when a bear was spotted. It was a healthy looking animal eating a seal on an ice flow in the bay. We approached with caution and passed slowly in silence except for the stifled sound of the engine and the low metallic clicking of camera shutters. The bear looked at us for a while, continued eating and then slowly decided to retreat with its prey, gliding into the water and unhurriedly swimming away. I climbed the out-

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Tracks in the landscape In the morning the weather had turned and a light rain was falling. We were protected from the strong northerly wind at our anchor site south of Chermsideøya. The captain had taken us to the island to show us the stone works on the site. The names and years of some of the visiting ships had been laid out on the sloping beach. The first was the Ran from the 1898

17 // Chermsideøya north coast Svalbard, the swastika laid out by a German ship in 1939.

18 // Phippsøya, Driftwood, September 2011

19 // Phippsøya, Høgberget, September 2011

Swedish reconnaissance expedition for the SwedishRussian Arc of Meridian led by Jäderin, whose name could also be seen on the beach. They had come to Beverly Sound and anchored there at midnight on July 8 during an attempt to sail north to Waldenøya and Parryøya, but the ice had been too heavy east of the sound. The Ran had been followed by the Russian ship Krassin searching for Umberto Nobile and his crashed airship, the Italia in 1928, and in 1939 a German ship had visited and laid out a swastika that now stood out among the names and numbers on the ground. Captain Engwall told us that the swastika had been vandalised a couple of times but had been restored as the protected cultural remain it strangely enough represents as it pre-dates 1946.

behind them, but can generally only speculate or be guided by them as signs when creating a story of previous expeditions, and by the tracks in the landscape when searching for traces of those who came before.

The attempt to go ashore was aborted by a polar bear that had taken up a position on the beach of one of the most northerly cultural heritage sites in the world. As I desperately wanted to see the site and also to film it we decided that a small team should go ashore as the bear had started to walk away. Our two reliable bear guards assisted me and, as the bear headed north, I was able to closely examine the stone settings. The weather was grey, rainy and a light wind had started to build in the sound. It was a brief and military-style visit as we had to stay alert should the bear decide to return, and the weather was now clearly turning.

we could not make it to Waldenøya as hoped in order to visit the island and follow Jäderin and the others of 1898, as well as Parry’s party of 1827. The captain aimed for Phippsøya and Isflaksbukta instead, where he thought he would find a protected anchor site for a visit to the island and a chance to get out of the rough sea. Commander Phipps had encountered heavy ice up here in 1773 but had been able to go ashore at the island that today bears his name. After a slow and rough journey north we finally came to anchor in the bay on the southeast of the island. We landed the group on the beach to the east of the little hut.

Seeing that symbol in this remote area of Svalbard is beyond strange, and is a ghostly reminder of the cultural, ideological and political baggage Man brings to every corner of the Earth, and of the tracks we leave behind. Viewing the names of the other visitors and their “we were here” reminders for future visitors gives me more pleasant associations and I come to think of Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Hamish Fulton and the concepts of land art. Building cairns and messages in the Arctic is quite a common practice and often seen in Svalbard. We sometimes know the story

The northerly winds remained strong Back onboard the ship, coffee and cake were served and we started to sail north for Sjuøyane following the route of the 1872 and 1898 Swedish expeditions. They had both encountered difficult ice conditions at Sjuøyane, as had been the case for Phipps in 1773. We met with hard northerly winds coming down upon us with a vengeance. The ice-free Polar Sea was roaring and

A group of walruses were on the beach and we spent some time watching them in the now Arctic weather conditions. A smaller group of us decided to go for an excursion towards the hut and head out to the strip of land between Eldsbukta and Horgvika on the island.

The light was very distinct, despite the mild snowstorm that now proclaimed that we were at our most northerly stop on this journey. Underfoot, the rock and gravel were sometimes slippery, and caution when walking was absolutely necessary. We passed the hut and walked over the frozen ground to the remarkable northwest side of the island and the land-strip filled with driftwood connecting the two halves of the island.

The weather did not permit us to climb the mountain-

20 // Bengtssenbukta, old ice, September 2011

21 // Bengtssenbukta, Stevie at Blaeuodden, September 2011.

22 // Rijpbreen 2011.

tops. We went down to the sea and then crossed the open windy expanse back towards the hut where our zodiac was waiting to whisk us back to the ship. It was now snowing and the wind was harsh. The captain explained that no better conditions were in sight and that going further east as planned would probably be a quite unpleasant but, more importantly, a very unproductive journey in heavy seas. He suggested that we head due south and seek safe haven at the end of Rijpfjorden, from where we could visit Haudegen Wettertrupp’s World War II station and explore Wordiebukta and Bengtssenbukta. The captain did a great job of taking us out of the heavy swell that seemed to come at us from every direction, and we were all quite relieved as we anchored in the calm of Wordiebukta when the weather cleared, though the northerly winds remained strong out in the open sea to the north of us.

that could easily have been removed by careless collectors. The station had been set up in September of 1944 and when the war ended in May 1945 the Germans at the station found themselves cut off and in a fairly tight spot. They had to prepare for another winter, which must have been a bleak prospect knowing that the war was over and they were stationed in one of the most remote places in Svalbard. The likelihood of another winter in the Arctic ended when the Norwegian sealer Blåsäl came into the bay, and the last outpost of the German armed forces surrendered unconditionally on September 4 1945. While we were trying to find a good spot to land our zodiac a bear was spotted on the mountain slope to the north of the station. The visit was aborted, the zodiac crossed the bay and we landed on Wordieodden to the east of the station, where we spent a couple of hours walking off our sea legs among the rocks and hills. Having returned to the ship, I wanted to get some footage of the station as I had old film from inside the houses taken back in 2001. Again we decided to do a quick landing with the bear guards on red-alert and the zodiac ready to leave should the bear become interested. The sadlooking animal sitting beside the remains of a glacier hanging on the mountain wall seemed to be the watch guard of the old German intrusion into the landscape.

The bear did not move or take any notice of us when

we landed just outside the station and I walked ashore and filmed the buildings. It was still in its position when we left for the ship and sailed out of the bay towards Bengtssenbukta at the western entrance of Rijpfjorden. Over the course of just 24 hours we had seen the traces of the rising of the German dark empire of 1939 at Chermsideøya with its uncanny reminder of what the stolen swastika symbol will forever represent, followed by evidence of the fall of the empire with the ruins of the 1945 remains of Haudegen’s hut in Wordiebukta. At both places it seemed like the bears wanted to have us stay away, observe and remember but move on and forget; observe the cultural heritage of war that marks the landscape, forget the acts of war imposed on the land and see the beauty beyond the scars of the worst acts of Mankind, the unspeakable acts of war.

A pile of fur and with its head intact The Haudegen station is the only German weather station that remains intact. It is now protected and you are not allowed to go within 30 metres of the buildings and other remains. When I first visited the site in 2001 we were allowed to enter the buildings, which were in fairly poor condition and filled with remains

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When geographer and glaciologist Alexander Richard Glen, along with second-in-command photographer Andrew Croft and the Oxford University Arctic Expedition 1935–1936, came to Svalbard they were joined by the Norwegian trapper Karl J. Bengtssen. The expedition was a survey expedition to Nordaustlandet and was working with observations of the glaciers and geological surveys on the north coast of the area.

The expedition also worked on the ice cap of the large

23 // Mosselbukta, Swedish wintering house, June 1873.

Photograph Axel Enwall.

24 // Mosselbukta, Swedish wintering house, September 2011.

glacier Vestfonna, and they used dogs to circumnavigate Nordaustlandet. Today we find Glenhalvøya to the north of Nordaustlandet. Looking west from Wordieodden we had caught a glimpse of Croftbreen and were now approaching Rijpbreen in Bengtssenbukta.

Considering the historic geographical and glacial work

by Glen and Croft, it seemed right to take a closer look at a glacier. We had decided to explore Bengtssenbukta and take a walk on Rijpbreen.

the colours darkened but intense, ranging from the solid black rock to the grey and bluish ice through hues of brown and red and green. The ground was frozen and covered in a light powder of frostlike snow. Bear tracks in the frozen pools of mud looked like fossil paw prints from past times. We walked up on the ice and watched our step as we approached a large crevasse. I followed our glaciologist thinking that he knew where to walk on a seemingly solid massive river of ice.

We landed our zodiac at Blaeuodden and walked towards the glacier. On the black rocks by the sea we came across a dead bear. It lay as a pile of fur with its head intact.

The view over the bay from the ice was spectacular.

The Stockholm was seen in the far distance, cruising the bay among some of the blue icebergs that had calved from the glacier. The afternoon had become evening dusk and we decided to head back to the ship for dinner. As we walked down the frozen ground along the glacier towards the bay I thought of Timothy O’Sullivan and his photographs from Nevada during the King Surveys of 1867 and 1868. Here in the semidesert of Svalbard there was no heat or hard sun, no desert plants or large rivers and falls, but there are mountains and dry ground and rocks, sand and washes with melt water, with rivers and falls replaced by glacial ice streams which fall into the sea. The survey photographers of the American West created a set of visuals that, to this day, play a part in defining the landscape they portrayed. Their photographs, the

The legs and spine were scattered among the rocks at the site. It looked as if another bear had eaten it. The tormented remains of the bear matched the twisted geological formations of the landscape. The combined views around the site reminded me of the desert lands of the American Southwest. After paddling the zodiac during a river crossing we reached the glacier, and on the ridge by the ice the landscape resembled even more its desert counterpart with its sliced and twisted rocks, sand banks and arid gravel fields with washes and stony ground through panoramic views of shifting colours. The light was late-afternoon-in-September,

first camera views, became pioneering visual documents and artistic representations of the American West. We still have much to learn about the photographers from that same era and their work in this Arctic land.

A situation far different to ours In the morning we came to Hinlopen and decided to visit De Geerbukta and Faksedalen. This place was of particular interest to glaciologist Holmlund who wanted to rephotograph some work that had been done in the area in 1901 and 1931. The ground was frozen as we came to another desert site, with a mountain range broken up by glaciers across the valley we looked out over from the range of hills we had climbed to find the vantage point from where photographs had been taken by Gerard De Geer’s party in 1901, and later Hans W:son Ahlmann in 1931. We found a small cairn on the ridge, which was probably where De Geer had marked his observational position. It was a cold but clear and calm day and Holmlund was able to do the work he needed for his study, as described in his accounts of his work included in this volume. As we continued our journey back towards the western coast we made a short stop in Murchisonbukta at Krossøya, or Nor-

25 // Svitjodbreen, Fuglefjorden, September 2011.

26 // Svitjodbreen #II, Fuglefjorden, September 2011.

27 // Larusbreen, Fuglefjorden, September 2011.

dre Russøya, at the entrance of Hinlopen to view the old wooden Russian cross still standing there as photographed by Vilhelm Carlheim-Gyllensköld in July 1898. The weather was clearing and as we headed for Mosselbukta, where we were to anchor for the night, the sun was shining on the north coast of Svalbard.

Reaching Mosselbukta on September 14 we again picked up the trail of photographer Axel Enwall, who was part of Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld’s wintering expedition in 1872-73. This had been their wintering location, and when the Stockholm had anchored our captain looked at the photographs of the ships frozen into the bay for the winter, a situation far different to ours. In the morning we planned to go ashore and visit the remains of the Swedish house that had been built there in 1872 — another house and Swedish cultural heritage place we could have maintained. Had we done so the house would no doubt still have been standing as a great terrestrial base for further research activities in an area with a historical tradition. Today it is but a pile of wood with a stove, robbed of its hatch, standing in the rubble.

ful in the Arctic autumn sun. According to Kjellman, the author of the expedition book, the bay would never again show itself from this inviting and beautiful side during their hard winter’s stay. The expedition arrived with no fewer than 66 men and 40 reindeer! The latter were with them as sledge animals for a journey north that was one of the main aims of the expedition.

Originally their winter quarters should have been further north, preferably on one of Sjuøyane. Ice conditions prevented them from reaching the northern islands. The ship, the Polhem, was the only ship that intended to stay for the winter but bad luck, difficult ice and an early winter meant that the two cargo ships, the Gladan and the Onkel Adam, had to stay as well. In April 1873 Nordenskiöld and his sledge party headed towards the north. There were no reindeer, however, as all but one had escaped during a storm and were possibly saved from certain death on that northward journey. Having reached Phippsøya on May 17, Nordenskiöld realised that they had to change their plans and head back towards the north coast of Nordaustlandet as the ice was severe and extremely difficult to navigate. This meant that they had no time to try to find their way through the maze of hummocks, ridges and frozen blocks. They managed to get beyond the most eastern point reached by Nordenskiöld on Torell’s expedition in 1861 and finally ended up travelling on

the vast ice cap of the Austfonna glacier. Several critical incidents with crevasses meant that they had to abandon plans to travel south across the ice cap, and they decided to make for Mosselbukta. After a long and arduous journey on foot they all arrived back at their base on June 29. The expedition had managed to survey the northeast corner of Nordaustlandet and produced an expanded, more reliable and updated map of the area that confirmed the 1871 observations of British traveller, adventurer and hunter Benjamin Leigh Smith of the land at the most north eastern end of Svalbard.

Nordenskiöld had arrived in Mosselbukta on September 3 in a “flood of light” and calm sea, rendering the bay most inviting and the landscape surrounding the little cove where they settled for the winter was colour-

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Having spent the night in the bay we went ashore and visited the remains of the site of Nordenskiöld’s house from close to the vantage point of one of Enwall’s images, which I rephotographed. The place has many interesting stories to tell, with many threads weaving through its narrative. One that comes to mind is, of course, the tragedy of the winter of 1872. Nordenskiöld had faced difficult trouble early on, with both his cargo ships having to winter in the area, and things only got worse when a group of Norwegian sealers froze in off the coast east and west of Mosselbukta and approached him in early September. He could not help the 58 sealers but advised a party of them to try to reach the house that he had built that

summer at Kapp Thordsen, much further south in Isfjorden. A group of 17 Norwegians took their chances and set off in small boats for the house, which was well stocked with supplies. They made it safely and almost got through the winter there. In early November the sea opened to the east and the rest of the Norwegians, except the two men who stayed behind to look after the ships off the western location at Gråhuken, sailed for Norway. 39 of the sealers made it safely to the mainland and back home and were lucky to have survived. The remaining men were not so lucky. The 17 men at Kapp Thordsen all died during the winter and were found in the spring and buried on site. Recent investigations indicate that they died of illness related to lead poisoning from the tin cans’ food storage rather than of scurvy as previously assumed, or perhaps a combination of both, effectively grinding them all down to a horrible death. The two men at Gråhuken, Johan Mattilas and Gabriel Anderssen, had built a hut and were suffering horribly through the winter before dying of scurvy late in the spring. They knew that help lay to the east but could not reach the Swedes’ station across the wide bay, and were buried on the site.

Dark sharp mountains rising from sea level At midday on September 15 the Stockholm set a westerly course, back towards Fair Haven where we intended to explore the area shown in Axel Enwall’s photographs.

At first the weather looked promising and the sailing was good. However, while approaching Velkomstpynten on Reinsdyrflya the fogbank ahead at Klovningen turned out to be like a wall. As we passed the landmark we could barely make out the cleft on the island and everything was grey. The sea was dead calm but visibility almost zero and we had to rethink our plans.

Experienced from previous encounters with the thick fog of Spitsbergen, Captain Engwall suggested that we go into Fuglefjorden towards Svitjodbreen. The fog is sometimes lighter around the large glaciers and can even offer a fairly dramatic experience of light and mist, mountains and glaciers. As we sailed into the fjord, following the eastern mountain wall at Skutelen,

the weather cleared and the landscape emerged like a painted scene from a novel by Tolkien.

Larusbreen on the western mountain slopes offered a sharp contrast to the dark and gloomy mountainous land in the bay. The old glacier, portrayed by Enwall in 1872 and used by Elisee Recluse in his Nouvelle Geographie Universelle La Terre Et Les Hommes in 1880 and in the English version from 1882, had lost its volume on the mountain and its wide front into the bay but still remained an impressive and colourful sight.

In 1872 Enwall, along with physicist Wijkander, botanist Kjellman and four sailors from the Polhem, was a member of the party that explored this bay in a small boat. They landed on one of the rocky islands on the eastern side of the bay and started their work that included magnetic observations by Wijkander, botanical notes by Kjellman and photographic recordings

by Enwall. Fuglefjorden, then called Foul Bay, is one of the most spectacular places in northwestern Svalbard with dark sharp mountains rising from sea level forming twisted ridges that surely explain why the Dutch gave the land the name of Spitsbergen. At the end of the bay lay the large glacier that was even more impressive in Enwall’s time. We experienced the same remarkable sound effects approaching the glacier, with the sea boiling with a fizzing sound from the melting ice that entirely covered the dark blue and green surface closer to the glacial front. Kjellman comments on that particular phenomenon and on his impressions of the uncanny sound of ice breaking away from the glacier sending thunder-like echoing sound waves over the bay that must have amplified the feeling of rugged wildness that he writes about even further.

Enwall is one of the Swedish pioneers of Arctic photography. Axel Goës on Torell’s 1861 expedition was possibly the first Swedish photographer in the Arctic but we don’t have Goës negatives or prints, only descriptions and drawings of his photographs. It is interesting that both Goës and Enwall were medical scientists and photographers. Both Enwall and Goës created photographic panoramas, (Goës in Magdalenefjorden and Enwall in Fuglefjorden and Smeerenburgfjorden). Enwall’s early camera views are important work

in the Swedish history of photography as a thorough visual recording of sites like Fuglefjorden and Smeerenburgfjorden, as well as a visual recording of the expedition. These days the historic series of photographs offers important renderings of the landscape in general and the glaciers in particular, and is a good example of photographs as both documents and artistic representations. Having explored the bay with the Stockholm sailing in towards the glacier, and having had a rare opportunity to experience the landscape by navigating the bay’s narrow passages, we decided to try Holmiabukta to find another glacier in some of the photographs we had with us. The fog was too thick, however, and we decided to spend the night in the bay and see if it would clear in the morning. It was a calm and pleasant night on the ship with an, as always, excellent dinner, with coffee and cake for dessert. The fogbanks enclosed us and we lost all sense of where we were. In the morning nothing had changed when I woke up at six o’clock as agreed with the captain.

Holmiabukta was still covered in a grey thick milky air and we could just about make out some light in the direction of the glacier. My camera and its 300-lens coped with the light far better than I could with my naked eye. The image is a ghostlike appearance of ice in the mist. It came out like something from bygone days, as if looking back in time, back into the realm of the cold, into the wild. I came to think of Frankenstein for the second time on our journey.

Learning from past mistakes The captain ordered the ship to sail south. The weather was grey and gloomy with rain and windy gusts as we cleared out of Fair Haven and soon passed the entrance to Magdalenefjorden, all covered in thick fog. Our next goal was Camp Mansfield or New London on Blomstrandhalvøya in Krossfjorden. Mansfield was a British prospector who thought he had found a rich well of marble and started a mine on the peninsula only to realise too late that it was worthless and useless as the marble was too fragile and, when taken out of the frost, no good. Still standing to this day, the industrial remains of his enterprise are a monument

28 // The Mine, Pyramiden, Russian ghost town, September 2011.

29 // The Pigshouse, Pramiden 2011.

to yet another attempt to exploit the natural resources of the Arctic. Before our journey ended we would visit more such attempts and it is impossible not to think of the political agenda of today’s dream of an Arctic Klondike of gas and oil. What if we were to take the brave and sane decision to save the entire Arctic wildness? As American environmentalist Mardy Murie might have had put it: is humanity so rich that we can afford to lose the Arctic wilderness, or are we so poor that we cannot keep from exploiting amongst the most fragile and last of the wild places on Earth? When it is gone, it is gone and too late to regret what we have done. The greatest achievement of progress is sometimes to halt and step back, step back wise from the experiences gained from pushing forward to the turning point. High-latitude travels in the tracks of polar history remind us of this, for sure. In our age, however, it is not fashionable to learn from past mistakes and experience when it comes to nature. We would rather predict the future and view our options from simulated models, and hope for technical solutions that will help us plough on with business as usual.

called this Spitsbergen. It was a remarkable sunset with red skies battling the dark hues of blue, purple and grey of the September evening and the black sharpridged mountains and glowing white glaciers. It was one of the most dramatic and spectacular evening views of the entire journey. As the sunset turned to autumn night we left the Dutch explorers at Salpynten, or the old Black Point, the most southerly point of Prins Karls Forland. In the morning we sailed on towards the ghost town of Pyramiden at 78°N in Billefjorden. The weather was still grey, with low-hanging thick clouds covering the Pyramiden mountain above the mining settlement, and the mountains surrounding the fjord were adorned with their first powder of snow of the season.

We sailed south, crossing the route of the Dutch discoverers of Spitsbergen. Passing Grampienfjella, rising above a mass of glaciers on the east side of Forland, we were again reminded of why the Dutch had

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for the Russian coal mining in Svalbard, is the only active Russian settlement. A claim on Pyramiden was originally made by Sweden in 1910 but the Russians finally started mining there in 1956. Despite the northern location, it became quite a popular place to work.

An estimated 1,000 people lived and worked there during its heyday. In the 1970s and 80s, the mining settlement in Svalbard was undergoing Soviet-style modernisation and renovation. Larger brick buildings were raised and grass was transported from Siberia, which made the settlement look more and more like a small village where many of the houses featured lots of intricate wooden details. The village was more or less self-sufficient and animals were kept in the farmhouse. The 1980s brought a swimming pool and sports centre. For a short while, it was even ahead of Norwegian Longyearbyen.

Man proposes, the Arctic disposes The frontier land in the Arctic sea, Svalbard, had a strategic role both during World War II and in the Cold War era. The main settlements in Svalbard are Norwegian and Russian. The largest community in Svalbard is Norwegian Longyearbyen, a developed and modern settlement that lacks for nothing when it comes to comfort. The mining village of Barentsburg, developed by Trust Arktigukol which was responsible

Pyramiden was closed in 1998 and the industrial location was stripped of scrap metal, which was shipped out of Svalbard via Trust Arktigukol’s harbour in Barentsburg. It is now a ghost town that once belonged on the fringes of the former Soviet Union, but now belongs to Russia. Pyramiden is just one example of the many problems Russia faced in maintaining the outposts of its former borders. Modern Russia could not afford to maintain the mine. To visit Pyramiden is to

30 // Nordenskiöldbreen, Billefjorden, September 2011.

31 // Pyramiden, Russian Ghost Town, September 2011.

walk back in time into a contemporary archaeological site that stands like a monument to a fallen empire. It is located in Billefjorden in Svalbard, and can easily be reached from Longyearbyen by day tour boat or, in winter, by snow scooter. There are no restrictions on visiting Pyramiden, but the houses are locked and visitors are not allowed to enter any buildings without a local Russian guide.

came the modern state that it is today, blood could no longer be pumped out to the fringes of its former vast empire. The barren outposts suffered when the central government changed its politics. The Cold War Arctic frontier was confined to Barentsburg, where the final battle of the Russian presence in Svalbard might be played out over the coming years. The coalmines are historically important employers in Svalbard, and mining is now one of the key issues in terms of the Russian presence in Svalbard. Tourism is thus now one of Svalbard’s most important and lucrative businesses and employers. In 2011 the hotel in Pyramiden was once again being prepared to open for tourists or scientists, and the hope of being able to attract visitors to Svalbard yet again was very much alive on the site. There have been ideas of turning Pyramiden into an archaeological laboratory, to use a term coined by the American archaeologist Pete. J. Capelotti. The Arctic is a place where the natural destruction of human traces is a slow process. The old mining village could be studied for centuries, as it is slowly broken down by nature. Other (Russian) suggestions have been to resurrect the village as a tourist and research centre. It is a fascinating place, like an outdoor industrial historical museum, one of Svalbard’s many industrial cultural heritage sites. It is a reminder of the former Soviet Union, where Lenin,

As the boat slowly entered the harbour I inevitably came to think of Tarkovsky’s movie “Stalker”. You are about to enter the “zone”. The ghostly feeling in the village was reinforced by the silent emptiness interrupted by the engines of tractors and lorries, suddenly a ghostly figure hurrying by and bleak lights in a few buildings. Clouds and mist often sweep through the Arctic landscape. The weather and light change rapidly and constantly reshape the views. One can only imagine the place in the dark and cold Arctic winter. There is an uncanny feeling of being watched when you walk through the streets of Pyramiden. As if there is something out there. The silence that goes with old industrial landscapes is difficult to grasp. In some parts of the village the fragments and traces of human occupancy seem fresh and recent. As if the site was abandoned in a hurry. Pyramiden is a place that the perestroika never reached. When Russia be-

from his position in front of the Gagarin sports centre, is forever looking out over the village towards the Nordenskiöld glacier in the distance. Man proposes, the Arctic disposes.

The weather had turned clear and sunny in Pyramiden and, this being the last day of our journey, we wanted to make the most of it. On our way back to Longyearbyen we sailed into Skansbukta and cruised the bay looking at the remains of the old gypsum mine from the ship. Once again Enwall’s photographs were with us as one of his panorama views from Spitsbergen was taken here at Skansen Mountain. The winds were fresh and the sky clear, with a low afternoon sun. We anchored in a moderate swell outside Kapp Thordsen, a place notorious for difficult wet landings.

Our luck was in, the sea would not disturb the landing site for a couple of hours. The walk up from the beach is a steep climb on a narrow trail, followed by a long walk in soft moss up to the old Swedish house, dated 1872, and the graves of the unfortunate Norwegian sealers of that same year.

The house at Kapp Thordsen is Svalbard’s oldest house still standing. In 1882-83 it was used by the Swedish wintering expedition led by meteorologist Nils Ekholm as part of the first International Polar Year. Salomon

32 // Isfjorden, September 2011.

33 // Longyearbyen, September 2011.

August Andrée was a member of that expedition; it was his first visit to the Arctic. Andrée, the Man who — 14 years later — would sail out from Danskøya with Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel in his balloon, The Eagle, and vanish in the frozen north. Reading his diary of that wintering, it is difficult to understand why he decided to go back to Svalbard to launch his own expedition. It had not been a pleasant winter for him, nor had he had any success with the group of scientists during his time with the expedition. He expresses no desire to go back or to explore further the land of the north. Having returned to the house from a guard watch in March 1883, he sat by the window looking out over the frozen sea and was struck by a feeling of what we might describe “the Arctic sublime”. Being a Man of few emotions, and dismissing any attempts at poetics, he concluded what many before had concluded when faced with the silence and dead calm emptiness of Arctic winter: he felt uncomfortable and chilled to the bones when contemplating on being out there in the realm of the cold, alone and facing survival. The sea, he thought, might be his saviour, trying to build a net to catch plankton. He did just that, 14 years later on an ice flow in polar waters north of the islands. It did not work and I have always wondered whether he thought back to that night in the house at Kapp Thordsen. We had to get back down

to the zodiac and out to the ship before the tide made it a difficult and very wet prospect. In the evening we crossed Isfjorden to Longyearbyen and anchored at the quay.

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Notes 1 — Beechey, F.W., A Voyage of Discovery Towards The North Pole ( London, 1843), pp. 45-46.

2 — See: The Place Names of Svalbard, (Tromsø: Norsk Polarinstitutt, 2001), Conway, M., No Man’s Land, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906).

3 — Beechey, F.W., A Voyage of Discovery Towards The North Pole, ( London, 1843).

4 — Crutzen, P. J., “Geology of Mankind,” Nature, vol. 415, 3 January 2002.

5 — Phipps, C., The Journal Of A Voyage For making Discoveries towards the North Pole (London, 1774), pp. 74-75.

6 — Larsson, A., “-skönt att än en gång vara bland isen,” Ralph Bergendahl och Johan Menander, Svenska sjöbefäl i polarforskningens tjänst, (Gothenburg: B4 Press, 2011), pp. 114-119.

7 — See: stadnamn.npolar.no at Norwegian Polar Institute.

The Polar Sea, Spitsbergen, September 2011

Magdalenefjorden, September 2011

View of Virgohamna from Smeerenburg, Amsterdamøya, September 2011

Søre Franklinbreen, Lady Franklinfjorden, September 2011

Sjuøyane, Nelsonøya, September 2011

Sjuøyane, September 2011

Phippsøya, Flakbukta Sjuøyane, September 2011

Rijpfjorden, Wordiebukta, September 2011

Rijpfjorden, Haudegen Wettertrup WWII Weather station, September 2011

Polar Bear remains, Blaeuodden, Bengtssenbukta, September 2011

Bengtssenbukta, Ice flow #1 September 2011

Bengtssenbukta, Ice flow #2 September 2011

Bengtssenbukta, Inlet, September 2011

M/S Stockholm, Bengtssenbukta, September 2011

View East from Rijpbreen, September 2011

Rijpbreen, Pelle, September 2011

Rijpbreen, Gunilla, September 2011

Rijpbreen, birds on ice cliffs #1, September 2011

Rijpbreen, birds on ice cliffs #2, September 2011

Faksedalen, Lomfjorden, September 2011

Krossøya, Murchisonfjorden, September 2011

Murchisonfjorden, September 2011

Skutelen, Fuglefjorden, September 2011

Svitjodbreen, Fuglefjorden, September 2011

Larusbreen, Hรถgstadiusberget, Fuglefjorden, September 2011

Ice cave, Svitjodbreen, September 2011

Ice peaks, Svitjodbreen, September 2011

Holmiabukta, September 2011

Camp Mansfield, Krossfjorden, September 2011

Prins Karls Forland, September 2011

Billefjorden #1, September 2011

Billefjorden #2, September 2011

Pyramiden, September 2011

Pyramiden, September 2011

Pyramiden, September 2011

Pyramiden, Nordenskiรถldbreen, September 2011

Kapp Thordsen, Svenskhuset, September 2011