Moby-Duck (50 page)

At three points along our route (I've been furnished with a map, one far more detailed than the one Curtis Ebbesmeyer gave me), I am to fetch from the
Louis
's wet lab one of three cardboard boxes. Inside each of these boxes are forty-eight corked beer bottles, all carefully numbered. Inside each bottle is a form letter addressed to beachcombers. “This bottle you have just found was dropped from the CCGS
Louis S. St-Laurent
, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker that travels the Arctic Ocean from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia,” the letter reads. “We have received reports from all around the world.” This year a freckle-faced, frizzy-haired fifteen-year-old oceanography enthusiast named Bonita LeBlanc is assisting Carmack with the project. She collected the bottles from a Canadian brewer. She spent weeks corking and sealing them. Before sealing them she recruited Nova Scotian schoolchildren to illuminate the letters in crayon and, if they wished, to add their own messages—messages like, “
Bonjour, je m'appelle Mélanie Maillet. J'ai 12 ans et je joue la flûte, le piano, et le violon.
” (Personal touches, especially those of schoolchildren, increase the response rate, Carmack has found.) Unfortunately for Bonita LeBlanc, minors aren't permitted to travel aboard Coast Guard ships—unfortunate for her, good for me. I'm her substitute, her proxy. From the stern of the
Louis
, I am to lob the bottles overboard and record assorted data—latitude, longitude, bottle numbers, time—in a logbook. It should be an easy job, but after my lackluster performance on the
Knorr
, I'm already anticipating ways in which I might mess it up—sleep through my alarm, send a box of bottles tumbling down a flight of slippery stairs or a bottle hurtling into a bulwark.

In return for my bottle-tossing services, I get to remain aboard the
Louis
for the voyage's second leg, which will take us from Resolute even deeper into the labyrinth, to the Canadian Arctic's sanctum sanctorum—a town called Cambridge Bay. A few weeks ago, late one night in Manhattan, I looked up Cambridge Bay in my
Atlas of the World.
There it was, 2,000 miles due north of Denver, Colorado, 1,444 nautical miles south of the North Pole, 3,139 nautical miles from the site of the toy spill, a little dot on the south coast of Victoria Island, at the very heart of the Northwest Passage.

 

 

Much as, seated in a taxiing jumbo jet, you can sense the precise moment when the wheels lift from the tarmac and the big steel machine takes improbably to the air, so too you can sense, standing on the bridge of an icebreaker—or for that matter at the taffrail of a ferry, or on the deck of a research vessel, or in the copilot's seat of a homebuilt cabin cruiser—that moment when, loosed from the bollards, a boat or ship goes adrift. Even in calm seas, you can feel it, the sensation of float.

Under hazy skies—the provisions all stowed, the safety drills all conducted, the gangway raised—the CCGS
Louis S. St-Laurent
departs. Up on the bridge, officers stand before levers and buttons and instruments and computer screens. The quartermaster sits at the helm, beside the gyro, a compass encased in a glass sphere. I stand before the windows, a paleochemist named Robie Macdonald to my left, and to my right, Captain Marc Rothwell, looking appropriately nautical in a navy blue sweater with gold epaulets. Neale Maude, the Australian cameraman, is shooting footage, panning this way and that. Over Maude's shoulder, his soundman, Daniel O'Connor, a lanky guy with a splendidly Victorian mustache, is holding up what looks like a feather duster on a stick, a gray, furry microphone.

Captain Rothwell radios the engine room and commands the engineers to test the bubblers. The bubblers are nozzles spaced along onethird of the
Louis
's hull. Icebreakers were invented about 150 years ago but only perfected in the last century. Mariners aboard the earliest models discovered that broken ice adheres to the cold steel of a ship like glue. Bubblers, Captain Rothwell tells me, “put a little air under the ice.” The air, like grease, makes the ice slip past.

Over the radio, from the engine room, four decks down, crackles the voice of an engineer: “Bubbles, roger, bubbles.” A moment later, the bubblers fire up, screaming. From the bridge they sound like a choir of damned souls.

“And that's the end of the first period,” one mariner says.

“The Canadiens are winning!” another adds. (The Canadiens, evidently, are an ice-hockey team.)

The
Louis
's helicopter, parked until now onshore, comes flying out, and Neil Maude swivels in its direction. The pilot, Chris Swannell, circles the ship then nimbly sets his pretty red mechanical dragonfly onto the helipad. Once word arrives from the hangar deck that the helicopter has been safely stowed inside its hangar, away we steam. The industrial districts of Halifax pass by.

By nightfall, we are out on the high Atlantic, making sixteen knots, and by first light, we've reached the subpolar front. There, where the warm water of the Gulf Stream meets the cold air flowing out of the Arctic, thick fog banks form. It's like steaming through a cloud. Our speed drops to 13.9 knots. Visibility drops almost to zero. Every three minutes, the foghorn of the
Louis
bellows out its two-tone song.

Late the following morning, the fog clears and there, to port, is the pale, mostly barren Labrador coast. Up on the bridge, I talk to Dave Fifield, the expedition's ornithologist, who is conducting a census of seabirds, one long-term aim of which is to assess the impact of global warming on populations and migration. To take a census of seabirds, what you do is station yourself in front of the thick windows, a pair of binoculars at hand, a pair of hiking boots on your feet, a pair of jeans on your legs, a pair of glasses on your face, a pair of ornithological field guides perched on the windowsill beside you, and spend all your waking hours gazing out at the ocean. And most of the time all you see are the same gray waves. The same encircling horizon. The same wedge of bow, pitching up and down, ever onward. Then, every so often, you spy a seabird and scribble something down in your logbook.

Considering myself an amateur bird-watcher of sorts, having gone bird-watching in the annals of folklore and myth, I borrow the second mate's binoculars, stored in a little box under the window, and give it a try. In the Strait of Belle Isle, with both Newfoundland and Labrador close by, seabirds are not uncommon. Before long, one appears to starboard, swooping down, skimming the waves, foraging for plankton and squid. Fifield's trained eyes spot it first. It has a snow-white underbelly, a dove-gray back. If forced to guess, I'd call it a gull. “Fulmar,” Fifield says, and notes it in his log. A northern fulmar, to be exact.
³³

“The thing to distinguish fulmars from gulls is the wing stroke,” he explains. “The gull will flap its wings slowly and continuously. A fulmar will hold its wings straight out and go
flap, flap, flap—glide; flap, flap, flap—glide
.” As he speaks, the fulmar demonstrates the accuracy of this description. There it goes, three quarter notes of flapping and then, wings locked, a long, whole note of glide, the waves sparkling beneath it. Although I have no use for such ornithological information, I admire it. I'd like to be able to read all the world so closely; to distinguish fulmars from gulls not by their coloring but by the subtleties of their aerodynamical styles.

In addition to fulmars and gulls, we spy gannets, and black-legged kittiwakes, and storm petrels. But no ducks. No plastic ducks. No real ones either. Ducks do frequent Arctic and subarctic waters. In fact many of the earliest and bravest Arctic explorers were fortuneseeking prospectors who went in search not of silver and gold but of ducks, eider ducks. Fowlers, these feather hunters were called. Female eider ducks line their nests with breast feathers—known to those shopping for an excellent parka or an excellent quilt as eiderdown. The plumage of eider ducks, whether newborn or juvenile, male or female, is never yellow. The females are brown. The striking black-and-white patterning of the males makes them recognizable from afar. Like the northern fulmar, the eider duck nests on Arctic cliffs. Eider ducks are by nature docile and defenseless birds. Hence their preference for cliffs.

To harvest eiderdown, you had to rappel down on a braided seal-hide rope, coax the mother duck from her nest, and then, dangling hundreds of feet above the icy, rocky surf, plunder her feathers, pocketing a few of her pale green eggs for tomorrow's breakfast, being sure to leave at least one, so that she would pluck more feathers from her breast, which you could come back to harvest later. Then you'd wad the harvested feathers into balls and lob these down to a boat pitching around in the rocky shallows below. Fowling was a perilous and often fatal form of avian husbandry that speaks both to the magically insulating properties of eiderdown, properties the manufacturers of synthetic down have attempted to simulate, and to the desperation and courage of fowlers, of whom one nineteenth-century journalist wrote, “We who have been brought up in comparative ease and luxury can scarcely picture to ourselves a more wretched lot than that of these poor islanders, compelled to undergo such toils, and expose themselves to so great dangers, for acquiring the mere necessaries of life.”

“Minke whale,” Dave Fifield says, pointing to port. As soon as I spot the black fin, it disappears. Ten seconds later it surfaces again, this time directly ahead of us, at twelve o'clock. Then ten seconds later it's to starboard, at two o'clock, headed south. Then it's gone. Then we are emerging from the Strait of Belle Isle into the frigid waters of the Labrador Sea, where for all I know an Irminger Ring is churning secretly beneath us, a yellow float or a sun-bleached duck caught in its watery coils. The next day, after passing through a gale-force storm, we're farther north than I've ever been.

In 2008, a British cell phone company launched an ad campaign inspired by the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea. There were print ads, billboards, television spots, all of which prominently featured ducks—yellow, of the classic sort, with clownish lips and cherubic cheeks and that innocent look of wonderment in their eyes—drifting merrily along through a digitally enhanced landscape of glaciers, icebergs, dark-blue water, sky-blue skies.

It's a compelling image, at once ironic and enchanting. After many lucubratory hours spent in spellbound contemplation, I am prepared to hazard an interpretation of the image's magic: The rubber duck is an icon of childhood, and of hygiene, and of domesticity, whereas the Arctic—or at least the Arctic of the mind, the Arctic as those of us who've spent our lives in temperate latitudes tend to imagine it—is everything that the rubber duck is not, the ultimate Ultima Thule, the most otherworldly place that is in fact of this world. The place where, before the space age began, virile men went to test their manhood, or, failing the test, to die.

From antiquity to modernity, what lay hidden within the ice was anybody's guess, and plenty of people guessed. Plato guessed that at the North Pole a tunnel conducted water to and from the earth's watery yolk—and as recently as 1909, his theory claimed adherents. The ancient Finns guessed that the Artic was a parallel universe and that every one of us had a shadow self who dwelled beneath the ice. I like this theory and kind of wish it were true. More accurately, if less hauntingly, an ancient Finnish epic described the Arctic as the “dark Northland, the man-eating, the fellow-drowning place.” In Greek myth, the Arctic was both the Cimmerian hell of perpetual darkness and the Hyperborean paradise of perpetual youth, a sunlit realm where, according to Pindar, dancing girls forever swirled around to “the lyre's loud chords and the cries of flutes.” According to the biblical prophet Jeremiah, “Evil is brought from the north over all the inhabitants of the Earth,” and in the last canto of
Inferno
, Dante's pilgrim visits a circle of hell where the damned are, as the historian Peter Davidson puts it in
The Idea of North
, “frozen into the ice of their own selfishness.”

In short, the Arctic has always been, in Davidson's words, “a place of extremes and ambiguities.” I think this is still true today, at least for most of us. Even in the narratives penned by explorers who actually traveled there and saw the place with their own eyes, you can detect traces of the old contradictory nightmares and dreams. The “unknown North,” as explorers often call it, is at once a “desert of ice,” a “howling waste,” “a frozen hell” and a sort of heavenly wonderland—“majestic,” “glittering,” “sublime.” The ice pack is “hydra-like” but the icebergs are “angelic” and the aurora borealis “celestial.” Adventurers still go to the Arctic seeking thrills, and find them; tourists on icebreaking cruise ships equipped with saunas and movie theaters go there seeking wonder and beauty and strangeness; scientists, meanwhile, go there seeking data with which to reduce their uncertainties to certainties, and find signs of fragility—thawing permafrost, melting ice, native species losing ground to invasive ones.

Before we went to the moon, the Arctic was the moon. Before we went to the moon, when we went to the Arctic, hygiene and domesticity were the least of our concerns. Who ever heard of an Arctic explorer taking a bubble bath? Arctic explorers had more pressing things to worry about than the odor of their undergarments—the odor of their gangrenous extremities, for instance. The Arctic is the symbolic if not the geographic antipode of the bathtubs of America, and the yellowness of the duck the antithesis of the whiteness of the polar bear, which is to the Arctic what the rubber duck is to the bathtubs of America—totem, emblem, mascot.

Melville himself gave some thought to the whiteness of
Ursus maritimus
: “With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged . . . that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analyzed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only arises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness you would not have that intensified terror.”