On the Open Polar Sea

In the distance to the north, we could see an ice floe, perhaps fifty feet long, hovering about thirty feet off the surface of the ocean. It rose up into the air, the ground beneath it perfectly visible, an expert magician’s trick.

This is what’s known as a “superior” or “looming” mirage, when the air below the line of sight is colder than the air above it, giving objects the appearance of floating above the water’s surface. (The opposite is what you see on hot days, when the ground in the distance shimmers.) Superior mirages are a hallmark of polar climates, responsible for the so-called Flying Dutchman, the appearance of a ship that floats above the sea (thought to be a harbinger of impending death); the Novaya Zemlya effect, when the sun appears as a rectangle or an hourglass; and sun dogs, when multiple suns appear on the horizon.

It was late June; the sun had been shining constantly since April, and wouldn’t set until August. Our latitude was roughly 78.5° north, on the northern tip of Spitsbergen, the largest and only inhabited island of the Svalbard archipelago. I had been sailing with a group of other artists, writers, and scientists, up the northwest coast of the island, and we had gone as far up as we’d be traveling. To the north, we saw only a few scattered ice floes, some on the water and some above it. For the most part, the horizon presented an undisturbed and placid sea, stretching endlessly into the curve of the earth. For all you could tell, one could sail north indefinitely, straight toward the North Pole and beyond.

The Svalbard archipelago has been a prime launching point for polar expeditions since the early nineteenth century. Among those who came here seeking the North Pole was John Franklin, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, who arrived in 1818—not yet “Sir John Franklin,” not yet the mythical figure he would become. Franklin had sailed with Captain David Buchan to Svalbard, hoping to get beyond it and into the Arctic Ocean. Buchan captained the larger Dorothea, while Franklin, then just a lieutenant, helmed the smaller Trent. North of Svalbard the two ships became trapped in ice; the Dorothea was crippled and could not go forward. Franklin, believing that he had found a way past the pack ice all around them, advocated taking the Trent forward alone, but he was overruled by his commanding officer, and both ships limped home.

This didn’t deter Franklin, any more than did an even more disastrous expedition overland in northern Canada...