On Monday 14 August, when the tide is right, an antique sailing ship will manoeuvre through the lock of Plymouth’s historic Sutton harbour and point herself south-west towards the Canary Islands. It will be the start of a two-year voyage around the world taking in 32 ports and involving thousands of people in a groundbreaking geographical project, Darwin200, which aims, among other things, to inspire the environmental leaders and scientists of the future.
Seeking to solve the Arctic’s biggest mystery, they ended up trapped in ice at the top of the world
25.07.2023 - 11:51 / nationalgeographic.com
Jacob Keanik scanned his binoculars over the field of ice surrounding our sailboat. He was looking for the polar bear that had been stalking us for the past 24 hours, but all he could see was an undulating carpet of blue-green pack ice that stretched to the horizon. “Winter is coming,” he murmured. Jacob had never seen Game of Thrones and was unaware of the phrase’s reference to the show’s menacing hordes of ice zombies, but to us, the threat posed by this frozen horde was equally dire. Here in remote Pasley Bay, deep in the Canadian Arctic, winter would bring a relentless tide of boat-crushing ice. If we didn’t find a way out soon, it could trap us and destroy our vessel—and perhaps us too.
It was late August, and we’d ducked into the bay to ride out a ferocious gale. For more than a week, the wind had raged, sweeping six-foot-thick chunks of frozen seawater down from the polar cap. Some were the size of picnic tables, others as big as river barges.
Here and there, small icebergs jutted skyward like miniature floating Alps. The pieces of this drifting mosaic bobbed around the boat, rasping as they ground against each other and fizzing as they slowly melted and released trapped air bubbles.
Any one of these floes could be the torpedo that pierced our fiberglass hull, so we’d traded watches around the clock, constantly steering the ice away from the boat with long wooden poles the Inuit call tuks. As one day became two, and two became three, the ice slowly closed in like a vise. On day nine, when Jacob and I awoke to find the water between the floes had frozen, it seemed certain we were going to be trapped here for the winter. A cold knot formed in my gut as I wondered if this was how Franklin felt.
If our situation hadn’t been so urgent, its irony would be almost comical. Our crew of five had left Maine in my sailboat, Polar Sun, more than two months earlier to follow the route of the legendary explorer Sir John Franklin. He’d set off from England in 1845 in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, a sea route over the icy top of North America that would open a new trading avenue to the riches of the Far East. But Franklin’s two ships, Erebus and Terror, and his crew of 128 men had disappeared. What no one knew at the time was that the ships had become trapped in ice, stranding Franklin and his men deep in the Arctic. None lived to tell what happened, and no detailed written account of their ordeal has been found. This void in the historical record, collectively known as “the Franklin mystery,” has led to more than 170 years of speculation. It has also spawned generations of devoted “Franklinites” obsessed with piecing together the story of how more than a hundred British sailors tried to walk out of
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