could only be one thing: the Swedish con-
tender, and, more importantly, not ahead of
us, but behind.
This was wildly exciting. Exhaustion fell
away; we were galvanized. Tired, aching
limbs were forgotten. We chuffed on, as
indeed Belzebub II was doing, with David
steering and me peering through the glasses
in search of leads and helping him to locate
them. We crawled up the remote and un-
inhabited coastline of Banks Island in the
Parry Channel that gave way to the McClure
Strait. Captain McClure was the nineteenth-
century explorer who discovered this chan-
nel; he witnessed the frozen waste from
the shore after his ship had foundered and,
sledging across it, recognized it as the miss-
ing link in the shortest passage between the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
As global warming proceeds, one day, in a
few years to come, you probably will be able
to sail through.
Finally we emerged from the blanket fog
and for the first time had clear sight of the
waterways we had been groping our way
down, scattered with floating rafts of pack
ice. The sea was mirror calm, reflecting the
clouds and the dramatic 1,400-foot-high es-
carpment about two-thirds of a mile off to
port, a prominent peak named Cape Vesey
Hamilton. We both went out on deck to take
photographs, David snapping shots in quick
succession with two different cameras—one
huge, multiple-lens Canon and a handier
Lumix with a zoom lens—while I persisted
with my humbler “point and press.” This was
the most northerly point of our voyage at 74
degrees, 32 minutes north.
Cape Vesey confronted us like the for-
bidding headquarters of mountain trolls.
Its convoluted rocky face has four distinct,
horizontal seams of rock, the whole crossed
by great striations as though made by giant
griffin claws. The seams perhaps mark dif-
ferent ice ages, successive glacial flow wear-
ing away the softer material. These are the
guardian rocks to the western end of the
McClure Strait. The eastern end, on Devon
Island, shows similar strata. We re-emerged
from putting on warmer clothing and con-
tinued to take pictures of this towering, de-
fiant façade, soaring in silent majesty as if
it were the last bastion of an extinct world,
long to remain when mankind has been
vanquished by its own greed.
The sky of soft pinks, grays and blues wasexactly mirrored in the calm waters of the
strait, in between floating lumps of ice. The
solitude was immense, immeasurably pow-
erful and all-embracing. Belzebub II had
disappeared off our radar screen, probably
because she had altered her position and
there was no longer her angled beam from
which to glance off—end to end with Polar
Bound she would not show up on the radar.
David calculated that she was about 26 miles
behind us.
This, for us, was an historic moment. We
had succeeded in making a passage that had
been sought after for the last four centuries,
and we had beaten a close contender too. In
the short window of weather, with David’s
charts and navigational aids and, most im-
portantly, his knowledge and determination,
and with the help of our ice captain, we had
done it. I like to think that my four-greats
uncle Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin was
celebrating in the firmament of the Great
Beyond. UFrom The Frozen Frontier: Polar Bound
Through the Northwest Passage. Used with
permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. All
rights reserved.38 E PILOTHOUSE
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