BY JOHN FITZGERALD
A shroud of fog, just enough to lend a hint of eeriness enveloped the zodiac as Fabricio, a young, bearded Argentinian who was navigating our approach, maneuvered around the Lyubov Orlova’s ample bow.
When we’d first sighted the ship a few moments earlier, I could make out a large decal featuring the snappy red star and CCCP letters so familiar in the old USSR. It was embedded in the frame beneath the bridge.
Named after the Russian stage and screen actress of the 1930s, the Orlova, a 100-meter cruise ship chartered out of Malta, was laid down in 1976 in the former Yugoslavia. From my rubbery perch on the edge of the zodiac, she didn’t look a day over 30.
It was a late afternoon on an August day in Canada’s Eastern Arctic and the ship was anchored in the frigid waters of Ungava Bay, about 1600 kilometres north of Montreal.
In 1610, the explorer Henry Hudson had sailed into the bay aboard the 65-foot bark Discovery during an ill-fated bid to find the Northwest Passage. Hudson’s freezing and disgruntled crewmen eventually mutinied, forcing him, his son, John and seven others into a lifeboat. They were not heard from again. Thinking about the incident as the zodiac bobbed gaily on top of the water, I shivered.
We were a few dozen kilometers out from Kuujjuaq, drab and dusty from what I seen after having been taken on a brief tour prior to moving out to the ship. With 2,055 inhabitants, Kuujjuaq used to be called Fort Chimo where the Hudson’s Bay Company, beginning in 1830, traded for furs. It’s now the largest community in Nunavit, a territory of more than 560,000 square kilometers covering the northern third of Quebec province. Nunavit’s population is composed mainly of 11,000 Inuit, the indigenous people formerly known as Eskimos.
Along with 55 passengers who’d accompanied me on the two hour and 15 minute flight from Montreal, I’d signed on for an eight-day trip organized by an Inuit-owned adventure tour operator called Cruise North Expeditions Inc. that’s based in Toronto Adventure tourism is a growing part of the Inuit economy as the North’s allure of ruggedness, remoteness and harsh natural beauty catches on with greater urgency among travelers educated about the dangers of global warming. Permafrost is thawing, endangering the tundra, and creatures never found in the North are showing up, including mosquitoes, bats, porcupines and groundhogs. There have even been reports of dolphins spotted in Ungava Bay.
Cruise North is part of Makivik Corporation, an entity set up by the Quebec Inuit to administer the millions of Canadian dollars that have come their way from the Ottawa government. The funds were allocated following the signing of agreements in 1973 and 1978 that settled aboriginal land claims going back to the 1800s.
The outfitter puts together Arctic trips each year for travel during June, July and August when the weather is comparatively temperate at 10C. Named Baffin Adventure, the nature-oriented package I was part of had me travel roughly 1190 nautical miles along the eastern Arctic seaboard. During the journey, there were visits to several Arctic islands, among them parts of huge Baffin Island as well as Inuit communities. We also did a rigorous, three-hour trek over the rock and lichen-covered land on south Baffin Island’s Auyuittuq National Park that includes the Penny Ice Cap. It’s a 5,698 square kilometer hunk of ice that glaciologists are studying to determine how far and how fast it is shrinking and what effect that may have on the rise in seas levels.
The Orlova’s passengers included a husband and wife team of university professors from San Francisco — one of them moonlighted as a mystery novelist — as well as a pair of London solicitors. In addition, a TV news magazine anchor from Cologne shared a cabin with his four year old son. All shared a passion to know the North with its brooding, almost other worldly landscapes, and populations of birds, polar bears and muskox as well as caribou, Arctic fox, whales, eels, whales and other creatures.
Having studied the brochures featuring photos of the ship, which has a Russian speaking crew, I knew we weren’t talking champagne and caviar. But then I wasn’t expecting Frette bathrobes and bubbly in a land where the weather in winter can climb to -40 F, a litre of water costs $35 and polar bears, if you’re willing, will eat you for breakfast. As one Inuit leader told me later in the week, “Up here, we have nothing. That means we have everything, too. Our distance from the south, from development is our jewel.”
A fellow passenger had a slightly different take when we talked one day over tea in the lounge. “I’m not here for creature comforts,” she said. “Everything on the ship reminds me of . . . civilization. It’s more pavement. The closer I can get to nature, the happier I am.”
With borrowed wellies and woolies for comfort, I also brought hiking boots along but rarely used them. Once on board the Orlova, which can accommodate 122 passengers (we were less than half full), I was charmed, despite the lack of trappings. The moment I noticed the framed stills of Madame Orlova, once described as “Stalinism’s Shining Star”, mounted on one of the varnished wood walls in the ship’s bar, the Orlova had me in her thrall.
The ship has several modestly furnished suites to choose from with TVs and windows instead of portholes but I was traveling alone and not really lacking for space. My cabin had two single beds, sufficient storage to accommodate the “layers” of clothing and gear I’d been advised to bring and a loo with space for a shower.
Despite our traveling for days along the eastern Arctic seaboard, the excursion included only a tiny fraction of an area that is roughly the size of Western Europe. Created in 1999, the self-governing Inuit territory of Nunavut, with its tiny capital of Iqaluit, once called Frobisher Bay after the explorer, takes up one fifth of Canada’s land mass, including half of Baffin Island.
The treeless, limestone rock and lichen-covered terrain has a population of 30,000, mainly Inuit, as well as roughly one million caribou, polar bears, muskox, foxes and other animals, and a single, 20 kilometer paved road. Access to and from Nunavut is by air or the sea during the brief summer months which is the best time to visit.
Setting ashore several times a day from the zodiacs, we visited Akpotok Island in Ungava Bay as well as Pritzler Harbour, Nannuk Island, and Lower Savage island. There, observed no doubt by a polar bear who made a brief appearance prior to our landing before disappearing behind some boulders, I was delighted to find what looked to be nothing so much as an Arctic meadow. Amidst the rocky landscape, there was a gully, alive with splashes of colour. Bright green lichen cloaked rocks as old as earth, while small magenta-shaded Arctic flowers preened in the afternoon sun. They appeared to grow out of nothing but ancient stone.
Throughout the week, and, from the safety of the zodiacs, we gaped giddily at polar bears (18 in all) as they presented themselves, the absence of ice in summer forcing them to scavenge along the base of the cliffs in search of injured birds and other prey. On the northern end of Akpotok Island, a female with a bloodied paw from eating murres, led her cub close to water’s edge.
Elsewhere, we snapped walruses bobbing in the swirling foam and followed the black-beaked murres, penguin-looking seabirds, as they dove to feed in the depths. And we gazed upon soaring 800 foot limestone cliffs. Their façades, sliced and jabbed by the fierce, unforgiving elements were masses of awesome precision and beauty. Coming as close as possible to majesty, we were at arm’s length some days from the blue-white bulk of icebergs that melted under the northern sun.
At almost full light one evening, we chowed down to a barbecue feast of beef, chicken and Arctic char on the Orlova’s rear deck within 14 kilometres of the Arctic Circle.
Meals, served by fresh-faced Russian servers with blonde hair and names such as Natasha included Arctic char, caribou bourgignon, salmon and entrecote. When we weren’t on shore, there were lounge lectures given by members of the expedition team on topics that covered Inuit language and culture, polar bears, bird and plant life in the Arctic. In the evenings, screenings of Nanook of the North, Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner and Arctic Dreamer, The Lonely Quest of Viljalmer about the controversial Arctic anthropologist were held in the forward lounge. But I was usually too bushed to bother. Unusual for me, I also preferred bed to boozing that some of the passengers had taken up with gusto in the Orlova’s bar.
Standing one day on a rocky windswept beach, a young Inuit expedition team member named Jason told about an incidence of cannibalism. Members of an Inuit family, tired of eating walrus, cut the rope being used by one of their number to scale the cliffs. No word on whether Ma and Pa suffered indigestion.
We heard Inuit throat singers perform this very old breathing game that was a form of entertainment for women while the men folk were away hunting. Forbidden for nearly a century by Christian priests as Inuit were forced into residential schools, it’s been revived in the past 20 years. Two girls or women stand facing one another wile holding each other’s arms. One leads with short deep rhythmic sounds while the other responds.
We travelled along the South Pangnirtung Fjord at Baffin Island’s Cumberland Peninsula en route to the 19,000 square kilometer Akuyittuq National Park that includes the highest peaks of the Canadian Shield. One day, the ship anchored off of Pangnirtung, a hamlet of 1300 inhabitants that’s given itself the informal title of Switzerland of the Arctic. Wooden sleds, waiting for winter, were scattered atop the wet glistening rocks that lined the shore. Directly above the tiny harbour, a small airplane landed on an airstrip and I could see dozens of tiny, rough-looking prefabricated houses along one of the unpaved roads.
A small wooden building announced itself as a “blubber station” used by the Hudson’s Bay Company until 1964 to process whale fat. We visited the Uqqurmiut Centre for Arts & Crafts that displays and sells serpentine soapstone, antler and ivory carvings, the hamlet having some of the most talented carvers in the Arctic as well tapestry and print makers. But in Pangnirtung, as everywhere else we had seen in the North, it was nature that was most compelling. A caribou skin, its jagged edges a deep red, dried over a fence in the morning sunshine. There was the sky, too, coloured a bold blue that matched the water, and the clouds that shifted lazily around cliff tops that probably knew the stories of time.
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