The Polar Bear Swim Club

How it came to be that I fell overboard and into the Arctic Ocean with all my clothes on is a [COMMENT1] rather long story. The short explanation is that I was bumped off a dumb barge which was transferring cargo from the ship to the shore. The barge bumped the ship, and I got tossed off the barge. How It was that I was on that barge in the first place is the subject of this story.

Considering how terrified I had been about making this trip in the first place, it is no wonder that I ended up taking a dunk. After working for Arctic seismic firms in the winter and spring of 1974, first on land and then on the ice, I decided I wanted to complete an Arctic triple play by working on the annual Arctic Sealift. The Sealift is a Canadian Arctic tradition that goes back half a century. It involves the maritime shipment of goods to Arctic communities and other sites each year, during the brief open water navigating season. Although it has lost some of its strategic importance in recent times, particularly as a result of competition from faster and more regular air transportation, the Sealift still plays a significant role in the Canadian Arctic. A similar sealift takes place in the Russian Arctic each year, on an even greater scale.

The first challenge I faced was to convince the company operating the Sealift under government contract to hire me. This was not going to be such an easy task, as I had no seaman’s card and no practical maritime experience. All I had was my MA Thesis in International Affairs on the Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act in International Law, plus my seismic work experience. This may not seem like much, but it was enough at least to get me in the door at Federal Commerce and Navigation ( FEDNAV ), who operated the Sealift at that time on behalf of the Canadian Coast Guard.

I had two or three meetings with FEDNAV, during which time I put forward my case. They were very nice about it all; they gave me a full hearing. They could, after all, have dismissed my request outright. I tried to impress them with my love for the Arctic, and how I needed to round out my study of Law of the Sea in the Arctic with some practical experience. I also stressed my capacity for tough physical work, as evidenced not only by my seismic tours of duty but several years of summer jobs while I was at university. For two such summers, for instance, I was an exterminator, a job which included fumigating a ship in Baie Comeau and several sheds at the Port of Montreal.

I was quite surprised how positive FEDNAV were vis a vis my proposal. I think part of it was that I had one or two letters of introduction from influential people in Ottawa. The Sealift is a regulated industry, and FEDNAV had won the contract from the federal government. So, I think they probably were engaging in some good public relations by allowing me to witness the Arctic marine environment first hand on one of their vessels. I believe I also demonstrated to them that I had commitment and a reason for going. They had space on board for me, so basically they went along with the plan. Of course, I didn’t just walk into their offices in Montreal and end up with a job. Theirs was a lot of toing and froing about what I could do on board. They ended up offering me the job of Checker on board the MV Tundraland. Checker is probably the easiest job you could have on board a cargo ship. Basically, it involves making sure that all the cargo is delivered to the right people, and getting their signatures for it. All I was told was that the voyage would last six weeks, and I would be paid handsomely for my efforts. They even told me who I would be bunking with: a fellow named Ted Rohmer, who I had gone to high school with. Ted was to be the crane operator on the ship.

I did not waste any time in accepting FEDNAV’s offer: for me, this was the chance of a lifetime. This would have happened around the middle of June. The ship was scheduled to leave the port of Montreal towards the middle of July. So, I had plenty of time to prepare for this incredible adventure, buying the right gear and other provisions, tying up some personal affairs, and just generally getting ready. Unfortunately, it also left an awful lot of time to think about what lay ahead. And the more I thought about it, the more terrified I became of the prospect of sailing to and from the Arctic on the MV Tundraland. Meanwhile, while I had basically accepted FEDNAV’s take it or leave it offer, I had not yet signed a contract. When I eventually went in to formalise things, I was surprised to find that the company’s fleet Captain, who was my contact, had brought in two of the ship’s officers, presumably to size me up.

These Old Salts wanted to satisfy themselves that I was aware of the risks that I was running, and that I knew what I was getting myself into. They were also giving me an opportunity to drop out before the voyage began.. For the life of me, I do not know how they got wind of the fact that I was scared shitless, but somehow they could sense it. In effect, they were saying that this was my last chance to back out, that if I were to have a nervous breakdown on board, they would have to have a medivac by helicopter, paid for at my expense. They told me that this had happened to someone else a few years back before, and that they did not want a recurrence. So, this was my last chance. I took the opportunity to reaffirm my commitment to the voyage, but in my heart I was full of self-doubt.

With one week to go before departure, I had never been more petrified in my life. Until then I had always taken pride in my ability to seek out and overcome challenges, but this time I was confronted with my own vulnerability. I just was not sure I could take six weeks living and working on a ship, with the dangers of Arctic navigation that lay ahead, the isolation, the potential for seasickness, etc. All these thoughts were racing through my mind, and I could not even sleep at night. I remember sitting in the back garden of my mother’s house, pouring through Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, trying desperately to convince myself that I was up to the task. In the end, I decided that I just had to swallow all those doubts about myself and get on with it. Backing out was not an option for me. Instead, I told myself that what I would have to do was take things one step at a time. If, for instance, there was something I did not understand or did not think I could handle, I planned to simply go to someone and talk about it. This was what I had done on my second seismic trip to the Arctic, when I only lasted a week. The problem was, this time I would still have to stick it out for the full six weeks on board, since I had no intention of paying for a helicopter to fly me ashore, followed by a plane flight home.

So, here I was, on a beautiful sunny day in mid-July, at the Port of Montreal, standing in front of my home for the next month in a half. I walked up the gangway of the MV Tundraland for the first time. Our day of departure was still a couple of days off. I had been advised to come on board to see the cargo being lowered into the holds and placed on deck; it was important that I have a rough idea at least as to where things were stored. It turned out to be a fascinating operation to witness, even though Montreal was in the midst of an unbearable heat wave. I also had a chance to meet the Captain and First Mate, see my stateroom, and generally familiarise myself with the vessel. Several thousand tons of cargo were sitting on the wharf waiting to be loaded. There was everything from lumber to pick up trucks; most of the cargo consisted of palletised cargo, however. I had been warned that it would look as if all that cargo would never fit aboard the little MV Tundraland. It was true: the ship, which was only about 4,000 DWTs, looked tiny in comparison to this massive load sitting on the wharf. The cargo looked about 3-storeys high, whereas the ship was already sitting low in the water.

The MV Tundraland was a neat little ship. She was around twenty years old, and she was a Baltic Class ship, which meant that she was designed to withstand the first-year ice prevalent in the Baltic Sea during a Scandinavian winter. This did not give her much protection against the kind of conditions one experiences in the Canadian Arctic, where multi-year ice and icebergs are often encountered. On the other hand, the Arctic Sealift basically only occurs during a limited summer shipping window, when open water is supposed to be present. That, at least, is how the theory goes. The Tundraland was Swedish-owned, by a company called Brostroms. To operate on the Sealift she had to be a Canadian coaster. This meant, in effect, that the vessel had Canadian registry while in Canadian waters; otherwise, the owners would have had to pay very heavy duties. The crew also had to be Canadian. Somehow the officers seemed to be exempt, for while the Captain and First Mate had Canadian papers, the rest of the Officers were British, out of North Shields. Thus, the First, Second and Third Officers, plus the Electrician ( or “lekkie” in nautical lingo ), Radio Operator ( “sparks” ) and Bosun’ were all Brits. And for that matter, both the Captain and First Mate were originally from Scotland. On top of that, both cooks were from the Caribbean and the Steward was a Greek. So, in effect, only about half of the eighteen-man crew complement were native-born Canadian.

Things seemed to get off to a bad start when rumour spread that the First Cook had been charged by the harbour’s board police with pilfering from the ship’s stores. He was accused of stealing some meat that was supposed to be for us, trying to get it off the ship when no one was looking. However, since we were leaving very shortly and there had not been enough time for the court case to be heard, he was allowed to sail with the ship anyway, on the grounds that a man is innocent until proven guilty. I found this situation, whereby a man nobody trusted was allowed to cook for us for a total of six weeks, extraordinary, to say the least. I never found out how the case ended up; all I can say is that both cooks were lousy and surly. Nobody really liked them, and they did the bare minimum required of them.

The cook was not the only one to have engaged in pilferage. There is a long tradition of this kind of activity at the Port of Montreal. Stevedores or longshoremen considered it their god-given right to walk off with anything that wasn’t bolted down. In the case of the Tundraland, loss seemed to be limited to several dozen cases of canned soft drinks: the weather was so hot that the longshoremen would simply break open a case with the hooks attached to their belts, and help themselves to some refreshment right their in the hold. Meanwhile, some poor sucker up North who had been waiting a year for his consignment, would be lucky to find everything intact.


For the most part the crew were rather unremarkable. This was not a Ship of Fools; it was more like a ship of plodders. The Captain and First Mate were both lushes. ‘The Old Man”, as the Captain of a vessel is traditionally referred to, was Captain Taylor. He was invisible the entire trip: aside from my meeting with him before we embarked, I cannot recall talking to him ever again. Most of the time he was either on the bridge or in his cabin. He dined in the Officer’s Mess, and never once set foot in the Sailors’ Mess. As for Dave, the First Mate, he was pissed to the gills every single night. To think that he and the Captain could have been allowed to have such power over the ship, and therefore us, is mind-boggling.

I was given the opportunity to dine with the Officers on one of the upper decks of the superstructure. I tried it once. I found it so boring, and I also thought it was sending out the wrong signal, so afterwards I always dined with the men, below decks, in the stern section of the ship. Meals were very uneventful occasions on this vessel, a far cry from the feasts I had become accustomed to in the Arctic seismic camps. The sailors I worked with were for the most part nondescript. Only one or two of them stand out as I look back twenty years to our time together. One of the Able-bodied Seamen was a big, gruff loudmouth of a guy named John; he always wore a watch cap, and he also had a hunting knife in a sheath dangling from his belt. He was a big talker, very volatile, and no one really liked him. He liked to dominate the scene, but nobody really paid much attention to him.

About the only people I could relate to on board were my old schoolmate Ted Rohmer, plus three fellows from BC who helped him with the cranes and manned the barges for offloading cargo. Ted was a very special person who no one really took seriously. Most people underestimated him. First, he had a rather frightening appearance. He had a constant grin on his face, as if someone were tickling his ribs. This would have been alright, except for the fact that he had a big gold tooth. To make matters worse, he was forever flicking his head back to get his hair out of his eyes. He found everything outrageously funny, and would double over with laughter without the slightest provocation. He was a clutz, always bumping into something, or spilling something, or what have you. He just wasn’t very coordinated. Nevertheless, he was very conscientious, especially when he was working on his crane. And he was also an excellent photographer. As I mentioned earlier, Ted and I bunked together; in this respect he was no trouble at all. In fact, from time to time he would help me out with problems, proffering timely advice when I needed it. I guess it had something to do with our having been in the same class at Loyola College High School in Montreal, under the Jesuits.

The boys from BC had been working together for years, so it was kind of hard to break in to their little circle. But, they were friendly enough, and we did manage a few games of cards after hours. The leader of the BCers was a tall, blond-haired, bearded fellow with a loaping stride and a big appetite for work. With his walrus-style mustache hanging over his upper lip, and his denim overalls, he had a real hippy look about him. His name was John, and he totally dominated the trio, to the point where his buddies never uttered a word. They did everything together. This was their second summer on the Arctic Sealift, which was really just a working holiday for them. They built houses in Kelowna the rest of the year. They were all good with their hands, as well as with equipment. Their job was to pilot the motorised barges used to transfer cargo from the ship to shore, a very dangerous job in the Arctic. It was nice having them on board, even if they were a bit cliquish.

Once we were underway, I had a full ten days to acclimatise myself to the ship before we reached the first port of call and I had to do any work. Thus, I had in effect a fully-paid ten day cruise to the Arctic presented to me on a platter. Not only was my passage paid for, but I was paid something on the order of ten hours per day. The first thing I remember spotting from the main deck was the spectacular site of Quebec City, one hundred and eighty miles downstream from Montreal on the St. Lawrence River. This historic city, site of the famous battle between Montcalm and Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham in 1763, is a bit of the Old World in North America. The Chateau Frontenac Hotel, one of the original Canadian Pacific Railway hotels, dominates the skyline, pushing out onto the river like the Rock of Gibraltar. The city has special meaning for me, for this is where the Grahams first set foot in North America, arriving by boat from Ireland in 1819.

Further down river from Quebec one sees the lovely Montmorency falls. Further still, one arrives at the mouth of the beautiful Saguenay River, at Tadoussac. [COMMENT2] Here a pod of beluga whales greeted our ship, sending us off on our journey North by diving in and out of the salty water of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. As I gazed out at this magnificent scenery, I could not help but wonder what was in store for me on this, my first extended voyage at sea. Prior to this, I had only ever been on ferry trips lasting at most two or three days. Would I get sea sick, I wondered? Would I panic? Only time would tell. In a sense, I was over-prepared. I had, for instance, bought a bright yellow Sou’wester, complete with an old style fisherman’s rain hat. My first morning aboard ship I came out on deck to start the engines of the numerous vehicles lashed to the fore deck; this was just about my only task during those first ten days of the journey north. With that flashy outfit and my big black fireman style boots, I created quite a stir, believe you me. I was dressed for a Force 8 gale. Everyone else, by contrast, was very casually dressed; I was surprised at the variety of clothing these sailors wore. With the exception of the British officers, who always seemed to be in uniform, everyone else was in civvies, or mufti, dressed like ordinary labourers.

Those first ten days at sea went by in a flash. About the only work that had to be done was the preparation of ropes and slings required to hoist pallets from the holds. This meant tying knots, something I had not done seriously since I was a Boy Scout. This was my turn to make a fool of myself. I was terribly embarrassed, for try as I might, I just could not get the hang of it. Davey, the First Mate, for all his faults, patiently demonstrated the correct technique, to no avail. It was as much a crisis of nerves as anything else. Lacking confidence, I convinced myself that I was going to fail and I did; it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fortunately, no one else seemed to take my failure at this first test of seamanship too seriously. Actually, I was rather surprised how little ribbing I was forced to endure from my crew mates. Privately, however, I always felt that I had been written off as an egghead with connections, someone who was just occupying an otherwise empty bunk in a stateroom which the shipping company reserves for its invited guests.

I passed the free time time reading, exploring the ship a bit, and walking on deck. I never did get onto the bridge: I was never invited up there, and I never built up the courage to ask. There was such a rigid distinction between officers and men on the ship, a sort of caste system, that I never even bothered to ask. Instead, I contented myself with asking various crew members about there work, finding out how the ship worked, and familiarising myself with nautical terminology. This latter exercise I found to be very rewarding, and quite useful in my later career as a fisheries and marine environmental Consultant. I memorised simple, everyday terms like fore and aft, bow and stern, port and starboard, midships, poop deck, lower deck, head, bulkhead, davit, painter, bollock, galley, screw and forecastle. It was akin to learning a new language. In fact, being aboard ship was like being in a foreign country, where as a first time visitor you have to spend some time learning the ropes. Everything is in code on a ship, and once you learn that code you being to be taken seriously. I wanted to be taken seriously, so I made it my task to learn the code as quickly as I could.

I surprised myself how quickly I got my sea legs. I had heard stories of previous Sealift voyages where passage had been very rough. There had also been cases of vessels sinking in the Arctic in recent times, so I was prepared for the worst. Passage through the Gulf of St. Lawrence was uneventful, and I missed the Strait of Belle Isle ( between Newfoundland on one side and Quebec and Labrador on the other ), because we traversed it at night while I was asleep. With daybreak, however, we were out on the Northwest Atlantic, in Iceberg Alley, where icebergs float down from the Arctic, following the cold Labrador Current, before melting in the warming waters of the Gulf Stream. It was on April 14, 1912 that the SS Titanic struck an iceberg and went down, some five hundred and ninety kilometres southeast of Newfoundland with the loss of fifteen hundred and twenty-two souls.

I had been looking forward to sailing up the coast of Labrador, where all the icebergs are. Thus, I was somewhat disappointed to learn that we would not be taking this route. Instead, our route was to take us up the west coast of Greenland. The stated reason for this was to take advantage of currents, as well as to avoid the icebergs I so wanted to see. Just before we changed course, however, an unexpected development occurred: we buried someone at sea. At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like something out of a Hollywood film. A Canadian flag was draped over what looked to be a coffin on the fore deck. The Captain, some officers and two or more seamen were present. In a solemn ceremony, which I observed from above, the coffin was lowered over the gunwales, and into the dark grey Atlantic. I was totally flabbergasted: who could this have been, I asked myself? Nobody had looked that sick! And if someone had died, how come I hadn’t heard about it? Could this have been a murder? When I enquired as to what was going on, I was perfunctorily told that the Old Man was carrying out a request from another old salt, who was a friend of his for his ashes to be buried at sea. The mock coffin contained an urn with the deceased man’s ashes inside.

My disappointment at missing Labrador on the outbound passage quickly turned to excitement at the prospect of seeing Greenland, which has always had a special attraction for me because of its sheer size and the fact that it is almost completely covered by glacial ice. The fact that Greenland is covered by ice and Iceland is for the most part green has lead more than one wag to suggest that the two places trade names. Unfortunately, the passage up the coast was enshrouded in fog for days on end, although I did see one or two fishing vessels, plus the lights of Godthab ( now Nuuk ) in the distance. We did, however, see one or two icebergs towering above us; the main calving ground for these aquamarine behemoths is Disco Bay on the west coast of Greenland. The icebergs break off from the glaciers, and drift across Baffin Bay on their voyage south through Davis Inlet. The fog only lifted as we entered Lancaster Sound, at the entrance to the Northwest Passage. Suddenly the scenery turned quite spectacular, with the corrugated cliffs of Devon Island on the north shore of the Passage, and the shores of Baffin Island to the south. Lancaster Sound is an area of very high biological productivity, brought about by upwelling, cold waters. Birds, whales, narwhals, seals and many other forms of life congregate here in large numbers, particularly when at breakup time, when the ice is melting. Bylot Island, on the southern shore of the Passage, is a noted bird sanctuary.

As we entered the fabled Northwest Passage, my heart was in my throat. This was what explorers had sought to discover for more than three centuries until the Norwegian Roald Amundsen traversed it end to end in the Gjoa between 1903 and 1906. Even though we arrived here aboard the Tundraland in early August, the ice was already forming. Because it was only about a foot thick, it did not pose a significant problem for navigation, or a threat to the safety of the ship. It did, however, slow our progress considerably: from this point on we never seemed to make better than three or four knots. Thirty-six hours after entering Lancaster Sound we arrived at our first port of call, Resolute, situated in Barrow Strait, about one third of the way through the Passage. Technically speaking, there is no one Northwest Passage; instead, there are a number of different navigable routes one can take to get from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic archipelago. One of the most common of these routes is the one that takes you through Prince of Wales Strait at the western end of the Passage, then eastward through Parry Channel, which includes Viscount Melville Sound, Barrow Strait and Lancaster Sound. These waters are generally well charted, and are usually free of ice at least part of the time. Just in case, however, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker can usually be found within forty-eight hours steaming time to escort shipping. In our case, the Sir John A. MacDonald was anchored offshore Resolute harbour in case we needed her, which we did not. She has long since been decommissioned, sold for scrap, I believe.

Resolute itself is unremarkable except for its bleakness. It started off as a weather station. In the fifties it was one of the two NWT communities to which a small number of Inuit from Port Harrison ( now called Inukjuak ), Quebec were relocated. It is said these Inuit were facing starvation in northern Quebec, and that Ottawa bureaucrats of the day saw their removal to The Queen Elizabeth Islands, which had no permanent settlements at that time, as a convenient way to boost Canadian sovereignty. The Inuit supposedly went further north on the promise that things would be better for them. They were not. In fact, for the most part life there was disastrous for them: the hunting and trapping were extremely poor, and some of the Inuit had to rely on food handouts from the local RCMP. Ever since, Inuit have been seeking a full apology from the Government of Canada for what they regard as forced relocation. The government, for its part, defends what it considers to have been the voluntary resettlement of Inuit.

In recent years Resolute has become the principal staging area for the High Arctic. Government agencies, oil and mining companies, as well as private expeditions, all use Resolute as their jumping off point. Commercial jets also fly in here on a regular schedule. So, when you here about another crazy and not-so-crazy attempt to reach the North Pole on skis, a motorcycle or on foot, the adventurer is usually starting from Resolute. He or she will then have to get to a place such as Ward Hunt Island off of Alert on Ellesmere Island; but to get there most people have to first get to Resolute. A man from India named Besel Judason ( check ) runs an outfitting operation that caters to this trade.

We offloaded a large amount of cargo at Resolute, even though the population at the time was no more than two hundred. The crew were chomping at the bit after ten days of relative inactivity on the sea voyage north. As in every port we visited, the ship dropped anchor offshore; sometimes this could mean one kilometre offshore, particularly if the waters were shallow. To this day there are only one or two wharves in the Arctic at which a cargo vessel can dock; the level of commercial shipping and the short shipping season militate against building expensive concrete structure which the ice and elements could damage or destroy at any time. Within minutes of dropping anchor, the offloading operation began in earnest. Offloading may not seem like such a big deal: in theory, all you have to do is get the goods from the ship to the shore. In practice, however, the operation can be both complicated and dangerous.

All the cargo is supposed to have been loaded on board so that the first cargo loaded comes off last, and vice versa. In practice, however, this did not always work out. We stopped at a total of seven points in the North, and I cannot recall any cargo going to the wrong place. What did happen once or twice, however, was that we forgot to offload a pallet or two in this or that community, the mistake only being discovered when we arrived at the next port. In cases such as these, the only option was to take the cargo back down south and arrange for air shipment north, at the company’s expense.

Getting the cargo ashore could be a very treacherous exercise, as I learned at my own expense in Resolute harbour. Resolute has a good natural harbour. It was one of the few places where we could get the ship just about smack up to the shore . The shoreline looked ideal for offloading, because it had a gently sloping beach, unless most Arctic communities, where the shoreline is either too steep or too rocky for offloading. In spite of these advantages, however, the cargo was still offloaded onto a so-called dumb barge, mainly because there was no wharf to tie up to. The winds were also an impediment to offloading. All of this meant that although the ship was no more than twenty metres from shore, the cargo still had to be lowered over the gunwales and on to ‘dumb barges’, so named because they are engineless. To get the cargo from the barge to shore, fork lift vehicles simply drove from the beach up a ramp and on to the barge, slipped their forks into the pallets, and backed down the ramp and back on to the beach, where they would discharge their cargo. My job during all of this was to stand on the barge and signal to Ted, the ship’s crane operator, where each pallet was to go. Because you cannot hear anything but the general din, and because the crane operator cannot necessarily see where the cargo is supposed to be dropped, it is conventional practice for the man on the barge to use hand signals to direct the crane operator. I always felt a bit silly doing this, because the main signals involve holding one arm in the air above your head and twirling your big finger in one direction for ‘up’, and the other way for ‘down’.

Things seemed to be going pretty smoothly for a while at least, until suddenly the wind picked up and either pushed the ship against the barge or the barge up against the hull of the ship. Either way, the force of the collision through me right off the barge and into the water! I could not believe what happened, and nor could anyone else: one minute I am standing there with my finger twirling up in the air, and the next minute I am six feet underwater, fully- clothed, fighting for breath in the sub-zero waters of the Northwest Passage. On the one hand I was lucky to be wearing a sort of parachute suit I had brought with me from my seismic work on the ice: this kept me warm, at least, for the twenty seconds I was underwater. On the other hand, my soaked clothes and leather and felt boots made me like a deadweight. Somehow I managed to grab a hold of the side of the barge. It was too high out of the water for me to clamber up on to. Fortunately, a crew mate on the barge saw what was happening and managed to grab my arm and pull me up and on to the barge. I consider myself to be extremely lucky that I was not crushed between the barge and the ship; otherwise, I may not have lived long enough to write about my initiation into the Polar Bear Swim Club. Since few Inuit bother to learn how to swim, membership in this fictitious club is very limited indeed!

I was terribly embarrassed by this incident, as one can imagine. It happened so innocuously. One second I am standing on a barge, and the next minute I am flailing away underwater, trying not to swallow any salt water, and desparately struggling to keep afloat. After I was plucked out of the water, I headed straight for the ship and my stateroom. I drew a bath ( yes, the stateroom Ted and I shared was equipped with a full-size bath! ), ripped my clothes off and hopped in. Next, the steward plied me with hot rum toddies, and I took thirty-six hours to recover. I came down with some kind of fever as a result of my dunk. I believe I was suffering from some kind of shock as well. In retrospect, the rum was not such a good idea, as alcohol is a diuretic which dehydrates you. Nevertheless, it did seem to warm me up, and cheer me up as well. I also got quite a bit of sympathy from my crew mates, who would check in one after the other to see how I was making out. Even the Captain dropped by to see how I was; he was no doubt terribly concerned lest he have a death on his hands. Twenty years later I was to learn that in 1979 someone else did die in similar circumstances while offloading at Resolute.

After my Arctic ‘baptism’, my main function reverted to being designated Checker. In Resolute this meant going around to various offices and households and obtaining signatures for cargo. The system for delivering Sealift cargo in the Arctic is surprisingly informal and lax. FEDNAV’s responsibility ended at the high water mark: it was only required to deliver cargo to that point. The owner of the cargo had to arrange for pickup and delivery of his or her cargo beyond that point. In most cases, I could simply get the signature of people who came down to the beach to pick up their consignment. The Sealift being what it is in the Arctic, there was seldom any trouble getting signatures: as soon as the ship was in sight of the community, people would start to congregate at the shoreline. In those days, at least, the arrival of the Sealift vessel was one of the biggest events of the year. People really depended upon the Sealift for cheap delivery of their bulk commodities. In a very real sense, we were delivering refrigerators to Eskimos. Not just refrigerators, but frozen foods and anything else that would be either cheaper to bring up from down south or unavailable up north.

Whole families would come down and wait for their cargo to be offloaded. Sometimes it could take eighteen hours to offload at a particular port, but this would not prevent someone from being there to identify the consignment and sign off on it. The power corporation, the Anglican church, the RCMP, the Ministry of Transport and the housing corporation were among the places where I would usually have to go in search of a signature. This was a job that I loved: it got me off the ship and put me in direct contact, however brief, with the people of the North. For the longest time I had a burning desire to see what life was like up in the Arctic. Now I had my chance! I was absolutely fascinated by everything I saw, and I did not waste one minute of my time. I wanted to see where everything was, how the town was laid out, what a typical Inuit house was like inside and out. I went out of my way to see the local Hudson Bay Company store, even though we did not serve The Bay: they had their own ships. I wanted to meet as many people as I could as well, and being Checker provided me with this opportunity. For a brief period of time I was the most popular man in town: everyone sought me out so they could sign on the dotted line before walking away with their cargo. And to think that virtually everything that you see in an Arctic coastal community had got there by ship!

When we were in port, we worked non stop, from dawn to dusk. Weather conditions could change extremely quickly in the Arctic, and so it was important to get the job done as quickly as possible and then get the hell out of there. The two biggest risks were the wind and the currents. One minute everything would be calm and the sky beautifully clear and blue, and the next minute you felt like you were in the middle of a hurricane or blizzard. This made things especially dangerous for those working the barges, as we were to find out later on in our journey. So, we would make hay while the sun shone. Rest would have to wait until we were en route from one port to the next.

Our second port of call was Grise Fiord, one of the most remote communities of the entire North. ‘Grise’, as everyone called it ( ‘grise’ being pronounced like ‘grease’, although it actually means ‘pig’ in Norwegian ), lies at the southern end of Ellesmere Island, in Jones Sound north of the Passage at its eastern end. Ellesmere is the third largest island in Canada. Evidence of prehistoric forests has been found on the island, which the Canadian Encyclopedia now describes as a “true polar desert, with only 2.5 cm. Of precipitation annually in some places”. Grise is the second community to which Inuit families from Port Harrison were relocated in the fifties. Here the game was more plentiful than Resolute; thus, the Inuit fared better. Grise is one of the most picturesque communities in the Far North. The town itself is situated in a sort of bay, with steep slopes running up behind it. Everything looks postcard perfect, but the harbour is notoriously dangerous for shipping. For the MV Tundraland, this proved to be almost disastrous. At first, everything seemed to be going according to plan: the motorised barge was lowered over the sides by Ted, the crane operator, and cargo started to be lowered onto it, for transfer to the nearby shore. The ship was anchored about half a kilometre offshore. The Old Man had evidently been here before, and he had no doubt read the warnings about the weather in the Arctic Sailing Directions issued by Coast Guard.

Suddenly, a violent squall came out of nowhere. Snow was blowing all around the ship. The wind was howling, and the barge started bobbing up and down like a cork. The barge was tethered to the mother ship with a ‘painter’, nautical jargon for a rope. The crew aboard the barge were helpless. The three fellows from BC were struggling; the one at the helm had all he could do to keep his hands on the wheel, while the other two on deck struggled to keep their balance. One or two oil drums were rolling around the deck of the little barge; they should have been lashed down, but evidently no one expected this eventuality. The boys on deck wisely dodged the oil drums run amok, because trying to secure them could have meant a broken leg or two.

I watched all of this in horror from the main deck. The First Mate, Dave, was beside me, sweating like a pig, and shitting bricks. He had two big concerns: one was that the barge would get smashed to bits by the ship, which itself was getting tossed all over the place. The other was that the ship would get thrown off its anchor and hurled towards the shore, dragging the hapless barge with it. Dave was on the walkie talkie, one minute with the helmsman of the barge, next with The Old Man, whose outline we could just barely see above us on the bridge. He was frantic, gesticulating wildly with his arms. The storm continued unabated for what seemed like hours, but was probably no more than two minutes at best. The wind was probably coming at us at a speed of 120 kilometres per hour. It showed no signs of letting up.

All hell broke loose when the ship was finally thrown off its anchor. All of a sudden, we could just feel ourselves being swept away. A decision had to be taken very quickly: whether or not to release ourselves from the barge, and them from us. The Old Man had made up his mind. “Cut the rope, cut the rope! I heard him yell into Dave’s walkie talkie. In a flash, Dave had found an axe. With his big, barrel chest and lumberjack’s arms he wielded the axe over his head, and brought it down over the gunwale, slicing the rope in two. ‘Til the day I die, I will never forget the face on Peter, the leader of the BC gang, as he stood on the deck of that ill-fated barge. Someone had cut that umbilical cord, that lifeline which the painter represented. Without that line, the barge and its three man crew were left twisting in the wind. The look on Peter’s face suggested “How could you do this to us?!”, and “What the fuck are you trying to prove?!” My heart sank as I saw that barge drift away into the fog, the figures on board becoming smaller and smaller until I could no longer pick either them or their vessel out.

I was absolutely crushed. I was convinced I would never see my BC mates again. I thought to myself: “This is not actually happening; it is just a film, a game. People’s lives are not really at stake here. You cannot go from watching cargo being loaded onto the barge one minute to seeing men about to go to their deaths the next”. But it was happening, and I never felt so utterly helpless. All I could do was wave to them, make the sign of the cross, and pray like stink. And then my attention turned to our own fate aboard the Tundraland. We seemed to be just skimming along the surface of the sea as if we were boardsailing or windsurfing. We were dangerously close to shore, and we risked either running aground or smashing up against some rocks. Somehow, to his credit, the Captain managed to gain control of events. After drifting for perhaps a minute or two, with the shoreline looming larger and larger, gradually we seemed to be getting out of danger. I could see an iceberg off to port, and for a fleeting moment the thought crossed my mind that we could throw an anchor onto it and thereby prevent our going ashore. Instead, we ended up steaming out of the harbour again.

As luck would have it, at this very moment the winds died down and calm returned. The squall had passed over us. The snow stopped, the waves receded. Even the sun came out. It was as if nothing had happened. The Tundraland seemed more or less intact, but initially at least there was no word from the runaway barge; radio contact had been broken. All this had happened in a matter of minutes, but it seemed like hours. Then came word that the barge crew were safe and sound on shore. They had drifted towards land, and managed to beach the vessel somehow; either that or it ran aground. It was like a miracle. When they came back on board, there were some angry glances and words exchanged between John, the barge skipper, and Dave, the First Mate. John was understandably outraged at the fact that he and his buddies had been cut loose. Dave was left explaining the Captain’s actions; he, characteristically, was nowhere to be seen. By this time he was probably drowning himself in booze.

After that harrowing episode, everything else proceeded more or less without incident. The ship visited a total of six more ports, all of them on Baffin Island: Arctic Bay, Strathcona Sound, Pond Inlet, Clyde River, Broughton Island and Cape Dyer. Of these, four were communities: Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet, Clyde River and Broughton Island. Strathcona Sound is the port for the Nanisivik lead/zinc mine, while Cape Dyer is a former DEW Line station. Our stop at the former was unremarkable, as I never even got to disembark. At “Dyer”, however, I got to drive up the steep, winding road that leads from the wharf to the old DEW Line site. The site itself is remarkable, or at least it was when I was there in 1975. Even at that time the DEW Line had essentially been abandoned. There was a skeleton crew assigned to the base, which seemed to consist of little more than one or two rather large hangars, some Quonset huts and outbuildings. Nevertheless, the setting was spectacular, because the base sits on a broad plane, the landscape is like the moon, and the silence is deafening. It felt like a scene from “On the Beach”, Neville Shute’s novel about life after a nuclear bomb has been dropped. Windows were broken out of the hangar ( where on earth would vandals have come from, I asked myself ), military vehicles sat waiting by the tarmac ( waiting for what, I wondered ), and a windsock waved forlornly in the breeze. I have seldom seen such a desolate place on this planet, Mauritania included. And the man who signed my papers looked like he was born there. I loved every minute of it, and everything about it. It was the kind of place I never would have had the chance to visit were it not for the Sealift; for this I was extremely grateful. And, to top it all off, they actually paid me to do this!

The three communities our ship pulled into on Baffin Island were each interesting in their own way. Broughton Island is a small, un-self-conscious place on the eastern shore of Baffin. It is now one of two gateways ( the other being Pangnirtung ) to Auyuittuq National Park Reserve and the majestic Pangnirtung Pass, which I hiked through in 1990, and which I write about later on. I picked up some lovely whalebone from a beach in Broughton. The cargo we dropped off there included, of all things, soapstone, which the Inuit carvers turn into the sculptures they have become justly famous for around the world. It felt like bringing coals to Newcastle, but apparently good soapstone is, or was at least, in short supply in most parts of the north.

Arctic Bay and Pond Inlet, both on the north shore of Baffin, are very picturesque. “Pond”, in particular, is breathtakingly beautiful, with the waters of Eclipse Sound in front of it, and the slopes of Bylot Island off in the distance. Pond was one of the first Arctic communities to go ‘dry’, meaning that there was nowhere in town to buy or consume alcohol. Booze being an enormous social problem in the North, amongst the white and native populations, but especially the latter, this was a groundbreaking move.

One of the peculiar things one sees in the Arctic is kids of all ages playing outdoors at all hours of the night. Wherever you go, it is very common to see tots from two to twelve out in the road at two in the morning, with the sun still hanging just above the horizon, the older ones perhaps riding bicycles or all-terrain vehicles, the younger ones taunting a mangy dog with a stick, or stuffing themselves with soft drinks and junk food. I have often wondered how parents can tolerate this kind of behavior, which to me looks like dereliction of duty and abdication of parental responsibility. Inuit, however, apparently believe it is wrong to discipline a child. Children are meant to play and enjoy themselves as long as they can, because when they are adults life will be very hard. There is also the fact that for six months of the year there is almost total darkness, with everyone locked inside; thus, the rest of the year the prevailing attitude seems to be “make hay while the sun shines”.

As we came down Baffin Bay and Davis Strait on our homeward stretch, we ran smack up against a gale. The vessel was heaving forward and backward, up and down. I could almost hear the sound of the screws turning each time the stern came out of the water, the bow attacking each wave like a hurdle. Through it all, I never got sick. I learned to keep my eyes on a fixed position, thereby avoiding nausea. Somehow I even managed to get a good night’s sleep. When I woke the next morning I was told that spray had been coming in over the bridge and superstructure, although no damage was done. Otherwise, the trip back to our home port of Montreal went off without a hitch. After all the sights and sounds of the North, arrival home was anti-climatic. My thoughts began to turn to my next challenge, of an entirely different order: I was about to leave for Geneva, Switzerland, to undertake a Ph.D. in International Affairs. These next six years proved to be some of the most interesting years I have ever spent. Nevertheless, that single summer I sailed the waters of the Canadian Arctic aboard the MV Tundraland proved to be just as exciting as anything I have done before or since.

[COMMENT1]Mention more of the wildlife, such as belugas, narwhal; mention environmental problems, such as contaminants in the food chain affecting women’s milk, DEW Line sites cleanup

[COMMENT2]Mention the plight of the belugas, Leona Pippard and Pierre Beland’s efforts to save them.