Arctic Dreams, page 31
The expansion of nations into lands beyond their borders, and the rearrangement of these lands, conceptually and in real terms, to serve the expanding nation’s ends, are among the most perplexing political problems of our time. A traveler often differs from a nation-state, however, in wishing to disturb nothing in the land beyond his borders, but only to visit and somehow arrive, through the inevitable contrasts, at a renewed sense of the worth of his own place, of the esteem in which he wishes to hold the landscape that originally shaped him.
In setting out, however, the traveler immediately confronts the problem of the map, an organization of the land according to a certain sense of space and an evaluation of what is important. I traveled everywhere with maps, no one of which was ever entirely accurate. They were the projection of a wish that the space could be this well organized. You cannot blame the maps, of course; nor can you travel without them. I was glad to pull them out of a pack or a back pocket and find clarification. I have leaned over the navigator’s shoulder in a C-130 to get a better idea of where we were going and where at that moment we were. I have drawn maps in a notebook to explain to someone where I had been, to see if he could corroborate or amplify what I had seen. I knew that mixture of satisfaction and desire—to know exactly how one is situated in the vastness; and that wish to fully comprehend the space a map renders and sets borders to. But I would try to be wary. Even a good map, one with the lines and symbols of a handwritten geography on it, where Tuan’s “spaces” have been turned into “places,” masquerades as an authority. What we hold in our hands are but approximations of what is out there. Neatly folded simulacra.
The perspective of most maps of the land, to begin with, is an abstraction, because it represents what the moving eye, not the stationary eye, sees in an overview. The map is two-dimensional, while the earth is three-dimensional and curved in two planes; neither the renderings nor the projections are ever quite accurate, and if the scale is large, the distortion can be extreme. (The most familiar sort of world map, the Mercator projection, in which the Arctic looms larger than all the Russias, and Greenland is almost the size of North America, is a distortion that takes a long while and some thought to unlearn.) Maps organize space mathematically. They set down outlines over various kinds of coordinates and use a distribution of names to make an abstraction—sometimes beautiful or astonishing—of what is real. The orderliness, simplicity, and clarity of the presentation, of course, is often seductive.
The variety of Arctic maps is enormous, and the information they provide is astonishing. If you could sit in a room with them undisturbed and digest the information they represent, you would become an Arctic Marco Polo. Beyond the predictable high-resolution, satellite- and U-2-generated, computer-enhanced assembly of physiographic maps, there are ones that show the migration routes of caribou with ten years of acetate overlays; the cobweb of electronic surveillance at sensitive military points such as northern Bering Sea; daily updates of ice coverage in summer shipping lanes, sent electronically and rendered on Thermofax paper; and maps that require much pondering, with isotherms (temperature gradients), isograms (magnetic gradients), and isanthers (time gradients for the blooming of flowers). And maps of archaeological sites, polar bear denning sites, and the distribution of sources of gravel in the Arctic. 4
Of them all, the one I carry in my mind most prominently is a polar projection, a physiographic map with the Arctic Ocean centrally located. The northern reaches of Eurasia and North America and the whole of Greenland form a perimeter. The narrow entrance to the ocean between Greenland and Svalbard stands out because the deep waters there are a darker shade of blue than those over the continental shelf. (Here is the only place a deep current can move in and out of the Polar Basin.) And all the obscure places—the New Siberian Islands, the Kara Sea, Franz Josef Land, places banished to regions of distortion in the Mercator projection—are accorded their proper proportions.
When I look at this map on my wall, I am reminded of the geographical continuity of the region, which is unique—no matter how far east or west you go, you are still there. I can see how much shorter the route from Rotterdam to Yokohama is via Bering Strait than through the Panama Canal. And there is a fetching remoteness to northern Greenland when the island is seen in its entirety, not distorted or truncated. And I can put my fingers on wild Ellesmere, with its Agassiz Ice Cap and exotic plateaus, a daydreamed landscape of my youth. The Baffin Island Eskimos call it oomingmannuna, where the muskoxen have their country.
The earliest maps of the Arctic reflected the skills and conceptions (and misconceptions) of the cultures that produced them. Long before it became a field science, cartography was a contemplative pursuit; cartographers drew fabled landscapes and imaginary lands of their own divining. The Arctic they depicted was a dark, mountainous, icy region of “brutes with neither language nor reason [who] hiss like geese”; or, alternately, an idyllic place of perpetual sunshine and warm seas. Either Asgard, the Norse citadel of zephyrs, brilliant light, and reigning power; or Niflheim, a cold wasteland of unending darkness hung with the stench of death.
The discovery of Svalbard by Dutch whalers in the sixteenth century and explorations north and west toward Novaya Zemlya by Willoughby and Chancellor (1553), and Barents (1596), and to the west by Frobisher (1576–1578), Davis (1585–1587), Hudson (1607–1610), and Baffin (1616), brought the Arctic to a more empirical definition. In succeeding centuries, it was discovered, piece by piece, beneath the ice and snow. Its lands were mapped and its waters charted. The final break with an Old World image of the Arctic was made when a Norwegian ship called the Fram completed a spectacular circumarctic voyage (1893–1896). Robert Peary proclaimed Greenland an island in 1892. In 1915–1917 Stefansson discovered the last, large pieces of land in the Far North. The coastline of the Canadian Archipelago was extensively redrawn during and immediately after World War II, as a result of military reconnaissance, and the last large islands in the south were discovered, in Foxe Basin west of Baffin Island (including Air Force Island, approximately 500 miles square).
Part of the allure of the Arctic has always been the very imprecision of its borders. The flat topography of the land becomes part of the frozen sea in winter. In summer, in some regions, low-lying land extends so far into shallow seas it is hard to tell them apart. It is easy to imagine that small bits of land might still lie hidden—and this indeed recently proved true in a dramatic way. In 1968, geographers finally determined mathematically that a small island called Kaffeklubben, which Peary had discovered in 1900, not Cape Morris Jesup, Greenland, was the northernmost point of land. In 1978, however, a tiny new island was discovered in the ice, 1500 yards north of Kaffeklubben. It was named Oodaaq for a Polar Eskimo who accompanied Peary on his 1909 trip to the Pole.5
In time, then—and more sophisticated satellite-mapping technology continues to improve the accuracy of arctic maps—the lands that were imagined to exist in the Arctic were slowly replaced on the maps by the outlines of the lands that were actually found to be there. “Frobussher’s Straights,” which cut across northern Canada from the Atlantic to the Western Ocean in George Best’s 1587 map; the Open Polar Sea, which Henry Hudson confidently sailed for in 1607; and the land bridge from Norway to Svalbard—all these misconceptions faded from the maps.
Many of the old maps of the Arctic, with their fabled islands, were only expressions of a wish for something better, for an easing of human travail—to find the Blessed Isles of the West, or a route to the Moluccas, the “Spice Islands,” free of Spanish ships or Turkish middlemen. One folds such maps and puts them gently back in the drawer, out of a certain regard for human history, the long reach of human desire, and a search for contentment that goes beyond the borders of one’s homeland.
To set these maps aside makes the colonial tragedies they record no less tragic; the admonition against imperious delusions no less sharp; and evidence of the real landscape no less insubstantial. Another age will surely find us as headstrong and avaricious as our exploring ancestors, and our plans as disrespectful and unwise as some of these earlier schemes for prosperity seem to us now. Perhaps they will be forgiving as well.
We have come to think of the Arctic as vast because in the familiar Mercator projection it stretches from one side of the world to the other. The suggestion that the region never comes together, however, that its various sections are “a world apart,” is false. The region turns in on itself like any nation. It is organized like Australia, around an inland desert sea, with most of its people living on the coastal periphery. It is not vast like the Pacific. It is vast like the steppes of Asia. It has the heft, say, of China, but with the population of Seattle.
The Arctic’s geographical unity derives from the sameness of its climate and seasons of light, and the similarity of its animal populations east and west—polar bear, bowhead whale, arctic fox, ringed seal, snowy owl. There are relatively few localized arctic species, such as the narwhal; and very few circumpolar animals show any subspecific differences (the walrus is one).6
To a modern traveler the arctic landscape can seem numbingly monotonous, but this impression is gained largely, I think, from staring at empty maps of the region and from traveling around in it by airplane. The airplane, like the map, creates a false sense of space; it achieves simplicity and compression, however, not with an enforced perspective but by altering the relationship between space and time. The interior of a plane is artificially lit, protected from weather, full of rarefied air cut with the odor of petroleum distillates and tobacco, and far noisier than the ground below. Many who fly in arctic aircraft, often crowded together with sled dogs and boxes of freight, incur slight headaches, and many experience some sort of spatial or temporal disorientation. Stories of government officials and reporters who arrive in northern villages by jet from somewhere in southern Canada, hear little of what is spoken to them, and insist on departing the very same day, are legion. Their haste, their cool insensitivity and aura of power seem, somehow, a part of the aircraft. The great compression of time and space the plane effects is without parallel in the northern villages. The knowledge of the land that such people carry home, therefore, is often false, and their summaries are bitterly resented.
The plane is a great temptation; but to learn anything of the land, to have any sense of the relevancy of the pertinent maps, you must walk away from the planes. You must get off into the country and sleep on the ground, or take an afternoon to take a tussock apart. Travel on the schedule of muskoxen. Camp on a seaward point and watch migrating sea ducks in their days of passage. You need to stand before the green, serpentine walls of the Jade Mountains north of the Kobuk River, or walk out over the sea ice to the flaw lead in winter to hear the pack ice grinding and scraping, a noise like “the whining of puppies and swarming of bees,” in the words of the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane. In the stomach of a walrus butchered on the spring ice you will find the sediment of the ocean floor. Slowly comes the realization that 250,000 walrus in the Bering and Chukchi seas are moving tons of sand and fine gravel around, every day. You will think of lemmings and voles turning over thousands of tons of soil on the tundra. And of the Thule, who carried large stones into their camps and set them up in a pattern for a jumping game, like hopscotch. Of the huge stone polar bear traps the Thule built with their sliding stone doors. Residents, moving stones about.
When you have walked for days under the enormous sky; when you have felt the remoteness of the world from the Thomsen River country of Banks Island; felt the unquenchable exuberance of sled dogs cracking off the frozen miles down a river valley; or been shown how some very small thing, like a Lapland longspur eating the lemming’s bones for calcium, keeps the country alive, you begin to sense the timeless, unsummarized dimensions of a deeper landscape.
But you must insist on time to walk away from the plane, which daily enters and leaves the Arctic like some sort of bullet.
Christian Vibe told me a story. He was in northern Greenland, coming and going by dog sledge from the small village of Uummannaq (Thule) on Hayes Peninsula. In the spring of 1940 he was traveling along the east coast of Ellesmere Island, living on supplies he had cached there months before. An Eskimo friend of his from Uummannaq knew that Vibe was a Dane and that some information that had reached Uummannaq in May would be important to him. The man sledged across Smith Sound and found a cache where he knew Vibe would show up. He scratched this message in Eskimo syllables on the side of a pemmican can:
germans taking meat from denmark
the king is still alive
no gas left in shop.
The meaning was almost instantly clear to Vibe. Germany had gone to war with Denmark (i.e., “was taking her food”); the government of King Christian had not been deposed; and, because of the war, there would be no supplies coming by ship to Uummannaq in the spring. Vibe said he held the can in his gloved hands and looked around in the bright light, at his dogs and his few supplies, and knew he would not get home for a very long time.
Some early explorers took Eskimos and their knowledge of the land seriously and asked them to draw maps of the surrounding country.7 The Eskimos obliged. These maps were a great boon to arctic travel and exploration; today they offer an insight into the way Eskimos perceived the space around them.
A good knowledge of the local landscape and the ability to draw a detailed map are two very different cognitive skills. Nevertheless, many Eskimos, both men and women, produced highly accurate maps of the coastal and interior regions of their homeland. Robert M’Clure told his biographer in 1856 that the Eskimo of western Victoria Island drew expertly with pencil and paper “as if they were accustomed to hydrography.” Another British naval officer marveled at a map created for him on the beach by Eskimos at Cape Prince of Wales in 1826, where stones, sticks, and pebbles were used “in a very ingenious and intelligible manner” to create a scaled replica of the region. Franz Boas reported Eskimos in the eastern Arctic drawing maps so fine he could recognize their every point in comparison with his own charts. “It is remarkable,” wrote Boas, “that their ideas of the relative position and direction of coasts far distant from one another are so clear.” The linear distances involved were as much as 1000 miles, and the areas represented as large as 150,000 square miles. Eskimos could also read European maps and charts of their home range with ease, in whatever orientation the maps were handed to them—upside down or sideways. And they had no problem switching from one scale to another or in maintaining a consistent scale in a map they drew.
Eskimos were making and using maps long before they met Europeans, both as mnemonic devices for ordering extensive systems of place names and as navigational aids. Some of the latter were carved of wood—excellent for sea travel because they rendered coastlines in three dimensions (very useful in the eastern Arctic), were impervious to weather, and would float if dropped overboard.
Above, map of the Cumberland Sound–Frobisher Bay region, drawn from memory by an Eskimo named Sunapignanq. Below, map of the same area generated with modern cartographic techniques.
Edmund Carpenter, with his particular interest in Eskimos’ differing appreciation of the volume of space and their lack of a preferred orientation in it, has noticed that in maps of Southampton Island that the Aivilik prepared for him, the only distortions appeared in areas that were hunted very intensively. These regions were drawn larger than those visited less frequently. Contemporary Eskimo maps evince the same accuracy and richness, testifying to the continued maintenance of local geographic knowledge by those for whom this aspect of the culture is still alive, the astonishing degree to which the faculty of memory is cultivated among them, and their enduring penchant for long journeys over the land and sea ice. All this, despite their having moved into permanent settlements in most cases.
Traces of human presence in the land, like maps, organize undifferentiated space in certain ways, and the effect, especially in open country, is soothing. To come upon a series of Dorset campsites adds dimension and direction to the land; and one of course takes pleasure in the objects seen at these places. The same is true of a place where caribou for hundreds of years have crossed a river, or moved between mountains.
Distinctive landmarks that aid the traveler and control the vastness, as well as prominent marks on the land made inadvertently in the process of completing other tasks, are very much apparent in the Arctic. The most evocative are the inuksuit (stones piled up in the shape of human beings) that dot the eastern arctic landscape. They once funneled herds of caribou into depressions or rock corrals and marked lake shores at points where the fishing was good. One also finds stone fish dams and ptarmigan fences that date from Thule times. Rock cairns raised by early European explorers still stand out crisply in the landscape, on hills and headlands, and at turns of the coastline; and they are still utilized by bush pilots and others as navigational aids.
More modern traces of man on the land, infinitely more prevalent, are not as charming. Canada’s recently awakened sense of a northern destiny, for example, initiated a contemporary period of fervent cairn-building that proceeds unabated. Geological survey crews, oil-drilling crews, and various bureaucratic officials and dignitaries now routinely erect commemorative cairns. A simple cigar tube placed inside might contain a Polaroid print of mugging pals, or a more substantial metal case might hold a large color print of a government official and his family. (The diminishment of genuine exploration history suggested by these acts infuriates some northerners. They regard such cairn-building as pompous or silly, and dismantle the cairns whenever they come upon them.)
