The dramatic story of eight Irishmen who sailed around the Arctic icecap in a yacht is one of great courage and skill, writes Lorna Siggins.
Ice blink, brash ice, pack ice, fast ice. Growlers, pancake ice, leads and floes. If and when the full story of the earth's rapid climate change is recorded, one wonders how many Arctic voyagers will need to know such terms.
If predictions are correct and the polar ice cap melts far more rapidly than estimated, a frequently misspelt adjective might require re-definition. Could "Arctic" become a slightly cooler version of the Mediterranean? Could the North-West passage become another Suez, as ships ply the 6,500km shortcut between Atlantic and Pacific, which was once the subject of haunting ballads about lost lives? Jarlath Cunnane, Mayo adventurer and civil engineer, doesn't think so - not in the short term at least.
Global warming was only an abstract concept when he and fellow sailor Paddy Barry and mountaineer Frank Nugent had a chat about a possible northern adventure in the Cobblestone pub in Dublin's Smithfield some years ago. The group had already experienced sub-zero sea conditions together, as members of the 1997 South Aris expedition attempting to recreate the epic rescue by Irishmen Ernest Shackleton, Tom Crean and others in the Antarctic 80 years before.
The result of that Cobblestone conversation has been well charted in this newspaper. When a 47ft aluminium yacht named Northabout sailed into Westport, Co Mayo, on October 12th, 2005, it had completed a 9,700km circumnavigation of the North Pole. The boat, built by Cunnane, had initially traversed the North-West Passage north of Canada and Alaska and through the Arctic ocean in just one season - roughly 100 years after Norwegian Roald Amundsen was first man to do the same over two.
Having left the vessel in Alaska, the crew then decided to take the long way home in July 2004, when they attempted an even more challenging voyage through the North-East Passage. They sailed successfully across the top of Siberia, but ran into pack ice shortly before Cape Chelyuskin, mainland Russia's most northerly point, and rescued a Dutch yacht while en route to safety in September 2004. For this, they were to receive one of several awards.
Northabout was put into storage in Khatanga in Siberia, and the group returned in August 2005 to finish the route. Cunnane has now put pen to paper, or digits to keyboard, to record the full story of the episodic adventure - as "full" as he can make it in his own clipped and unassuming style. Three paragraphs in all are given to his own background, focusing on sailing, which began in home-built dinghies and progressed to an Atlantic crossing in 1986.
He built his own steel 34-foot cruiser, Lir, which took him to the Azores and the eastern Mediterranean, and his experience grew as he "learned the moods of the sea". When he was invited to join the 1997 South Aris expedition, he found that, like Shackleton and others, he had become "utterly obsessed by the beauty of the icy wastes".
That obsession drove him to retire from his job in April 2000, take a course in inert gas welding, and start building Northabout in his late father's unused joinery workship in Mayo on Good Friday of that year. The chosen design was the Madja class, one of three expedition boats modelled by French naval architect Gilbert Caroff for polar voyages.
The vessel's name was selected by Mary Barry, Paddy Barry's wife - not only was it the whalers' name for the route north by Melville Bay, Greenland, but it encapsulated the Irish course. An initial team was assembled - all male, and mostly men who had sailed with Paddy Barry before. It included radio operator Pat Colleran; sadly, he lost his battle with cancer before the group set off.
Boat building started with an initial contribution of £350 (€444) from each of the volunteers. Cunnane describes how he fabricated 15 frames, to which stringers were added, but lifting full-length plates became a slight problem for one working solo. Several members of the local football team came to the rescue, dropping in for a "quick lift" every so often on their way home. The boat's work schedule was rearranged around their training programme. As the shape took form, and parts had to be finished in various locations, construction became a "truly all-Ireland" effort, Cunnane recalls. It paid off, with its shallow draft and its sterling girth allowing it to become only the 13th small vessel to complete the North-West passage in 2001.
"Our journey was not a sociology study," Cunnane says. Notwithstanding this, observations on brief encounters with communities - be they the Inuit in Greenland or the Chuckchis of the north Asian coastline or the descendants of Russian Pomors and coastal traders in Siberia - are threaded through his spare narrative, which is complemented by occasional contributions from his crew, and wonderful photographs. The perspective of Vladislav Lashkevic or "Slava", the crew's Russian ice pilot during the North-East passage, might have been interesting as the potential "scapegoat" in the group; instead, there is a sympathetic portrait of the man by Kevin Cronin, the expedition's accountant and official "pacifier".
A COMMON WORD in the native languages of the many different people inhabiting the Arctic is "hunter", and it is no accident that it is synonymous with "man", Dr Michael Brogan, ship's doctor and musician, observes. "A good hunter is highly respected within his community, because it is through his skills the people can exist in the harsh environment of the far north," he notes - a fact not often appreciated among well-meaning environmentalists.
"Knowledge of the environment and climate, gained over years, and handed down from generation to generation, has enabled the people to prosper both spiritually and physically," he says. The close relationship between humans and animals in the far north is such that people across the Arctic believe animals have souls, and must be respected. They believe that hunted animals choose to give themselves up for the benefit of the people, who "in return must treat them with respect and dignity".
It is a belief system supported by rites and rituals and taboos. For instance, when hunting, the Chuckchis murmur magic spells, Brogan says, in the belief that the hunted animal spirits can hear them. At home, their wives utter spells to urge the animals towards the pursuit.
THE CREW'S MUSICAL skills opened many doors - significantly, the rotating crew included several women, such as fiddle player Joan Bourke on a delivery trip in between the two main voyages. During one such session, they encountered the effects of outside influences, when some Greenlanders began dancing a Caledonian set.
"They told us it was their traditional dance; somewhere in the misty past, visiting Scottish whalers had passed on their dance. In fact the whalers were far more familiar with the Arctic than the British Admiralty," Brogan notes; had British officialdom accepted an offer by whaler and navigator William Scoresby to help, the history of the North-West passage could have been very different.
Cunnane, Barry and company acknowledge those many adventurers such as Sir John Franklin and Irishmen such as Leopold McClintock, who have gone before them. Mountaineer Frank Nugent devotes a chapter to the Irish presence in the Arctic - recording that Ireland even had a connection with the North-East passage; two Corkmen, Jerome Collins and John Cole, were members of the American Jeanette expedition that sank off the Siberian coast in 1891. Sir Henry Gore-Booth, father of Countess Markievicz, explored Norwegian waters in his boat, Kara, during the same period.
And while McClintock and Capt Francis Crozier - who lost his life on Franklin's voyage - might be classified as the real explorers, there is a point to the activities of their descendants which transcends a selfish need to escape or a relentless urge to travel.
British solo traveller Benedict Allen explained it very clearly in a recent article in the Guardian. While the land surface of this planet has been mapped many times over, and the "great romantic journeys have all been done", the modern explorer's role is much more subtle, he argues. That role involves pushing back "the barriers of the known" by "revisiting distant or inhospitable places and peoples about which we have hazy or wrong ideas", Allen says.
The business of exploration now, he says, is about science and about "our own mental landscape". Interestingly, that's why Allen is one of those rare creatures who doesn't take a Global Positioning System (GPS) if he can help it, and "certainly not a satellite phone". Such "gadgets" prevent one from becoming exposed to the place one is in, he argues.
Exploration is "not about making your mark on the place, but allowing that place to make its mark on you".
Northabout: Sailing the Northeast and Northwest Passages, by Jarlath Cunnane, is published by Collins Press, €27.95