Journey Through Ice and Water

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              "text": "As this distant shot of the Kraushavn settlement shows, many places on the route are completely covered in cascading fog, especially along the northern coast of Greenland.",
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              "text": "PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEFANO DE LUIGI / VII",
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              "text": "A view of Godhavn (or Qeqertarsuaq), a tiny port town in western Greenland, from the flight to the jump-off base of Upernavik.",
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              "text": "A view of Upernavik cemetery, not far from the coast, and midway between Davis Strait and Baffin Bay. Flowers can’t survive the ice—and, so, plastic flowers cover the tombstones.",
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              "text": "After heading north of Upernavik, Best Explorer passes through the 70-km-long Upernavik Icefjord, which empties into Baffin Bay. As seen from the mainmast, the boat’s bow is just about scraping past the ice from the huge Upernavik Glacier—a difficult bit of navigation because the glacier moves with the tides.",
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              "text": "A tugboat tries to push iceberg breakoffs away from the entrance to Upernavik harbour. Each year, about 15,000 icebergs detach from the mainland. Especially during the summer (which the rest of the world knows as snow-covered wintertime), these pocket icebergs can bob their way up to 40° north and south of their latitude of origin.",
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              "text": "Icebergs floating off the Upernavik coast tend to melt into fantastical shapes during the Danish somme. Navigating through an archipelago of icebergs is dangerous, because they hide about 87.5 percent of their volume under the surface. The biggest icebergs, which can cover up to 19,000 sq km, are easy to dodge (unless you’re the Titanic). The smaller ones can rip a boat’s hull to shreds.",
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              "text": "Heading north up Greenland’s coast from Tasiusaq settlement in southern Greenland towards Kraushavn, Best Explorer circumnavigates the tiny Kippaku island, which hosts an Arctic bird colony of Thick-Billed Murre, that is under perennial study by researchers.",
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              "text": "A detail of Kraushavn, the last human habitation in northern Greenland before we cross through Baffin Bay to get to Pond Inlet in Canada. A glacier looms in the background.",
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THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE, the trade route through the Canadian Arctic that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, has been the subject of myth and nightmare for European sea explorers since 1497, when Giovanni Caboto—the flamboyant Venetian-English navigator and explorer who is today known as John Cabot—was sent off by Henry VII to find it. Part of the mystery of the passage is whether or not Cabot actually succeeded (and why, if he did, he thought he had landed in—of all places—China).

But attempts were made even before Cabot to cut through this channel of icebergs—in 985-6 CE. Norse explorer Bjarni Herjólfsson, chasing to catch up with the flotilla of Eirikr Thorvaldsson (Erik the Red), who wanted to colonise Greenland, was blown off course, coasted to southern Greenland, tacked east, and kept going until he spotted what was the east coast of North America. Not recognising the changing land terrain—wooded and hilly to mountainous and snowy—and being a trader, not a salty adventurer or an outlaw (like Erik the Red at that time), he turned back. The Norse were superstitious seafarers: Herjólfsson’s lucky boat was bought, 15 years later, by Erik the Red’s son, Leifr Eiríksson (Leif Ericson), who sallied forth with a crew of 35 and ended up founding, in 1,000 CE, what is known today as L’Anse aux Meadows (from the French L’Anse-aux-Méduses, or ‘Jellyfish Cove’) in Newfoundland. This is the only instance of Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact with the Americas that scholars accept as incontrovertible.

But this pre-Columbian exploration was, basically, Viking adventurism, celebrated not so much in cartography but in sagas. The first definitive, marked route was covered by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1903-06, who hired six sailors, struck out on a 21-metre-long, 47-tonne, shallow-keel sloop to escape baying creditors, anchored near Herschel Island off the coast of the Canadian Yukon—and then skied 800 km to the settlement of Eagle, Alaska, to send off a triumphal telegram. And then skied 800-km back to his ship.

In those years, it was possible to ski straight through unbroken Arctic land. Today, you can’t. Global warming changed everything: in 2007, the European Space Agency took readings from its satellites and declared that Arctic shrinkage had made the Northwest Passage “fully navigable”. But it’s still not an easy journey, nor commercially viable: although, in August 2012, the giant, 43,500-tonne residential cruise ship, The World, became the largest passenger vessel to transit the Northwest Passage, following Amundsen’s trail, the Arctic Marine Transport Workshop (2004) concluded that it wouldn’t be an alternative to the Panama Canal for the “next 10 to 20 years”.

So, transiting the Northwest Passage remains a sea adventurers’ prerogative. This photo essay documents part of a voyage made this year through the Northwest Passage, the first time it has been accomplished by an Italian boat—Best Explorer, skippered by the Ligurian Nanni Acquarone, who has just published his book, Best Explorer—Dal Mar Ligure al Mare Glaciale Artico (Best Explorer—From the Ligurian Sea to the Arctic Ocean). Acquarone and his team began planning this project in 2010. After 15 days of navigation from the tiny island of Upernavik in northwestern Greenland—near the 73rd parallel north, 900 km inside the Arctic Circle—to Pond Inlet (or Mittimatalik in Inuit) in Nunavut territory, via Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, Best Explorer became the first ship to cross the passage this year.