Читать книгу The Ice Balloon - Alec Wilkinson - Страница 10

The first mariners to go toward the North had no idea what they were approaching. Homer described people in The Odyssey called the Men of Winter, who lived at the edge of the ocean and never saw the sun. What the Greeks knew of the Arctic they derived from observing that the stars went round a stationary point and that some stars could be seen every night whereas others were only occasional. The two classes were separated by a circular boundary that ran through Arktos, the Great Bear. From astronomical speculations they had deduced that north of the Arctic Circle there was sun at midnight during midsummer, and no sun at midwinter.

The first sailor to advance some ways north was a Greek named Pytheas, who probably lived in the third century BC, about the time of Aristotle and Alexander the Great. He sailed around Britain and six days north to a land he called Thule. What he wrote, which was apparently a geography more than a travel account, survives only in references by other writers, mainly Polybius, and those only brief. It is not possible to tell where Thule was for sure—some people think it was the Shetland Islands, some people think perhaps Iceland—but Pytheas, possibly having encountered ice and fog, wrote that in its vicinity the air, the earth, and the sea all blended, and it was no longer possible to navigate northward.

The next known journeys were made in the seventh and eighth centuries by Irish monks who were seeking a haven. At least some of the monks had followed the flocks of geese that flew over their monasteries. Proof of the monks’ visits appears in the form of place-names. Their legacy may be the impression of the Arctic as a sanctified territory, a refuge where a soul might withdraw to cleanse itself.

The Vikings displaced the monks. Among their legends was the visiting of Iceland, which was called Snowland, around 864, by Rabna Floki, which translates as Floki of the Ravens. The mariner’s compass hadn’t been invented, and fog often shrouded the sun for days, so Floki took three ravens trained to fly toward land (some accounts say two ravens, some say four). When Floki released the first raven, it flew in the direction he had come, leading him to conclude that land was closer behind than ahead. Released farther on, the second raven circled the ship, then also flew toward home. The third one flew forward. Floki spent the winter on Snowland and didn’t like it, and is the one supposed to have named it Iceland. After Floki came Ingolf, who with others, in 874, was escaping the rule of the Norwegian king, Hårfager. Approaching the shore of Iceland, Ingolf threw a door over the side of his ship, a Norwegian custom. The gods were supposed to guide the door to a favorable landing, but it drifted out of Ingolf’s sight, and he landed on the southern shore of the island. The settlement he established was the island’s first permanent one.

The British spent three hundred years looking for the Northwest Passage, dying by degrees, sometimes in big numbers, and usually of scurvy, starvation, and cold. The Arctic scholar Jeannette Mirsky wrote that Arctic exploration from the beginning had been a “series of victorious defeats.” Sometimes sandhogs—the men who build tunnels for trains and aqueducts—describe a task as a man-a-mile job, because a man dies every mile. By victorious defeats, Mirsky meant that while one expedition after another turned back, and many lives were given up, mile after mile of the blankness on the northern map was effaced.