Peter Sinclair: Get out on the ice

By PETER SINCLAIR

Chicken Little's at it again: "The ice is melting! The ice is melting!"

She got it wrong about the sky, but this time she's right on the money. The North Pole is open water again for the first time in 50 million years, give or take an epoch.

The last time you could go fishing there was back in the Eocene, when orchids bloomed in the Arctic Circle and our earliest forefathers came out to take the sun (we rather resembled a mongoose in those days, but must have decided it wasn't a good look).

Satellite studies confirm that the Arctic ice has thinned more than 40 per cent in the past 50 years.

Quite apart from the ecological implications, there's the inconvenience. A party of tourists on a Russian ice-breaker was forced to sail 10 km away from the pole to find ice thick enough to allow them to get off and take photos of each other on the ice-cap as had been promised.

It's the legendary Arctic explorers of the past I feel sorry for. All that pointless valour, those stiff upper lips, those noble deaths. All those huskies stewed in vain.

In retrospect John Cabot (1497), Henry Hudson (1607-10), and Sir John Franklin (1786-1847) might just as well never have bothered setting sail in search of the North-West Passage.

In the end it was a relatively unknown Irish admiral, Robert McClure who was first to travel across it in the search for Franklin. He became icebound too and got fed up, sensibly travelling the rest of the way on foot.

Fridtjof Nansen solved many of the riddles towards the end of the century when he pottered about the Arctic Circle in the Fram but it wasn't until 1903 that Norway's Roald Amundsen was finally to sail the full length of the Passage in the Gjoa.

It was left to Robert Peary's epic expedition of 1909 to finally make it to the Pole, thanks to his sidekick, Matthew Henson, the unsung African-American hero who built the igloos, hitched the huskies and rustled up a musk-ox for dinner.

Like all Men Friday, he did much of the work for little of the credit. I'm glad to see he has been reinvented as "the noblest of all Arctic explorers" with an impressive memorial at Arlington Cemetery.

He must have had a way with the Eskimo, too — his grandkids are all over Greenland.

Mind you, the Pole didn't always bring out the best in heroes. On the evidence, Richard E. Byrd summoned the press to the Arctic Circle in 1926, took off, flew out of sight, sprang an oil-leak and, on the "near enough is good enough" principle, flew right back again into a storm of applause from the world press.

Three days later, with little fanfare, Roald Amundsen floated quietly up there in the dirigible Norge. It looks as though Scott's nemesis was first to reach not only the South [1911] but to fly over the North Pole as well.

But the way things are going, huskies have little to worry about. From now on, explorers will need snorkels rather than skis ...

Links:

Eocene

Sir John Franklin

Robert McClure

Fridtjof Nansen

Passage in the Gjoa

Matthew Henson

Richard E. Byrd

Roald Amundsen

E-mail: petersinclair@email.com