Dear Cha-Wel-Dor-Sue,

"Arctic scenery is so simple and clear. All that is superfluous and unnecessary has been eliminated." (Peter Ereuchen)

Society's Expedition's ship, the World Discoverer, was our home for two weeks in July and August of 1989 as we sailed along the west coast of Greenland, crossed Baffin Bay, cruised among the fjords of Baffin Island, visited the hamlets of Pont Inland and Arctic Bay, landed on Devon Island looking for the Musk Ox and on Beechey Island to see the cairns and gravestones of Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition to find the Northwest Passage across the Arctic Ocean to Cathay, and finally to land at Resolute, Cornwallis Island in the Queen Elizabeth group only 900 miles from the North Pole. It was an exciting adventure marred only by an accident Pat incurred in our Zodiac just three days short of the termination of our vacation as we headed for the Rocky Coast and Cunningham Glacier on Devon Island.

Our trip actually began as we flew Iceland Air to Reykjavik, Iceland, and then after a few hours rest in a hotel, we flew on to Sonderstrom Fjord on the west coast of Greenland. This fjord is over 20 miles long and the glacier that formed it has long since receded inland. A bus transported us to our ship and we set sail for Holsteinborg and arrived there in the morning. Sisimiut, as it is called in Inuit, has a population of approximately 5,000 inhabitants and is an active fishery town. Among the fish landed here are salmon, halibut, and cod, and the town is the center for Greenland's shrimp industry as well as that for seal, walrus, beluga, and reindeer.

Flying over the vast icecap of Greenland was an unforgettable experience. As one approached the east coast of Greenland, one spotted miles of "fast" ice attached to the coast line, soon rugged mountaintops appeared, and finally, the icecap itself, which was dazzling white and which, in some areas, is almost two miles deep and composed of solid ice that was formed at least a million years ago. The amount of ice is so great that were it to melt, the seas would rise approximately 42 feet and thoroughly drown Manhattan Island and all other coastline cities throughout the world!

Greenland is the largest island in the world, covering 840,000 square miles and of this huge land mass, seven-eights of the land is covered with ice. The island is 1,650 miles long and approximately 200-300 miles wide. In fact, it is as long as the distance is from Hartford, Connecticut to Miami, Florida. The rocks of Greenland, or its granite or gneisses, are among the oldest rocks in the world, in contrast to those in Iceland, which are among the newest on our planet. The average height of the land mass is 6,000 feet and the highest peak is 11,196 feet high. The island, like Antarctica, is considered a desert, as the average rainfall is less than 10" a year.

However, the icecap has accumulated snow precipitation for over one million years. The glacial tongues along the coastline are among the largest in the world, and the one at Jacobshaven is over five miles wide and over 80 miles long. The front of the Humbolt Glacier is 60 miles wide. These and other similar glaciers are the site for the formation of the huge icebergs that find their way into the North Atlantic and which were responsible for the sinking of the Titanic. Icebergs form by calving as huge chunks break off the glacier and fall into the sea. In fact, a tragedy occurred a few days before we arrived in Jacobshaven as three Eskimos were viewing the glacier from their umiak, which is a skin type boat which holds several people as contrasted to a single person kayak. These people were drowned as the glacier calved and caused a wave 40 feet high to fall into the sea, resulting in the overturning of their boat and the loss of their lives.

The west coast of Greenland is warmer than the east coast, as it is bathed by the Gulf Stream as far north as Jacobshaven. The east coast is less populated and much colder, as it is bathed by the Arctic current coming down from the Arctic Ocean.

Greenland is a semi-autonomous state of the Kingdom of Denmark, having voted to end their colonial status in 1953. They elect their own Parliament and have two representatives in the Legislature at Copenhagen.

Our second port of call was Jacobshaven, or Iliulissat, in Inuit. There is a huge fish processing plant in the center of the city and it seems to dominate the community. Unfortunately, due to "sanitation requirements", visitors were not permitted to view their operations, unlike our experience a few years ago in Iceland, where we did have the opportunity to watch fish processing. The huge glacier at Jacobshaven is unusual, as it is known to move at an astonishing rate of 30 meters every 24 hours!

The third village we visited on the west coast of Greenland was Umainak, and this village impressed us greatly. It was immaculately clean, with each house situated on a rocky crag or peak and all painted in a variety of pastel colors. Many of the homes were surrounded by sled-dogs anchored with chains to prevent them from roaming. We visited a church and saw some of the beautiful dressed Eskimo women who had arrived for a christening ceremony, and we also visited a museum which had been formed to preserve their historical relics and to display their past history. Most of the small hamlets have a general store, usually managed by the Hudson Bay Company. Another surprising feature is the sophistication of their prefabricated, well-insulted homes, equipped with TV antennas, and many ski-mobiles and aluminum boats with outboard engines. High tech has invaded the High Arctic! Most of the foodstuffs, except for seafood, is imported.

Our next hamlet visited was Upernavik, and this town, in contrast to Umainak, was disorderly-appearing, with trash and bric-a-brac everywhere. There was no visible evidence of any civic pride here and it was obvious that this community sustained itself off its fish and hunting activities, and imported very little.

One of the lecturers on our trip had just attended an Inuit Circumpolar Conference, at which Inuits from the U.S.S.R., the U.S. (Alaska), Canada and Greenland were present. It was the first ever held where descendants from a common race (Siberian Mongoloid tribes), but living in vastly different countries, met to discuss their common problems and their environmental concerns. These people have dark eyes, straight black hair and brownish skin, with relatively small hands and feet. They have a large trunk and body mass as a genetic response to the cold environment. It is interesting that Carbon Fourteen dating in these areas indicates that the Inuits were in Greenland at least 2,000 years B.C. Due to climatic variations, these nomadic people traveled vast distances in order to find a habitat that enabled them to survive and this was primarily to follow the reindeer herds. It is also interesting in this regard that the climate was much warmer when Eric The Red and his son, Leif Ericson, explored Greenland and Vinland, or the Labrador Coast. Apparently, there were none of the impenetrable ice floes at that time that thwarted so many subsequent Arctic pioneers from finding the celebrated short cut to China and those hardy intrepid adventurers who first sought to find the North Pole.

After we left Upernavik, we sailed north a short distance and found the site of an Inuit, or ancient Thule culture. Here, there were some burial sites and some skulls that were seen beneath pyramidal type structures made of stones. Several well-preserved mummies had been found here several years ago and are now in the museum in the country's capital of Godthaab, or Nuuk in Inuit.

After leaving Greenland, we headed north toward Melville Bay, intending to hug the coastline and cross over near the top of Baffin Bay in order to reach Baffin Island. This was a long way around but the ice reports that we had received had indicated Baffin Bay was frozen solid except along the coastline. However, a report subsequently came in indicating that the ice was breaking up and that there was a stretch of broken packed ice about 30 miles long that might provide a safe corridor across the mid-portion of Baffin Bay. The Captain and the Ice Master conferred and elected to chance it, and thus began a thrilling 48 hours in which we were surrounded day and night by ice of all kinds. We nudged ice floes and at times, were almost stopped in our forward progress. We were scraping along the ice almost continually and we could hear the thuds striking the hull of our ship. During this time, the Captain and the Ice Master were constantly on the bridge, conferring with one another. Occasionally, a stretch or lead of clear water was seen but by and large, it was packed ice everywhere, with bergey bits (small icebergs), growlers (tiny icebergs), and then the occasional huge icebergs. At night, navigation was difficult and during the day, particularly when fog and mist descended upon us, it was equally difficult to move ahead safely. Fortunately, our ship was built for travel in the ice and while it was called an ice-breaker, it was not a double hull constructed ship. It was a reinforced construction throughout and proved seaworthy at all times. From what we learned, the U.S.S.R. cruise ship, the Maxim Gorky, that foundered off Spitzbergen recently, did not hit an iceberg, but rather plowed into a mass of perfectly flat solid "fast" ice full steam ahead at 18 knots an hour. Apparently, the fault was with the Soviet "Intelligence", or perhaps radar could not have detected it.

My camera was busy as we were traversing the ice floes of Baffin Bay and one easily falls under the spell of the beautiful, but ever-dangerous and always moving ice masses. The ice masses are of so many colors but particularly shades of green and blue. Several reasons are given for the different colors and we were told that green ice represents two year old ice and blue ice represents three year old ice. I might add that the ice forms that we saw depend to some extent upon aggregate coalescing or stratifying of one mass upon another, and also ridges develop when ice masses are forced together by the winds and the tides and currents. Ice, I have learned, is a science all of its own.

Upon reaching Baffin Island, we sailed into Eclipse Sound and then on to the small hamlet of Pond Inlet, where two Royal Canadian Mounties serve as the local constabulary and administration officials. This area is under the control of the Northwest Territories Government of Canada. Fishing and hunting help to support the natives in these areas but frankly, they subsist largely on a dole from the Canadian government. We sailed further on looking for narwhales or the "Unicorns of the Sea", which are unusual in that they have a long single ivory tooth or tusk protruding from their upper jaw and some of these are as much as ten feet long, or only slightly shorter than the length of their bodies. They are almost an endangered species and we had no luck in spotting any of them. We did, however, spot a few polar bears and others saw many seals. There were no walruses spotted nor on our landing at Devon Island did we see any musk ox. When we were ashore where musk ox and polar bear were reported, we were escorted by a rifleman. Not a shot, however, was fired.

While we were in the Pond Inlet area, we sailed to a site where some Dorsit and Thule cultures were being excavated, and these were under the direction of a Jesuit priest who had spent years digging for the artifacts of these prehistoric civilizations of the Paleo-Eskimos. He had unearthed some small tools, one blade which was probably sharper than any scalpel I have ever employed in my surgical practice. At all the sites, swarms of mosquitoes greeted us, most of them larger than any I had ever seen at home.

While at Arctic Bay, we bussed to Nanisivik, the site of a lead and zinc mine that was obviously fabulously successful. They use both the open pit concept and the pillar and room technique where they dig out large areas creating rooms and leave large columns or pillars to support the overburden (horizontal mining as contrasted to vertical shafts). The area mined was solid permafrost and it was very cold inside the mine. The ore is crushed, washed, and partially digested, and the dried powder is conveyed on a belt to the hold of an ore ship to be taken to Belgium for further refining.

One of the most interesting landings was on Bechey Island, where Sir John Franklin wintered in the year 1846. It was here that several of his ill-fated crew were buried and we saw their tombstones. Sir John Franklin had been given the command of 120 men and two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, and he was fully provisioned for three years. None of the members of his expedition ever returned nor was anything known about them. Subsequent to this, there began a series of rescue attempts, not only on the part of the British Admiralty but some of which were privately financed by Lady Franklin and all were undertaken in an effort to rescue any possible survivors and to learn what might have happened to the expedition. A great many books have been written about this period and this era and they make intensely interesting reading. They all entail stories of extreme hardships, living in the frigid North, and having their ships crushed by the ice. In fact, many of the names of the islands and the straits and the passages in the Northern Arctic are named after these rescue teams and also a great deal of map-making resulted from the searches that were made for the lost expedition leader and his followers.

Our Ice Master, Captain Tom Pullen, a retired Captain in the Canadian Royal Navy, had a grandfather who was one of the early explorers in the Arctic area and when his ship visited this area some 25 or more years ago, he built a Cairn and left a record of his visit and some abstracts from his grandfather's diary. Tom was rather touched coming back to this site and looking at what he had built over two decades ago. Tom today is recognized as one of the premier ice-masters in the Polar Areas and has made no less than 11 visits to the Antarctic area and, in fact, was the Ice Master on the USS Manhattan when it made the first west to east passage through the Northwest Passage.

Three days before the end of our trip, Pat was injured in a Zodiac accident and incurred a compressed fracture of her lower vertebra, causing agonizing pain. She was riding in the bow of our rubber inflated boat when we hit a large swell or wave which tossed Pat skyward and as she came down, the bow itself was riding, causing a severe impact on the seat of her spine. The pain was intense and she was returned to the ship immediately. We placed her in bed and there she remained for the subsequent three days until she was finally medically evacuated on a stretcher from Resolute, Cornwallis Island to Montreal. This took place on a combined cargo and passenger plane and the trip took six hours, as the distance from Resolute to Montreal is approximately the distance from New York to Los Angeles. An ambulance met Pat in Montreal and subsequently at Bradley Airport here in Hartford. She was taken to the Manchester Memorial Hospital, where Wells had x-rays made and prescribed treatment. At the moment of my dictation, she is convalescing at home, wearing my old lumbosacral corset that I wore following my complicated disc surgery in 1974.

Today, Pat and I are members of the Bi-Polar Club, a small group of travelers who have traveled both in the Antarctic Ocean and the Arctic Ocean, and were I asked which area was most impressive, I could only reply that each is different and equally fascinating.

Antarctica was impressive for many reasons. To begin with, it was an entire continent of ice, with huge icebergs, some of which were reported to be the size of the State of Connecticut, and others reached the heights of 20 story buildings. There were seals, sea lions, and millions of penguins, and exotic birds flew overhead, such as the albatross, the skuas, and the stormy petrels. There were the research stations of a dozen different nations and the interesting Thermal Springs and Discovery Bay, where we went bathing. There was Drake's Passage and Mal De Mer, Cape Horn, Darwin's Passage, and Magellan Strait. It was, indeed, all very exciting.

The High Arctic was quite different and yet, as I said, equally interesting. For one thing, we saw more ice and icebergs than we ever saw in Antarctica and the glaciers appeared larger and more numerous. Greenland provided visits to Eskimo villages whereas Antarctica was uninhabited except, of course, for the research scientists. The colorful hamlets in Greenland and Baffin Bay were novel to see and their ancient cultures were fascinating to learn about and to hear about from our lecturers. The history of the exploration of the Arctic held us spellbound as the tales and adventures of the early explorers were recounted by our lecturers. The use of dog sled teams in Arctic exploration was fascinating, particularly as revealed by Angus Erskine, a Scotch man, who has done a lot of travel in Greenland. Finally, one must admire such men as Knud Rasmussen, who sledged some 25,000 miles or more to every known Inuit village in the Arctic area and who recorded his findings, noting the differences in their languages, their customs, their housing and clothing, and their boating and hunting techniques. In summary, one must say they were hardy people who inhabited the Arctic area and who endeavored to explore it in the interest of their countries and of Mankind.

Love,

DAD

CEJ/ngb

9/12/89