Svalbard
Welcome to Cosmographia — a newsletter dedicated to exploring the world and our place in it. This post is part of our Atlas’ Notebook series, featuring art, poetry, literature, cartography, and photography, all centred on a particular place. For the full map of Cosmographia posts, see here.
Svalbard is the name given to a collection of islands, roughly the size of Ireland, found in the far reaches of the Arctic Ocean. The islands contain virtually no infrastructure, aside from a few tiny settlements. Sixty-percent of the land is covered in glacier, thirty-percent is barren rock, and only ten-percent has any vegetation at all. The three thousands residents rarely risk venturing much beyond the towns, for polar bears roam freely in great numbers. Aside from a few military bases, these towns are the furthest north of any human settlements on earth. Yet, in its bleak and rugged desolation, Svalbard seems beautiful.
I. In Art
François-Auguste Biard had an incredible life. His parents intended for him to join the clergy but he decided to pursue art instead. He began his career at a wallpaper factory before his talents earned him a spot at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. However, he was unable to apply himself consistently to his studies, and ended up being mostly self-taught. He travelled widely, painting in Italy, Greece, the Middle East, Malta, Egypt, Cyprus, Brazil, and North America. Somewhere along the way he was awarded the Legion of Honour - the highest French order of merit. His wife, Léonie d’Aunet, a famous writer in her own right, ended up having an affair with Victor Hugo, and was banished to a convent after a stint in prison for the crime of adultery. In 1839, Biard joined a scientific expedition to Lapland and Svalbard, where he painted dramatic scenes of the islands, its wildlife, and its people.
In the painting above, he depicts a lone survivor shipwrecked upon Magdalenefjorden, a fjord on the west coast of Spitsbergen — Svalbard’s biggest island. The man, surrounded by the dead, sits in solemn indecision while a mast bobs uselessly in the freezing water. Wind whips the moonlit frost and a pair of footsteps leaves us wondering whether the mourner has just arrived or someone has just left. The scene seems to capture something about the bleak immensity of the frozen north.
II. In Verse
Round and ever the circling sun Travels the summer's single day, The single day that is never done Till the snow and the frost shall have their way, And come with their comrade night, to stay. They shall endure for a five-month night Blind with storms and black with cold. But now the unending summer's light Changes not from its pallid gold, And the sleepless land is ever bright. So do I learn to love the moon And value the alternate boon Of night and day, and day and night; And all the changing of the light From calm perfection of its blue To gold and crimson, fading through Shade upon evanescent shade, Who are treasured by the mind afraid To lose the beauty that must die, Perceived through mutability. And yes, dear Moon, eclipsed here By the unsetting solar sphere, I have learnt how you can grow Into the heart of all we know.— Julian Huxley, from Spitsbergen Summer (1932)
Svalbard is so far north it experiences a midnight sun from April to August. Its polar night begins in October and doesn’t end until February.
III. In Cartography
Willem Barentsz was a Dutch navigator, cartographer, and Arctic explorer. He ventured into the Arctic three times looking for a northeast passage through to the East. He was forced back by ice on the first two voyages. On the third, he discovered Spitsbergen and Bear Island, before being stranded on Novaya Zemlya for over a year.
With their ship trapped in the ice, the crew survived the long winter by building a cabin out of the wood from their ship. They were continually attacked by polar bears and only managed to keep off the worst of scurvy by eating raw arctic fox meat — which, unbeknownst to them, contains Vitamin C. By June of the following year, the men were getting desperate. They decided to try a return voyage on the smaller open boats. Barentsz died while at sea soon after. The rest of the men reached the Kola Peninsula (part of Russia to the east of Finland) where they were rescued by a Dutch merchant who came across them by chance.
The Barents Sea, Barentsburg (the second largest town on Svalbard) and Barentsøya (Barents Island) — one of Svalbard’s islands — were all named after the late captain.
Barentsz’s chart above is the first time Svalbard appears on any map. Aside from the many whales they must have sighted on their travels, we can also see that at this time the perennial Arctic ice pack was unknown to the world. They hoped to find a sea passage over the pole to other parts of the world. From the start Barentsz mission was doomed; there was no way through the ice.
IV. In Literature
There it was, the land under 80 degrees, a land of stern magnificence, where icebergs rear up almost to the very mountaintops, and mountain rises above mountain; there it was, inviolate, alive to the raucous voice of millions of birds, the continuous staccato bark of foxes, the castanet click as the hoofs of great herds of deer fell in a swinging trot; there it was, surrounded by waters whose surface was slashed and sprayed by schools of walrus and whales that had swum there before ever man was born.― Jeannette Mirsky, from To the Arctic (1970)
In To the Arctic, Mirsky retells the stories of the many explorers who tried to map, or searched for a means to live in, the far reaches of the Arctic.
Many Fujiyamas lie in a row along our coast to the south. As the distance increases, their sombre blackness seems to be lit up by a deep red light. They take on every shade from red to lilac, and all the colours have a glowing depth that is never found in the landscape at home, or at most only in some exquisite flowers. In the holy stillness, everything is lit by a supernatural brightness. Two gulls fly low and silent close by the hut toward the fiord. They are lit up by the red rays of the bright sun. Their magnificent broad wings are a deep pink in the turquoise sky.― Christiane Ritter, from A Woman in the Polar Night (1938)
When Christiane Ritter’s husband, Hermann, asked her to spend a year with him on frozen coast of Spitsbergen, living in a hut, 60 miles from their nearest neighbour, she was, rather understandably, a bit reluctant. But, somehow, with descriptions of the abundant wildlife and the spectacular Northern Lights, he convinced her to accompany him to the North. A Woman in the Polar Night is her memoir of this period, telling of how she came to fall in love with the beauty of the frozen wastes.
V. In Photography
When I was in Svalbard, grief never felt very far from the surface — nor did the bodies of the dead themselves, which linger rather than decompose.― Colin Dickey
Being from Montana, I found the words and pictures like home and yet isolated.
The starkness is frightening and beautiful at the same time.