The Odyssey had a permanent complement of just twenty-three men. The senior officers—captain, chief engineer, chief mate—were Ukrainian, as were the electrician and the second engineer; the rest of the crew was Filipino. The Ukrainians spoke Russian among themselves, while the Filipinos spoke Tagalog. Across the cultures, they spoke a rudimentary marine English. Otherwise, their contacts were limited. In addition to this permanent crew, there was a Russian “ice adviser,” or pilot, named Eduard Cherepanov, who had been sailing these waters for almost twenty years.
Relations aboard the Odyssey were hierarchical and traditional. The captain, a native of the old naval city of Sevastopol, was the absolute authority. He was therefore a little isolated socially from the crew and seemed grateful for the presence of Cherepanov, who had served as a captain and was therefore his social equal and, more important, not someone with whom discipline needed to be maintained.
The chief mate, Zakharchenko, occupied an ambiguous position. On the one hand, he was in charge of much of the day-to-day operation of the ship, and he was the only one on board who knew as much about ships and the sea as the captain. On the other hand, he was entirely at the mercy of the captain, not only on the ship but professionally: because the chief mate has no independent contact with the home office, the only way he’ll ever get a captaincy is if he’s actively promoted by his captain. Zakharchenko was a soft touch. He tried to present a stern face to the crew, but he stuttered when he was nervous, and when he wasn’t nervous he couldn’t help but make a joke of some kind. As he liked to say, “Am I from Odessa or not?”
The two most senior Filipino crew members were Felimon Recana, the second mate, and Eliseo Carpon, the third mate. Both men were in their fifties, almost a decade older than Captain Shkrebko and Zakharchenko. The second mate was handsome and sarcastic, a born cynic; the third mate was gregarious and enthusiastic. I once saw him jump up and cry “Yes!” after winning a game of Spider Solitaire on the computer in the crew rec room.
Life on board the ship is mostly confined to the “accommodation,” a yellow, five-story metal building that rises from the stern. The bridge is on the top floor; the bottom floor contains locker rooms for the men as they prepare to go on deck. The men’s living quarters are spread through the second, third, and fourth floors. Each man has his own cabin, about the size of a college dorm room, with a small bathroom and shower. Everything is secured so that it doesn’t go flying around the room during a storm. This battening down takes some getting used to. It’s easy enough to understand why the mini-fridge is strapped to a hook in the wall and the back of the bathroom mirror has little compartments for your toothbrush and shaving cream, but it took me almost a week to realize that the drawers under my bed, which wouldn’t open when I tried them, were not ornamental, as I’d decided, but just extremely sticky. I was able to move my clothes out of my desk.
Most of the men were on six-month contracts, with monthly pay ranging from $1,100 for the mess boys to around $10,000 for the captain and the chief engineer—pretty good money in the Philippines and Ukraine. The contract is the standard unit of experience in the trade; one says “my last contract” rather than “my last ship.” A six-month contract may include as few as ten port calls and as many as several dozen. These reprieves are short, and growing ever shorter as improved port technology gets ships in and out faster, but the men are grateful for them and can recite the price of girls in many ports across the world. The crew members had all received phone calls from their crewing agency in early April and had taken over the ship from its previous crew at the Irish port of Aughinish in mid-May. So far they’d brought soybeans from Quebec to Hamburg and coal from Latvia to Antwerp. None of them had been through the Arctic before.
To be aboard a ship is to be constantly aware of everything that can go wrong. A ship can run into another ship—hard to believe when you look at how wide the ocean is, a little easier to believe once you consider that it takes the Odyssey almost two miles to come to a complete stop. A ship can be overtaken by pirates: Captain Shkrebko narrowly escaped pirates in the Gulf of Aden in 2007 (he was saved when an American military helicopter responded to his distress call), while the Odyssey’s fourth engineer was on a ship that was hijacked off the coast of Kenya in late 2009 and held hostage for forty-three days. A ship can be compromised by its cargo, which may shift, forcing the ship off balance, or create other problems—Zakharchenko had with him an alarming color brochure called “How to Monitor Coal Cargoes from Indonesia,” which warned that Indonesian coal had a tendency to catch on fire. The Odyssey’s electrician, Dmitry Yemalienenko, had a short cell-phone video of a ship listing very hard to starboard in the Black Sea; it was carrying plywood, which had shifted en route. “Then what happened?” I asked.
“It sank,” Yemalienenko said.
Then there was the danger of running into something beneath the waterline. To avoid this, the ship carried a full set of hydrographic charts, most of them from the British Admiralty. But the charts are never complete, and the telex machine on the bridge kept up a steady patter of warnings. When we headed out into the Barents, there was a broken signal at 69°40'N, 32°09'E, a shipwreck at 69°52', 35°16', nighttime artillery fire at 70°15', 33°38', plus some fishing nets.
Finally, there is the ice. The books on the bridge of the Odyssey—arranged on shelves behind the navigation table, with little wood braces to keep them from falling out in heavy seas—were all in agreement on the subject of the ice. “It is very easy and extremely dangerous to underestimate the hardness of ice,” The Mariner’s Handbook cautioned. “Ice fields consisting of thick broken floes, especially those that bear signs of erosion by the sea on their upper surface, should be avoided . . . Do not enter ice if a longer but ice-free route is available.” The Guide to Navigating Through the Northern Sea Route, published in English in 1996 by the Russian Ministry of Defense, put the matter more dramatically: “Any attempt at independent, at vessel’s own risk, transiting the NSR, without possessing and using full information, and without using all means of support, is doomed to failure.”
This seemed harsh. But the ice-strengthened cruise ship Explorer sank off the coast of Antarctica in 2007 after hitting ice. The shrimp trawler BCM Atlantic sank near Labrador after hitting ice in 2000. Were the Odyssey to start sinking, there was a free-fall lifeboat hanging three stories up and at a 45-degree angle from the stern, but Vadim Zakharchenko said he would rather drown; the boat is raised so far up that its impact against the water could knock out your teeth.
Seamen don’t like to talk about the things that can go wrong at sea, but they love to talk about the things that go wrong on land. As we approached Novaya Zemlya, the Ukrainians started joking about radioactivity. The Soviets had turned Novaya Zemlya into a nuclear-testing site; while they were at it, they used the coast around it as a dumping ground for reactors from decommissioned nuclear submarines. The largest nuclear bomb in history, the Tsar Bomba, had been detonated here in 1961. “Chernobyl is nothing compared to this!” Vadim announced.
On the evening of July 11, we entered a thirty-mile-wide strait between the southern end of Novaya Zemlya and Vaygach Island, at the entrance to the Kara Sea. The southern portion of the Barents that we had just been through is open to warm Gulf Stream currents, and it’s rarely frozen even in winter. The Kara Sea is a different story. For years, no one could penetrate it. In the 1590s the Dutch explorer Willem Barents was repeatedly foiled by the ice at the Kara Gates and decided at last to head north and seek a way around Novaya Zemlya. This was not a good idea. His ship became trapped in ice, and the crew was forced to abandon it and spend the winter on land. One evening in October, the sun set and did not come back up again for three months. The men battled cold, scurvy, and hungry polar bears. “In Nova Zembla,” the chronicler of the journey wrote, “there groweth neither leaves nor grasse, nor any beasts that eate grasse or leaves live therein, but such beasts as eate fleshe, as bears and foxes.” When the warm weather came, in June, t
he crew headed for the Russian mainland. Some survived; Barents died of scurvy on the way.
The failed Barents expedition took place during the late-sixteenth-century Dutch ascendancy on the seas. It followed failed English attempts to traverse the passage earlier in the century and preceded some failed Russian ones. To be fair to these early explorers, their boats were made of wood, their maps were wildly inaccurate, they didn’t know what a vitamin was, and they had no satellites to help them navigate the ice. Instructions from the London-based Russia Company to its early employees were notably vague: “And when you come to Vaygach, we would have you to get sight of the maine land . . . which is over against the south part of the same island, and from thence, with Gods permission, to passe eastwards alongst the same coasts, keeping it alwayes in your sight . . . untill you come to the country of Cathay, or the dominion of that mightie emperour.” This was the state of the art in 1580. The dream was to reach China and its untold riches. But after enough men had disappeared into the ice never to return, the Dutch and the English decided it would be easier to go to war with Spain and Portugal for the right to use the route around the south of Africa; the Arctic, for a while, was forgotten.
For the next 950 miles, the Russian mainland stretched upward into the Arctic, forcing us to head northeast through the Kara Sea. Only when we reached Cape Chelyuskin, at almost 78 degrees N the northernmost point in Asia, could we turn southeast. And the farther north we got, the colder it became. Out on deck, though the temperature was still above freezing, a chill northerly wind blew in our faces.
On the morning of July 13, we crossed the 75th parallel; we had passed by the Yamal Peninsula, home to most of Russia’s natural gas, and the mighty Ob and Yenisey Rivers. In recent years these rivers have been discharging more fresh water into the Arctic seas, as warmer temperatures increase overall precipitation in the Arctic water basin. Scientists anticipate that there will soon be more soil in the water, as the permafrost layer underground melts and the riverbanks begin to slide down. The Kara Sea was clear and cool, the air temperature 39 degrees, the water temperature 41; not swimming weather, but nothing to make ice from, either.
Late in the morning, we entered a stretch of fog. We could see as far as the bow of the ship and not an inch farther. The captain turned on our foghorn. It emitted a deep, loud wail every two minutes, to let anyone in front of us know that we were coming. But the ice pilot thought this precaution was goofy. “We don’t really need that thing, you know,” he said to the captain. “There’s no one else out here.” He was right. That afternoon, we were in radio contact with the two ships that were joining us in our convoy through the Northern Sea Route; one was 150 miles ahead of us, the other 100 miles behind. That afternoon, too, on our radar, we saw the only other boats outside our convoy that we’d encounter on the Northern Sea Route: the Geofizik and the Geolog Dmitriy Nalivkin—the ExxonMobil/Rosneft seismic expedition, searching for oil.
The next morning we finally saw it: ice. It floated in isolated islands along the water. The islands were 10 or 15 feet in diameter, with a layer of snow on top, which protruded from the water by about a foot; beneath the water, you could see the ice, a few feet down and widening toward the bottom before narrowing again, like a teapot. These ice floes were on their way out of this world: there were still two months left in the melting season, and already the floes looked the worse for wear. The water lapped at their corners. In the middle of some of the floes, little green pools, known as “melt ponds,” had formed in the snow. Unlike the white snow cover, which reflected sunlight back into the atmosphere, the puddles absorbed it. The sunlight was slowly drilling a hole in the ice under the puddles; if it managed to create a hole all the way down to the water, the water would have a toehold inside the ice to begin its destructive work.
They were a strange sight, these islands of ice in the middle of the sea. The lookout on the Barents expedition, when he first encountered the ice, exclaimed that he saw swans. Our crew was equally amazed. Many of the younger men were immediately on deck with digital cameras and cell phones. Eliseo, the third mate, who’d been going to sea for twenty-five years, was especially moved. “My first time,” he said.
A few hours later, we reached the rendezvous point with the icebreakers: the Vaygach, beige and black, and the Yamal, red and black. They were not as long as the Nordic Odyssey, but they were stouter and, with their nuclear-powered engines, significantly more forceful. They had shallow-angled bows that allowed them to climb atop ice and crush it with their weight. A shallow bow must have felt insufficiently aggressive to the builders of the Yamal, however, for they had painted on it a set of big red jaws.
A Norwegian tanker, the Marilee, its deck covered with a tangle of pipes by means of which it kept its various liquids separate, was also waiting for us at the rendezvous point, and in the middle of the afternoon a 570-foot Russian cargo ship, the Kapitan Danilkin, caught up with us as well. Off we went into the ice. We were now approaching the tip of the Taymyr Peninsula, Cape Chelyuskin, named for the explorer who reached this spot by land in 1742. Halfway between Murmansk, to the west, and the Bering Strait, to the east, it was one of the most obscure places in the world; Severnaya Zemlya, a large archipelago just thirty miles north of the cape, was not discovered until 1913—the last major piece of undiscovered land on Earth. The ice we’d seen earlier was scattered and melting; this ice was thicker and packed closer together. We followed the Yamal at a distance of about half a mile; the Vaygach was behind us, followed by the Marilee and the Kapitan Danilkin. We were soon joined by a small red tugboat, the Vengery, which took its position directly behind the Odyssey.
Captain Shkrebko, who until this point had mostly been taking photos with an expensive camera, walking around in sneakers, and generally looking more like a club tennis pro than like a sea captain, was now fully engaged, giving minute instructions to Able Seaman Ronald Segovia, who was at the wheel. The captain and the ice pilot had both gotten up in the middle of the night at the first sight of the ice and were still up, twenty hours later. Their job was to maintain radio contact with the icebreaker ahead and help the young helmsman maneuver the ship in unfamiliar conditions. Shkrebko and Cherepanov also had to decide how fast to go. There was a booklet on the bridge, from the Central Marine Research and Design Institute, in St. Petersburg, indicating the proper speed for an ice-class vessel through varying thicknesses of ice; the thicker the ice, the slower the ship should travel, so as not to damage its hull. But determining the actual thickness of the ice was an inexact science, and the ice pilot’s contribution was primarily a counsel to remain calm.
“Take it down to six?” the captain would ask the pilot as they looked at one of the booklets, referring to 6 knots, or about half speed.
“Eight is probably fine here,” the ice pilot would say, and we’d go to 8.
I put on a winter coat and hat and walked to the bow. It was a cold day and overcast. About 20 feet above the water, I watched the ship smash into the ice. Even after getting worked over by the Yamal, some of the ice pieces were big, 6 or 7 feet thick and 30 or 40 feet across. But we were bigger. Sometimes the ice simply cracked in two as soon as we collided with it and then fell away to our port and starboard. At other times it remained intact, trying to stop us, sometimes climbing the bow as we pushed it backward. Occasionally a large piece would seem to have some traction, but the Odyssey was just too strong. Eventually the ice floes slithered off to the side. After we’d made it through the first ice field, the captain went down to the bow, too, and looked over the side. “Not even a scratch,” he reported. He did not go down there again.
Over the next few hours, and then over the next eight days, we saw an incredible variety of ice. Some of the bits were just a few feet across, some were hundreds of feet; some were gray and even black, covered in grime, the way snow gets in New York after a few days. Some of the ice floes bobbed up and down in our wake; others remained proudly immobile. A few times the ice was so thick, and the icebrea
ker broke it so cleanly, that it came up again on its side, looking like a giant slice of cake, with green and blue layers separated by thin lines of white. Sometimes a smashed ice floe would be submerged beneath the surface and then come up, the water rolling off its back as off a slowly rising whale.
It took the Odyssey nearly twenty-four hours to round Cape Chelyuskin and enter the Laptev Sea. The sun still hadn’t set since we’d left Murmansk, and much of the time the skies were relatively clear. But the air temperature was now at freezing, and toward the middle of the afternoon, on July 15, it began to snow.
As the trip progressed, I found myself spending more time with the chief mate, Vadim. Of all the men on board, he seemed the most ambivalent about his job, and the most philosophical. “This sun-filled prison,” he said of the bridge. “A wonderful people,” he said of the Jews of Odessa. “They’ve all left. And I alone in that whole city to carry on their memory.”
Vadim’s mother was a schoolteacher and his father an electrical engineer on a ship in the Soviet merchant marine. Young Vadim worshiped and feared his father. “He would come home from sea and you could just feel the aggression in him,” Vadim said. “Then after two weeks he’d go back to normal.” Seamen were a privileged category of Soviet citizen in that they could travel abroad, and Vadim, too, wanted to travel. He got his wish. In more than twenty years at sea, he has worked on passenger ships, refrigerator ships (reefers), oil tankers, and all kinds of bulk carriers, or bulkers. He likes to talk about music, soccer, and citizens of Odessa who have become wealthy, but his favorite topic is how sick he is of the sea. “You think it’s beautiful,” he would say as the sun came out from behind a cloud and shone on the blue, clear water, lightly chopped by the wind. “I used to think it was beautiful, too. Now I can’t even look at it.”