Adventures of a Sea Hunter (29 page)

Fox
outlived McClintock by five years, a surprising fact considering that most ships have short lives, particularly those that work in the Arctic. Sold to Danish owners in 1860, the tough little steamer carried supplies up and down the Greenland coast for the next fifty-two years. The end for
Fox
came when she went aground on the west Greenland coast in June 1912. After getting off and returning to Qeqertarsuaq (Disko Island), the damaged
Fox
was discovered by surveyors to be beyond repair. And so the famous ship, stripped of her fittings, was beached in a small cove near the harbor entrance. There, lying half submerged on the starboard side, the hulk slowly deteriorated.

Even in death, however,
Fox
attracted visitors drawn by the vessel’s fame. Arctic explorer Donald MacMillan photographed the wreck in 1926, dismasted but still solid, though the local Inuit had been salvaging loose wood from the hull. Accounts of visitors to Qeqertarsuaq mentioned the wreck through the 1930s, but in 1931 and 1934, visiting naturalist Tom Longstaff boarded the hulk to find it breaking apart. He pulled two oak treenails from the hull as souvenirs. In 1940,
Fox
finally broke apart when a spring storm swept into the harbor and smashed up the deteriorated hull, leaving, one account reported, “only parts of the metal engine” behind.

The cold spume of the sea sprays over the deck as the bow of Mary
West
buries itself in a wave. The wind whips around, chilling us to the bone, as we stand clustered on the small deck of the fishing boat. We’re two hours out of Aasiaat, a mainland port, making our way to Qeqertarsuaq, sailing across the waters of Disko Bugt, a bay that cuts into the western coast of Greenland above the 69th parallel. Icebergs, large and small, fill
the sea, most of them towering above our deck. It is the height of the brief Arctic summer, and yet the temperature hovers just above 30° F.

Qeqertarsuaq, a small port community of a thousand, is more than two hundred years old. Founded by Danish traders and whalers, it was named Gødhavn, or “good harbor,” by them. Later known as Lievely, it became a major port of call for Danish, British and American whalers working in Arctic waters. Now known by its original name of Qeqertarsuaq, the settlement survives on fishing, hunting, tourism and the presence of the Arktisk Station—the Danish Polar Scientific Station of the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1906, it remains a center for Arctic research, hosting two hundred visiting scientists a year. It will be our home for the next week as we venture out to find and dive on the wreck of
Fox.

We’ve traveled to this remote spot in search of a famous shipwreck for
The Sea Hunters.
This is our northernmost adventure. The team includes Mike Fletcher, his son Warren (our dive co-coordinator and underwater cameraman), land cameramen Marc Pike and camera and soundman John Rosborough. We rendezvoused in Iqualuit, the capital of Nunavut, where we took a small chartered plane across Baffin Bay to Aasiaat, where we boarded Mary
West
for the last leg of a thirty-six-hour trip.

Aasiaat, a small coastal settlement, allows the team to either familiarize, or in some cases, like mine, to refamiliarize, ourselves with the Arctic. For me, that involves a walk to the harbor front where Inuit hunters and fishermen are busy butchering fish and seals. One of the great delicacies of the Arctic is raw fresh seal—or so I’ve been told, somehow having missed this treat on previous northern expeditions. But now, standing on the shores of Aasiaat, with John Rosborough pointing a running camera right at me, how can I refuse the bloody chunk of fresh seal liver that the cheerful hunter is offering me?

With a smile, I pop the oozing morsel into my mouth, slowly savoring each chewy bite. I must look like I really enjoy it, because my gracious host cuts off a bit of fresh seal blubber and hands it to me. It truly is an honor and a gift not to be refused, so I pop that in, too, finishing off my
snack by smacking my lips and licking the blood and glistening fat off my fingertips. He offers me another bite, but I politely decline with “Thanks, I’ve already had a big lunch.” We both laugh. Feeling fully reintegrated with the Arctic and like I’ve just swallowed a glass of oil in which sardines have been soaked, I rejoin the rest of the crew for the voyage across Disko Bay.

Qeqertarsuaq is a beautiful town, nestled against high cliffs that at present are carpeted with a summer bloom of grass and flowers. The tops of the cliffs are capped with snow, and in the distance, the solid mass of a glacier that covers the center of the island gleams in the sunlight. The houses, built on the crests of the rocks that line the coast and on the small bay that forms the harbor, are a well-kept array of brightly painted red, blue, green, orange and yellow buildings. Some of them, like the Qeqertarsuaq Museum, are old, dating to the nineteenth century. The museum, formerly the home of the
inspektor
, the government official in charge of this coast, was built in 1840. Solidly constructed of heavy beams atop a stone foundation, its red walls now contain displays that tell the history of the settlement’s Inuit and Danish inhabitants.

Here, we meet the museum’s director, Elisa Evaideen, and Karl Tobiassen, “an old Greenlander” who knows where all the wrecks on the coast are. Karl points across the harbor to a small cove, known to the locals as K’uigssarssuak, and says that that is where
Fox
ended her days. More surprisingly, he also tells us that, on the way in, we’d passed a small island, Qeqertaq, where a tall, red-painted metal stack stands as a navigational marker. It is the smokestack or funnel of
Fox
, taken off the wreck and recycled. Nothing goes to waste in the Arctic.

With the help of our host, the Arktisk Station, and its director, Bente Jessen Graae, we borrow an inflatable boat to reach the wreck site. We refill our dive tanks every day at the local fire hall (there are no dive shops north of 60 degrees). All this helps us to take advantage of the rare opportunity to dive down into history beneath the waters of the Arctic. Pulling into K’uigssarssuak’s small cove, we realize we will not have to search for the wreck—the tip of Fox’s boiler rises out of the water at low tide. Wedged into the rocks, just where we’ve tied up our boat, are Fox’s hawse pipes, the iron sleeves that once protected the wooden hull from the anchor chain. Pulled free of the wreck after
Fox
broke up, they were probably left here for salvage and then abandoned, just like the boiler. Wooden hull planking lies on the beach, nearly perfectly preserved. Close by is a section of Fox’s wrought-iron propeller shaft. I’m worried that the hulk, which broke apart in 1940, has been picked away and that nothing but the boiler remains. There’s only one way to find out, though. Pulling on our thick dry suits to keep out the freezing water and our heavy gear, Mike, Warren and I step off into the numbingly cold water and drop down to the bottom to see what remains of
Fox.

James Delgado beside the smokestack or funnel of
F
OX
,
now serving as a navigational marker in Qeqertarsuaq harbor in Greenland. Mike Fletcher.

The rocks that surround the resting place of
Fox
are worn and rounded by the ice, and covered with slippery seaweed. We follow the rocks down to the sand and gravel seabed, 16 feet below. The cold bites into me, right through the thick layers of the dry suit and the protective “woolies” beneath it. My lips and cheeks, the only bare skin exposed to the sea, throb with the cold, then quickly turn numb.

The water is relatively clear, and ahead we see the ship’s boiler, completely submerged at high tide. Lying in the sand next to it are the shattered remains of the stern: broken timbers, twisted bronze bolts and a massive iron yoke that once reinforced the rudder. Nearby, a large iron pulley, part of the ship’s steering apparatus, lies atop fallen timbers. We swim past the boiler as Warren films the scene. The boiler has been torn free of its mount in the hull and dragged here to the stern, probably by the ice that buries the wreck each winter. The thick iron is ripped and part of the boiler gapes open, exposing the fire tubes inside it. Coal-fired heat once flowed through those tubes to make the steam that powered
Fox
, but now they lie cold and dead in the shattered remains of the shipwreck. Trailers of weed drape the boiler, and small fish dart into the protection of the dark boiler as we swim by.

The keel and keelson that formed the sturdy backbone of
Fox
lie before us, along with the collapsed starboard side of the hull, partially buried in the sand and the mats of algae that blanket the bottom of the cove. The current sweeps through the wreck, exposing brief glimpses of dark oak, rusted iron, and the shrouded shapes of frames (the “ribs” of the
ship) and planks. As Mike and Warren videotape the wreck, I work quickly with a measuring tape and use a pencil to make notes and draw what I see on a sheet of frosted Mylar taped to a plastic clipboard. My notes, together with the video images and the photographs I am also taking, will help us to assemble a map of the broken-up ship, replicating on paper what we see in the gloom of the cove. I am particularly keen to capture as much information as possible because Fox’s plans vanished many years ago.

Astonishingly, half of
Fox
survives, pressed into the seabed by years of ice pushing into this small cove. It is an unexpected boon. The ice has flattened the curving side of the hull, shattering the thick layers of planks that formed it and wrenching the bolts out of the timber. And yet much survives, telling us a great deal about the ship. One of the keys to Fox’s survival in the Arctic was the original hull laid down in the Aberdeen shipyard of Alexander Hall & Company. From what remains, I can see that it was formed from diagonally laid planks of Scottish larch, fastened with thick bronze bolts to make a tightly sealed hull with the strength of an interwoven basket. Over these planks, McClintock had the shipyard fasten two layers of thick planks to sheath the hull against the ice. Splintered and torn, one layer of these planks remains in place, held on by the stubs of tough oak treenails that pegged them to the hull. The hull itself was formed from thick curved frames of oak, tightly spaced to make an almost solid wall of wood. Rows of iron stanchions were set into the hull at McClintock’s suggestion to brace
Fox
against the crushing pressure of the ice.

But as I examine and document these sturdy features, Warren Fletcher finds a reminder of the exquisite handicraft of the yacht builders. Lying loose on a section of the hull is a small, beautifully lathed and decorated deadeye from the ship’s rigging. Deceptively strong despite its delicate carving, it has that extra touch that befits a gentleman’s yacht. Somehow, perhaps because its lignum vitae wooden heart was stout, the deadeye was kept when many other “decorations” were stripped off for the difficult Arctic voyage.

The steam engine’s parts lie scattered nearby. As I swim over them, I think of the famous voyage of 1857-59. At the end of the expedition, as
the crew prepared to leave their frozen berth and make their way home with the news of the fate of the Franklin expedition, the steam engine lay stowed in the hold, disassembled to keep it from cracking in the freezing months of winter. The ship’s engineer had died, so McClintock had to put the engine back together and fire it up to escape the Arctic. Looking at the scattered pieces of machinery lying on the timbers of the hull like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, I am reminded of what a talented and determined man Francis Leopold McClintock was.

Over the course of a week, we make more dives, sometimes surfacing in the bright twilight of the midnight sun as we work around the clock to gather as many images and as much information as we can. We may not only be the first but perhaps the only team of divers, and me the only archeologist, to visit
Fox
at the bottom of the sea. Even in the twenty-first century, this is a distant, hard to reach spot.

After surfacing on my final dive, I look out at the wind-whipped waters of Qeqertarsuaq’s harbor. Ice is drifting in, in small chunks, and the sun has gone, replaced by gray skies. Snow dusts the cliffs above the settlement. Winter is on its way, and soon the wreck will again be covered by many feet of ice. Slowly, inexorably being ground away by the forces of winter,
Fox
is returning to the elements in the Arctic where she gained international fame and spent most of her working life. It is a perfect grave for this polar explorer, and as I float over it, I think of Sir John Franklin’s epitaph, carved in marble over his empty crypt at Westminster Abbey:

Not here: the white North has thy bones; and thou,
Heroic Sailor-Soul,
Art passing on thine happier voyage now
Towards no earthly pole.

Standing on the hot sand beach of San Telnio, a small deserted island in the Bay of Panama, I look out at the water. Nothing. Not a thing to be seen, and yet here, according to the locals, lies the wreck of a “Japanese two-man submarine,” sent in secret to attack the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal. An unlikely tale, to be sure, but after a few years of sea hunting with Clive Cussler, I’ve come to realize that the truth is often stranger than fiction.