Cruel North: On Violence and the Arctic

On August 16, 2016, a cruise ship called the Crystal Serenity departed from Seward, Alaska. The price for a place on its month-long voyage started at $22,000, but the Serenity had no trouble filling its berths: 1,700 people signed up to take part in the first-ever passenger cruise through the Northwest Passage, the straits and sounds that for centuries had tempted and foiled even the hardiest captains and crews. Climate change has so dramatically shrunk the Arctic’s sea ice that the Serenity, with the help of a single icebreaker, was able to make short work of the Northwest Passage. Its passengers sailed smoothly through the polar sunshine, untroubled by fears of an icy death.

Just a week after the uneventful completion of the Crystal Serenity cruise, news broke that an Arctic Research Foundation team, acting on a tip from an Inuk crewmember, had documented the wreck of the HMS Terror in the Canadian Arctic. The ship had last been seen in 1845, when it was part of Sir John Franklin’s famously ill-fated attempt to traverse the last unnavigated section of the Northwest Passage; the Terror and its sister ship became locked in sea ice in Victoria Strait, and all 129 crewmembers, including Franklin himself, froze or starved to death.

Despite its deep silences, despite its vast distances and relatively few people, despite the tendency of outsiders to see it as a blank slate, the Arctic is a place of collisions: between ships and sea ice, Europeans and indigenous people, animals and humans, expectations and realities. The Crystal Serenity, whose diesel engines pumped carbon dioxide and soot into the atmosphere as they powered the ship through the Northwest Passage, is part of a quiet but devastating collision between the Arctic and the industrial world. The voyage of the aptly named Terror, which ended in mortal fear and agony, was a collision between hubris and the elements. Because the conditions in the Arctic are so harsh, because the isolation is so extreme, survival is always chancy, and the consequences of these collisions are often grave, even bloody. The Arctic might be silent, but it is rarely quiet.

Two new books, one fiction and one nonfiction, are set centuries and tens of thousands of miles apart, but both are driven by the Arctic’s colliding forces. The North Water, a novel by the English critic and writer Ian McGuire that was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, is as compact and confining as the nineteenth-century whaling ship that serves as its stage. From its opening lines, when harpooner Henry Drax shuffles out of a tavern in Northern England after a night of debauchery and “snuffs the complex air—turpentine, fishmeal, mustard, black lead, the usual grave, morning piss stink of just-emptied night jars,” the book confronts its reader with the mortal and the bodily. Piss, blood, farts, life, death: There’s no getting away from them, not even in the Arctic, and especially not in the tight quarters of the Volunteer, the ship that Drax will soon board for the whaling season.

The Volunteer, like the HMS Terror, is perfectly if unfortunately named. Most of the ship’s inhabitants have volunteered, many to escape trouble on land. Only a few, however, know the true, craven purpose of the voyage, and only one foresees its hellish conclusion. All are outsiders in the Arctic, and as they collide with it, each dedicates himself to survival with matter-of-fact brutality.

Though most of the characters are at least as ruthless as the animals around them, they seem determined, at first, to maintain the distinction. When a group of Greenland sharks—“gray-green bodies, blunt and archaic”—try to feed on a dead whale the crew has found, the first mate, Cavendish, tells the men to drive the scavengers off the carcass. One sailor picks...