The Uncertain Light of the Midnight Sun

Under the little-known Svalbard treaty, South Africans have the right to live, trap, fish and prospect for minerals in a remote archipelago deep in the Arctic Circle.  Hamilton Wende went there to try his luck.

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It is just after three o’clock in the morning and the sky overhead is a deep azure blue.  The only shadows on the cold wet, ground are created by the heavy grey clouds that scud in from the freezing Greenland Sea.  It’s midsummer and the temperature tonight is about 4°C.  We have just flown in to Longyearben, the capital of the Svalbard islands, from the Norwegian mainland, and this is our first view of the midnight sun.  After traveling through airports all day, I’m so tired I can hardly stand, and being surrounded by broad daylight in the middle of the night is, frankly, disorientating.

Our guest house is made of nondescript wooden planking and is marooned in a wide patch of dark mud and shale.  It is surrounded by piles of chopped firewood, garbage bags and rusty snowmobiles and car parts.  A pair of reindeer antlers hangs askew from the wooden railing of a nearby balcony.  My traveling companion, Patrick, an aviation buff, points eagerly at the nearby peaks emerging from the cloud.  ‘Did you know that an Aeroflot plane crashed into those mountains a few years ago?  Everybody on board was killed.’

It is, as Lawrence Sterne might have said in an earlier era of travel, incontestably the most unpromising place I have ever arrived at in the middle of the night.  We clamber up the wooden entrance stairs with our suitcases and are told by the night manager that someone is mistakenly occupying our room.  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘but he seems to be drunk.’

Somehow, she finds us a room, and the next morning we prepare some breakfast in the self-catering kitchen under the steady gaze of a stuffed polar bear standing at full height.  The curved shape of a seal pelt adorns the other wall.  A man in stockinged feet and heavy protective clothing is just finishing his tea.  In the tiny vestibule he puts on his boots and slings a rifle over his shoulder. ‘We’ve just come in from hiking,’ he tells me.  ‘And we need it for protection against polar bears.  They can be very dangerous.  If you don’t have a gun you can be hurt.’

‘Not hurt,’ his friend adds gravely.  ‘Killed.’

Here you are literally at the end of the world, or at the end of the human world anyway.  This archipelago is almost 500 kilometres further north than the extreme reaches of Alaska or Siberia.  Longyearben is at 78° N, only 12º from the fabled 90º N – the North Pole.  There is no easy space for humans to exist here.  In winter ice and snow cover the land and the long Polar Night, where the sun never rises above the horizon, lasts from October to February.  Temperatures are measured in 10s of degrees below zero, for months of the year and that is excluding the wind chill factor.  The lowest temperature on record is -46°C.

Such extremes mean that there is something utterly compelling about the Svalbard archipelago.  Outside the drab human settlement, the grandeur of the landscape is breathtaking.  Tall, imposing mountains rise up out of a metalled sea; white, sparkling glaciers loom over the town.  Guillemots, puffins and arctic terns nest in the cliff faces, sweeping in low graceful arcs over the icy sea to snatch fish from the water.  Arctic foxes with pale fur and hard black eyes watch you from high up in the cold safety of the rocky permafrost valleys.  The Svalbard reindeer is much smaller than the reindeer on the mainland.  Its size seems to be an adaptation that allows it to survive on the extremely sparse vegetation.  No one knows exactly how many polar bears inhabit the Arctic Circle, but many of them come to breed in the Svalbard islands, and to hunt seals here on the pack ice in the winter.

The Svalbard, or the ‘cold coast’ islands first appear in the early Mediaeval Islandske Annaler, or Icelandic Annals of 1195.  They were discovered, like North America, by the roving longships of the Vikings and then slipped out of human memory until their rediscovery by Willem Barents in 1596.  He named them the Spitsbergen islands, which is still the name of the largest island today.  For two centuries they were primarily a remote whaling station until the beginning of the twentieth century when a rich seam of coal was discovered.  An American began the first coal mine, but the Norwegian government took it over in 1916.  There were additional tensions with Russia, Sweden, Britain and Holland also claiming mineral rights over discoveries made by their citizens.

It is an unexpected legacy of the Randlords that South Africa, as a large mining country, was a signatory along with the major powers at the Versailles negotiations to the Svalbard Treaty on February 9, 1920.  This gives Norway sovereignty over the islands but citizens of the signatories of the treaty are allowed to live, work, fish, hunt and especially, to prospect, and mine in Svalbard.  (Afghanistan and Monaco are two other unlikely countries whose citizens are entitled to the same rights).  The coal has largely run out, though, and the coastline mountains are littered with the mournful wrecks of abandoned mining works.  The only working mine is at the small Russian settlement of Barentsburg.

Under the Svalbard treaty, the sysselmann, or governor is only allowed to collect taxes in order to administer the island and there is no VAT.  Despite the low-tax enticements – especially compared to the mainland – the entire population is only some 3000 people.  Longyearben, the capital, has a population of 1500, the rest are scattered between the two other settlements, Barentsburg, and the polar research station at Ny Ålesund, all on the main island of Spitsbergen.  There is apparently one wealthy stockbroker who lives on the slopes of a mountain in an old mining cabin and who runs his business by internet and satellite phone.

The islands have also been used as the base for a number of important expeditions to the North Pole.  In his 1895 bid for the Pole, Fridtjof Nansen planned to return to the relative safety of the archipelago by walking and by kayak.  He never reached the Pole and he eventually landed up, exhausted and near death, in the Russian territory of Novaya Zemlya.  In 1899, Salomon Andrée, a Swede, and his team took off from the islands in a balloon, hoping to land on the top of the world.  Their bodies were found on an island not far away in 1930.  Finally Roald Amundsen and Umberto Nobile left Spitsbergen by airship and reached the Pole on 12 May 1926, the first expedition indisputably to arrive at 90º N, as many experts now dispute Robert Peary’s claim to have done so in 1909.

Late one afternoon we set off on a stiff hike across glaciers to the peak of the wonderfully named Trollstein mountain.  We started from sea level and climbed to nearly 900 metres.  The wind was biting cold, and as we climbed higher and higher, what normally would be night remained day.  The ethereal beauty of the Arctic summer surrounded us in alternately gentle and then suddenly hostile layers.  Far below us we could see patches of bright open ocean with seabirds flying into banks of shrouded mist and cold soft rain.  For a few moments a rainbow arced across the deep valley and then the fog rose off the ocean far below.  The temperature plunged as the mist swirled around us. With the haze, both light and colour faded from the world.  The tiny, fragile white flowers on the rocky mountain side were covered in a thick coating of ice.  Somehow they found the strength to survive this constant wet and bitter cold.  The cold quickly seeped through your layers of clothing, nothing it seemed could keep it out.  Then the fog moved on, the sun broke through, the air warmed and the ripples on the ice exploded into fiery, welcome light.

As we trudged, exhausted, across the white expanse of the glacier I thought of something  Fridtjof Nanson wrote in his diary, ‘What is,’ he asked, ‘the strange power that fire and light have that all creation seeks them?’

It was only much later that I thought I found some kind of answer.  Late one night I looked out my hotel window, and I saw some birds chasing an arctic fox from their exposed nests on the tundra on the edge of town.  I watched, fascinated for a long time as the birds swooped and screeched over the fox, threatening him with their talons and beaks.  He scuttled away little by little, unwilling to give up the chance of food that he had found.  But in their endlessly repeated patterns of low, aggressive flying the birds overwhelmed him.  Occasionally, he turned and snapped back at them, but his sharp rows of teeth were no match for their collective determination.  Slowly, I watched him slip away and disappear into the shadows of the nearby rocks.  It was one of those eerie, unexpected patterns of the world that exist outside the dimensions of human experience, a single moment of beauty visible only in the shimmering, uncertain light of the midnight sun.