When the first Arctic explorers starting venturing north, some five hundred years ago, in search of the supposed riches beyond the ice, they encountering numerous problems. Not the least of them being that their flimsy wooden ships kept sinking when they ran into the inevitable ice pack.
The pursuit of the fabled North West Passage from the Atlantic to the
Pacific brought numerous sailors undone as they pushed deeper into the
frozen wilderness above what is now Canada. In fact, the most celebrated
failure, that of Sir John Franklin in 1845, saw two ships and the
entire complement of 129 men disappear.
Navigating the treacherous and capricious ice pack was an immensely
arduous task even for the most skilled seamen. When the ice closed in
around their ship, men would go out onto the ice and physically cut it
away with huge saws while another party dragged the ship through the
tiny passage like mules. Any progress was painfully slow and if the
currents were unfavourable, the ice would carry them backwards despite
their best efforts. The other great, ever-present danger was for a ship
to be completely trapped by a rapidly freezing icepack. Probably the
best known example is Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-16 expedition, where
his ship, the Endurance, was beset for 281 days in the ice before
finally being crushed by the enormous lateral pressure of the frozen
ocean. Despite the use of special, ice-strengthened designs, the force
of nature prevailed over man’s insignificant craft. Shackleton’s
Endurance, perhaps the strongest wooden ship ever built, was only
powered by a tiny 350hp steam engine - nowhere near enough power to
force her 350 tonne hull through the thick Antarctic ice - ultimately
dooming her to an icy grave.
Commerce, war and exploration fuelled the urgency for ships capable of
not only withstanding the enormous forces of the shifting ice, but to
actually break through it and create a channel other vessels could
follow. Because each country had such vast Arctic coastlines, Russia,
Canada and the USA were the driving forces behind this new maritime
technology. Russia, however, can probably claim the first use of an
icebreaker when the Pilot was used to maintain shipping lanes between St
Petersburg and the nearby naval base at Kronstadt where she was built
in 1864.
At the very end of the 19th Century, Russia introduced the world’s first
true icebreaker, the Yermak. On her maiden voyage, she astounded the
maritime community by immediately setting a new northernmost record for a
ship when she explored to 81o 21’N on her maiden voyage to Spitsbergen
in 1899. The Yermak gained hero status when she freed an icebound
Russian battleship and, while on the same mission, rescued fifty
stranded Finnish fisherman from an ice floe.
Convinced of their value, Russia added the Krasin, the world’s first
“linear” icebreaker to her fleet. Built in Newcastle, England to Russian
order in 1916, she was crucial in maintaining the Northeast Passage to
the Far East along Russia’s northern coastline. She brought the
icebreaker to world-wide attention again when, in 1928, she rescued
General Umberto Nobile and his crew who had crashed at 82o above
Spitsbergen on their failed attempt to reach the North Pole by airship.
The 6,000 tonne, 100m Krasin, amazingly, is still afloat today.
Russia continued her illustrious reputation with icebreakers when she
launched the world’s first nuclear-powered surface vessel in 1957, the
Lenin (pic above). She was decommissioned in 1989 after a chequered
career and is currently laid up in the Russian port of Murmansk where
she will apparently become a museum ship.
In 1975, Russia launched the world’s most ambitious icebreaker yet, the
Arktika. She was a new class of vessel and the largest and most powerful
icebreaker ever constructed. Two 160 tonne nuclear reactors power steam
turbines which, in turn, drive six electric generators providing an
unprecedented 75,000 hp (max) to three fixed-pitch propellers. Her
displacement is 23,455 tonnes. In a impressive demonstration of her
superior design and performance, the Arktika became the first surface
vessel to reach the North Pole when she cut a swath through the Arctic
pack ice to reach 90o N on August 17, 1977. The journey took her a
little over a week from her home port of Murmansk, although she could
have kept going for another five years before needing to refuel. Four
sister vessels were constructed over the subsequent ten years, with the
last ship, the Yamal (from the Nenets language: End of the Earth)
finally launched in 1992.
At the time of Yamal’s launch, the Russian icebreaker fleet was in
disarray. Previously funded by the Soviet government, they now had to
pay their own pay and, apart from regular transport and escort duties,
soon began to carry Western adventurers to unheard-of destinations,
including the North Pole. In a curious twist of fortune, the sudden
availability of the world’s most capable fleet of icebreakers and
ice-class vessels (including the conventionally powered Sorokin-class
icebreakers) for free-market commercial use, has exploded the
adventure travel
market. Today, voyages to the far reaches of Antarctica, the fabled
NorthWest Passage, the North Pole and elsewhere can be booked as easily
as picking up the phone.
In 1991, Australian travel entrepreneur, Dennis Collaton, was one of the
first to take such a voyage and thus recognise the possibilities.
“I walked out onto the deserted shore of the New Siberian Islands with
some of the crew of the Sovetskiy Soyuz and there on the beach was the
most enormous woolly mammoth tusk. No one could lift it. It was a
struggle just to get it upright,” recalls Dennis. “It was then that I
realised how incredibly special these remote destinations were and how
privileged I was to be there.”
“You develop an enormous respect for the fragility and delicate balance
of our environment when you visit these incredible lands,” continues
Dennis, “and it makes you want to work just that much harder to preserve
them.”
Since then, thousands of modern expeditioners have experienced the
life-changing thrill of a voyage to the polar extremes of our
fascinating planet aboard one of these extraordinary vessels.
