happens, Doc, whom Steinbeck based on his friend Ed Ricketts—marine biologist, pioneering ecologist, founding father of fish-boat science—also happens to be one of Eddy Carmack’s heroes.
At three points along our route (I’ve been furnished with a map, one far more detailed than the one Curtis Ebbesmeyer gave me), I am to fetch from the Louis’s wet lab one of three cardboard boxes. Inside each of these boxes are forty-eight corked beer bottles, all carefully numbered. Inside each bottle is a form letter addressed to beachcombers. “This bottle you have just found was dropped from the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker that travels the Arctic Ocean from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia,” the letter reads. “We have received reports from all around the world.” This year a freckle-faced, frizzy-haired fifteen-year-old oceanography enthusiast named Bonita LeBlanc is assisting Carmack with the project. She collected the bottles from a Canadian brewer. She spent weeks corking and sealing them. Before sealing them she recruited Nova Scotian schoolchildren to illuminate the letters in crayon and, if they wished, to add their own messages—messages like, “Bonjour, je m’appelle Mélanie Maillet. J’ai 12 ans et je joue la flûte, le piano, et le violon.” (Personal touches, especially those of schoolchildren, increase the response rate, Carmack has found.) Unfortunately for Bonita LeBlanc, minors aren’t permitted to travel aboard Coast Guard ships—unfortunate for her, good for me. I’m her substitute, her proxy. From the stern of the Louis, I am to lob the bottles overboard and record assorted data—latitude, longitude, bottle numbers, time—in a logbook. It should be an easy job, but after my lackluster performance on the Knorr, I’m already anticipating ways in which I might mess it up—sleep through my alarm, send a box of bottles tumbling down a flight of slippery stairs or a bottle hurtling into a bulwark.
In return for my bottle-tossing services, I get to remain aboard the Louis for the voyage’s second leg, which will take us from Resolute even deeper into the labyrinth, to the Canadian Arctic’s sanctum sanctorum—a town called Cambridge Bay. A few weeks ago, late one night in Manhattan, I looked up Cambridge Bay in my Atlas of the World. There it was, 2,000 miles due north of Denver, Colorado, 1,444 nautical miles south of the North Pole, 3,139 nautical miles from the site of the toy spill, a little dot on the south coast of Victoria Island, at the very heart of the Northwest Passage.
Much as, seated in a taxiing jumbo jet, you can sense the precise moment when the wheels lift from the tarmac and the big steel machine takes improbably to the air, so too you can sense, standing on the bridge of an icebreaker—or for that matter at the taffrail of a ferry, or on the deck of a research vessel, or in the copilot’s seat of a homebuilt cabin cruiser—that moment when, loosed from the bollards, a boat or ship goes adrift. Even in calm seas, you can feel it, the sensation of float.
Under hazy skies—the provisions all stowed, the safety drills all conducted, the gangway raised—the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent departs. Up on the bridge, officers stand before levers and buttons and instruments and computer screens. The quartermaster sits at the helm, beside the gyro, a compass encased in a glass sphere. I stand before the windows, a paleochemist named Robie Macdonald to my left, and to my right, Captain Marc Rothwell, looking appropriately nautical in a navy blue sweater with gold epaulets. Neale Maude, the Australian cameraman, is shooting footage, panning this way and that. Over Maude’s shoulder, his soundman, Daniel O’Connor, a lanky guy with a splendidly Victorian mustache, is holding up what looks like a feather duster on a stick, a gray, furry microphone.
Captain Rothwell radios the engine room and commands the engineers to test the bubblers. The bubblers are nozzles spaced along onethird of the Louis’s hull. Icebreakers were invented about 150 years ago but only perfected in the last century. Mariners aboard the earliest models discovered that broken ice adheres to the cold steel of a ship like glue. Bubblers, Captain Rothwell tells me, “put a little air under the ice.” The air, like grease, makes the ice slip past.
Over the radio, from the engine room, four decks down, crackles the voice of an engineer: “Bubbles, roger, bubbles.” A moment later, the bubblers fire up, screaming. From the bridge they sound like a choir of damned souls.
“And that’s the end of the first period,” one mariner