also thank Stephen Muecke for his translation into English and Elise Heslinga at Polity.
For their help in various ways (bibliography, translation, proofreading, illustrations, conversations), my gratitude goes to Glenn Albrecht, Þorvarður Árnason, Caroline Audibert, Petra Bachmaier, Chris Bowler, Aïté Bresson, Garry Clarke, Stephen Collins, Julie Cruikshank, Philippe Descola, Élisabeth Dutartre-Michaut, Katti Frederiksen, Sean Gallero, Samir Gandesha, Shari Fox Gearheard, Hrafnhildur Hannesdóttir, Lene Kielsen Holm, Cymene Howe, Nona Hurkmans, Guðrún Kristinsdóttir-Urfalino, José Manuel Lamarque, David Long, Robert Macfarlane, Andri Snær Magnason, Rémy Marion, Christian de Marliave, Markus Messling, Éric Rignot, Camille Seaman, Charles Stépanoff, Agnès Terrier, Torfi Tulinius, Philippe Urfalino, Daniel Weidner and Stefan Willer.
Finally, I am indebted to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Leibniz Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung in Berlin and the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver for allowing me to present parts of the manuscript as I was preparing it.
The Issue
Icebergs have been considered secondary characters for a long time now. They made the headlines when ships sank after hitting them. Then they disappeared into the fog and no one paid them any more attention.
In the pages that follow, they take centre stage. Their very substance breathes. They pitch and roll over themselves like whales. They house tiny life forms and take part in human affairs. Today, they are melting along with the glaciers and the sea ice.
Icebergs are central to both the little stories and the big issues.
This book invites you to discover worlds rich in secret affinities and inevitable paradoxes.
There are so many ways to see wildlife with new eyes.
Prologue They are Coming!
The morning was dark. Fog was suspended over our heads. Pancakes of ice floated near the ice edge. The sea seemed sluggish.
Then a discreet sun lit up the horizon.
Three points appeared in the distance. A thin silhouette emerged from the fog. I could not immediately identify the shape, but it was becoming more and more curved. No whale has these spurs on its back; my nomadic brothers are larger.
The clouds began to glow.
A ship was approaching us.
It was making slow progress. Like a lost penguin, it took small steps sideways. When it anchored in our vicinity, I saw them stirring. They were huddled together on the forecastle, jumping up and down in a strange dance. They were pointing at me. Their faces were long, their beards shaggy, and they smelt strong. They looked like ghosts. I could only make out the males. Some smiled, others opened their mouths but no words came out. With their hands on the main mast, some were kneeling and bowing their heads. They crossed themselves as they stood up.
A man emerged from a cabin at the back of the ship. He climbed the stairs leading to the deck. A group followed him. Drumbeats echoed in the silence of the ocean. When the music stopped, he was announced by one of his companions.
Captain James Cook looked at the assembled crew and then addressed his sailors. His clear voice carried a long way. He told them that they had sailed far and wide, so far across the ocean at this latitude that they could no longer expect to see any more dry land, except near the pole, a place inaccessible by sea. They had reached their goal and would not advance an inch further south. They would turn back to the north. No regrets or sadness. He prided himself on having fulfilled his mission of completing his quest for an Antarctic continent. He seemed relieved.
As soon as the captain’s speech was over, a midshipman rushed to the bow. He climbed over the halyards and managed to pull himself up onto the bowsprit. There, balancing himself, he twirled his hat and shouted, ‘Ne plus ultra!’ Cook called the young Vancouver back to order, urging him not to take pride in being the first to reach the end of the world. Screaming thus in Latin that they would go ‘no further!’ made him unsteady over the dark waters. He could fall into oblivion with the slightest gust of wind. The crew burst out laughing. With a smile on his face, the reckless hopeful returned to the bridge like a good boy. Then they turned their backs on me and went back to their tasks, some disappearing into the bowels of the ship while others climbed up to the sails.
Those three words echoed in the sky. I remember it with pride.
Call me ‘The Impassable’.
I am the one who stopped Cook on his second voyage around the world, the happy surprise that cut short his labours at 71° 10’ latitude south and 106° 54’ longitude west.
I am one of the icebergs on which the Resolution, a three-masted ship of four hundred and sixty-two tons, would have crashed if the fog had not cleared. On that day, 30 January 1774, they saw me in all my imposing, menacing volume.
My comrades from Greenland are slender. I am flat and massive. I blocked the way without giving them the chance of going around me. In any case, there is only ice behind me, an infinity in which they would have become lost. I saved them from a fatal destiny.
Thanks to me, an entire era thought that no one before the captain had gone so far south, that he was the sole person, the only one, the incredible one to have achieved this feat. What can I say about the snow petrels that have been landing on my ridges for centuries? I am familiar with these small white birds with black beaks and legs. They are attracted by the tiny algae that cling to my submerged sides.
Cook and his sailors kept their distance. Except for the times when they took picks and boarded fragments of iceberg from longboats. They climbed over them, dug them up and extracted blocks of ice which they left in the sun on the deck of the big ship to melt so they could drink their water.
We were much more than their tired eyes could count, not ninety-seven but thousands, an ice field as far as the eye could see.
We were a whole population.
1 Through the Looking Glass
A painter and a priest are standing at the rail of a steamer, the Merlin, on the way to the coast of the island of Newfoundland. They had left the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the middle of June 1859 and are making their way to one of their destinations, Saint John. Having reached the foot of Cabot Tower, they meander north of the Avalon peninsula, between the Gulf of St Lawrence and Fogo Island, an area where strangely shaped blocks from Greenland are drifting. After about ten days, they embark on a chartered schooner called Integrity and sail towards the Labrador Sea. A rowboat is waiting on deck between the gangways that connect the forecastle and the stern. This will be their way to approach the giants.
Thus begins a chase that lasts several weeks.
A game of hide and seek
They are iceberg hunters.
They are armed with a battery of brushes and pens. Their satchels are overflowing with notebooks and drawing boards. Pairs of telescopic-handled theatre binoculars sit atop crates of paintings. Frederic Edwin Church intends to capture the volumes and colours of icebergs in oil studies and pencil sketches. He has a large work in mind. Louis Legrand Noble, on the other hand, is keeping a chronicle of their expedition. He wants to write a truthful account of it. The two friends play cards with other passengers. They reminisce, discuss the colour