North By Northwest

"Into the Ice By Mark Synnott Dutton, 432 pages, $33 Many people reassessed their lives during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mark Synnott, an accomplished mountaineer and writer, decided it was a good time to refit his sailboat, the Polar Sun, and navigate the Northwest Passage -- the icy arctic waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. "Could I sail a forty-year-old fiberglass boat from Maine to Alaska -- a voyage of some seven thousand miles -- and live to tell my own tale?" he wonders. "It was a question that would soon all but consume me, in the same way I knew it had done to the European explorers who had ventured into these same waters long ago when this part of the world was still a blank on their maps." For centuries the search for a polar trade route had indeed consumed -- and bettered -- more-experienced explorers, until Roald Amundsen successfully sailed it between 1903 and 1906. Today the passage remains a daunting journey fraught with danger, from the frigid waters and the shifting currents to "Jakobshavn, the fastest-moving glacier in Greenland, which surges forward" up to 130 feet a day and is responsible for about 10% "of all icebergs spawned from the Greenland Ice Cap." Further complicating his adventure: Mr. Synnott was recently remarried and the father of a young son. As he sat on his boat docked in its marina and contemplated the idea of traveling the Northwest Passage, Mr. Synnott, then in his 40s, asked himself: "What do you really want to do with the time that you have left?" To which he reflected: "I [want] to spend as much of it as possible with the two human beings sleeping below and with my three other children." But he also admits that "I'm someone who has always needed more than that. I need epic adventure and exploration in my life." He would find both on this journey, and live to write about it in "Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery." The mystery of the subtitle is what happened to John Franklin. On May 19, 1845, the Royal Navy expedition commander set off from Greenhithe, England, in search of the Northwest Passage. In September 1846, Franklin's two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, became trapped in the ice near King William Island in northern Canada. "Not a single one of them made it out," Mr. Synnott tells us of Franklin's crew, "and no detailed written account of their ordeal has ever been found." Solving that mystery became Mr. Synnott's mission and justification for leaving his family behind for much of this six-month lark. Lucky for him, his second wife, Hampton, herself somewhat of a free spirit, supported him. Lucky for him, too, that he surrounded himself with the right people. Mr. Synnott was smart enough to know that he didn't have the sailing chops to pull this off alone. So he enlisted an old climbing buddy, Ben Zartman, who had far more experience on the high seas. He also convinced National Geographic to foot the bill for the expedition, in exchange for bringing along a camera crew to produce a podcast and an hourlong television special. Once under way, serendipity intervenes in Greenland, where Mr. Synnott meets Jens Erik Kjeldsen, another peripatetic soul who had sailed the Northwest Passage in 2018 with his wife, Dorthe. Mr. Kjeldsen introduces Mr. Synnott to Povl Linnet, who promptly produces, Mr. Synnott tells us, a "rusted steel cable as thick as my wrist." It was from the Fox, the boat that Francis Leopold McClintock sailed in the 1850s in search of Franklin and his expedition. The two Greenlanders give Mr. Synnott navigation advice and charts of safe anchorages, including a whaling station. "If you look around," Mr. Linnet tells him, "you might find the iron bollards that Franklin used" to secure his ships nearly two centuries before. Once inside the passage, Mr. Synnott and the rest of his small crew of five encounter Alan Cresswell and his partner, who are also sailing the passage, but in their much-sturdier 50-foot aluminum sailboat. Together, the two boats buddy-sail through the most treacherous parts of the voyage. Mr. Cresswell leads the Polar Sun out of a crushing ice floe to open water and safety. Mr. Synnott's narrative often brings readers onto the boat with him, sluicing through the icy waters. "As a weak sun struggled to burn through the haze overhead, we all stripped down and jumped off the stern, hooting and hollering as we briefly plunged into the 42-degree water," he writes of their celebration upon crossing the Arctic Circle. There's also a good deal of environmental preaching. Mr. Synnott frets that the very success of this trip depends on man-made global warming to keep the Northwest Passage free from ice too thick for his boat to break through. When his boat is in peril of being crushed by a growing ice field, he's more worried about spilling diesel fuel than about surviving the arctic. Yet after describing all the horrors of 19th-century commercial whaling, Mr. Synnott is able to enjoy the whale meat left for him by some Greenland fishermen. "The meat was tender, with a delicate flavor I would describe as much closer to beef or venison than fish. I savored every morsel." Mr. Synnott does a lot of soul searching along the way. He recalls an essay by John Harries, a "high-latitude sailor" who in 2014 wrote about people attempting the Northwest Passage, comparing them to the tourists who scale Mount Everest. "For these crews it's not a voyage with the associated appreciation and learning about the surrounding lands and seas," Mr. Harries writes. "It's a mad dash, starting way too late in the season, just to say they did it." "Was I really all that different from the hordes he was describing?" Mr. Synnott wonders. "I had, in fact, climbed Everest, and now here I was apparently going for the sailing equivalent." In the end, he completes the passage, arriving in coastal Alaska on Sept. 20, 2022, having spent 112 days and logged 6,736 miles aboard the Polar Sun. He doesn't solve the Franklin mystery, but finds a storybook ending all the same. "Hampton and I put our house in New Hampshire up for rent, sold our cars, and pulled Tommy out of school," he writes. "And with any luck, by the time you're reading this, we'll be on our way to the South Pacific." [1]

1. North By Northwest. Yost, Mark.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 21 Apr 2025: A15.