Maine Maritime Academy acquired the Bowdoin in 1988, she has returned to
Greenland twice, in 1991 and 1994. Following are excerpts from an account of the
1991 trip.
"On June 30, 1991, with the traditional noisy fanfare from a flotilla of
well-wishers, the Bowdoin left Castine bound for Greenland. Her first
day's sail was but a short hop to initiate those aboard who had never sailed
offshore before. Thirty days and two thousand miles later, the Bowdoin
crossed the Arctic Circle and was cruising among icebergs in Disko bay,
Greenland. For the first time since before most of her company had been born,
the Bowdoin was back in the seas she was designed for."
"As he had the year before, Andy established a Swedish watch system, with
three watches working five shifts a day; the day watches were six hours each,
the night watches four. This system allowed the crew twelve consecutive hours
off every third day, a luxury which would have astounded the Bowdoin's
earlier arctic sailors. Classes were held each day, 'on deck in nice weather,
below when it was rotten, and cancelled when it was really rotten,' as Josh
Smith, one of the students, described them. Subjects included: meteorology,
seamanship, anchoring, magnetic variation, provisioning, arctic whaling, whale
populations and identifying whales, arctic culture."
"'We have so much more than Macmillan had,’ Elliot noted. 'Electronics.
Mustang Suits. GPS. The exotic wireless that once filled a whole cabin is now an
off-the-shelf item the size of a shoebox…. But we keep the cold and damp, and
the dreary half-nights of these latitudes, the hours of myopic staring into gray
mist. And we keep a feeling that was surely there before, that slight sense of
foreboding, of sailing north into a barren world through a tiny window of
summer.'"
"At breakfast on July 22, after their first full night of twilight,
Greenland showed up on radar, sixty miles off. Only minutes later, a mountain
peak was visible over the fog bank ahead. Landfall Greenland! ‘Now that must be
quite a mountain,’ wrote Andy."
"At 1606 hours, July 28, 1991, the Bowdoin crossed the Arctic
Circle, 66° 33' N, for the first time in more than 35 years. For Deborah (the
steward), an Alaskan, the Arctic Circle was an unremarkable part of life, and
David Ames (a passenger) had crossed the line during his navy duty. Together
they had planned what Andy calls a "thoroughly humiliating" ritual for the
neophytes in recognition of the experience. After a salute with the cannon, the
fourteen 'warmbloods' turned to on deck, dressed in only their underwear. Air
and water temperature were both right around 40 degrees, accompanied by a good
northerly breeze. David read pompously significant words of indoctrination to
the assembled company while Deborah painted everyone's noses blue. Then David
turned the firehose on the inductees and chased them forward to kiss the
Bowdoin's stemhead (subsequently painted blue as well). It didn't take
the underwear-clad crew long to go below to dress, although Andy stopped long
enough to kiss both Deborah and David, in order to smear their faces with blue
food coloring."
"At sunset, a half hour before midnight, the Bowdoin reached 70°
01' N. She rested inside a headland called Akunaq point while Elliot and other
members of the crew took the zodiac ashore to build a cairn to mark their
northernmost reach. ‘The twilight was gentle,’ Andy wrote, ‘not vibrant-and
remained fully bright enough to write and read on deck until sunrise came at
0130.’ Steve looked up the point's name in their U.S. Navy dictionary of Eskimo
place names and aid to conversation, which Macmillan had written in 1938.
Akunaq, appropriately for the Bowdoin in 1991, means ‘midpoint of one's
journey.'"
"The Bowdoin's next stop was in southern Disko Bay at Illulisat,
the former Jakobshavn, where the Bowdoin's people were once again greeted
as VIPs. They were met at the dock by the Lord Mayor and treated to both showers
and a tour of ancient ruins."
"Davis Strait lies between Greenland and northern Labrador. When the
Bowdoin crossed westerly in 1991, it was foggy and miserable; everyone
aboard had colds and was cranky."
"Elliot, reading charts of the area they were approaching, wrote that they
‘have no coloring, no shading, few soundings, and a sparse scattering of printed
information that is all bad news…forty years later, this is still Mac's
coast.'"
"Northern Labrador today feels far more remote than Greenland, and more so
even than when the Bowdoin regularly traveled up the coast carrying
supplies. During the years since the Bowdoin had last been there, the
Canadian government moved everyone who lived in the far north down to Nain,
believing that they couldn't provide services to so remote an area. (Of course,
after they were moved, the people then required more services.) Port Burwell,
where the Bowdoin spent more than a week hanging about in 1934, is now an
empty settlement, home only to an unmanned radio relay station. Northern
Labrador has little traffic, and still provides most of the navigational
challenges of Mac's days."
"The Maine Maritime gang were not the only people to have felt distant in
this locale. From Elliot's journal: "the pervasive loneliness of the land is
manifest in the culture of its people. A tall cairn on a rise at the run's
entrance is actually an Innukshuk--a structure meant to mimic the silhouette of
a human and thus relieve the solitude."
"Students took over navigation, starting the Junior Watch Officer program
as they saw increasingly more indications of civilization. Finally,
Nain."
"Off Cape Sable they passed their furthest south point of the voyage, 42°
50' N, 1,691 miles from Disko. They stopped to fish for cod on Brown's Bank, and
enjoyed chowder for supper that night."
"The next morning, on the way back to Castine, everyone turned out for a
final field day to polish the schooner for her return home."
Virginia Thorndike
The Arctic Schooner Bowdoin
