Circumnavigating Svalbard: My Love Affair with the Arctic, an essay by Cynthia Reeves

Thanks to Cynthia Reeves, author of The Last Whaler (Regal House, Sept. 3), for contributing the following essay about her research. I hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I did.

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Circumnavigating Svalbard: My Love Affair with the Arctic

by Cynthia Reeves

Imagine this: You land by Zodiac at a remote beach on the southern shore of Van Keulenfjorden in the Svalbard archipelago, the site of an old beluga whaling station called Bamsebu, unprepared for what’s preserved there. Stretching to the horizon are whale bones, piles and piles of bleached beluga bones bearing silent testimony to the slaughter that occurred there in the 1930s. How is it, you wonder, that no one has been moved to incorporate this tableau into a story?

Piles of Beluga bones (photo by author)

I was inspired to write The Last Whaler when I came upon this sight during my 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice residency aboard the barquentine Antigua. Prior to this encounter, my love affair with the Arctic was satisfied only through books, starting in childhood reading tragic tales of doomed Arctic explorers. This early interest later merged with concern for the impact of climate change on the Arctic’s fragile eco-system. Flying over the vast, undulating white terrain leading into Svalbard’s airport at Longyearbyen feels like entering another world—a frozen landscape riven with fissured glaciers spilling down into the ice-pocked waters of the archipelago. That this magnificent spectacle might one day vanish spurred me to commit Svalbard’s beauty to my writings in hopes of helping raising awareness of what could be lost.

The Last Whaler is the most ambitious of these works. The story centers around Astrid Handeland, a botanist who travels to Svalbard in 1937 with her whaler husband, Tor, hoping the sojourn will enable her to move on from the devastating death of their son Birk and to reconnect with her passion for Arctic flora. Instead, she discovers the reality of the challenges imposed by the unforgiving environment and her growing unease with her husband’s industry harvesting belugas. Ten years on, in the devastating aftermath of World War II, Tor returns to Svalbard to come to terms both with his wife’s death and his role in damaging the abandoned station’s once-pristine shores.

Research shaped The Last Whaler, above all because I had little familiarity with Svalbard and Norwegian history prior to my Arctic Circle expedition. In the two years following the expedition, I spent several months living in Longyearbyen and exploring the surrounding area to gain a sense of the unusual environment, from the days of perpetual sunlight to the nights of utter polar darkness. Aside from allowing me to absorb the physical landscape, these residencies also provided unique historical insights into Svalbard and Norway of the 1930s and 40s. For example, the former art gallery, Galleri Svalbard, housed a library of rare documents—including an original copy of the Norwegian botanist and environmental activist Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen’s Svalbards flora. Also contained in the library were journals, newspaper articles, memoirs, and other documents—often in Norwegian and unavailable elsewhere—that offered background into the lives of those who lived on Svalbard and in Norway during that time. I was especially captivated by the women who survived and even flourished in the Arctic. In addition to Resvoll-Holmsen, the novel features such real-life heroines as Christiane Ritter, whose memoir A Woman in the Polar Night details her year in 1935-36 on Svalbard with her hunter husband, Hermann; and Helfrid Nøis, who spent years carving a life as the “Arctic housewife” of the famous hunter Hilmar Nøis.

Moreover, the history of Norway in World War II required substantial research in order to assess its impact on Tor’s changing views on war, whaling, and women’s roles. Of particular interest were the heroism, and cowardice, exhibited by Norwegians during the war. Remarkable acts of bravery include the almost-mythical journey of Jan Baalsrud, who together with eleven other Resistance fighters sailed from Scotland to Bardufoss in northern Norway to sabotage a German airfield control tower. Baalsrud alone escaped capture and endured a harrowing trek across Norway to freedom in Sweden with the help of sympathetic Norwegians. Conversely, Lebensborn, the Nazi program of using Norwegian women to give birth to “perfect” Aryan children, plays a role in Tor’s life as he tries to protect his teenaged daughter from the predations of Nazi soldiers.

Pages from Charlier scrapbook, v.2t

The Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England, was also an invaluable source of Arctic history. There, I scoured rare documents, focusing on the biographies of polar explorers as well as ordinary people whose lives intersected with those more famous. One such story involved Anna Charlier, the fiancée of Nils Strindberg, one of the three occupants of S. A. Andrée’s hot-air balloon during its ill-fated attempt to sail over the North Pole. Quite by chance, I discovered among the artifacts five enormous, leather-bound volumes of newspaper clippings and other mementoes preserved by Charlier from the time of the balloon’s disappearance in 1897 through and after the discovery of the men’s bodies on Kvitøya in 1930. Her obsession culminated in asking her husband to bury her heart next to Strindberg’s grave in Stockholm, a request her husband honored after her death in 1949.

Charlier’s story is not only embedded in The Last Whaler but also the centerpiece of my next project. Again I will travel to Svalbard to circumnavigate the archipelago aboard the 2024 Arctic Circle Summer Alumni Expedition. On this trip—ice conditions permitting—I hope to explore the eastern side of the islands and get a glimpse of Kvitøya, an inhospitable spit of land that does not lend itself to landings. I’m curious about the kinds of obsessions that would drive Andrée and his companions to undertake their courageous (or foolish, depending on whose history you read) journey and that would illuminate Charlier’s eternal passion for Strindberg.

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author Cynthia Reeves (credit: 5L Photography)

Cynthia Reeves is the author of three books of fiction: the novel The Last Whaler (Regal House Publishing, 2024); the novel in stories Falling through the New World (Gold Wake Press, 2024), which was awarded Gold Wake’s Spring 2023 Fiction Prize; and the novella Badlands (Miami University Press, 2007), which won Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. Cynthia’s short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared widely. She has been awarded residencies to the Arctic Circle’s 2017 Summer Solstice and 2024 Alumni Expeditions, Hawthornden Castle, Galleri Svalbard, Art & Science in the Field, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program, she taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Creative Writing Program and Rosemont College’s MFA program as well as at conferences nationwide. She lives with her husband in Camden, Maine. Find out more at her website cynthiareeveswriter.com.