Adventure classics: Home is the sailor, home from the sea

Surface at the Pole

by James Calvert

***

At first thought, if a submariner wanted to surface at the North Pole, it might seem simpler to do it during the summer when ice melt lakes called polynyas sometimes offered breaks in the Arctic Ocean’s frozen surface. That was the hope of James Calvert, commander of the USS Skate, who chronicled the historic voyages of one of the earliest nuclear-powered submarines in his 1960 volume, Surface at the Pole.  But although the Skate was able to surface numerous times during its initial August 1958 voyage as it circled the pole, the goal of surfacing at the actual geographic North Pole eluded it. At least for a time.

Sir Hubert's memorial at North Pole

Not able to surface during the comparatively balmy arctic summer? How about trying it during the depths of a polar winter? And how about accomplishing a lifelong goal of one of the world’s most ardent adventurers, Sir Hubert Wilkins?

An Australian by birth, polar explorer Wilkins was the first to fly a plane in Antarctica, was knighted for his exploits, and served as a consultant on polar clothing and equipment to the U.S. Army. In 1931, he made the first attempt to reach the North Pole by submarine. Unfortunately, neither his vessel, an aging, pre-nuclear U.S Navy submarine he renamed Nautilus nor his equipment were equal to Wilkins’ ambitions. After sailing further north than any previous ship had accomplished under its own power, and days of negotiating the polar ice pack, he was forced to return.

But nearly 30 years later, his dream was still alive. He visited Calvert after the Skate’s return in October 1958.

“Now that you have everything you need to do the job,” as Calvert recounts Wilkins’ admonition, “you must go in the wintertime.”

“I was startled,” Calvert writes, “but knew what he meant. Every bit of submarine exploration in the Arctic had been done in summer, when polynyas are abundant. In winter they would be frozen over and open water nonexistent or very difficult to locate. . . (then) he sat for some time with a faraway look and a half-smile. . . On the first of December I learned of his death from a heart attack.”

Early in 1959, the Skate was sent back to the Arctic Ocean to investigate the feasibility of winter operations. And to fulfill the final request of Wilkins – having his ashes scattered at the North Pole, by submarine.

Would a surfacing during the Arctic winter even be possible?

Possibly, if the Skate’s sail, the vertical structure that housed its masts, antennas, periscopes and ventilation pipes – vital to its safe operation – could be strengthened enough to serve as a battering ram. “Could they stand the splintering shock as (a) three-thousand-ton ship drove them into the ice?” Calvert wondered.

In March 1959, the Skate had reached the North Pole again, beneath the surface of its frozen sea. “There was no sign of a skylight,” Calvert writes, using the name given to areas of ice thin enough for light to show through, although with the sun still below the horizon there would be little light at best. Hours passed while the ship searched for an opening before finding a trace of thin ice, “so small we could see the whole area at a glance through the periscope, outlined sharply by the . . . floes around it. . . (at last) with a sickening lurch we hit and broke through.”

The Skate had reached its goal.

Raising the flags of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States from the Skate’s masts and periscopes in the midst of a stiff gale, the crew held red flares in the darkness to give Calvert enough light to read the service for burial at sea. The sprinkled ashes “quickly disappeared in the half-darkness and the swirling snow. . . Sir Hubert Wilkins had reached his final resting place.”

(After the death of Wilkins’ widow, Suzanne Evans Wilkins, at her request her ashes also were sprinkled into the sea at the North Pole, this time under brilliant summer sunshine.)

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues an August of adventures at sea with Edward Beach’s Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton.)

Adventure classics – Under the ice at 90 degrees North

Surface at the Pole

by James Calvert, USN

***

On a Sunday morning in August 1958, two groups of men clustered around instruments in the control center of submarine USS Skate. One group watched as a moving pinpoint of light shone through the glass top of the control center’s plotting table and the chart paper covering it, following the light's path with a pencil. The other group stood before a metal stylus drawing two irregular parallel lines across a moving paper tape.

Attending to both was US Navy Captain James Calvert, who didn’t dare show the crew how nervous he was.

The plotting chart indicated the Skate’s path under the Arctic ice pack. The stylus indicated the thickness of ice over the submarine. Calvert’s orders were to find a way to make the first surfacing of a submarine through the ice of the North Pole.

And, by the way, to surface without damaging one of the world’s first nuclear powered submarines. He could, of course, attempt ramming the underside of the ice pack with what the Navy oddly called the Skate’s sail – the fin-like projection at the top of the submarine that housed its sensory equipment, as well as the vents that allowed it to take on fresh air from the surface. Damage to the sail would leave the Skate to complete the rest of its voyage effectively blinded beneath the arctic ice.

At last, the stylus lines converged, indicating an area of open water – one of the polynyas (pronounced pull-een-yuhs) – the temporary lakes that open between ice floes during the Arctic summer.

But was the opening big enough to accommodate the Skate’s length and width?

Calvert ordered the periscope up. He turned it right, then left, hoping to see the edge of the ice. There was nothing in sight except a jellyfish, “waving his rainbow-colored tentacles in the quiet water of a sea whose surface is forever protected from waves by its cover of ice,” Calvert writes in his 1960 account, Surface at the Pole: The extraordinary voyages of the USS Skate.

The previous year had been one of embarrassment for the United States, pummeled by its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, in the race for space. Worse, the USSR’s launching of Sputnik 1 happened during the International Geophysical Year (July 1, 1957 – December 31, 1958), which was supposed to mark a new rapprochement in the sharing of scientific information.

The USSR launched Sputnik 1 October 4, 1957, following it a month later with Sputnik 2. And for all that the less than two-feet across satellites looked more like toys than spaceships, there they undeniably were, visible to all as they orbited the Earth. What was the US to do? Launching the world’s third orbiting satellite (accomplished in early 1958) only gave it the equivalent of bronze medal. It needed something bigger, something – dare I say – splashier?

How about going low instead of high? Low under ice that is, at the top of the world? How about not only a nonstop voyage across the top of the world (accomplished by USS Nautilus in August 1958) but an actual surfacing at the North Pole?

Enter USS Skate, named for the fish, as were many of its sister nuclear submarines of the era, and captained by James Calvert.

The Nautilus’s name was a nod both to a marine life form and the heroic ship of 19^th century science fiction writer Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. But though Nautilus grabbed the glory of the first naval transarctic transit, Skate managed the feat of first surfacing at the Pole. Its crew's’ work of mapping portions of the Arctic Ocean as well as doing extensive testing of the nature of the underside of the polar ice also tied in neatly with one of the IGY’s emphases on oceanography.

Reaching the North Pole by ship had been attempted for more than a century, never successfully. Even Australian adventurer Sir Hubert Wilkins’ expedition aboard the diesel-powered submarine, Nautilus, was turned back at the edge Arctic ice pack in 1931. Not until the post-World War II era of nuclear-powered submarines did venturing under the Arctic ice become feasible.

What was there to fear now? Nothing, except a virtually uncharted ocean and, oh, yes, the deadly ice.

(I’m never more enthusiastic about adventures at sea than during August in Texas, when temperatures below 100 degrees F. qualify as a cold spell. Hope you’re reveling too in the oh so cool adventure of Arctic submarines, which continues next Friday with more of James Calvert’s Surface at the Pole, as well as with photographer Paul Gierszewski’s glorious photo of pack ice which illustrates this post.)