Silence written in gravel

By Flavia Tomaello, https://flaviatomaello.blog/, Instagram @flavia.tomaello

Someone else looks out the window at a strip of gray beach that is already left behind, at some stones arranged in rows that, seen from the deck, seemed like just a geological whim. Only hours later, with his boots still damp next to the cabin door, that arrangement of stones reveals his true job: they are letters. They are names of ships written more than a century ago by sailors who piled up pebbles so that the world would know, once upon a time, that they had been there. This chronicle begins, then, at the end of an afternoon, because that is how memory works in the Arctic: first comes the sensation, then the data, and only at the end does the story complete.

The Zodiac boat hits the water with a dry, almost percussive rhythm as it moves towards Phippsøya, the largest island in the small Sjuøyane archipelago, twenty-two kilometers north of the cape that marks the northern limit of Svalbard proper. The disembarkation occurs at thirteen thirty, although the itinerary printed on the ship’s screen warns, in red letters, that every hour in the Arctic functions as a conditional promise: first the expedition team arrives, evaluates ice, wind and current, and only then authorizes the passage of the colored groups – green, red, blue, yellow – who order, with an almost school-like discipline, the disembarkation of dozens of passengers covered up to the eyes.

The island owes its name to Commodore Constantine John Phipps, who in June 1773 sailed from Deptford in command of two bombardier ships, the Racehorse and the Carcass, built to withstand the impact of heavy mortars and later reinforced with double timbers and fortified bows to attack the polar ice. Phipps sought to verify a theory held at the time by much of the Royal Society: the existence of an open, navigable polar sea beyond the ice barrier. He never found that sea. Instead, he found white walls that blocked his path near eighty degrees and forty-eight minutes north latitude, and he also found something that no European had described until then with scientific rigor: the polar bear and the ivory gull, species that Phipps cataloged with the meticulousness of a naturalist although his official mission was purely geographical. Also traveling aboard the Carcass was a barely fourteen-year-old midshipman named Horatio Nelson, who, according to legend—repeated so many times that it now functions almost as sacred writing—challenged a polar bear armed only with an unloaded musket and the reckless courage that would later take him to Trafalgar.

Walking on Phippsøya today means stepping on soaked moss that gives way under the boot like a cold sponge, advancing between gneiss rocks polished by ice that will never return, and looking up at mountains with flattened profiles, almost like hats, which gave Sjuøyane its affectionate nickname among sailors: the islands of the seven hats. Thousands of seabirds nest in the crevices, and their guano dyes a stone an intense green that, without them, would remain bare and gray all year round. Walruses dive near the shore in search of mollusks, indifferent to the passage of humans dressed in red who observe them from a safe distance. The entire landscape seems to hold Phipps’ breath, the anxiety of his men trapped between icebergs for weeks, the progressive certainty that the Pole would remain, that summer, absolutely unreachable.

The signs that the beach never forgets

Chermsideøya appears the next day, seven thirty in the morning, with a different light: lower, more oblique, lying over the Beverlysundet Strait like a freshly ironed sheet. The island takes its name from Herbert Chermside, a lieutenant of engineers who in the 19th century accompanied the explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith on a journey to Spitsbergen, and its two highest mountains – Knoll and Tott – are curiously named after some mischievous German-American cartoon characters, The Katzenjammer Kids, proof that even the most severe cartography admits, from time to time, a wink of humor.

However, what really stops the passage in Beverlysundet are the signs drawn on the beach itself: names of ships written with stones lined up on the gravel, some dating back to 1898, when a Swedish expedition set up camp in Sorgfjorden and its crew members, idle between scientific measurements, decided to leave a physical record of their passage. That custom—marking the territory with one’s own naval identity, letter by letter, stone by stone—was repeated for decades, layer upon layer, until forming a curious coastal palimpsest where inscriptions from different eras, different crews, different urgencies of transcendence coexist. Among them survives, uncomfortable but undeniable, a swastika drawn in 1939, a silent vestige of an expedition whose political intention is impossible to dissociate from the chosen symbol, and which today remains there as a geological warning that no landscape, no matter how remote it may seem, ever escapes the history that men insist on writing over it.

Further northwest, in Kapp Rubin, remains of an old station recall a lesser-known tragedy: that of three explorers belonging to a certain polar expedition who, trapped during the winter of 1908 to 1909, succumbed one after another to hunger, cold and the exasperatingly slow pace of a rescue that came, when it came, too late to save any survivors. That story circulates among expedition guides almost like an oral legend, transmitted from season to season, adorned with details that vary depending on who tells it, but whose core remains intact: three men, a cabin of wood and stone, a winter that refused to end on time.

What the eye finds, what the memory retains

The disembarkation in Beverlysundet takes place under protocols identical to those of the previous day: groups by color, estimated times, an announcement fifteen minutes in advance once the expedition team certifies safe conditions. At ten in the morning, while some passengers are still walking among the stone inscriptions, the announcement of a scheduled emergency drill echoes through the ship’s speakers: alarms that will sound, crew that will practice maneuvers, services that will be suspended for a few minutes. No passenger needs to intervene; It is enough to continue the walk, to continue observing how the fog moves over Nordkappsundet like a curtain undecided between opening and closing.

At half past eleven, back on board, Mikhail Barabanov – a member of the expedition team – gives a talk on Arctic bird migrations in the Observation Lounge, and explains how tiny species travel distances equivalent to several times around the Earth’s equator to reproduce, briefly, under a sun that never sets. The audience listens between yawns of polar dream and genuine admiration, while outside the landscape continues to change imperceptibly, a glacier that retreats a few centimeters, a walrus that shows its mustache between floating icebergs.

Thinking of Phippsøya and Chermsideøya as simple geographical coordinates is equivalent to reducing a cathedral to its measurements in square meters. Both islands function, in truth, as open archives: repositories of human gestures—scientific, military, reckless, tragic, even sinister—deposited on stone and moss for more than two centuries, permanently exposed to the harshest weather on the planet and yet still strangely legible. Each landing on Zodiac represents, in that sense, less a tourist excursion than a reading: walking among gravel inscriptions is equivalent to passing your finger over a line written by hands that have been underground for a century, or under ice, or simply dissolved in the collective memory of an archipelago that continues, despite everything, to receive visitors every northern summer.

The chronicle ends, as it began, in the middle of a scene: light that never completely falls, and a remote beach that continues to guard, stone by stone, the entire memory of those who dared to set foot on it first.

Swan Hellenic It organizes expeditions that lead to bays like this, true to its promise of discovering what usually remains out of sight. A glacier baptized by a European prince, thousands of birds singing over an arctic garden, seals indifferent to the pace of man, all of this pulses in Fjortende Julibukta, waiting for those who decide to get off the boat and take a closer look.

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