LYUBOV ORLOVA, CUMBERLAND SOUND – We’ve spent the last few days puttering around the Cumberland Sound after ice floes jammed around the eastern coast of Baffin Island forced a change of plans. The expedition was originally supposed to head north to Clyde River and Isabella Bay to celebrate the opening of a new National Wildlife Area – the world’s first bowhead whale sanctuary which will provide an important summering home for the creature. A visit to the bowheads at Isabella Bay would have been wonderful, but with our path to north cut-off we decided to stay in Cumberland Sound and explore the nearby Kingnait Fjord.
Despite the wealth of arctic knowledge aboard this ship, no one actually knew much about Kingnait. Fred Roots, the eighty-six-year-old geologist and explorer who seems to have explored every nook and cranny in the north, only knew that it had been the site of one of scientific stations during the first International Polar Year in 1882-83. The waters are uncharted – the place is rarely if ever visited by ships our size – but our Russian captain agreed to give it a shot. A zodiac motored ahead of us with a depth sounder, reporting back to the ship while we inched forward.
As we moved up the fjord, someone spotted a plume of spray out in the distance on the starboard side, followed by a dark smudge on the surface of the water that quickly disappeared. A moment later, another white column of water at twelve o’clock, right before the bow, and then two more to the port side. And suddenly we were surrounded by bowheads, spouting and surfacing for a moment before diving down with a flash of their tales. A mother and calf moved casually through the water just in front of the ship, their enormous bodies visible as dark shadows just below the surface. Over a few hours we saw dozens of animals while Richard Sears, the ship’s marine biologist, jumped in a zodiac to try to get some audio recordings.
“It’s amazing,” said Sears at the ship bar later that night. “The place is another Isabella Bay! It would be the perfect place to study bowheads.” He grew excited as he talked about the possibilities – the camp you could set up at the beautiful mouth of the fjord, the short zodiac trip to the whales themselves. “If I were younger and just starting my original research…” He trailed off.
The fact that we found bowheads at Kingnait probably shouldn’t have been surprising. The area was once thick with whales. Nearby Kekerten Island, the old whaling station we visited two days ago, was the headquarters of a booming industry. Starting in the 1850s, Scots and Americans plucked thousands of bowheads from the waters. After just thirty years, they had decimated the population, and by 1900, the major whaling companies had abandoned the area.
The fact the bowheads have been able to bounce back, at least to some extent, is encouraging. David Gray, the seasoned arctic biologist and historian aboard the ship, says he’s only heard of one other mention of bowheads in Kingnait Fjord. Gray is currently working a film about the expeditions of Rudolph Martin Anderson, the Chief Biologist for the National Museum of Canada from the twenties to the forties. In Anderson’s 1928 diary, when coming up to Pangnirtung, the scientist recorded information he’d heard from the local Inuit. “The natives said that they saw two bowhead whales during the beluga whale fishery in Kingnait Fjord,” wrote Anderson. “They said the whales are starting to come back.”
Photos by Lee Narraway.
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