Original subtitles

PINSENT: Last time on The Polar Sea...

The Arctic has arrived under the midnight sun

and the great seasonal melt has begun.

The Northwest Passage has become the new Everest,

drawing a growing crowd of unlikely explorers.

RICHARD: I wouldn't consider myself adventurous.

PINSENT: Aboard the tiny ship Dax,

three middle-aged Swedes

have sailed from Iceland to Greenland

to discover a fusion of European and Inuit culture

INUNNGUAQ: Every year it's expanding

with the tourists

and they are coming more and more and more.

PINSENT: As scientists explore the unprecedented warming,

artists worry about its consequences

while sailors test themselves on a changing sea.

PINSENT: The Swedish yacht, Dax,

en route to the Northwest Passage,

has taken shelter in the busy port of Ilulissat.

It took 24 days and some 3,000 kilometers

to reach here from Iceland.

Her captain is 60-year-old retired salesman,

Martin Sigge.

MARTIN: The only bad thing, so far is that

we have this problem with the forestay

which also has cost a lot of concern and time.

PINSENT: With Martin is his old army buddy, Bengt Norvik.

BENGT: What you have to do now, is to bring it on the...

The, uh, quay here

to examine it, and to fix it, and then put it back.

But it's very dirty,

so to speak, up here so we don't want to have any

sand in the mechanism.

We wrap it in plastic bags or something

so we can prevent it from being damaged.

PINSENT: Completing the crew is Richard Tegner,

the ship's cook and diarist.

We have had some conflicts aboard

and we have solved them together

and it feels very nice now

because it's like maintaining the things on board,

machines and equipment.

Even relations have to be maintained.

Hand it here, the other end of that rope.

Okay.

PINSENT: Martin has been sailing his whole life.

He has spent the last 18 months preparing for this voyage.

(SPEAKING SWEDISH)

PINSENT: Dax is one of more than 30 yachts

that will attempt the Northwest Passage this summer.

She is moored to one of them, Libellule,

a Swiss-flagged catamaran.

Libellule is sailed by Yves German and Sylvain Martineau,

French sailors from the storied port of La Rochelle.

They await the family that owns the ship,

with whom they will challenge the notorious Passage.

(SYLVAIN SPEAKING FRENCH)

PINSENT: The Arctic Ocean's ice cap

begins to melt in mid-March.

Beneath the midnight sun that shines all summer,

more than 130,000 square kilometers of ice melt every day.

By mid-July, seven million square kilometers of the ice cap,

almost the area of Australia,

have melted.

But passage through the narrow channels between

Arctic islands is still blocked.

Sailors attempting the passage from the east

gather to wait in Greenland.

If the Northwest Passage is the new Everest,

Ilulissat is base camp.

Europeans have been traveling to Greenland for 1,000 years,

but only with global warming has it become a tourist hot spot.

Twenty thousand visitors come to Ilulissat annually

to see its melting glacier chip ice into the sea.

And for the select few,

that is just the beginning of the adventure.

Anchored off Ilulissat, the luxury liner Le Boreal

is taking on passengers bound for the Northwest Passage.

(MAN AND WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)

(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH OVER PA)

PINSENT: As they arrive, groups of passengers

are briefed by Captain Patrick Marchesseau.

(IN ENGLISH) Good morning, everybody,

we start with the Greenland.

It will be much more oriented about culture

so we will go to different village

and to meet the Inuit.

Don't expect to see too much wildlife

on the Greenland side.

The second part of the itinerary,

the Baffin territory, Nunavut,

then it will be very oriented about wildlife.

If we have the opportunity to spot a whale,

if we have the opportunity to spot a polar bear,

narwhal or bird or I don't know what...

Uh...

We will stop the ship and chase

the animal to give you a good...

MAN: Uh, captain. Yes?

We should say follow the whales, not chase.

PATRICK: Ah, okay. Okay, okay, okay.

Okay, okay. We don't hunt.

Not to worry!

(PATRICK SPEAKING FRENCH)

PINSENT: Boarding Libellule are the youngest explorers

to sail the Northwest Passage this year.

(PHILIPP SPEAKING FRENCH)

(WOMEN SPEAKING FRENCH)

PINSENT: The yacht is owned

by Swiss financier Philipp Cottier.

(PHILIPP SPEAKING FRENCH)

PINSENT: His wife, Marielle Donze.

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

PINSENT: And their daughters Naima, Line, and Anissa.

(SPEAKING GERMAN)

PINSENT: The family has brought along

professional camera equipment to record their adventure for posterity.

(PHILIPP SPEAKING GERMAN)

PINSENT: There's a museum in Ilulissat

dedicated to the Dane, Knud Rasmussen,

where Arctic explorers seek inspiration.

Rasmussen did the Northwest Passage

on ice by dog team, helped by Inuit.

He typified the Scandinavian way of Arctic travel.

The Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen,

also succeeded by hunting and trading as he went.

Amundsen is Martin Sigge's hero.

In 1903 he was the first to sail the passage.

MARTIN: Amundsen had small crew, small boat,

that was an old fishing boat that he converted.

PINSENT: At the time the approach was revolutionary.

The British naval expeditions,

like John Franklin's in 1845,

always sailed in big ships

loaded down with supplies.

MARTIN: Franklin thought that he could make it with...

With muscles, so to say.

Sailing up with two warships

equipped to the teeth with everything.

Franklin was surely a great guy,

though in the Northwest Passage,

I think, he had the wrong approach.

PINSENT: The European instinct

was to bring everything from home.

In 1930, the scientist Alfred Wegener

complained bitterly about his expedition's luggage.

MAN: (AS ALFRED) We reckon that we have 2,500 packages to transfer,

a figure which horrifies everybody.

The total weight? Just under 100 tons.

PINSENT: Whether they carried provisions

or hunted to survive,

Arctic explorers expected to over winter.

They assumed the Northwest Passage

would take at least three years.

Today's mariners expect to be home by summer's end.

(INDISTINCT TALKING)

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

RICHARD: I'm not particularly interested in sailing.

I like to...

To visit places.

Especially places like the Arctic

because it's like the end of the world.

Interesting. Very interesting.

This is a

World Heritage,

so it's protected area.

The ice cap further down the fjord

will release 20 million tons of ice every day.

Some of these icebergs, they...

They stay here in the same position maybe

half a year, or year,

so people here get a sort of a personal relationship to...

To their iceberg.

PINSENT: For the tourists waiting to depart

for the Northwest Passage,

the ice fields are an attraction

and a playground.

(CRUISE GUIDE SPEAKING FRENCH)

(PHILIPP SPEAKING FRENCH)

(ENGINE REVVING)

Okay.

(IN ENGLISH) Maybe in this cluster over here?

PINSENT: Bill Covitz

has come to Greenland from New York City.

This is the proverbial candy store for Bill,

who is a professional sculptor of ice.

BILL: Oh he got it! This guy's an animal!

PINSENT: Bill is searching the bergs to find a particular kind of ice.

BILL: So as you can see behind us,

we are amongst a whole ice field here now.

We are searching each individual piece

trying to look for the clearest that we can find.

Wefound a really nice piece here,

best that we've found so far.

PINSENT: The fluffy white ice

floating above the surface is relatively young.

Bill is after the clear, hard, blue ice

that weighs down the bergs.

It can be as much as 100,000 years old.

And it's the best for making music.

That's an absolutely beautiful piece of ice.

It's almost hard to concentrate on the small ice around you.

The surroundings are absolutely beautiful

and the icebergs that we're passing...

The scene changes every little bit that we go.

It's a hard place to come to and concentrate.

We found a piece with a really long clear stripe in it.

It's the one we are going to try to drag to shore.

PINSENT: Bill's job is to carve ice instruments

for the avant-garde Norwegian musician Terje Isungset.

Well, hello there!

(LAUGHS)

(TERJE SPEAKING)

(GRUNTS)

Okay.

(TERJE SPEAKING)

Yeah.

Okay.

(TERJE SPEAKING)

Mmm-hmm.

(TERJE SPEAKING)

BILL: That sound that you're hearing

is all the air bubbles that my chisel is going through.

Clear ice is 10 times harder than this is.

My concern now is...

You can hear it, as my chisel is going through,

hitting those air bubbles and when I make it thinner,

it's going to get super fragile.

(MAKING TRUMPET-LIKE SOUNDS)

(HIGH-PITCHED NOISE)

(TERJE SPEAKING)

(HIGH-PITCHED SOUND)

(BLOWING)

PINSENT: Martin's repairs have made Dax seaworthy again,

just as satellite reports

show enough ice melted

to allow an approach to the passage.

MARTIN: It looks good for Pond Inlet, I think.

The channel is opening up.

It's partly open already.

And it should take

four days over to Pond Inlet,

unless we have bad luck with the weather,

but that I don't know enough.

(PHILIPP SPEAKING GERMAN)

(ENGINE STARTING)

RICHARD: I never felt afraid

because we had the SAT phone, we had our GPS

and we had all kinds of things to...

To help us.

But, of course, getting stuck in the ice

in some isolated place or just

falling into the water,

that would be very dramatic and

a very quick death, I suppose.

PINSENT: As the adventurers finally set sail,

the dreamy labyrinth of ice

becomes a navigation nightmare.

(ELECTRONIC BEEP)

PATRICK: Starboard 20! MAN: Starboard 20!

MARTIN: One could get trapped in the pack ice.

We're not going to be able to

act as an ice-breaker,

we're just going to have to wait.

You have to be so alert and use all your senses

that you are in the middle of something

and if you do the wrong thing,

you might...

You might die!

(PATRICK SPEAKING FRENCH)

(CONTINUES SPEAKING FRENCH)

Can you hold it for one quick second?

Should have the dry ice.

(SCRAPING)

(ICE VIBRATING)

(VIBRATIONS ECHOING)

PINSENT: The ships sail north and west for Canada.

It's a centuries-old route

through the Baffin Bay ice pack

that bedeviled captains in colder times.

In 1824,

the Briton William Edward Parry

spent two months weaving, pushing and chopping

his way through the pack.

Dax makes the journey in a mere four days.

But she's no sooner at sea

before her crew is struggling with bad morale in close quarters.

RICHARD: Being on board the Dax, it was not at all pleasant.

He was...

He pointed out

even small things.

MARTIN: We have decided to have a little meeting every day

and bring up all small things on the table

immediately before they get big things.

So if I feel that you shouldn't

be putting your wet towel on that place all the time,

then we're going to talk about that. "Let's not do that".

RICHARD: After a while I got really pissed off with this and I...

I...

We got into a real conflict.

I told him, "You have to stop doing this because it's...

"I can't go anywhere on this boat

"and it's not pleasant."

And he got...

He got really pissed with me, I suppose,

because I raised my voice and, um...

But I felt I had to

define the limit.

I wonder how

can anybody work as an astronaut

being in a space shuttle for half a year or even more

and deal with each other.

No matter how much you train, you're...

It's amazing.

I mean...

And thinking about these old expeditions,

like Amundsen and Franklin.

Franklin, they were 128 men on board...

Wow.

It's amazing that people can

go on and deal with the problems.

(ENGINE CLICKING)

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

(ALARM BEEPING) Ah!

(INDISTINCT TALKING)

(INDISTINCT CHATTERING)

(GALA HOST SPEAKING FRENCH)

(PATRICK SPEAKING FRENCH)

(MARIELLE SPEAKING FRENCH)

(SYLVAIN SPEAKING FRENCH)

RICHARD: I felt a bit lonely on the boat.

On the other hand, it sort of pushed me to, uh...

To think more and, uh,

I wrote a lot.

I wrote a lot about my reflections and thoughts

and to my own surprise,

I composed a song.

I have never done that before

and it just came naturally

and it was...

It was a very nice experience

since we had this little mini guitar on board

and I could strike some cords

and create a little melody and the text

which I called Waltz...

Waltz in Baffin Bay.

Entering Canada,

the weather was kind of a little bit rough,

and it was very cold and windy

and really Arctic feeling about it.

We came out of the fog

and we saw this fantastic nature

which, in a way, was welcoming us.

I think that's a really happy moment for me.

(PLAYING FOLK MUSIC)

RICHARD: # The sun it shines on Baffin Bay

# There goes Upernavik

# Our jib is filled the northern wind

# We're greeting Canada

# The sun it shines on Baffin Bay

# My turn is over now

# Our course is straight on westward ho!

# Say hello to Canada #

PINSENT: Canada greets the modern explorers

with the cliffs of Baffin Island,

and it's just as their captain promised,

wildlife abounds.

They are finally at the gates of the Northwest Passage,

entering the most beautiful,

and savage, wilderness on Earth.

(SEALS SQUAWKING)

(ROARS)

ALL: Whoa!

(MARIELLE SPEAKING FRENCH)