Thor’s Breeches
“In the Beginning there was nothing but salt and ice and gray, gray sky. Everything else came later. The first thing to come later was a man who appeared as though out of nowhere, dropped out of a hole in the sky. He tried to lick the salt out of the ice, but he couldn’t. His physiology did not agree with the cruel climate. With nothing to sustain him, with nothing and nobody to protect him from the cold, he died quickly. More men and women of all ages dropped down soon after, one by one, and drifted by instinct toward the first man in Indian file. They too were unable to survive, since the bodies of their predecessors had frozen thoroughly before they had arrived. There was nothing to feast upon. It was as good a place as any to sleep the cold sleep, which was all they knew to do. The icicled corpses piled high. Topography was born. Everything else came later.”
When Gunnar Gunnarsen came upon the Tjorgbjerget in northwestern Lapland in February 1835, this is what he recorded in his journal. He then jogged back to camp and pantingly retrieved his reluctant first mate Úlfur Karlsjørden. Their polar expedition, Thor’s Breeches, was nearing its trying ninth month. Due to extreme logistical incompetence on the part of the more ambitious explorers (Gunnarsen, for instance) and quiet subversion from those who had joined to avoid life in unbearable Europe for as long as possible (Karlsjørden and everyone else), Thor’s Breeches was no farther from Kristiania (modern day Oslo) than it had been in blooming August. The thirty man team had been circling a horseshoe-shaped area of coastland for months, making no progress whatsoever.
None of conscripts seemed to mind, since a return to Norway meant confronting the men and women they had wronged or financial conditions so embarrassing they had stopped joking about them in September. Gunnarsen, on the other hand, was making daily breakthroughs. His journal reveals an incredibly fertile imagination and attention to detail almost unknown among Norwegians. He records the sounds of the morning wind, the hues of the sky (“halfyear-pickled mackerel sky today”). Gunnarsen was a poet in whom early exposure to the Norse poetic tradition had awakened a lifelong interest in the Scandinavian landscape. He was attracted to the north like a magnet. Yet his youth was a portrait of loneliness and thwarted potential — but after all, isn’t that the birthright of the poet? Due to his distractible nature, he failed miserably in his studies. Today we might say he suffered from an attention deficit disorder. He had actually gone to gymnasium with Ibsen’s father, who remembered him as “always chewing on flowers and looking confused.”
After a series of failures in the military, Gunnarsen managed to join a trading company as a shipwright’s apprentice. The shipwright died spontaneously from a heart attack only two weeks after Gunnarsen had met him. The other shipwright, his partner, died the next day from bad sharkmeat. Miraculously, under the newly revised guild laws, Gunnarsen was qualified to take over the enterprise. He managed it acceptably. Meanwhile, he began composing a polar expedition in his mind’s eye. With the income from the venture, Gunnarsen recruited mates: he found his extravagant pitch met with the best reception in Kristiania’s few opium dens. He figured these tired youngsters just needed some arctic air in their lungs.
After about four months of preparation (remarkably little time for such inexperienced sailors) and without a single university meteorologist, Gunnarsen set sail for the magical north. It was June, 1834. He should have left in April, but he was still assembling a crew then; he was too impatient to wait a year. By August Thor’s Breeches had traversed more than half of Norway’s coastline. The magnificent fjords are described in his diary as “the claws of a giant wolf.” He admits he was uninspired during those summer months; he would need the ice and the snow and the infinite grayness to rouse the genius within.
For the next six months the expedition made no headway, simply eating through its supplies. According to his journal, Gunnarsen revealed to Karlsjørden some time in late February that he was waiting to glimpse a polar bear on a prime number calendar day. Blithe Karlsjørden, we learn, did not know what that meant, nor did he care. He and the crew had brought a monstrous supply of opium on board. By March of 1835 Gunnarsen decided to go home after a propitious bear sighting. On April 12, 1835, the ship was overtaken by Danish pirates just outside of Kristiania. Everyone was killed. The pirates then seized the opium, much of which still remained, some whale blubber, a number of walrus tusks, and Gunnarsen’s travelogue.
