Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

McClintock, Hobson and the crew of Fox reached England in September 1859 with relics of the doomed expedition and the “last note.” The tiny yacht, its commander and crew made headlines around the world. Parliament rewarded Fox’s crew with a payment of £5,000, and in 1860 the Queen knighted McClintock. Subsequently promoted to admiral, McClintock enjoyed a long career, serving as commander of the West Indies and the North American station for the Royal Navy and as an honored Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society before his death in 1907.

Fox outlived McClintock by five years, a surprising fact considering that most ships have short lives, particularly those that work in the Arctic. Sold to Danish owners in 1860, the tough little steamer carried supplies up and down the Greenland coast for the next fifty-two years. The end for Fox came when she went aground on the west Greenland coast in June 1912. After getting off and returning to Qeqertarsuaq (Disko Island), the damaged Fox was discovered by surveyors to be beyond repair. And so the famous ship, stripped of her fittings, was beached in a small cove near the harbor entrance. There, lying half submerged on the starboard side, the hulk slowly deteriorated.

Even in death, however, Fox attracted visitors drawn by the vessel’s fame. Arctic explorer Donald MacMillan photographed the wreck in 1926, dismasted but still solid, though the local Inuit had been salvaging loose wood from the hull. Accounts of visitors to Qeqertarsuaq mentioned the wreck through the 1930s, but in 1931 and 1934, visiting naturalist Tom Longstaff boarded the hulk to find it breaking apart. He pulled two oak treenails from the hull as souvenirs. In 1940, Fox finally broke apart when a spring storm swept into the harbor and smashed up the deteriorated hull, leaving, one account reported, “only parts of the metal engine” behind.

The cold spume of the sea sprays over the deck as the bow of Mary West buries itself in a wave. The wind whips around, chilling us to the bone, as we stand clustered on the small deck of the fishing boat. We’re two hours out of Aasiaat, a mainland port, making our way to Qeqertarsuaq, sailing across the waters of Disko Bugt, a bay that cuts into the western coast of Greenland above the 69th parallel. Icebergs, large and small, fill the sea, most of them towering above our deck. It is the height of the brief Arctic summer, and yet the temperature hovers just above 30° F.

Qeqertarsuaq, a small port community of a thousand, is more than two hundred years old. Founded by Danish traders and whalers, it was named Gødhavn, or “good harbor,” by them. Later known as Lievely, it became a major port of call for Danish, British and American whalers working in Arctic waters. Now known by its original name of Qeqertarsuaq, the settlement survives on fishing, hunting, tourism and the presence of the Arktisk Station — the Danish Polar Scientific Station of the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1906, it remains a center for Arctic research, hosting two hundred visiting scientists a year. It will be our home for the next week as we venture out to find and dive on the wreck of Fox.

We’ve traveled to this remote spot in search of a famous shipwreck for The Sea Hunters. This is our northernmost adventure. The team includes Mike Fletcher, his son Warren (our dive co-coordinator and underwater cameraman), land cameramen Marc Pike and camera and soundman John Rosborough. We rendezvoused in Iqualuit, the capital of Nunavut, where we took a small chartered plane across Baffin Bay to Aasiaat, where we boarded Mary West for the last leg of a thirty-six-hour trip.

Aasiaat, a small coastal settlement, allows the team to either familiarize, or in some cases, like mine, to refamiliarize, ourselves with the Arctic. For me, that involves a walk to the harbor front where Inuit hunters and fishermen are busy butchering fish and seals. One of the great delicacies of the Arctic is raw fresh seal — or so I’ve been told, somehow having missed this treat on previous northern expeditions. But now, standing on the shores of Aasiaat, with John Rosborough pointing a ru

With a smile, I pop the oozing morsel into my mouth, slowly savoring each chewy bite. I must look like I really enjoy it, because my gracious host cuts off a bit of fresh seal blubber and hands it to me. It truly is an honor and a gift not to be refused, so I pop that in, too, finishing off my snack by smacking my lips and licking the blood and glistening fat off my fingertips. He offers me another bite, but I politely decline with “Thanks, I’ve already had a big lunch.” We both laugh. Feeling fully reintegrated with the Arctic and like I’ve just swallowed a glass of oil in which sardines have been soaked, I rejoin the rest of the crew for the voyage across Disko Bay.

Qeqertarsuaq is a beautiful town, nestled against high cliffs that at present are carpeted with a summer bloom of grass and flowers. The tops of the cliffs are capped with snow, and in the distance, the solid mass of a glacier that covers the center of the island gleams in the sunlight. The houses, built on the crests of the rocks that line the coast and on the small bay that forms the harbor, are a well-kept array of brightly painted red, blue, green, orange and yellow buildings. Some of them, like the Qeqertarsuaq Museum, are old, dating to the nineteenth century. The museum, formerly the home of the inspektor, the government official in charge of this coast, was built in 1840. Solidly constructed of heavy beams atop a stone foundation, its red walls now contain displays that tell the history of the settlement’s Inuit and Danish inhabitants.

Here, we meet the museum’s director, Elisa Evaideen, and Karl Tobiassen, “an old Greenlander” who knows where all the wrecks on the coast are. Karl points across the harbor to a small cove, known to the locals as K’uigssarssuak, and says that that is where Fox ended her days. More surprisingly, he also tells us that, on the way in, we’d passed a small island, Qeqertaq, where a tall, red-painted metal stack stands as a navigational marker. It is the smokestack or fu

With the help of our host, the Arktisk Station, and its director, Bente Jessen Graae, we borrow an inflatable boat to reach the wreck site. We refill our dive tanks every day at the local fire hall (there are no dive shops north of 60 degrees). All this helps us to take advantage of the rare opportunity to dive down into history beneath the waters of the Arctic. Pulling into K’uigssarssuak’s small cove, we realize we will not have to search for the wreck — the tip of Fox’s boiler rises out of the water at low tide. Wedged into the rocks, just where we’ve tied up our boat, are Fox’s hawse pipes, the iron sleeves that once protected the wooden hull from the anchor chain. Pulled free of the wreck after Fox broke up, they were probably left here for salvage and then abandoned, just like the boiler. Wooden hull planking lies on the beach, nearly perfectly preserved. Close by is a section of Fox’s wrought-iron propeller shaft. I’m worried that the hulk, which broke apart in 1940, has been picked away and that nothing but the boiler remains. There’s only one way to find out, though. Pulling on our thick dry suits to keep out the freezing water and our heavy gear, Mike, Warren and I step off into the numbingly cold water and drop down to the bottom to see what remains of Fox.