or signup to continue reading "Where are all the whales?" someone asked on an eerily-warm Arctic morning. The haunting answer was waiting a few hours later on the peak of a primeval rock-strewn island. A large, rusted iron cross gripped by heavy granite boulders stood defiantly on the summit of Ytre Norskaya, one of many islands that comprise Svalbard, an archipelago of serrated mountains and yawning blue-white glaciers halfway between Norway and the North Pole.
No one knows who erected the cross. But it serves as a sentry over a wide bay once filled with so many bloated whale carcasses men used them as stepping stones, walking end to end across the water without getting their feet wet. From the early 1600s Dutch whalers and later, the English, invaded the Arctic in flimsy wooden ships armed with harpoons and ropes to hunt the bowhead whale, famed for its blubber and bone.
Bowheads are prodigiously strong but remarkably sensitive, startling when a bird gently touches the water's surface. One is reported to have dived in such painful fury after being harpooned by the English ship Truelove in 1856 that it plummeted for three minutes before snapping its neck as its head penetrated two metres into the mud of the ocean floor. These waters ran crimson as the bowhead was hunted to near extinction.
Hundreds of ill-clothed sailors also died pursuing them. But the Dutch, instead of burying their men at sea, laid them to rest on Ytre Norskaya. The Arctic, though, is as contemptuous of d.