Breaking the ice — by cruise ship to the North Pole

I’m at the North Pole in an awkward orange suit. An hour ago, I abandoned the very comfortable ship that got me here, pretending some awful calamity had happened. Now, while I drift on an ice floe thousands of frozen kilometres away from land, the captain and crew of Le Commandant Charcot are busy co-ordinating a make-believe rescue operation. We are brewing tea from melted snow and playing card games inside an inflatable shelter. Outside, armed guards scan the flat, white, hostile void for encroaching polar bears.

Until recently, anyone wishing to visit the North Pole had limited options to choose from. One was a very long and uncomfortable ski trip; another was a voyage on a chartered Russian nuclear icebreaker. But if it is up to the French cruise company Ponant, visiting this once most extreme of destinations is about to become a lot more comfortable — stylish, even.

For Le Commandant Charcot, which entered service late last year, is a new type of icebreaking cruise ship, rated Polar Class 2, meaning it can operate year-round in ice that has built up over multiple years. (The US Coast Guard has commissioned two ships that will meet the same rating, though the first is not expected to launch until 2025, while no ship has yet been built to the higher Polar Class 1 standard). So accomplished is Le Commandant Charcot that in February it was used to break a path through Antarctic sea ice ahead of the RSS Sir David Attenborough, the British Antarctic Survey’s state of the art research ship.

Yet above the French vessel’s strengthened hull and pioneering propulsion system are five upper decks containing what is in effect a luxury hotel. There are 123 rooms and suites, including a spa and two restaurants serving a menu designed by Alain Ducasse. Soon, nobody will have to skip a yoga class on their way to the ultimate north.

Le Commandant Charcot’s first voyage to take paying passengers to the North Pole is due to depart from Longyearbyen, Svalbard, on July 8, with the ship expected to reach 90 degrees north on July 15. All being well, it will return three more times during the summer season. My voyage on the ship took place in September last year, on what was a test run to check the ship’s capabilities, a month ahead of its official christening in Le Havre. Onboard were the engineers who had built the ship, plus a mix of scientists, safety experts, travel agents, photographers, a couple of journalists and members of the Norwegian, Canadian and American coast guards.

We set off from Svalbard on September 1, using a hybrid-electric propulsion system fuelled by liquefied natural gas. The ship also boasts a navigation system that uses satellite data to plot a route through the constantly changing “street plan” of open water and ice.

It took us a day to reach the pack ice, which cracked around the hull in a satisfying, hypnotic spectacle. Giant shards slowly tilted upright and danced around the ship, their bright blue edges in contrast with the dark ocean below.

The noise was barely audible in my cabin but in the theatre, which is closer to the bow, lectures and films on Arctic explorations were given an extra layer of drama by the violent banging against the hull. The ominous thundering was at its loudest during a lecture about the history of Arctic exploration.

Among the many heroic early failures to reach the pole, we learnt about Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen’s 1893 attempt, which ended up taking more than three years and saw them drifting in pack ice for months aboard their ship Fram, an abandoned push for the pole on dog sleds, then a dash for safety in two kayaks. En route they spent a winter camping on a remote island in a shelter made of rock and moss, and survived attacks by both a polar bear and walrus.

In contrast, we glided up towards the pole in a week. As the GPS marked 90 degrees north, Captain Etienne Garcia, who had been involved with the ship’s development from the start, made an emotional announcement from the bridge, declaring Ponant’s navigational feat “a victory for all citizens of the world”. It was the first purpose-built passenger ship to reach the pole, the first LNG-electric hybrid ship, and the first French ship to do so. Moments later, “La Marseillaise” blasted into the howling Arctic wind, as crew and passengers gathered around a champagne buffet slowly hoisted through a hatch from the hangar below the helipad.

A day later, all that was a faint memory as we began the drill to test the ship’s safety protocols — which is how I ended up as a test subject for the unwieldy suit of orange neoprene. It had been carefully designed to keep hapless cruise passengers alive for six hours immersed in Arctic waters, if the indignity of looking like an orange Teletubby didn’t kill them first.

Gone were the crêpes and magnum bottles of Veuve Clicquot; the survival kit I had been handed for the next 24 hours contained a ration of 18 emergency food bars (gritty, yet oddly satisfying), water in tiny bags (confusing), a dull knife, a pair of gloves, sunglasses, lip balm and a tube of sunscreen. Outside the inflatable shelter, the wind-chill was minus 18C; inside, it was an almost toasty minus 2C, and we were encouraged to snuggle up.

As the cold settled into our bones, many were starting to have second thoughts about signing up for the exercise. I began to imagine the passengers that had stayed behind, having their chakras aligned at the spa or snuggling up with a book in the egg chairs behind the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking our camp in the distance.

If the Commandant Charcot has established that cruise ships can get safely to the North Pole, there remains the question of whether they should. The Charcot’s hybrid engine reduces emissions compared to conventional cruise ships, plus there are two scientific labs onboard that allow climate scientists to work in these inaccessible regions, but some will inevitably regret rather than celebrate Ponant’s North Pole record.

One argument in favour of venturing this far north is that, as Sir David Attenborough put it, “no one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced”. I’m not sure if I believe in the kind of trickle-down environmentalism that cruises for the lucky few propose. But spotting a polar bear and her cub on the way up certainly left me deeply impressed. And one clear benefit of being able to switch to battery power was that the surprisingly quiet ship didn’t disturb the bears as it silently loomed on their horizon.

The experience is hard to convey unless you’ve been there but the Inuit have a word for it: nanurevinja. I’m told it describes a mix of awe and reverence closely related to the hunt. Including, presumably, the terror of being hunted in return.

I learnt this from two Inuit hunters I met at the ship’s indoor pool. Adam Eskildsen and Ole Eliassen were travelling with their friend and interpreter, Nicolas Dubreuil, a formidable French adventurer who crossed the Greenlandic ice sheet eight times and has travelled to the North Pole three times before, on skis. Dubreuil built himself a home in Kullorsuaq, the isolated community in northern Greenland the men are from. He spoke fondly of the warm welcome they provided, and the decomposing head of a polar bear he received as a housewarming gift. Eskildsen and Eliassen had been invited to continue their cultural exchange and share their insights on the activities of the expedition team.

To the Inuit hunters, it was not the frozen world outside that inspired awe but the ship itself, built at a cost of about £250mn. Le Commandant Charcot’s myriad comforts were in such contrast with the Arctic wilderness that I imagined they might feel as if they had been beamed into an alien spaceship. Glass elevators shot past a five-storey LED artwork, decorative vases were glued to the furniture, single-origin chocolates appeared on bedside tables and there was a special room next to the sauna where passengers could cool off in artificial snow.

But the men, who were exceptionally gregarious and kind, adapted quickly. One festive evening, I found Eliassen doing the Macarena on the dance floor. The indoor pool had initially unnerved the men; there are no pools in Kullorsuaq and the frigid ocean there can kill anyone unlucky enough to fall into it in minutes. The first time they dared to enter the water, the muscular hunters looked vulnerable, clinging to Dubreuil as if the pool were a shark tank. But soon enough, the men delighted in the pleasantly warm water, returning every day to race other passengers.

Back on our emergency exercise, just as morale was starting to drop, the weather cleared. Dubreuil invited the participants who hadn’t quit early for an invigorating walk; the sort of activity that will be organised for passengers on future journeys. Now that the sun was out, circling low above the horizon, the scenery around the camp took on an otherworldly sheen.

A fog bow — an ethereal, almost white rainbow caused by sunlight hitting the water droplets in fog — appeared in the sky above the ship in the distance. As we carefully crossed the pressure ridges between floes, we found ourselves in pearly white forests of piled-up ice. Our immersion suits forced us into an awkward waddle but the walk lifted our spirits just enough to soldier through the last hours. I eventually managed to doze off for a few minutes but only after I surrendered my last bit of dignity and snuggled up to a stranger.

The first people to reach the pole, and not have their claims subsequently called into question, were on Roald Amundsen’s 1926 expedition. A team of 16 floated there in an airship. A Russian team landed three planes at the pole in 1948, and the following year two Soviet scientists parachuted there. It would take until 1977 for the first icebreaker to arrive at the pole.

Even now, and even in the kind of luxury afforded by the Commandant Charcot, reaching 90 degrees north offers the kind of experience that tourists like to go home and boast about (which baffles Eskildsen and Eliassen). I’ll admit that’s why I not only volunteered for the safety exercise but also for a so-called “polar plunge” into the open water behind the ship.

The crew installed a set of metal stairs on the edge of the ice floe. A rope was tied around my waist to avoid a freak current from sucking me under the ice, and in I went for a decidedly brief dip in all the world’s time zones at once. This proved to be not nearly as miserable as the final six hours spent inside the polar shelter, but my smugness lasted for weeks.

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