NFB - Arctic Mission - Documentaries

INTERVIEW WITH JEAN LEMIRE

Photo - Jean Lemire Interviewer: Tell us about your film on the expedition.

Lemire: What we want to do with The Great Adventure is really try and bring everyone on board, so that they become privileged witnesses - as we were during the whole voyage - and are really in a position to reflect. The film is a reflection on the Arctic and the climate change it's facing, but it goes farther than that. It shows the Arctic as it's rarely been shown, with all the challenges, especially in terms of navigation. So it's really an expedition where people can relive what we lived on the ship: lots of challenges in terms of ice, but especially a broad reflection on Inuit culture in the face of climate change. We'll really see a difference between the various regions of the Arctic: those which are more affected by global warming, like the Hudson Bay sector, the Beaufort Sea and the south of Siberia, in comparison with what's happening in the central and upper Arctic regions, which are somewhat less affected by global warming.

Interviewer: Did the idea you had at the beginning resemble what you actually lived through?

Lemire: Yes. Actually, if you look at the script, it's almost all there. Where we had a little more difficulty is that we had an especially tough year in terms of ice. So navigating was not easy. In that sense, we lost a lot of time. Whenever there was an opening in the ice, we had to go forward. So we had planned to make some of the stopovers last much longer, with a lot more contact with the Inuit, but it didn't work out that way. That's what we missed the most. But actually, you have to divide the voyage into two parts. There was the whole Eastern Arctic part, where we were constantly battling the ice. Then when we arrived in the Western Arctic, we really felt the effects of climate change. It was an exceptionally mild autumn, so we were able to stay longer than we'd planned in the Western Arctic. When we decided to go through Bellot Strait, our biggest fear was that normally the passage closes up at Point Barrow around September 15. This year, we didn't even get to Point Barrow until September 21 and we stayed there; we could have stayed even longer because the ice field disappeared in less than five to seven days. So this was really an exceptional autumn for the Beaufort Sea. And that was lucky for us because otherwise we would have been really stuck in the Beaufort Sea. We had lots and lots of incredible encounters with wildlife. We had our fill of polar bears - there was so much ice that obviously there was a lot of wildlife. It was quite an extraordinary human adventure. We almost lost the ship on two occasions. We had to fight against the ice a lot. And without a doubt, one of the surprises of the shoot was the discovery we made about the Franklin expedition. It's something that might even change that whole story, so we're pretty pleased about it.

Interviewer: Can you tell us about it?

Lemire: What happened was that instead of taking all the information from the British Navy like everyone else has done to try and find the Franklin ships, we concentrated on what the Inuit told us. We set out to explore the site based on the accounts that are passed on from generation to generation by the oral tradition. So we went to a sector that had already been inspected by Parks Canada, and we found several elements that Parks Canada identified as belonging to one of the Franklin ships. This was in a sector that has been completely ignored for the past 150 years because all the searches have been done much farther north. We just set out with the Inuit information, which indicated that the ship had probably drifted farther south in the ice. That fit with what the Inuit said, so we went and had a look. We checked it out and found several elements that apparently - according to the tests done by English museums -correspond to a ship built between 1800 and 1850 - that's smack in the right period. And don't forget, there were not a whole lot of English ships built between 1800 and 1850 that went to the Arctic. So it was probably either the Terror or the Erebus. We found the elements on an island that doesn't even have a name; it's never really been explored before, except once in 1990 I think. It's really a discovery, I think, that will change the direction of all subsequent searches to find the famous Franklin shipwrecks.

Interviewer: Did you make any other discoveries?

Lemire: Actually, we made some pretty funny discoveries. There's one that won't even be in the film. We found a bunch of bottles that had been put out to sea for the 150th anniversary of Guinness. And...

Interviewer: When was that done?

Lemire: From memory, I think it goes back to around 1950. The bottles were cast out to sea, specially engraved for the event and had messages inside. And we found some of those bottles on Coats Island. Obviously, that gave us a good idea of how the currents in the Arctic work. What's funny is that we found about 15 bottles, and in each one there's a message. Every time, you win a case of Guinness. So there are around fifteen cases of Guinness waiting for us in England somewhere!

Interviewer: You haven't contacted the people at Guinness?

Lemire: No, well, we started making contacts - obviously we could get some publicity out of this, but we didn't want to. We haven't really had time yet to look into it yet. But it was a great discovery.

Interviewer: What are the highlights of the expedition that we'll see in the film, especially with relation to climate change?

Lemire: Actually, there are two. There's Hudson Bay, which was quite upsetting for us because we found two polar bear carcasses on the beaches. And you can really see that those polar bears are at the end of their energy resources. So that was clear proof that in the Hudson Bay sector, the decrease in the ice field due to warming has a direct impact on the whole ecosystem. Since polar bears are at the top of the food chain, they're the ones that pay the price, because if there's less ice, there are fewer seals. And if there are fewer seals, obviously it's much harder for the bears to find food. They also use the ice to migrate. It's clear that the polar bear population in Hudson Bay is in real danger. And we found proof of that.

The other really strong moment was of course Bellot Strait, where we were stuck in the ice for seven days. That was really something, having to wait all those days, just wait and wait. The more we waited, the more the North was closing up. And at a certain point, we could only go in one direction. I remember on the last day, I gave myself two tides to try and get through, in conditions that we swore we would never tackle. We were in seven- to eight-tenths ice. At the first tide we tried, and it didn't work. We had one tide left and we finally managed to get through. If we hadn't gotten through with that tide, we would have all gone home. The mission would have been over.

Interviewer: When you say all gone home, you mean all but the ship, which was still stuck in the ice. Would you have left it there, and gone to ask for help?

Lemire: In fact, if we'd gotten stuck, it's almost certain that we'd have lost the ship, because the pressure was really, really strong and the ship would probably have been crushed like a matchbox. So obviously before getting into a situation like that, we had another option left. We would have had to take it very, very quickly. There was a passage open. If we had gone back, we would have headed for Pelly Bay and Igloolik. That was our only option, because we knew there was a coast guard vessel in that sector. But if we had set out to cross Bellot in that ice and gotten stuck... That almost happened, but we managed to get unstuck twice. If we had gotten stuck and the change of tides had recompacted all that ice, it would almost certainly have been the end of our vessel, or at least the damage would have been considerable. We certainly didn't want to leave another shipwreck in the Arctic. I don't think there was any danger for our lives, because Bellot Strait is only about a mile wide. We would have been able to get to shore, but obviously, it would have been a huge loss. We would have lost the vessel and created pollution. That would have been terrible. It was really close, but in the final analysis, I think the crew reacted with extraordinary professionalism. Everyone was really concentrated, we fought hard, and we made it through.

Interviewer: When the film is screened, what will we feel as we watch it?

Lemire: I think people will really understand that the Arctic is like the canary in the coal mine. At this point, the Arctic is saying loud and clear to anyone who wants to hear that things are not going well. There is clear proof of that, especially in the Western Arctic where we could really feel the effects of climate change. When we worked on the Miraï, the Japanese ocean-going vessel that had Canadians, including Eddy Carmack, on board, we really understood that major changes are happening in terms of water temperature. There are lots of changes going on in water mixing. There is much more fresh water now than salt water, which changes just about everything in how the currents function. It has also been observed that with the decreased ice cover, more and more water is transferred from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic Ocean. So there are some very, very important changes happening in terms of the entire marine food chain. What also struck us a lot was seeing that the permafrost really is melting, and once that process is underway it's almost irreversible. So we were obviously struck by villages like Shishmaref or even Point Barrow where you really see that the beaches are disappearing. There are places in southern Siberia that are losing up to thirty metres of shoreline every summer.

So what is important, I think, at least for the first film, is to give people a general sense that the Arctic is threatened, and to encourage them to reflect on the importance of the Arctic in terms of essential elements for climate regulation of the whole planet. The Arctic and the Antarctic - that's why we went to the Antarctic, too. It's the poles that run the entire planet in terms of climate. I often make the comparison with a car battery: if the poles of the battery don't work, the entire car doesn't work. That's a little bit what's happening with the Arctic and the Antarctic. And if people can remember that, we will already have succeeded in getting the message across.