‘Into the Ice' Review: North by Northwest

Wall Street Journal

20-04-2025

Many people reassessed their lives during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mark Synnott, an accomplished mountaineer and writer, decided it was a good time to refit his sailboat, the Polar Sun, and navigate the Northwest Passage—the icy arctic waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 'Could I sail a forty-year-old fiberglass boat from Maine to Alaska—a voyage of some seven thousand miles—and live to tell my own tale?' he wonders. 'It was a question that would soon all but consume me, in the same way I knew it had done to the European explorers who had ventured into these same waters long ago when this part of the world was still a blank on their maps.'
For centuries the search for a polar trade route had indeed consumed—and bettered—more-experienced explorers, until Roald Amundsen successfully sailed it between 1903 and 1906. Today the passage remains a daunting journey fraught with danger, from the frigid waters and the shifting currents to 'Jakobshavn, the fastest-moving glacier in Greenland, which surges forward' up to 130 feet a day and is responsible for about 10% 'of all icebergs spawned from the Greenland Ice Cap.' Further complicating his adventure: Mr. Synnott was recently remarried and the father of a young son.
As he sat on his boat docked in its marina and contemplated the idea of traveling the Northwest Passage, Mr. Synnott, then in his 40s, asked himself: 'What do you really want to do with the time that you have left?' To which he reflected: 'I [want] to spend as much of it as possible with the two human beings sleeping below and with my three other children.' But he also admits that 'I'm someone who has always needed more than that. I need epic adventure and exploration in my life.' He would find both on this journey, and live to write about it in 'Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery.'
The mystery of the subtitle is what happened to John Franklin. On May 19, 1845, the Royal Navy expedition commander set off from Greenhithe, England, in search of the Northwest Passage. In September 1846, Franklin's two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, became trapped in the ice near King William Island in northern Canada. 'Not a single one of them made it out,' Mr. Synnott tells us of Franklin's crew, 'and no detailed written account of their ordeal has ever been found.' Solving that mystery became Mr. Synnott's mission and justification for leaving his family behind for much of this six-month lark. Lucky for him, his second wife, Hampton, herself somewhat of a free spirit, supported him.