Mark Synnott isn't afraid to be reckless
Writer Mark Synnott's ship, Polar Sun, navigates the northwest passage during a 2022 attempt to retrace the steps of famed British Explorer John Franklin.
The adventurer and author of Into the Ice recounts his harrowing attempt to sail the Northwest Passage and why he always listens to his gut. Photographs by Renan Ozturk
In 2022, Mark Synnott set sail from his home in Maine to complete the Northwest Passage, the legendary route through the Arctic that connects the Atlantic and Pacific. Synnott wanted to retrace the path of an 1845 expedition led by British explorer Sir John Franklin, who was attempting to chart the sea route over North America and open a valuable trade avenue with East Asia. But along the way Franklin's two ships, Erebus and Terror, became trapped in the ice, stranding the expedition. The crew of 129 men were never seen again and the mystery of what happened to them has spurred 180 years of speculation by scholars and obsessives.
Synnott originally planned to explore what happened to the crew as part of a longer voyage with his family down through the South Pacific. But he soon found his 47-foot fiberglass-hulled sailboat, Polar Sun, trapped in circumstances similar to those that proved catastrophic to the Brits. Synnott's new book, Into the Ice, recounts how his boat narrowly escaped its end in the Arctic—as well as what might have happened to the members of the Franklin expedition.
We caught up with Synnott as he and his family had resumed their voyage on Polar Sun—just hours before they were due to make their first landfall in the South Pacific—to discuss the allure of expeditions gone wrong and the fine line between adventurousness and hubris.
(Read an excerpt from Synnott's book on how he tried to solve the Arctic's biggest mystery.)
Can you start by setting the scene for where you are? I checked the GPS link to your boat, Polar Sun, and it looks like we're picking up where your book ends, with your plan to sail the South Pacific with your family.
Yes, we're currently on the boat, about 80 miles from our first stop, the island of Hiva Oa, which is part of the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia. I still can't see land, but we should arrive today, after 20 days at sea.
Doing the Northwest Passage was always tied to this larger 20-year plan to sail the South Pacific with my family. My wife Hampton and my youngest son Tommy are onboard right now, and my three older kids plan to visit us along the way. All the other expeditions in my career have been discrete projects that lasted a month or a few months. This one has become a more open-ended, all-encompassing thing, and it's the first one we're doing as a family. It's still a little unknown how far we plan to go but right now we have an agreement that we're going to sail through French Polynesia to the Cook Islands, then Samoa, to Fiji, to New Zealand by the end of 2026.
What originally got you interested in sailing the South Pacific?
In 2005 I led an expedition to the Pitcairn Islands with Jimmy Chin and a few others for National Geographic. We sailed there from French Polynesia. It was my first time sailing. I didn't know anything about this world we were in, and seeing all those beautiful atolls made me decide right then and there, I need to find a way to get into this. I remember asking so many questions on that trip to learn about sailing. I've always wanted to come back and explore. You're so much freer to do that if you have your own boat because a lot of the islands are very isolated. Synnott, left, and crew member Rudy Lehfeldt-Ehlinger below deck on Polar Sun. A crewmember surveys Pasley Bay, a remote stretch of water deep in the Canadian Arctic not far from where Franklin's two ships became stuck in the ice.
As you started planning the Northwest Passage specifically, what was about the lost Franklin expedition that drew you into the mystery?
The Franklin expedition was 129 guys and not one of them made it out alive to tell the story. Then, on top of that, if you consider the accounts from the Inuit, which have proven highly credible, you've got evidence that there were survivors from the Franklin expedition all the way into the mid-1850s. There's an Inuit testimony about a band of survivors from the expedition on the Melville Peninsula where a bunch of their papers were supposedly buried in a cairn 10 years after they left. It's fascinating to imagine what happened during all that time they were stranded in the Arctic. The Royal Navy officers were trained to keep a record of what happened on their expeditions. And there's a strong possibility that one of the last men standing was Francis Crozier, the second-in-command. He would have definitely been recording what was happening. So the fact that more information could be out there to shed light on this mystery is super intriguing.
(In 1845 explorers sought the Northwest Passage—then vanished.)
When your boat had a brush with the same fate as the Franklin expedition, getting trapped in the Arctic ice floes, was the writer in you thinking how great that would make bringing the story to life?
We were trapped there for 10 days versus 10 years, but I honestly don't think there was ever a moment during that time when I thought, 'Wow, this is going to make a great story.' My whole objective in doing the Northwest Passage was to not get caught in the ice. You really don't want that to happen, especially in a fiberglass boat. Now when I look back, from a safe distance here in the South Pacific, I can see so clearly how it makes the story so much better—and I'm kind of glad it worked out the way that it did, because it was an incredible experience. Synnott sailed through Pasley Bay in August, but summer in the arctic ends quickly and the bay was always at risk of freezing over completely.
On these expeditions, how do you decipher that fine line between maintaining an adventurous spirit and outright recklessness?
There have definitely been moments when I've crossed that line before. When we were filming the documentary Lost on Everest for Nat Geo [about Sandy Irvine and George Mallory's Everest expedition] I left the fixed ropes at 28,000 feet to try to find Sandy's body. There was eyewitness testimony that a body had been seen in a certain place high up on the mountain, but it wasn't on the standard route, so it required leaving the fixed ropes to get there. I took a lot of shit from different people, including family, because I had stepped over the line in that instance. But I knew in my gut it was something I was supposed to be doing. Whenever I get to the point of feeling that way, I just try to do everything I can to manage the risks to the best of my ability. I also try to remember that it's pretty risky just being alive. For me, all the best, most fun, rewarding, meaningful experiences have tended to be risky. Into the Ice is Synnott's third book.
Another thing that comes through in your book is people's enduring obsession with new frontiers, which drove Franklin's exploration. And I wonder if the notion of frontiers drives your own expeditions?
I got introduced to the whole world of climbing and exploration through reading as a kid. Prior to 1950, none of the 8,000-meter peaks in the Himalaya and Karakoram had been climbed before, but the subplot to a lot of the books I read as a kid was how that Golden Age of exploration was already over. I think one of the main reasons I became a big-wall climber was realizing that was still its own frontier, and there were giant cliffs people hadn't yet climbed. In a way, I'm still going with that, exploring giant unclimbed cliffs. I've got all my climbing gear here on the boat. There's a big cliff out on this French Polynesian island called Ua Pou, and I think I'm going to try to climb it. Of course, what I've also learned along the way is that the Golden Age is not over at all. There's so much of this planet that remains unexplored.
Since you mentioned the upcoming route on your voyage I've been wondering if you see this extending into a trip around the world?
That definitely falls into the category of not wanting to overcommit where we might end up. When people sail to some far away place like this, often they'll sell their boat, and I already know I don't want to do that. I see Polar Sun as a member of the family at this point. I want to get back to Maine eventually. For now, I'm just happy to see we've made it this far.
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