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National Geographic
14-05-2025
- National Geographic
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.
Washington Post
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Book Review: Mark Synnott heads ‘Into the Ice' to chase the maritime mystery of Sir John Franklin
Mark Synnott admits in the introduction to his new book that 'it is out in the high and wild places in this world that I've always felt the closest to whoever it is that I really am.' While not exactly poetry, it's a good summary of the best parts of 'Into the Ice,' Synnott's third work of long-form nonfiction after 'The Impossible Climb' and 'The Third Pole.' Part travelogue, part historical mystery and part memoir, 'Into the Ice' will appeal to fans of extreme adventure stories, nearly all of whom will never sail a boat through the Northwest Passage.
Associated Press
14-04-2025
- Associated Press
Book Review: Mark Synnott heads ‘Into the Ice' to chase the maritime mystery of Sir John Franklin
Mark Synnott admits in the introduction to his new book that 'it is out in the high and wild places in this world that I've always felt the closest to whoever it is that I really am.' While not exactly poetry, it's a good summary of the best parts of 'Into the Ice,' Synnott's third work of long-form nonfiction after 'The Impossible Climb' and 'The Third Pole.' Part travelogue, part historical mystery and part memoir, 'Into the Ice' will appeal to fans of extreme adventure stories, nearly all of whom will never sail a boat through the Northwest Passage. The travelogue moments of the book are the best written, as Synnott and his crew sail his 47-foot boat Polar Sun east to west through the passage, from Nuuk, Greenland, to Nome, Alaska. 'When the sun shone directly into the bay, the light reflected off the faces of the ice in infinite shades of blue and green, like a polar disco ball,' Synnott writes on a summer evening in 2022 while conjuring likenesses for icebergs with his young son. (Tommy and Synnott's wife, Hampton, herself an accomplished sailor, join the crew for a couple weeks at the start of the trip.) The 6,736-mile journey takes 112 days, which provides plenty of time for readers to learn the story of British Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and the 128 men he led on an expedition to discover the passage in the mid-19th century. The mystery of what happened to Franklin and all of his men has never been entirely solved, though the wrecks of both his ships were discovered earlier this century. Synnott sets out 'in the wake of Erebus and Terror, (to) anchor in the same harbors, see what Franklin and his men saw… Maybe if I fully immersed myself into the Franklin mystery, I might discover what really happened to him and his men.' Spoiler alert: He doesn't. You would have heard about it by now. But he does dive deep into the historical record, and that's where the book loses some momentum. At times it reads like an academic paper, as Synnott references the work of various historians through the years who have investigated the Franklin expedition. He takes us back nearly two centuries to recount Franklin's career and what is known about his third attempt to map the Northwest Passage from 1845-1847. The tale is more compelling when Synnott is engaging with living Franklin-ologists like Canadian Tom Gross, who has been searching for Franklin's tomb and collecting evidence of what happened for decades. Gross was scouting King William Island in a small plane in 2015 when he observed 'two black stones standing up vertically on a ridge' that did not belong a few miles inland. But in their excitement at the discovery, he and his co-pilot forgot to note the GPS coordinates and he's still looking for what he believes were markers of Franklin's tomb a decade later. If all this sounds like it might be better watched on TV, you're in luck. National Geographic funded Synnott's voyage, as it has many of his previous adventures, and the stunning scenery and drama on the high seas is available to view on Disney+ as 'Explorer: Lost in the Arctic.' If you're not a subscriber, the best parts of the book let readers travel in their mind 'beneath massive waterfalls that cascaded from the heights… thousands of feet tall, and where they poured into the sea, clouds of fulmars, cormorants and kittiwakes circled in the salty mist.' ___ AP book reviews:
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Yahoo
One of history's greatest mysteries: Behind the deadly quest to conquer the Northwest Passage
In May 1845, one of England's most storied naval officers, Sir John Franklin, launched an expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. Once thought to be ice-free, the legendary North Pole journey had been mythically described — without any real evidence — as an earthly paradise with palm trees, dragons, and 4-foot-tall pygmies. Forget about blizzards, polar bears, and Arctic typhoons. But, Franklin and a crew of 128 men never made it out of the great Northwest. And what became known as 'the Franklin mystery' has led to more than 175 years of speculation and 'spawned generations of devoted 'Franklinites' obsessed with piecing together the story,' writes New York Times bestselling author and adventurer Mark Synnott in his travelogue-mystery, 'Into the Ice, The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery' (Dutton). Synnott, a veteran of international climbing expeditions, including in the Arctic, Patagonia, the Himalayas, the Sahara, and the Amazon jungle, had become obsessed with what really happened to Franklin and his crew. Thus, he embarked on his 40-year-old fiberglass boat, Polar Sun, from Maine through the Northwest Passage in order to witness what Franklin encountered some nearly two centuries prior. His greatest hope was to find the famous skipper's records and diaries, possibly on King William Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, where Franklin's two ships became stranded in 1846 and froze in the sea ice just north of the island that lies between Victoria Island and Boothia Peninsula. 'Nearly every shred of the Franklin expedition's recorded history has been lost to the winds of time and . . . the story of Franklin's expedition is one of cannibalism and chaotic disintegration of order although one small band may have survived for years,' writes Synnott who confesses he got caught up in his own 'morbid fascination' with what happened to the skipper who was left stranded in the central Arctic. Franklin's tomb and logbooks are still out there. Finding them would be like finding the Holy Grail, writes the author. 'I had in fact climbed Everest, and now here I was apparently going for the sailing equivalent.' Synott never found Franklin's frozen resting place, but he learned that he had died on June 11, 1847, two years after leaving England. Moreover, some 105 survivors from his crew crossed the ice and tundra, dragging their boats and hoping for open water. 'But one by one, every single sailor must have succumbed to a variety of maladies including, we can assume, starvation, tuberculosis, scurvy and trench foot,' writes Synnott as he sat with his own crew members looking over the open ocean and pack ice. It was here where Franklin's crew likely deserted their ships and headed off on a doomed death march, ignorant of the dangerous polar bears that traveled across the treacherous ice floes. They likely had even less knowledge than the nomadic Inuit people who had lived in the north for more than 4,000 miles, traveling with the seasons via dogsleds and kayaks — facts the British chauvinistically believed they were discovering for the first time. The Inuit people knew how to eat 'Greenland food — the seafood, sea and whale oils, and fatty meats that prevented scurvy when there were no fruits and vegetables.' In the same locale, members of Franklin's expedition starved and were forced to eat other crew members. In 1854, Dr. John Rae of the Hudson's Bay Company discovered that Franklin and his ships had become trapped in ice since September 1846, and Franklin died nearly a year later. The explorers had left notes in tin containers they buried under rocks on King William Island confirming that 24 other crew members died and the 105 remaining survivors abandoned ship and headed south toward Back's Great Fish River. Traversing the ice-bound sea lane across the Arctic Ocean connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had long been a dream of explorers as a shortcut to the Far East, and for England, this northern route could break Spain's colonial-era stronghold on world trade. When John Barrow, secretary to the British Admiralty made the offer in 1844 of 20,000 pounds sterling — the equivalent of $2.5 million today — for the discovery of 'a northern passage for vessels by sea between the Atlantic and Pacific,' Franklin was chosen to lead the voyage although he was 59 years old at the time and retired for 18 years. Franklin had been to the Arctic three times and was a famous and deeply respected explorer nicknamed 'the man who ate his boots' after half his crew died on his first expedition and he ate his own boot leather to stay alive. This time, he set sail with stores of 7,000 pounds of pipe tobacco, 3,600 gallons of 135-proof West Indian rum, 5,000 gallons of beer, and a daily food allowance for each sailor of three pounds of grub. Franklin mania consumed the British public, and expeditions and search parties were sent out only to find mutilated corpses. In the end, writes the author, 'The Inuit held the keys to this kingdom . . . they had long ago explored every inlet, strait and island in this Arctic maze. All the explorers had to do was ask.'
