When you sail into Nuuk fjord, it looks big. A wide expanse of water opens out in front of you. But sailing south of Nuuk, unless you looked at the map, you would hardly know that Ameralik Fjord is there. Passing the rocks that curve landward, you wouldn’t know that the rocky hills don’t simply close around a broad bay but instead continue to open inward into a long, straight, and sometime treacherous stretch of water almost sixty kilometres long.
At the wrong tide, I don’t like to pass its widening mouth, or creep between its islands and hidden skerries. At slack tide the fjord mouth looks like nothing, just a broad stretch of sea. But for half an hour or so at the rushing tide, it is a raging river within the sea itself, patches of water shuddering this way and that. Wild white water churns in strangely confined zones, hiding rocky pinnacles that reach up toward the elusive surface like submerged sentinels. Nearby, deceptively smooth surfaces are marked by ephemeral spirals, spinning downward. And when the tide slackens, all is still again, the water hiding its angry secrets for another six hours.
This wide open fjord plunges east, a deep glacial incision that cuts straight toward the ice cap, lined by featureless walls, long stretches with few safe anchorages. So when the wind tears down from the ice, it gets a good long run up and quickly whips into a rage before reaching the screaming fjord mouth.
I don’t like to go in there. But many people do. The hunting is good. The Norse once lived near the head of the fjord, now all but silted up, the green water turned pale brown by suspended particles of powder formed by the endless grind of ice on rock. I once took a small boat through that ghostly pale water near the head of the fjord. Unable to see the bottom, we found ourselves grind to a halt in shallow water. Stepping out of the boat with one foot to push us off the bottom, my boot sank quickly through a pasty substrate with no apparent end and I quickly withdrew back into the boat, realising that we were half floating, half stranded in a glue-like mixture. We paddled as hard as we could to escape.
This is also where Nansen and his men walked off the ice cap on their first crossing of the inland ice in 1889. Imagine. Thirteen months on the ice, and here is where they exited – one of the wildest stretches of water to drain the ice on the west coast.
“I shall never forget,” wrote Nansen, “what pleasure and enjoyment it was to get water again.”
He was damned lucky they rowed out on a good day. Transforming their equipment into a boat, they launched it into the opaque grey-blue water filled with rock flour, transitioning almost imperceptibly from mud to water. In this morasse, this mire, where being stuck could mean the end, down this long fjord that howls with bitter, angry squalls, through its mouth that twists and leaps over hidden rocks. This is where they ended their journey.
