A Voyage Near the Arctic Circle With Michener

We are at the midpoint between Asia and North America, a few miles south of the Arctic Circle in a part of the world being rediscovered as a destination for adventure travel unlike any other on this planet.

As our World Discoverer expedition ship slowly gets under way in the two-mile-wide strait, the bow is in U.S. waters and the stern is in Soviet waters.

A rubber Zodiac boat with its Eskimo crew and one passenger bounces over the waves toward us out of the Little Diomede harbor. The outboard motor is turned up to full speed. The four crew members are waving at the World Discoverer, as if imploring the ship not to leave behind its most distinguished passenger, who holds up his hand as if saying, “I’m sorry.”

A Fitting Climax

My wife Elfriede and I have shared many travel dreams, but in none of our fantasies could we have imagined a more fitting climax to the Tale of the North Pacific we’ve been living these past two weeks.

It’s a story of exploring the past and present of sub-arctic islands between Japan, Siberia and Alaska with James Michener, whose legendary dedication to research while working on a new novel almost got him left behind on Little Diomede.

The ever-alert Society Expeditions cruise staff had just double-checked the name tags down at the boarding deck and found that Michener had not turned over his tag to indicate he was back on board, as every passenger is required to do personally on this expedition.

Campus Home

The story began one afternoon in July when we visited Michener in his campus home at Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka, Alaska. He will live there during six months of each of the next two or three years to research and write his 34th book, a novel about Alaska.

During the other six months of the year he will return to his campus home and the creative writing program he is guiding at the University of Texas in Austin, where he has lived for three years while writing “Texas,” his recently completed novel to be published this month.

“With Alaska,” he told us that afternoon in Sitka, “I will be returning to the Pacific, where it all started for me.”

That was 38 years, 33 books, a dozen films and a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical ago, when an ex-Navy officer won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for “Tales of the South Pacific.”

Throughout all these years, 21 million people have bought copies of Michener’s books, and uncounted millions more have read them.

Now the same thing will happen in Texas, where Michener’s latest novel will be the theme of the state’s 1986 celebration of its 150th year since winning independence from Mexico.

A Growing Interest

Interest in what Michener will do with “Alaska” will grow steadily here the next three years and after publication of the novel.

“Early in my research,” he told us in July, “I want to travel through the Aleutian Islands and the islands of the Bering Sea. “That’s where Imperial Russia began its conquest of Alaska, which the empire held until the Czar sold it to the United States in 1867.

“If the Soviets ever try to back out on that sale, these islands are where the action could begin again.”

We talked about Seattle-based Society Expeditions, which sends its small but luxurious vessels to faraway places of the earth and was ready for a first adventure with the 150-passenger World Discoverer through the Aleutians and the Bering Sea the next month.

Michener and Mari, his American-born wife of Japanese heritage, were planning to take this voyage as a basis for his research. He was gracious enough to say that he was pleased that Elfriede and I were planning to join the same expedition.

We flew to Japan in August, where Mari was visiting friends and relatives. Michener would continue his work in Sitka, then fly in a small plane with the U.S. Immigration Service officers to meet the World Discoverer on the island of Attu, its first U.S. port.

All other passengers, a total of 101, were aboard when we sailed from Kushiro on Hokkaido, the northernmost main island of Japan. Some of our fellow passengers had boarded in the South Pacific, and would continue from Alaska for the first attempt at a west to east crossing through the ice floes of the Northwest Passage.

Experts Aboard

Society Expeditions had prepared for the Aleutian and Bering Sea expedition by bringing aboard as lecturers and guides four nationally known experts on sea birds, marine mammals and the history of these northern islands from earliest geological times to contemporary issues.

Mari Michener, a noted librarian in her own career, married Michener 30 years ago when he was writing “Hawaii,” and they have traveled the world together ever since.

Over the rough waters from Attu’s Massacre Bay, Michener came toward the Discoverer with the immigration officers and our pilot. All were wearing hooded parkas, boots, padded and water-repellent pants. He and Mari hugged and greeted each other. He soon had the passengers calling him Jim.

Attu, 1,600 miles west of Anchorage, is in the group that the 18th-Century Russians called the Near Islands, nearest to their homeland. Today it is manned by a small U.S. Coast Guard station.

The men stationed there take turns at all chores, “like in a family.” Executive Officer John Hall has been there five months, with seven to go. He was born in Van Nuys in Los Angeles. His parents live in North Hollywood; his wife and two young children live in Petaluma, Calif.

For adventure travelers, Attu is a treasure island of bird life and creatures of the sea. Walking trails are also rich in history. The first Aleutian peoples came from Asia at least 10,000 years ago. The Russians came in 1741, and within a century the fur traders had decimated the Aleutian people as well as the sea otters.

Imprisoned in Japan

When Japanese troops took Attu early in World War II, the remaining 40 Aleuts on the island, together with one Caucasian schoolteacher and his wife were imprisoned in Japan. American troops recaptured the island after heavy losses on both sides, following a landing in the bay that is still called Massacre Bay.

And so the tales of the North Pacific grew, and this was only the first of the islands on which we landed, day after day. Every landing had to be by Zodiac, through the surf and the rocks, “wet landings.” Michener, at age 78, made them all. Fortunately, he wasn’t in the same Zodiac with us when we were hit by an icy wave and had to return to the ship to change before trying the landing again.

Atka, the next stop after Attu, greeted us with whales in the bay. Ashore were three schools for Aleut children, a church and an airfield served by regular flights from Anchorage. Atka has plans for a pier and a fishing industry, for a hotel and restaurant to serve visitors who study birds and sea life.

Then, with just as abrupt a change of setting, we landed through the surf at Bogoslof, an island inhabited by sea lions, fur seals and thousands of birds, including Elfriede’s favorite, the puffin.

Michener has some difficulty with his left leg, yet he walked the lonely beaches, hands sometimes behind his back, listening, watching, thinking, feeling. He absorbs it all without taking notes. “A novel is like an iceberg,” he said. “The biggest part is below the surface. You never see it, but it has to be there.”

Capt. Heinz Aye, skipper of the World Discoverer, was always ashore with us to observe the wildlife and to make friends with the people, inviting many of them aboard. After captaining expedition ships around the continents of the earth, he is creating his own story as an Ambassador at Sea. Everywhere our walks ashore were themed by the cruise staff to conservation and the preservation of nature.

Heart of the Issues

St. Paul’s Island in the Pribiloffs brought all passengers, and Michener’s research, into the heart of contemporary issues, with their impact on preserving nature and traditional life styles. Aleuts have returned from university training on the mainland to administer native corporations in control of lands and financial assets provided by the U.S. government through the Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.

In the lobby of the King Eider Hotel on St. Paul Island, James and Mari Michener could relax in comfort with other passengers after touring the island by bus to see wildlife sanctuaries. The hotel, with modest doubles priced about $82, recently hosted a party of 50 nature lovers who flew in from Anchorage. The King Eider restaurant, overlooking the water, specializes in fresh fish.

Nearly 200 years ago the Russians forcibly brought Aleuts to this uninhabited island and used them to harvest fur seals.

The U.S. Eskimo-inhabited island of Little Diomede is just two miles across the Bering Strait from the Soviet military observation base on Big Diomede. What delayed James Michener on Little Diomede until the Discoverer almost left for Nome without him?

High school teachers Larry and Shirley Preszler began it by bringing out a copy of “Poland” for Michener to autograph. Then, as he told us, “books started coming out of the woodwork.” He added with a twinkle, “I don’t know how I’ll go over with my next book in New York or Los Angeles, but I’ve already got it made big in Little Diomede.”

The World Discoverer and Society Explorer will cruise the Aleutians and the Bering Sea next summer, starting in July. This year’s price for the Kushiro-Nome cruise started at $3,700. The new prices will be announced soon, but aren’t expected to be much more. For information contact Society Expeditions, 723 Broadway East, Seattle, Wash. 98102, phone (800) 426-7794.