This book deals with the under-ice Arctic voyage of the submarine USS Queenfish, the first of the Sturgeon class nuclear attack submarines, designed specifically to operate beneath the ice of the Arctic Ocean, and with a total complement of 105 men. Her captain, Alfred McLaren, was mandated to retrace the route of the submarine Nautilus from Bering Strait north to the North Pole, to compare ice conditions in 1970 with those reported by Nautilus in 1958. Thereafter he was to carry out an under-ice survey of the Siberian continental shelf in the Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi seas.
Queenfish had been commissioned in December 1966, and McLaren took command of her in August 1969. She put to sea from Pearl Harbor on 6 July 1970, and after calling at Seattle, passed through Bering Strait on 30 July. Having negotiated the hazards of deep-drafted floes in the shallow waters of the Chukchi Sea, which on one occasion gave her a clearance of only 30 feet above and below, having narrowly missed an unexpected iceberg, and having surfaced several times in polynyas, she reached the North Pole, where she surfaced, on 5 August. By then McLaren had perfected the techniques of locating polynyas and surfacing vertically in them. Before heading for the Laptev Sea, McLaren started south along the meridian of 25°E to investigate the Gakkel Ridge, where the configuration of the ridge suggested possible volcanic activity.
On 10 August, Mys Arktichesky, the northern tip of Severnaya Zemlya, was sighted through the periscope and then the survey of the Siberian continental shelf began. Staying out beyond the Russian 12-mile limit, Queenfish looped southeast, east, and northeast across the Laptev Sea. The seabed was found to be extremely irregular with numerous sea-mounts or possibly submarine pingos; these combined with deep-drafted floes made for a very tense experience for all concerned.
On 16 August, a Soviet convoy consisting of an icebreaker, a tanker, and four freighters was spotted through the periscope, and on the 18th a mother bear with two cubs was sighted and photographed through the periscope. Swinging around the north side of the Novosibirskie Ostrova, Queenfish entered the East Siberian Sea on 21 August. Here, too, conditions were found to be very challenging, with an irregular sea-bed and deep-drafted ice floes. Late on 22 August the submarine found herself in an impasse: deep-drafted floes ahead and close on either side, only 10 feet of water beneath her keel and only 10–15 feet between the top of the sail and the ice above. The difficult manoeuvre of reversing out of this situation lasted about an hour.
Passing north of Ostrov Vrangelya on the night of 24/25 August, the submarine reached open water in the Chukchi Sea on 27 August. During her under-ice voyage she had attempted surfacing through the ice 30 times, 22 times successfully. She emerged through Bering Strait on 29 August, and, after receiving an initially unfriendly welcome at Nome, Alaska, where she was at first mistaken for a Soviet submarine, she was back at Pearl Harbor by 11 September.
Throughout his account, for security reasons McLaren is somewhat vague as to his exact course; thus the somewhat cryptic phrase ‘the contour of interest’ recurs quite frequently. For those interested in such things, the technical details of the submarine are covered in considerable detail. However this reviewer found the excessive use of abbreviations somewhat tedious and confusing; some 31 abbreviations are listed in a glossary. Many of then seem superfluous, for example, it is not necessary to refer to an iceberg detector as an IBD.
Previous exploration of these Arctic waters is covered adequately. However, McLaren has relied on only two sources, namely Holland (Reference Holland1994) and McCannon (Reference McCannon1998). While these are excellent secondary sources, it would be useful to have reference to some primary sources, all of which would have been easily accessible to McLaren while working on his MPhil degree at the Scott Polar Research Institute. The total absence of Russian-language sources is particularly noticeable.
The title of the book, and the recurring comment that these waters were unexplored, are also troubling and misleading. While the detailed bathymetry of the Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi seas was undoubtedly unknown to the United States Navy in 1970, the characterisation of these waters and of their ice-cover as ‘unknown’ does a great disservice to the scientists and men of the USS Jeannette (1879–1881), of Fridtjof Nansen's Fram (1893–1896), of Baron Toll's Zarya (1900–1902), of the Tsarist Russian icebreakers Taymyr and Vaygach (1910–1915), and of the Soviet research vessel Sadko, which along with Georgiy Sedov and Malygin drifted around the Laptev Sea, beset in the ice for the winter of 1937–1938. Soundings, water sampling, and ice-observations were carried out in these waters on a regular basis by all of these vessels.
The number of mistakes in the spelling of place-names is rather unexpected. Thus, ‘More Lateryka’ (page 132) should be ‘More Laptevykh’; ‘Lotel'ny Island’ should be ‘Kotel'ny Island’; and ‘Maly Lyakhov Stolbovoy Island’ is in fact two islands, ‘Maly Lyakhov’ and ‘Stolbovoy’. And the description of the trans-polar drift as having an ‘easterly set’ (page 165) is not one to be expected in a book dealing primarily with navigation.
