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ExxonMobil in Alaska: Passage to Prudhoe Author shares impressions of 10,000 mile voyage of SS Manhattan from Pennsylvania to Alaska, via the Northwest Passage Bern Keating The Humble Way, fourth quarter 1969 Petroleum News editor’s note: Oil transport was one of the key challenges associated with commercializing a remote field such as Prudhoe Bay. To explore the feasibility of an Arctic marine transportation system, ExxonMobil’s Humble Oil & Refining led the world’s first voyage of a commercial tanker, the SS Manhattan, through the Northwest Passage in late August of 1969. I planted my felt-lined boots atop a six-foot ice hummock, surveyed the grim desert of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago about me, and thrilled to the heady knowledge that I was the first person ever to stand on one of the last bits of untrammeled land on our planet.
Aboard the SS Manhattan, I had examined charts of Viscount Melville Sound which showed vast areas where no ship had ever passed to take soundings. Our radar fixes on landmarks showed little-known islands such as this one to be as much as six miles from where our charts placed them.
Standing on this bit of virgin earth, I savored the kind of sensation which Neil Armstrong must have felt when he stepped onto the moon.
It was September and winter had arrived in the Arctic. The sun rose late, skimmed low across the edge of the sky and set early so that daylight hours passed quickly — fiery sunrise lasting till noon followed by flaming sunset and darkness.
Rarely was the snow a reasonable white. Its sunny surfaces glowed with orange light while deep purple masked its shadowy slopes.
Skimming into the atmosphere at low angles and bouncing from snowbank to cloudbank and back, the sunlight played weird tricks with the scenery.
Two and sometimes three coastlines seemed to loom over nearby islands in shimmering layers of mirage.
Broken ice took on fantastic shapes — submarine conning towers, bears, walrus, musk oxen, igloos — anything the imagination might conjure up.
Compasses useless due to solar storm At night great sheets of northern lights twisted and coiled overhead. A solar storm had driven the magnetic pole miles from its normal site so that our magnetic compasses were useless. In that harsh world, even the familiar sun, the source of all life, was hostile.
And yet the ice was dotted as far as I could see with men who had asked to be transported to this hostile world. Obscured below the waist by blowing snow, they happily pursued the esoteric craft of their infant science of ice studies. Just now, they were drilling holes through that monstrous floe, in some places 14 feet thick, and testing cores of ice for strength and salinity.
In the distance rested the immense bulk of the Manhattan and the potbellied shapes of Canadian and American icebreakers, the ships which had brought these men to this rendezvous with history.
The events that led to our improbable presence in that remote and uncomfortable corner of the planet began in 1968 when Humble Oil & Refining Company with Atlantic Richfield Company discovered a vast oil field on the North Slope of Alaska. Experts have recently estimated it to contain as much as 10 billion barrels of oil, making it almost twice as large as any other known oil field in North America.
But the market for most of that oil is America’s East Coast. Between producer and consumer, as the snowy owl flies, lie more than 3,200 miles of muskeg, tundra, and forest — frozen in winter, soggy in summer, difficult to cross in any season.
As an alternative, there’s the Northwest Passage through the icy waters across the top of North America. Could a tanker be outfitted as an icebreaker to bring out the oil by this route?
Humble’s Marine Department decided to find out.
A task force under the direction of engineer Stanley Haas conducted exhaustive studies and analyses of ships and ice. They eventually concluded the idea of an icebreaking tanker was theoretically feasible. Accordingly, Humble leased the Manhattan, of 115,000 deadweight tons, the biggest and most powerful tanker under the American flag.
Shipwrights went to work outfitting the vessel with an icebreaking bow that extended its length to 1,005 feet and adding a belt of armor around the waterline to protect the thin inner haul. A corps of engineers and ice scientists was assembled and an elite crew of sailors was recruited from Humble’s fleet. Careful plans were made to make the Northwest Passage, a 470-year-old dream, practical reality.
When I joined the crew in the shipyard in Chester, Pa., under the blazing August sun, cranes were swinging aboard sleds, parkas, insulated boots, thermos bottles, sleeping bags, rifles, hand warmers, snowmobiles, ear muffs — all part of the 8,000 items of stores and provisions for a modern Arctic expedition.
We sailed the next day on August 24, 1969, with a complement of 35 shipyard hands, welders, riggers and engineers still attending to last minute details. Next day, at Delaware Capes, tugs arrived with barges containing the Manhattan’s fuel order of 184,000 barrels of bunker oil for its engines and those accompanying icebreakers.
Zigzagging between icebergs Most of the shipyard personnel went home with the tugs. But some stayed and worked virtually without sleep on the 678-mile ride to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Here, we made our first stop en route to the Northwest Passage.
Beyond Halifax, which lies on the 45th parallel, halfway from the Equator to the North Pole, air and water temperatures dropped sharply.
By September 1, in Davis Strait between Greenland and Baffin Island, the Manhattan was zigzagging between majestic icebergs gliding southward on the Arctic Current. We changed from summer gear to woolen shirts and windbreakers. At night I lay awake listening to chunks of ice clunking down the ship’s sides.
Shortly after sunrise observers went aloft in one of our two helicopters. They reported exciting news. The notorious Baffin Bay sea-ice pack — a drifting killer that crushed and sank 500 whaling ships during the 19th century — lay only a few miles westward. It offered an opportunity to give the Manhattan its first trial by ice. So, the big ship’s master, Captain Roger Steward, turned off course and headed for the waiting pack.
For hours, the Manhattan bashed through immense floes, shattering ice six to ten feet thick. The ship put on a dazzling show of power, hurling great chunks of ice and spray into the air. Foreign observers with experience in Siberian, Greenlandic, and Baltic ice fields admitted their previous skepticism about the Manhattan’s icebreaking ability had been considerably diluted.
But they warned that fields of ice packed solid by heavy wind pressure awaited us in the channels of the Canadian Arctic Islands. Such conditions would offer far more resistance to our passage than the free-floating ice of the Baffin pack, they pointed out.
We steamed on to Thule in Greenland through a metropolis of icebergs spawned from Northwestern Greenland’s glaciers. The sea was a museum of weird ice sculpture — cocked hats, horned Viking helmets, skyscrapers, butterfly-roofed auditoriums, skulls. They passed in silent procession, shooting flashes of cold light from crystal-hard surfaces. Even the most phlegmatic of us confessed an eerie feeling that the bergs possessed some kind of inhuman intelligence and a cold, alien malevolence.
Sailed for Lancaster Sound On September 4 at Greenland, divers from our Canadian icebreaker escort, John A. MacDonald, swam beneath the Manhattan and reported her hull and screws undamaged by the tussle with the Baffin pack.
With this heartening news, we sailed for Lancaster Sound where the Northwest Passage begins. Most of us felt the insouciant self-confidence enjoyed only by the innocent. Our ice veterans reserved their huzzas.
Halfway through the Canadian Archipelago in Viscount Melville Sound, we hit the first ice field which had been compacted under wind pressure. We soon discovered that the veterans were justified in withholding their enthusiasm.
Amid what one of them called “the aroma of evaporating euphoria,” the Manhattan thrashed helplessly for hours. Squeezed by wind-driven ice eight feet thick and abraded by a snow cover that acted like sandpaper in setting up friction against its long, flat sides, the great ship ground to a halt.
The Johnny Mac, with its fat midsection, suffered less from snow friction. It came to our rescue, cutting a channel beside us to relieve pressure against the Manhattan’s sides.
With freedom to move, we crunched forward once again, only to slow inexorably to a stop. Again the doughty Johnny Mac broke us loose. And again we hurled ourselves at the ice.
With increasing experience, the Manhattan’s officers learned what their huge craft could do in ice. They relied less and less upon assistance from the Canadian icebreaker. In time, they were taking the tanker through the frozen sea with a sureness that restored the confidence of the timid and converted the skeptics permanently to the conviction that the Manhattan would succeed.
The season advanced rapidly as we inched westward through the heavy pack.
One morning the plastic frame of my sunglasses snapped with a loud report when I stepped from the warm galley into the numbing cold of the poop deck. Changing film in a camera became a race against frostbite, and occasionally I had to abandon the effort when a balky camera kept my hands exposed so long that tears swam into my eyes from the pain.
Polar bear tracks At first, ice parties journeying away from the ship carried rifles grudgingly and only from a sense of duty. Grudgingly, that is, until the morning we awaked after a night stopped in the ice to find the tracks of a polar bear circling the ship several times. At one point, the half ton brute had mounted an ice blister just below the main deck and had stretched to sniff the enticing aroma from the galley — or was it from cabins where the crew lay sleeping?
As we neared the western end of the channel through the archipelago, our officers debated which of two routes to take into the Beaufort Sea.
We could follow McClure Strait along the northern coast of Banks Island or the Prince of Wales Strait around its eastern and southern coast. The McClure Strait route offered the most severe challenge, for westerly winds blow ice from the polar pack into the Strait where it piles up into a 220-mile stretch of tangled and storm-wracked floes. No ship has ever fought through McClure Strait from the east into the teeth of those westerly winds. But the Manhattan was there for research. And our officers had become so confident in the great ship’s strength that they chose to attempt the more difficult passage in hopes of achieving a historical first.
Into the wilderness of McClure Strait ice we went.
But on September 11, after fighting 120 miles into the rugged pack, the Manhattan became beset once again. Around us was a solid sheet of ice 12 feet thick. It was hummocked with ridges of hard polar ice indicating occasional thicknesses up to 100 feet.
Aerial reconnaissance by laser beam, infrared photography, and side-scanning radar carried by Canadian and U.S. Coast Guard airplanes showed worsening conditions for 80 miles ahead. In view of these reports, our officers decided further efforts in McClure Strait were unwarranted.
They carried out the difficult job of turning around, for a ship as long as three football fields needs plenty of room even in the open sea.
Then we sought out a lead of weak ice that showed up on the airborne radar scanners. With airplanes and helicopters scouting ahead, the Manhattan returned the distance in ten hours which it had taken two days to cover upon entering McClure Strait. Our conning officers had acquired such skill in the newborn art of ice navigation by big ships that they seldom called on the Johnny Mac for help.
A sidestream of polar ice from McClure Strait flows halfway through Prince of Whales Strait, and this pack was waiting for us as we turned south. For 70 miles the ship fought through a massive field of thicker ice than the one that stopped us in McClure, but the Manhattan plowed unaided.
At 2:34 o’clock on the afternoon of September 14, the Manhattan’s bow broke through the far side of the Prince of Wales Strait ice pack and into open water.
A pod of seals stared at us in amazement and circled around the ship. On the snow-covered slopes of Victoria Island to the east, a herd of musk oxen briefly watched our passage and resumed grazing what appeared to be a bank of frozen gravel devoid of any herbage. Caribou roamed the crest of the coastal hills.
From the helicopter, I spotted five polar bears going about their perpetual nomadic ramblings on the ice. (By then, only the most ardent of the scientists wandered on the ice beyond rifle range; and none of the crew did.)
But for all the wildlife, not one trace did we see of human presence: no buoy, cabin, tower, lighthouse, radar beacon, sledge, dog, or boat.
1,000 miles left to Barrow Now only chunks of weirdly eroded and mud-spattered ice floated in the 1,000 miles of sea that separated us from Point Barrow, Alaska.
Still, there was reason for caution. The Beaufort Sea ice pack lay to the north, and in September, wind and current normally begin moving it southward. Dozens of vessels, tardy about escaping the autumnal Beaufort Sea, have been crushed between shoals and advancing ice.
So we skimmed along the southern edge of the pack, making westing exactly along the 71st parallel.
Lookouts kept one eye on the windsock and the other peeled for the first sign of southward movement of Beaufort Sea ice.
At Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, site of the great oil strike, we steamed inside a 45-mile-long string of gigantic ice islands stranded on the 25-fathom curve, indicating a thickness of over 150 feet.
The hazards of navigating so close to shore to avoid the ice were brought home when a great swirl of muck in our wake send the horrified bridge gang racing to the fathometer. It showed that we had just crossed an uncharted pinnacle reaching within 12 feet of our keel.
But the polar pack held off, the shoal water deepened, and on September 20, Captain Steward dropped the hook off Barrow.
We had arrived at the northernmost point of the United States, the western end of the Northwest Passage, 5,113 miles from our starting point on Delaware Capes. The Manhattan had made it, the first merchant vessel in history to transit the Northwest Passage.
At this moment, engineers and economists are processing the data our task force gathered.
Meanwhile, the Manhattan has returned again to the Arctic to gather information on the ship’s performance in new winter ice. Later this year, experts will arrive at an answer as to whether it is economically feasible to move oil through the Northwest Passage by icebreaking tanker. If their decision is favorable, the Manhattan may have been the forerunner of commercial traffic that could transform the world’s shipping patterns as profoundly as Columbus’ Santa Maria in 1492. And so the trip may have been of epochal importance in the world of commerce.
But, for me, the voyage was memorable, not for its economic significance, but because it was one of the last great adventures left on this shrinking globe. The Manhattan took us where few men had ever been, showed us landscapes seldom exposed to human wonder, let us breathe air as pure as the dawn of time, and brought us before herds of animals so innocent of man that they did not flee.
They don’t make places like that anymore.
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