Jack McClintock
Correspondent
Call me, Ishmael. In the summer of 2006 a research vessel named Akademik Ioffe cruised the High Arctic gathering oceanographic information about the Polar Ocean floor. It was a fast double-hulled Russian spy ship that had been sold to a commercial enterprise after the fall of the Soviet Union. My wife and I took a berth aboard the Ioffe to pursue my dream of exploring territory in that legendary part of the world. We drove north out of Worcester for seven hours to the capital city of Ottawa in the province of Ontario, Canada; then took a seven-hour jet flight due north to Resolute Island in the province of Nunavut. A small barren bit of land, Resolute was named to commemorate heroic exploration related to the search for a North West Passage in the frozen wastes above North America. Barely a dot on the map, it lies nearly 1,000 miles above Hudson Bay and occupies some of the most inhospitable real estate on Earth.