IMAGES: OPHELIE BLEUNVEN; AWL IMAGES; IAN DAWSON


SVALBARD


The polar bear pauses on the ice and sniffs the air.


She can see and smell us, but she looks remarkably relaxed. She ambles nonchalantly across an ice floe. From the deck of Le Commandant Charcot, camera shutters click urgently. Nobody speaks. Then, a bolt of adrenaline shoots through me as two tiny,


cream-coloured cubs emerge from behind a chunk of ice, scampering along behind her. She launches herself into the jet- black water, on a mission to reach the next ice floe, both babies jumping onto her back for the ride. As the bears shake themselves down and wander off into the infinity of whiteness, I’m so overcome with emotion that I don’t know whether to laugh with joy, cry or just jump up and down. I’m exploring the High Arctic on Le Commandant Charcot, the


world’s most luxurious icebreaker, launched in 2021 and running on hybrid battery power, perfect for polar expeditions. It’s owned by French expedition line Ponant, and named after the early 20th-century French polar scientist and explorer, Jean-Baptiste Charcot. Thanks to its reinforced hull, it’s able to penetrate deeper into pack ice than other expedition ships. The ship has made several successful forays to the North Pole,


but our mission on this midsummer expedition is to explore Nordaustlandet, at the northeastern extremes of Svalbard — a bleak, beautiful, windswept archipelago 450 miles north of Norway. Most expedition ships hug the coast around Spitsbergen, the main island, characterised by its serrated black peaks and ford-indented coastline. Nordaustlandet is something else altogether, permanently draped in ice, the sea beyond it frozen and, to most vessels, impenetrable. I board the ship in wind-whipped Longyearbyen, capital


of Svalbard, snow splotching the mountains that protect the harbour. Le Commandant Charcot is an imposing beast, with a fleet of Zodiacs for exploring and a helicopter that will carry out scouting flights once we’re in the pack ice. There are two working


24 NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/TRAVEL


science labs where up to four academics per voyage apply for a place to conduct research. In contrast, the guests drift around soothing interiors in a nature-inspired vision of cream, stone, fawn and sea blue. The main restaurant, Nuna, is masterminded by superstar French chef Alain Ducasse. We’re kitted out in smart orange expedition parkas and mud


boots, like stronger, padded wellies, which are mandatory for going ashore, and I quickly realise why. Ytre Norskøya, our first stop, is a hilly speck of an island north of the archipelago that served as a Dutch whaling station in the 17th century, and as I clamber off the Zodiac I plunge calf-deep into a squelching bog. Under a white sky, the colours of our world have already shrunk to near monochrome, the sea steely-grey and the mountains black. The only pops of colour are from the steady stream of orange jackets as passengers puff their way up a steep, icy ridge. The whalers didn’t fare well on Ytre Norskøya. Many of them


died of scurvy and were buried here. In places, their coffins, reduced to broken planks of bleached wood, have been forced upwards by the Arctic permafrost. I see the white bone of a skull in one of them and imagine the brutal existence and lonely end to this life on the edge. This chilling scene and the starkness of the landscape is


a dramatic contrast to the plush cocoon of Le Commandant Charcot. Our daily hikes are surprisingly tough, and we return to steaming mugs of hot chocolate laced with rum and a chance to ease aching muscles in the warm indoor pool. Evenings are curiously formal, starting with a welcome dinner of flowing Veuve Clicquot, truffled guinea fowl, lobster and chocolate mousse. Around 80 percent of the guests are French and a handful, to my astonishment, have even dressed in black tie for this occasion. Picking our way along the shore of Nordaustlandet island, I marvel at Europe’s biggest ice cap: Austfonna, its edges


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