Over the past few years, I've read dozens of accounts of Arctic journeys—some disastrous, some tragic, some triumphant—from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Reading primary-source diaries, the universal commonality, alongside privation and sled dogs, is a sense of otherworldliness. The way ice forms fantastic landscapes, the illusions created by light, and the creatures whose bodies are adapted to the punishing cold. Someday, if I can, I really want to go to the far north, where the light dances green, and musk oxen huddle in phalanxes against blizzards. I am no great artist, but sometimes it's a gentle break to exercise creativity in forms that have nothing to do with words. I've accompanied these sketches and paintings of some of my favorite Northern denizens (plus one errant penguin, because penguins are adorable) with some quotes from famous explorers. I hope you enjoy this interlude from our usual sandwich fare!"

This whale is watching you and judging you for your incursion into his kingdom. His judgement is ruthless but resolves in your favor. You are cleansed.

At the same instant the dogs bounded forward, and, as I looked up, I saw crowds of grey netsik, the rough or hispid seal of the whalers, disporting in an open sea of water.

I had hardly welcomed the spectacle when I saw that we had passed upon a new belt of ice that was obviously unsafe. To turn was impossible; we had to keep up our gait.

— Elisha Kent Kane, The Far North: Explorations in Arctic Regions, 1879

It was a lovely morning—fine, still weather; the walruses’ guffaw sounded over to us along the clear ice surface. They were lying crowded together on a floe a little to landward from us, blue mountains glittering behind them in the sun... Ten or twelve great weird faces glared upon us at once; the colossal creatures twisted themselves round with incredible celerity, and came waddling with lifted heads and hollow bellowings to the edge of the ice where we lay.

—Fritdjof Nansen, Farthest North, 1897

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Musk oxen don’t run from threats. They face them down en masse, shielded by their own mass, and the great piles of fur that protect them from the coldest winds in the world. Instinctively they draw together. They are utterly helpless against guns and die en masse. But the longest winters cannot defeat them. They eat saxifrage. They walk through the blizzard unscathed.

Now we found that these birds were so anxious to sit on something that some of those which had no eggs were sitting on ice! Several times Bill and Birdie picked up eggs to find them lumps of ice, rounded and about the right size, dirty and hard. Once a bird dropped an ice nest egg as they watched, and again a bird returned and tucked another into itself, immediately forsaking it for a real one, however, when one was offered.

— Apsley Cherry-Gerrard, The Worst Journey in the World, 1922

If the ship founders in the ice you may die.

You may drift across the world.

You may sink and be lost forever.

You may drift thousands of miles on an ice-floe.

You may never make it home.

But you saw the light here.

At the furthest cold edges of the world.

Where light comes to be born.

A version of this piece was originally published in Flaming Hydra, an art collective I'm proud to be a part of.