By Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, September 22, 1997
On September 24, 1918, three days after setting sail from Norway’s northern coast, the Forsete arrived in Longyearbyen, a tiny mining town on one of the Norwegian islands north of the Arctic Circle. It was the last ship of the year, before ice made the Arctic fjords impassable, and it carried among its passengers a number of fishermen and farmers going north for the winter to earn extra money in Longyearbyen’s coal mines. During the voyage, however, the ship had been hit with an outbreak of flu. Upon landing, many of the passengers had to be taken to the local hospital, and over the next two weeks seven of them died. They were buried side by side in the local cemetery, their graves marked by six white crosses and one headstone:
Ole Kristoffersen
February 1, 1896–October 1, 1918
Magnus Gabrielsen
May 10, 1890–October 2, 1918
Hans Hansen
September 14, 1891–October 3, 1918
Tormod Albrigtsen
February 2, 1899–October 3, 1918
Johan Bjerk
July 3, 1892–October 4, 1918
William Henry Richardsen
April 7, 1893–October 4, 1918
Kristian Hansen
March 10, 1890–October 7, 1918
The Longyearbyen cemetery is at the base of a steep hill, just beyond the town limits. If you look up from the cemetery, you can see the gray wooden skeleton of the coal mine that used to burrow into the side of the hill, and if you look to your left you can see the icy fringes of a glacier. Farther down the mountain are a shallow stream, a broad shale plain, and then, half a mile or so across the valley, Longyearbyen itself: a small cluster of red-roofed, brightly painted frame buildings. There are no trees, because Longyearbyen is many miles above the tree line, and from almost anywhere in the valley the cemetery is in plain view. Each grave site is slightly elevated and surrounded by rocks, and there are well-worn pathways among the rows of crosses. A chain-link fence rings the periphery. When I was there in late August, the ground had been warmed by the Arctic summer sun and was soft and spongy, carpeted with orange and red and white lichen. In the last row I found the miners’ graves—seven deaths separated by six days.
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