Phyllis, our friend Grete, and I were finishing dinner and the last of a bottle of wine. The conversation turned to the Arctic, as it so often does when the three of us are together.



Grete, an eminent anthropologist specializing in the people that inhabit the circumpolar regions, was telling us of her multi-year project to study the impact of climate change on those people and her desire to visit and study the communities of Greenland herself after having spent much of the last few years supervising other scientists from an office.



We talked about the logistical problems of visiting these communities and suddenly realized that our expedition sailboat, Morgan’s Cloud, provided the answer.



A year and a half later Phyllis and I were once again—we have spent much of the last 20 years sailing the northern North Atlantic and adjacent Arctic waters—northbound. This book is the story in photographs and text of that voyage.



Our primary task over the four months the voyage encompassed was to make the science project a success, not take photographs or write accounts. This means that there were fewer photographs to choose from than we would have liked and fewer still taken from the land, which are usually better than those taken from afloat. In fact, I took the liberty of using several of my photographs from our previous voyages north to fill things out. And the text was written during the project, often hurriedly in the small amount of time left over from handling our boat in a challenging environment.

So if you are expecting a slick book like that produced by those who travel specifically for that purpose, this isn’t it. On the other hand, I feel that the book has immediacy and reality just because the content was created by the two of us while we were making the voyage happen. We hope you will agree that this has merit.