The North Atlantic Ocean is the open-water setting of the Kronos’s westward passage toward Greenland, a space whose scale and sameness unsettle Smilla rather than promise adventure. The novel contrasts the sea’s unbroken horizon with the ice-bound landscape she knows: on water, movement is difficult to perceive, and the ship seems to pound in place above an abyss. This contrast makes the ocean both a route across the Atlantic and a measure of Smilla’s estrangement from home.

Route and Climate

A ship bound for Greenland does not simply sail north from Europe. It first travels west, and only after rounding Cape Farewell does it head due north into the colder waters. Cape Farewell lies on the same latitude as Oslo, a detail that complicates the familiar image of Greenland as uniformly remote and frozen: the severe cold comes later, while the wind before it is raw and damp but no colder than a storm in the Kattegat. The sea’s long, deep North Atlantic swells nonetheless distinguish this crossing from an ordinary coastal voyage.

During the night watch, the ocean surrounds the ship without interrupting its routine. Smilla is roused to serve coffee on the bridge at three in the morning, after the captain’s order has come over the loudspeaker at ten the previous night. By then, the engine’s thudding, the long swells against the hull, and the stern breaking water into spray have become familiar enough to merge into what she experiences as silence. The sea is not quiet in itself; its repeated sounds have become part of the shipboard world.

A Sea Without Landmarks

For Smilla, the central difference between travelling on the sea and travelling across ice is the absence of fixed points. On a sled journey, she can read the terrain, the ice formations and the mountains as they rise and disappear beyond the runners. Those visible landmarks register motion. At sea, the horizon remains a permanent circle, while the water below appears uniform and the ship becomes a fixed steel platform propelled by engines that seem to pound in vain at one spot.

This account stands against the European idea that the sea naturally symbolizes the unknown and that sailing is inherently an adventure. Smilla calls that image unrelated to the reality of movement at sea: without landmarks, the voyage can feel less like progress than suspended motion. Her response is sharpened by the fog outside and by depression, which seems to drift inward with it. The ocean’s blankness becomes the condition in which she asks why she has ended up there and describes retreating inward when her surroundings give way.

Greenland in Relation to Europe

The Atlantic crossing gives Smilla’s sense of distance a cultural as well as geographical meaning. Europe and Greenland are not simply opposite ends of a voyage: the route moves west before it moves north, and the ship’s changing latitude does not by itself capture the difference between the places. On land and ice, Smilla’s orientation depends on experienced terrain; at sea, that intimate knowledge has fewer points of attachment.

The ocean therefore marks a transition without guaranteeing arrival as a return home. Smilla reflects that travel requires a home to leave and to come back to; without one, a traveller is a refugee, an exile, a qivittoq. The North Atlantic is the space through which the Kronos carries her toward Greenland, but its monotonous horizon also gives form to her uncertainty about belonging and return.