Sigmund Lukas

Sigmund Lukas, captain of the Kronos, occupies a position of command that the voyage steadily reveals to be more apparent than real. He steers the ship and speaks as its master, yet has lost control of its telephone, does not know its destination, and has been told only how far he is willing to take it. His gambling adds a private vulnerability to this constrained authority: a high-stakes player who can win a stack of chips in the casino, he has recently lost everything and borrowed money even for cigarettes and a cab.

Identity and Background

Lukas is identified as the Kronos’s captain. His age is difficult to determine: he might be in his mid-thirties or forties, or perhaps fifty. At a high-roller blackjack table, he wins and pulls a tall stack of chips toward himself. The game’s stakes are substantial: each chip is worth 5,000 kroner, and the table allows bets as high as 20,000 kroner, with the possibility of doubling down. The same scene that shows him winning therefore establishes the scale of the risk he takes.

That win is set against a recent collapse. A casino employee describes Lukas as returning night after night until he has lost everything, then working for six months before coming back to lose it all again. The employee says that the previous week Lukas had lost the last of his money and borrowed from him for cigarettes and a taxi home. Gambling is not merely a passing pastime in this account: it repeatedly consumes the captain’s earnings and leaves him dependent on someone who sees the pattern close at hand.

Command Aboard the Kronos

When Smilla sees Lukas in the darkened navigation room, he stands at the manual tiller, partly turned away from the others. Two green radar images and the red glow of the liquid compass frame his position among the ship’s instruments. The room contains satellite navigation, shortwave radio, LORAN C, sonar, an inclinometer, a sextant, visibility dials, an automatic pilot, and panels of meters and control lights. Lukas’s alert, expressionless face stands out above this apparatus: a human commander surrounded by systems for locating and directing the vessel.

His authority is nonetheless qualified. After sending the other figures out of the room, he tells Smilla that she is aboard because the ship needed a cabin attendant, and that their earlier conversation was only an employment interview. He makes the boundary of her position explicit, but his own command is also bounded by decisions made elsewhere. He says the crew has not been able to find out where they are going and that, for now, they are proceeding due north without a known destination.

The Voyage and Its Limits

Lukas later explains that reporting to the Ice Center is voluntary, although ships commonly sign in and report every twenty-four hours. Not reporting has a more consequential use: if a vessel does not check in, the Danish inspection vessels and police receive no word of its movements. He presents this as the exception for a mission that is not legal and whose operators want to conceal where they are going. His explanation gives Smilla a practical account of how a ship can move beyond routine oversight, without establishing that he knows the full purpose of the voyage.

The telephone aboard the Kronos has been confiscated. Lukas is bitter about this, and his anger is directed less at Smilla’s request than at the loss of the commander’s power over his own ship. He is prepared to make one exception to the shipowner’s agreement that the telephone not be used during the trip, but the concession does not restore his independence; it emphasizes how tightly the vessel’s communications are controlled.

When Smilla asks where the Kronos is headed, Lukas points to a chart of South Greenland. A transparent overlay from the transmitter at Julianehåb marks ice concentrations, visibility, and iceberg positions. The charted course runs north along the coast, rounds Cape Thorvaldsen, and then turns north-northwest before ending at a point in the ocean near Vestland. Lukas says that this is all he knows. The route is plotted, but its endpoint is not explained to him.

He does, however, name a limit of his own. The western ice extends south to Holsteinsborg, and conditions there are no picnic; he says that Søndre Strømfjord is as far as the owners will get him to take the ship. The distinction is telling: Lukas can identify dangerous waters and set a boundary to his participation, but he cannot determine the destination or the broader plan. His nautical judgment survives even as his institutional authority is reduced.

Narrative Role and Significance

Lukas’s scenes join two forms of compromised control. At the casino, he risks money at a scale that has already left him broke; aboard the Kronos, he is responsible for navigation but is denied essential information and control of communications. The parallel does not erase the difference between the two situations: his gambling is presented through the recurring cycle of winning, losing, and working to recover, while his limitations at sea arise from the shipowners’ restrictions and the secretive voyage.

For Smilla, Lukas is a source of concrete information, but not a guide who can disclose the whole undertaking. He explains how the ship can evade routine reporting, identifies the plotted course, and admits where his knowledge ends. His position on the bridge makes him look like the person in control; the confiscated telephone, unknown destination, and imposed limit on the route reveal a captain operating within someone else’s design. The gap between visible command and actual power makes him an important measure of the Kronos’s secrecy.