Smilla Jaspersen—Sigmund Lukas

Smilla Jaspersen and Captain Sigmund Lukas develop a guarded, practical relationship aboard the Kronos, where each initially misreads the other’s purpose. Lukas hires her as a cabin attendant while secretly hoping her presence will protect him from legal consequences; Smilla, in turn, uses his access to the ship and its route to investigate what the voyage is concealing. Their exchanges disclose a captain whose authority is being constrained and a passenger whose expertise is far greater than he understands.

The Hiring and Its Conditions

When Smilla enters the bridge, Lukas stands at the manual tiller, with Jakkelsen nearby and the ship’s radar and compass glowing in the darkness. He dismisses the motionless figure behind him, then explains that Smilla is aboard because the ship needs a cabin attendant. Their earlier conversation, he insists, was only an employment interview. The distinction is pointed: he wants to define her as staff, not as someone entitled to question the voyage.

Lukas says the crew has not been told where the Kronos is going. Until further instructions arrive, they are heading due north. He assigns Smilla light cleaning, laundry, and occasional service to the officers, while First Mate Sonne gives her a separate restriction: the shipping-company representatives living in the forecastle are off limits, except when she is called to serve a meal. When she reaches the door, Lukas calls after her to make sure she understands they are sailing without a known destination. His insistence makes the uncertainty sound less like routine and more like a condition he needs her to accept.

The ship’s bridge brings their unequal knowledge into view. Its SATNAV, shortwave radio, LORAN C, sonar, automatic pilot, and other instruments represent to Smilla a technical barrier between people and their effort to know where they are. Lukas, however, is not simply an extension of those instruments: later, she observes that he prefers to steer manually, even when it means a less precise course. He can perceive her arrival without turning to look, and notices that she is limping. Their first working contact therefore rests on observation and control, but not on candour.

Suspicion and a Limited Offer

After Lukas has not spoken to her for days, he tells her the ship will pass Cape Farewell around two in the morning. Passing the cape is an occasion to report to the Greenland Ice Center, whose voluntary check-ins allow ships to register their positions every twenty-four hours. Lukas explains the consequence of not reporting: Danish inspection vessels and the police receive no word of the ship’s movements. He then offers to make an exception to the agreement that the Kronos’s telephone will not be used during the trip.

Smilla realizes that Lukas believes she is a police agent working undercover. Verlaine and Jakkelsen share the suspicion. In her reading, Lukas took her aboard because this voyage frightens him and her presumed investigation might later serve as an alibi if the law catches up with the ship. His rigid watchfulness and effort to oversee everything become signs not of settled command but of fear. The offer of a telephone call is consequently double-edged: it looks like a concession to Smilla, but also like a move by a captain hoping to manage the risk she represents.

That presumed authority is itself compromised. When Smilla asks about the ship’s telephone, Lukas answers that it has been confiscated; his bitterness is directed chiefly at the loss of power over his own vessel. Asked where the Kronos is headed, he can point only to a course marked on a South Greenland chart: north along the coast, around Cape Thorvaldsen, then northwest toward an offshore point near Vestland. He says that is all he knows. The route is being set above his level, while he remains responsible for navigating it.

Expertise, Leverage, and Family Loyalty

Smilla’s knowledge begins to change the terms of their conversations. When Lukas probes whether she hoped to go ashore, she recognizes that he wants to discover how much she knows. She counters by asking why the vessel is stopped. In the bridge, she reads the charts and explains the ice conditions in Davis Strait: the winter field ice extends about one hundred sea miles offshore, the West Greenland current has carried ice northward and out to sea, and three mild winters have left the strait relatively warm. She also describes the iceberg hazard around Disko Bay, where Jakobshavn Glacier has advanced roughly 130 feet a day during the previous two winters, producing exceptionally large icebergs. She predicts that after departure Tørk will steer northwest to clear the belt.

The exchange is more than a display of technical competence. Lukas has treated Smilla as a hired attendant and suspected her of being a police operative; her reading of the chart establishes that she can interpret the very conditions governing his ship. She does not simply ask for information but offers an explanation grounded in Greenlandic ice and currents, making knowledge a form of bargaining power. Lukas, who had wanted to find out what she knew, now has to consider what she can infer.

Their uneasy cooperation is also shaped by Lukas’s concern for Jakkelsen. He suspects Smilla was ashore during a blackout and asks whether she knows anything about his brother. His officerly composure breaks into anxiety close to desperation. Smilla understands that he has been trying to protect Jakkelsen, keep him at sea, and spare him prison or the harmful influences of the cities, whatever the cost. The voyage that Lukas has not been allowed to control is also a means of keeping his brother close.

Later, as the Kronos nears the field ice, Smilla enters the small steering shed expecting to find Lukas. Instead, Tørk is there. The cramped station contains a telegraph, compass, tiller, and intercom; it is where Lukas will steer once the ice makes visibility from the bridge insufficient. Smilla has come wanting to tell Lukas about Jakkelsen and believes the captain’s authority might still be used to restrain Verlaine and turn the ship back toward Sisimiut. The substitution of Tørk for Lukas leaves that intended appeal unrealized and makes clear how little control the captain’s title guarantees.

The Limits of Their Alliance

Lukas and Smilla never arrive at uncomplicated trust. He gives her work, rules, a route, and a possible telephone call, but his gestures are governed by the belief that she is a police agent and by his need to shield himself. Smilla takes what information she can while concealing her own judgment and testing his knowledge. Their cooperation is real but conditional: it grows whenever their interests overlap, then falters when the ship’s hidden purpose, Jakkelsen’s danger, or Lukas’s limited authority comes into view.

The relationship’s central irony is that each has something the other needs, yet neither can rely on the other to disclose everything. Lukas can provide access to the bridge and the ship’s decisions, but often cannot explain those decisions himself. Smilla can read the ice and recognize the implications of the route, but cannot make the captain act on her understanding. Their guarded partnership thus reflects the Kronos’s larger structure: a vessel moving north under orders its own commander has not been told, with its passengers and crew trying to infer who is in control before the ice closes around them.