Smilla’s escape aboard the Kronos is the decisive passage from a threatened life in Copenhagen to a dangerous pursuit at sea. As pressure closes around her investigation of Isaiah’s death, she abandons her apartment, accepts help from her estranged father, Moritz, and leaves shore in a small rubber boat. The crossing is both practical flight and a test of what freedom means to someone who has long experienced confinement as a form of punishment.

The decision to leave Copenhagen

The escape begins amid a painful discovery about Isaiah. On the stairs, Juliane emerges from her apartment and recognizes that Smilla is going away. Smilla confronts her over why she had concealed that David Ving came to collect Isaiah. Juliane explains that Ving had provided the apartment and had threatened to take it away; her fear of losing their home had helped keep her silent. She asks whether Smilla will return, and Smilla assures her that she will. The exchange leaves the promise of return beside a newly exposed breach of trust: Juliane’s silence was tied not to indifference but to the power Ving held over her housing.

Smilla goes upstairs and finds her apartment undisturbed. She tries to pack essential clothes in the dark, using the city light reflected from the snow rather than switching on a lamp. Two suitcases prove too heavy to manage, so she pares her belongings down to one large duffel bag, making the departure an act of painful selection rather than a simple change of address. She takes Isaiah’s cigar box with her and says farewell to her home in her mind. The box is among the few things she carries out, linking the escape to the death and investigation that have made staying impossible.

A telephone rings just as she is preparing to leave. She knows she should let it ring: she has promised the mechanic not to return upstairs, does not want to speak to the police, and sees no advantage in answering. Nevertheless, she loosens the tape and picks up the receiver. The caller says her name and lets her hear his deep, calm breathing. Smilla puts the receiver down on the table rather than back on the telephone, then takes her bag and runs. Her sudden flight shows how little control remains once fear overtakes deliberation: she races down the dark stairs and out into the streets without time to change her shoes.

Moritz’s intervention

Lander is waiting with the engine running. Smilla throws herself into the passenger seat and clings to him; he calls it a good start. Yet the path out of the city does not lead directly to the boat. When Smilla reaches Moritz, she is exhausted by the recurring pattern in which attempts to escape her father’s house and country have been interrupted by life’s return to unresolved problems. She is preparing to give up when Moritz stands, tells Benja to stay, and asks Smilla what he can do. The change matters because the father who has often been a source of distance now chooses to help her leave.

Smilla gives him a precise task: drive his car to the back door, close enough to load the box without being seen, and let her lie on the floor in the back. At the car, she does exactly that, with Isaiah’s box placed on the rear seat and a blanket pulled over her. Moritz takes the front seat. The Toenail thanks him for his help as they drive away, while Smilla remains concealed. The scene makes the escape a piece of covert logistics, dependent on Moritz’s willingness to risk assisting her under the eyes of those pursuing her.

The crossing to the Kronos

At Skovshoved Water Ski Club, Lander is waiting beside a broad wooden ramp descending from the high dock toward the water. His black waterproof sailing suit is tucked into his boots; the vehicle is a high-bodied Land Rover, not the Jaguar, and a black tarp covers the rubber boat. The Zodiac, made of heavy rubberized canvas with a wooden bottom, is tied beneath it. Moritz tries to help but cannot move quickly enough. Lander tips the boat off the car, catches it on his head, and pushes it down the ramp in one fluid movement. He then brings out an outboard motor and fastens it to the stern.

The three of them lift the boat into the water. From her box, Smilla takes rubber boots, a balaclava, thermal gloves, and a sou’wester, dressing for the crossing rather than for the life she has just left. Moritz stays by the railing instead of joining them on the ramp and asks if there is anything more he can do. Lander answers that he can get out of there fast. He pushes off and starts the motor; the boat is drawn away from land as the snow falls heavily, and Moritz disappears from view before turning back toward his car.

Lander has a compass strapped to his left wrist. A temporary corridor of visibility in the snowfall reveals Sweden and the lights of Tarba;k, as well as two ships at anchor between the shore and the central navigation channel, northwest of Flakfort. Lander identifies the starboard vessel as the Kronos. The ship is not an abstract destination but a visible point beyond the shore, reached by a small boat through winter darkness and falling snow.

Boarding and the meaning of departure

At the transfer, Smilla slings Isaiah’s box onto the platform herself. She steps up and turns back. Lander stands for a moment, a small figure rising and sinking with the movement of the rubber boat, then turns away and pushes off. Smilla’s action completes the separation: the man who has brought her across does not follow her aboard, and the box that connects her to Isaiah is carried into the next stage of the journey.

The escape draws force from Smilla’s understanding of spatial freedom. She recalls that there are no prisons in Greenland and contrasts Greenlandic punishment by fines with Copenhagen’s use of imprisonment. In her memory of childhood, she and her mother were almost never indoors, and remaining in one place for long was unthinkable to her mother. Smilla describes her own attachment to freedom of movement as something she cradles and worships. Against that background, the locked room is not merely an instrument of interrogation or punishment: it represents a form of confinement that threatens the self she has built around movement and open space.

The flight also carries a cultural and personal history that the novel does not reduce to a simple opposition between Denmark and Greenland. Smilla describes understanding another culture as a matter of living within it, being tolerated as a guest, and learning its language; explanation, she reflects, can itself create distance. Her memories of Greenland include concrete practices and inherited knowledge, from hunting and paddling to living with the demands of landscape. Those memories inform her sense of what freedom costs, even as she recognizes the difficulty of claiming a culture as wholly her own.

Boarding the Kronos therefore shifts the story’s geography and its immediate stakes without resolving the investigation. Smilla leaves behind an apartment, a promise to Juliane, and a father who has helped her at the moment she is ready to surrender. She carries Isaiah’s cigar box into a journey at sea, while her need to escape confinement becomes inseparable from her need to find out what happened. The crossing is an exit from Copenhagen, but not an escape from the questions that drove her there.