Davis Strait

Davis Strait is an Arctic setting whose significance reaches beyond geography: it is the remote place where Smilla’s knowledge of snow and landscape meets a hidden crime, and where the question of what Isaiah saw becomes part of the investigation into his death. The strait belongs at once to a world navigated through intimate attention to terrain and to a world organized by charts, ships, and controlled routes.

Geography and Lived Knowledge

The strait is tied to Smilla’s account of learning to read snow and direction. In a winter journey from Qinnissut toward the mouth of Inglefield Bay, fog suddenly blinds the traveling party, but Smilla feels certain of the way forward. Her mother trusts her judgment, and the others follow. Placed on the front sled, Smilla remembers the route as a silver line stretching between her and the house in Qaanaaq; she knows a corner is there just before it emerges from the night. The episode presents orientation not as a calculation made after the fact but as a bodily knowledge of landscape.

That ability later has a technical vocabulary as well as an intuitive one. Smilla can look at a map once and make the landscape rise from it. Topographical contours, military maps of the ice pack, X-band radar images, LANDSAT scans, geological sediment maps, and thermal photographs become different alphabets for reading the same terrain. The instruments do not replace her sense of snow: they give it another set of signs. Davis Strait thus sits within a larger Arctic geography understood through both practical experience and formal systems of representation.

Routes, Maps, and Control

The novel repeatedly places lived movement beside the systems that regulate it. A ship bound for Greenland must meet ice-class requirements; its hull, safety equipment, and engines are inspected on set schedules, and the rules require a double hull for Greenland voyages. Such provisions make the route a matter of classification and authorization as well as navigation. A ship’s destination and cargo can also be obscured through a side contract, exposing the gap between the official account of a voyage and the private arrangements that enable it.

This contrast continues aboard the ship. Its navigation equipment includes satellite navigation, shortwave radio, LORAN C, sonar, a sextant, visibility dials, and an automatic pilot, while the captain is told that the crew does not know the destination and must proceed due north until they receive further instructions. Later, a chart of South Greenland carries an overlay showing ice concentration, visibility, and iceberg positions; the planned course runs north along the coast, around Cape Thorvaldsen, then north-northwest before ending at an ocean point near Vestland. The chart makes the route legible, but the captain knows only what has been marked for him.

The account of an offshore oil complex sharpens the political dimension of this managed geography. The captain contrasts the freedom to go ashore at a formerly desolate harbor with a developed installation where shops, helicopter service, a hotel, a diving station, post and administrative offices, and major oil-company offices coexist with strict restrictions on leaving the ship. Supplies arrive through controlled procedures, and security officers accompany a captain who insists on going ashore. With as much as 250 million gallons of oil present when the piers are full, the site is defended in the name of fire and sabotage prevention. The captain calls this centralization: the infrastructure promises services and progress while removing the independence of shipmasters and, in his view, the seafaring life itself.

The Crime and Its Afterlife

Davis Strait acquires its most ominous narrative meaning when Smilla confronts Ravn with her reconstruction of Isaiah’s last moments. She imagines the boy running from a man through the street and toward warehouses, then climbing scaffolding as terror drives him upward despite his fear of heights. In Smilla’s account, the man follows and watches Isaiah run along the roof’s edge. The possibility she raises is that the man sought to eliminate a witness—to prevent Isaiah from telling anyone what he had seen in a cave on a glacier somewhere in Davis Strait. Ravn answers that she is guessing; the concealed past remains an accusation under dispute rather than a fully confirmed account in this exchange.

The strait therefore links a remembered Arctic landscape to the unresolved circumstances of a child’s death in the city. Its distance does not make it incidental: the cave and glacier place the possible secret beyond ordinary access, while Isaiah’s fall brings its consequences back into the investigation. Against maps that divide the region into routes, ice conditions, and navigable positions, Smilla’s reading of the landscape insists that the place also holds traces of what happened there—and of what someone may have tried to keep hidden.