I have often pondered his fate, and now, as I glide through the black waters of the Arctic Ocean in a fragile kayak, watched by a bemused bearded seal, both he and I understand how the young officer might have felt in those last moments. The Inuit have a word for it: iliyra, the fear that accompanies awe.

Welcome to Svalbard, a Nordic archipelago of jagged peaks, epic glaciers and icebound wilderness, named Spitzbergen by 16th-century Dutch explorers, governed by Norway and now known by its Viking name, “cool coast”.

It’s an elegantly understated description of this Arctic Galapagos, a chillingly beautiful world of unclimbed peaks, unnamed rivers and unspeakable human cruelty. Svalbard is as far from Oslo as London is from Tunis, and two-thirds of its surface lies under permanent snow and ice.

Plundered first by whalers and then by seal-hunters, this polar desert seems as dead as the bones that litter its pebbled coastline, but step ashore and life explodes from the guano-splashed scree. A grove of Salix arctica, the Arctic willow, the world’s smallest, hardiest tree, stands ankle-high like a Lilliputian forest from which trunks the diameter of a forefinger have been cut to reveal 200 years of growth.

Vivid mosses in a dozen shades of green, hot-yellow and fierce-orange lichens, scarlet saxifrage and the mad blue of Campanula uniflora, the Arctic harebell, belie the distant impression that the tundra is a colourless environment. A chill northerly carries aloft a wheeling, screaming panoply of glaucous gulls, black-legged kittiwakes, puffins and marauding squadrons of skuas.

Arctic foxes, their summer coats fading to winter white, ignore groundless avian threats and prowl with cat-like impunity between the pungent roosts, while the oily cast of the freezing sea is broken by curious seals and the enormous tusked blubberbuckets they call walrus. Or walruses. Or walrii.

The collective noun for these toothy marine sloths is a point of genial dispute among the assorted experts employed by Peregrine Adventures to staff this 11-day cruise around Svalbard aboard a former Soviet spy ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov. They’re part of an admirably earnest setup that deserves high praise for its cautious and thoughtful attention to detail. Gourmet meals appeal to epicure and ecowarrior alike: the organic beef comes from Argentina, and no fish on the Marine Conservancy Council’s endangered list is served.

Life aboard the Sergey V is luxurious: we can drift from a comfortable ensuite cabin via the gym and sauna (with icy outdoor plunge pool) to the observatory bar. There, we might sip a cocktail cooled with chunks from a 500-year-old glacier while keeping an eye open for whale spouts among the icebergs.

IT’S ALL delightfully civilised, but it’s not what we came for. We might attend lectures on polar history, hole up in the ship’s library or cadge a private lesson from the on-board photography instructor, John Rodsted (whose work for an anti-landmine group helped earn a Nobel peace prize in 1997). All wonderfully informative, but, again, not why we’re here.

Polar bears are why we’re here — but before we go ahunting, the expedition guide, Martin Gray, would like a quiet word.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he begins, surveying the assembly with the grimace of a man spreading rumours of war. “A polar bear cannot be tricked, duped, outrun or outfought, and the only rule of engagement is that there are no rules. There are more than 3,000 of them in Svalbard and, right now, with the sea ice gone for the summer, they’re all ashore.”

Another dramatic pause.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president