The Arctic Plague Ship Part 2

Last month I wrote about the Arctic ship hit with a covid outbreak that left a best-selling author stricken with debilitating long covid.

I didn’t plan on a second part, but, after I published, Aaron Kreuter messaged me about his exchange with Aaron O’Connor, the man who runs these Arctic trips for creatives.

What he told me was almost beyond belief.

Aaron Kreuter, a published author and assistant professor of English literature at Trent University in Ontario, had been accepted onto an Arctic trip planned for July this year. After reading about what had happened on the August expedition, he decided to email O’Connor to ask him, politely, as you can see, what measures he would be taking to ensure the trip avoids a similar fate.

He was told by O’Connor to fuck off.

Not metaphorically or cryptically.

Literally, as you can see from the exchange below.

Before being told to fuck off, he was essentially kicked off the trip. In his responses, O’Connor refused to provide any reassurance that measures were being taken to avoid another covid outbreak, and instead told Aaron he should stand at the dock and watch the ship sail away.

Aaron’s request was of course entirely reasonable. He simply wanted to know that lessons had been learned from August and that O’Connor and the organisers would be doing more to ensure the world’s leading cause of infectious disease death and disability would be kept off the ship this time.

For this he faced abuse from O’Connor who clearly felt zero contrition or remorse for events in August and was doubling down on his reckless approach to covid (or any other contagious pathogen).

I’ve seen the documents related to the trip, and there is no indication that O’Connor learnt anything from August.

Firstly, in O’Connor’s opening spiel to participants he says he ‘encourages dialogue’ and welcomes ‘all questions.’ Just not questions about preventing infectious disease outbreaks on the ship, obviously.

Just six words in the planning and logistics document is dedicated to health and medical matters, and those words are that ‘you should have or obtain medical travel insurance.’

The participants also agree to waive any liability for injury, illness or death:

The message is loud and clear: if you get sick or hurt in any way during the trip, or if you die, that’s on you. We take no responsibility. Even if it’s our fault.

I’m sure this is standard. It is still shitty behaviour, especially from an organiser who brands the trip as an opportunity to reflect on human hubris in a fragile landscape, to be inspired by nature, to reflect on art and its meaning, blah blah blah, etc etc etc.

Half a page, on the other hand, is dedicated to how O’Connor should be paid.

Reading the documents gave me the sense that O’Connor is a good marketer.

And a grifter.

There isn’t a lot of information out there on him, but he’s been running these trips since 2009 and has made himself quite wealthy by doing so.

O’Connor calls the two-week trip a ‘residency’ but the documents show it costs nearly $9,000 (USD) per person.

That’s not how a residency works, but he uses the word because he knows how to sell an Arctic cruise to people who would baulk at the idea of an Arctic cruise in any other context. He knows to place it in the context of creativity and exploration.

And at a little under $9k per person, some basic maths here can tell us that O’Connor is raking it in.

On the August 2024 trip there were more than one hundred paying ‘residents.’

So on this one trip, O’Connor brought in around $900,000. Of course he has to lease the ship, pay for the food, crew and a four-person expedition team. But there will be plenty of profit left over. Hundreds of thousands. And last year he ran four trips. So he’s almost certainly clearing as pure profit well over a million dollars a year. Probably significantly more.

This nice little earner has enabled him to buy himself a house in Heriot Bay on Quadra Island in British Columbia on a street where houses can sell for upwards of a million dollars.

Does this matter? Of course ethics and morals matter in the pursuit of money. Especially when you claim you’re somehow performing a creative good in service to humanity.

O’Connor had a choice. He could have said, ‘you know what, we really don’t want to go through that again, we really don’t want to harm people,’ and insisted on a negative covid test for boarding. He could have made a responsible, pro-social decision. Instead he responded to a polite enquiry in the most anti-social way imaginable.

In reality he has a reckless, dismissive and arrogant attitude to genuine concerns about threats to health on his ship.

In reality his attitude has disabled people.

When half the ship got sick on the August trip, he didn’t once check in on any of the sick people.

And this attitude, which displays a shocking and callous lack of regard for people’s health and welfare, has made him rich.

The connections between the melting of the Arctic ice and the implications for future pandemics and viral outbreaks are also clearly lost on him.

Participants on the July trip are supposed to return the signed agreement to O’Connor by January 15th.

If you know anyone going on that trip you might want to share this story with them.

And if you are going on one of O’Connor’s trips, you might want to think twice.