Icebound

by Andrea Pitzer

  The audacity of this idea was matched by the ambition of their upstart country. Any reliable sea route to the East would carry a flood of goods and money into North Sea ports, allowing the Dutch to establish a global presence and compete with existing European powers. Explorers from the Netherlands dreamed of sailing from Amsterdam north over Scandinavia and then Asia. Cresting the top of the world, they hoped to arrive at the kingdoms of China and Cathay. The latter had been mentioned in Marco Polo’s travelogue centuries before and was thought to lie north of China proper. Europeans knew so little about the region that several more years would pass before they came to realize the two kingdoms were one and the same.

  Meanwhile, the sea held dangers for everyone. A territory with hundreds of miles of coastline, the Netherlands in 1594 had yet to formally establish a national navy. Early in the war with Spain, a group of disenfranchised local noblemen and pirates called the Sea Beggars had harassed ships and raided Spanish vessels for goods. William of Orange had granted them letters of marque authorizing their piracy, and for a time they used England as a base for operations with the blessing of Queen Elizabeth I, a Protestant ruler who had no love for Spain.

  Later, however, support for the Sea Beggars became too problematic for her, and in 1572 Elizabeth barred them from English shores. With no remaining port as a haven, they grew desperate. They sailed back home and managed to seize the Dutch town of Brielle from Spanish control, establishing the revolt as a force to be reckoned with. William of Orange’s tactical accomplishments on the ground were few and far between, but the Sea Beggars’ successes laid the foundation for future Dutch naval forces.

  For the time being, in place of a national navy, individual towns and provinces had admiralty boards to defend their shores. By 1574, an admiralty had been formed at Rotterdam, but it was initially incapable of reliably protecting even merchant ships from pillage. Over the next fifteen years, other regional boards would be established, but coordination was poor and at times incoherent. For a time after the assassination of William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch forces was English and not Dutch.7 Any convoy at sea had to be prepared to defend itself.

  At that point, war—particularly endless, ramshackle conflicts like the Dutch revolt—tended to be bad for empires, bleeding them of military strength, destroying property, and emptying coffers. In fact, some violence unleashed in the Spanish Fury had been part of a mutiny sparked by imperial failure to pay troops garrisoned in the Netherlands. The Dutch, however, managed to create a new prototype, an early model of a military-industrial complex that allowed key sectors to thrive in wartime.

  William Barents would benefit from the chaos that birthed the Netherlands. The population shift to escape religious violence combined with the flight of those rejecting monarchy to funnel wealth and entrepreneurs into northern provinces, triggering a cultural and financial boom. These provinces further built strong trade with Baltic states, exporting tile and bricks, and importing massive stores of grain to sell at home and abroad.

  Concentrated capital, skilled tradesmen, and intellectuals gathered in the new republic. By the time Barents had returned from his Mediterranean voyages and prepared to set sail for the Arctic, the nation was filled with investors and merchants eager to find new markets for their goods. It was a historic convergence that brought the possibility of empire within the nation’s grasp.

  Yet Barents and his companions weren’t the first to sail north. The idea of sailing into the high Arctic had roots reaching at least as far back as the ancient Greeks. In the fourth century BCE, the astronomer Pytheas wrote On the Ocean, an account of his unprecedented voyage high into the unknown.

  Heading out from his home city of Massalia—later known as Marseille—Pytheas recounted his passage through the Mediterranean and what is today the Strait of Gibraltar out into the Atlantic Ocean. No Greek had ever sailed so far north. Pytheas went up the western coast of Europe and over to Britain, where he hiked on foot and described circumnavigating the islands. He made his way to the Orkney archipelago and sailed six more days to a far northern land he called Thule—possibly Iceland.

  Pytheas embraced his project not only as a guide for navigation, but also as a way to understand and interpret the wider world he discovered. He wrote of the midnight sun and how the moon influenced the tides, and he declared that one day’s sail north of Thule lay the “Congealed Sea.” In this sea, he wrote, “neither earth, water, nor air exist separately, but a sort of concretion of all these, resembling a sea-lung in which the earth, the sea, and all things are suspended.”8

  In the centuries that followed, Greek geographers and Roman writers would catalogue Scandinavian coastal tribes, from the Finnei in the far north to the Geats and Swedes clustered in the south. But the Arctic by and large remained a place of mystery.

  The people eventually known as the Sami had inhabited Scandinavian Arctic regions for thousands of years. And before that, another indigenous Siberian people had ventured from Asia hundreds of miles north of the continent over frozen seas, building homes and hunting polar bears on distant Zhukov Island eight thousand years ago.9

  But in the annals of European seafaring, another group would conquer history’s imagination as the mythic explorers of the North: the Vikings. More than a thousand years after Pytheas sailed from Massalia, the North’s wildest sailors staked their claim. Sweeping outward from Scandinavia, they explored, plundered, and colonized. From AD 780 to 1070, they set out for northern Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and Britain, also voyaging eastward as far as what is today Ukraine.

  The shallow draft on Viking ships meant that some vessels could sail in less than two feet of water. Warriors regularly surprised enemies by winding their way up rivers large and small, including some that couldn’t be navigated by enemy vessels. In 845, Danish Vikings sailed one hundred twenty ships into the Seine and took Paris. No European soil seemed safe from them.

  But the most dramatic Viking legends came from their far northern voyages, which added a shudder of violence and geographic isolation to exploratory sailing. On oceangoing ships, or knarr, the Vikings navigated their way to Iceland and Greenland, where they made even more dramatic history. Late in the tenth century, Thorvald Asvaldsson was exiled from Norway to the Hornstrandir settlement on Iceland for what was depicted loosely as “some killings.” From there, his son Erik the Red found himself banished from Iceland after murdering his neighbor. Erik sailed westward to Greenland, where he named several features of the landscape after himself and led the settlement of two colonies. Legends recount how his son Leif Eriksson captained his way to the North Atlantic reaches of America, where remains of Viking settlements would later be found dating from 1000.

  The Vikings made their own marine innovations, perfecting clinker-style shipbuilding. Splitting oak logs radially into wedges, they fastened the planks with iron rivets, each plank overlapping the last. The flexibility of the planks allowed a ship to ride rough seas without shattering the hull. But the inevitable gapping from planks as they rode the waves meant constant bailing in bad weather. On one trip to Greenland, Erik the Red arrived with only fourteen of the thirty-five ships he had when he set out.10

  A sound ship was important, but navigation was just as critical. A vessel that lost its way in open water might never return home. From the earliest days of seafaring, sailors developed ways to ensure safe passage and to orient themselves on the face of the deep. The Vikings had a few strategies to find their way, but little theory to guide them. Yet these strategies allowed them to sail half the globe.

  From their earliest voyages, they kept near land and used coasts and visible landmarks to navigate, employing one of the most enduring tools known to sailors: a plumb line, weighted to measure the water’s depth and warn of shallow seafloors. They shared directions with fellow navigators based on time or visual cues, including directions from Hernam in Norway to southern Greenland that are indecipherable as a map and can only be understood from the vantage point of a sa
ilor at sea: “Steer due West for Hvarf in Greenland. You will then pass Hjaltland so close that you may just see them in clear weather, and so close to the Faroe Islands that half of the mountain is under the water, and so close to Iceland that you may have birds and whale from there.”11

  On the ocean, landmarks could be hard to come by, and directions might emphasize the number of days to sail before reaching the next island, an unreliable way to measure distance, since wind and weather varied. Sometimes other tactics were necessary. In the Landnámabók epic, Flóki Vilgerdarson made his way to Iceland in the ninth century carrying three ravens on his ship. After the first was set free, it turned and flew back the way they’d come. When he released the second, it flew up into the air but later returned to the ship. Once the third bird was loosed, it headed forward from the ship in the direction they were sailing, and they followed it to land.

  The Vikings likely had instruments of navigation as well. Late in their era of expansion, compasses might have come to them from China through overland trade. They could have carved round bearing dials to help them stay on course. They might have used a gnomon, a crudely constructed sundial that could establish rough latitude. Historical records also include tales of sunstones, which were said to show the location of the sun even on a cloudy or snowy day. But if the Vikings had these tools, none have survived intact. Only fragments of relics remain.

  Whatever their navigation instruments, the Vikings knew the position of the North Star and how high it should ride in the sky as they drew close to home. The Viking ability to hop islands hundreds of miles in a journey, first from continental Europe to the Faroe Islands, then on to Iceland, Greenland, and North America—creating settlements as they went—remains a staggering feat of exploration.

  By the time Barents set out, more than five hundred years later, the Viking legacy lived on in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe. But no Viking cultural inheritance made William Barents’s voyage possible at the dawn of the Dutch empire. Instead, he would find his way using knowledge adapted from Pytheas and the Greeks and a host of other civilizations going back thousands of years.

  Barents’s chief advantage over the Vikings lay in a clear understanding of latitude and a way to measure it. The Vikings likely had no idea of the roundness of the Earth or the demarcations of the planet, but these ideas were bound up in a formal logic and geometry that was second nature to Pytheas as he sailed into the Arctic. If the rough ball of the planet spins on an imaginary axis running through the North and South Poles, the equator lays horizontally at zero degrees like a belt across its middle. With a full circle measuring 360 degrees, a ship heading from the equator to the North Pole covers a 90-degree arc as it sails. The position between the equator and the Pole in degrees is a ship’s latitude.

  Knowing where a ship’s harbor of departure sits on that arc of latitude and the location of the boat at any given moment make up more than half the art of being able to find a way home. If sailors left Amsterdam in 1594 knowing that the port sits 52 degrees north of the equator, and they were able to find their current latitude anywhere at sea, they could easily sail north or south until they reached the latitude of Amsterdam again. Once a boat reached the right latitude, even without a compass, the direction of the morning sun would show the sailors east and west, and for any European in the Atlantic, home would lie east toward the morning sun along that imaginary line of latitude. A sailor ready to return home would never be permanently lost.

  The Greeks later determined that the farthest places from the equator where the sun is directly overhead at some point during the year sit at predictable distances north and south of the equator. As a result, along with the equator circling the Earth, they had added one line above and one below, both parallel to it. The northernmost extreme of the sun’s travels was christened the Tropic of Cancer, and the southernmost band the Tropic of Capricorn.

  And the ancients realized that because of the changes in the sun’s position, there should be another line of latitude closer to each pole, beyond which it would be possible to see the sun at midnight during the summer, and for sunlight to vanish entirely during part of the winter. The Greeks named the Arctic Circle for the polar constellation that should always be visible inside it—Ursa Minor, or Little Bear. The “Arctic” in Arctic Circle comes from arktikos kyklos, or “circle of the bear”—not creatures on the ground but the stars in the sky.

  By 1080 a group of Arab astronomers compiled the Tables of Toledo, using trigonometry to establish the sun’s angle in the sky at noon each day of the year in that city. Four hundred years later in Lisbon, astronomer and rabbi Abraham Zacuto would calculate declinations for the Sun, the Moon, and five planets, finally making tables simple enough for mariners to carry and use aboard a ship.

  Zacuto’s tables would be one of the first documents created in Portugal on a printing press. Similar charts were recalculated or openly copied, finding translation and adoption right up to the Dutch edition published in 1580 that William Barents carried with him to sea.12

  Arab astronomers worked to perfect astronomical instruments as well, such as the astrolabe, a stationary tool that could track heavenly bodies with dials mounted over a plate. By the end of the fifteenth century, a simpler mariner’s astrolabe would be adapted for use at sea: a flat brass ring hung vertically with a rod attached by a pin at its center like a clock, with two small holes in the outside end of the rod through which sunlight would line up when the dial was adjusted to the height of the sun. The mariner’s astrolabe allowed navigators to track the sun’s height in combination with declination tables to sail with much greater accuracy, even without any knowledge of trigonometry. An astrolabe would accompany William Barents into the Arctic.

  These were the forebears whose work made Barents’s voyage possible. But their insights came as a result of geographical placement as much as the discoveries by individuals themselves. At the nexus of trading routes, Greeks and Muslims alike had benefited from collecting the most advanced knowledge coming from other cultures and places. During the five thousand years before Barents’s birth, the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Indians, along with Muslim scientists from Persia to Spain, and Chinese inventors farther east all contributed to an evolving body of knowledge through trade and scientific advancements that would unlock the mysteries of heaven and earth for explorers.

  But Europe had lived for most of a millennium largely absent the astronomical knowledge of the Greeks, and their reintegration of lost math and theory sometimes left them unprepared for the navigation challenges they embraced. In 1492, Christopher Columbus made the first of his voyages to the New World under Spanish auspices, finding not the Indies he expected but an entire Western Hemisphere that came as a complete surprise to him.

  It seems astounding that he could make that mistake, but Greek mathematics and astronomy were garbled as they were carried forward and reinterpreted, with the result being that the globe of Christopher Columbus’s imagination was one-third smaller than the real world.13

  By the time Barents sailed north, the first circumnavigation of the Earth had been completed more than half a century before by Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastián Elcano, who, like Columbus, sailed on behalf of Spain. Between them, the two navigators managed to cross the Atlantic, arrive at the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins near the tip of South America, cross the Pacific to the Philippines, and return to Spain by rounding southern Africa—a route around the world that veered from middle to southern latitudes. It remained an open question whether an intrepid voyager might likewise skirt the continents by heading north.

  Meanwhile, the Scientific Revolution in Europe gathered steam. William Barents left Amsterdam for the Arctic at almost the midway point between the 1543 publication of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and Galileo’s 1632 defense of it, which led to the latter being tried as a heretic. During Barents’s lifetime, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe struggled to decipher which heavenly bodies might revolve
around the Earth and which around the sun. The sailors put this still incomplete but growing understanding of the heavens to good use, wielding scientific instruments and cartography to track everything they encountered, transforming new seas and terrain into maps.

  Among Protestant nations, a call to search for a northern route via the North Pole had been taken up first by England. In 1527, Robert Thorne, who’d embraced the idea of an open polar sea, managed to persuade Henry VIII to fund “two fair ships well manned and victualled, having in them divers cunning men to seek stranger regions.” The first vessel was reportedly forced to turn back, and the second one vanished.

  The riches of the Far East remained the prize that drove exploration in all directions. England moved to stake a seafaring claim by sending John Cabot across the Atlantic in 1497 to North America to seek a westerly route to China. A 1553 expedition from England using hired explorers attempted to sail over Europe to China but led instead to trade with Russia. An attempt by sailor and former privateer Martin Frobisher two decades later to steer west instead of east and find an Arctic passage over North America appeared promising initially, despite several crewmen being kidnapped by Inuit.

  Gold ore that Frobisher carried back to England from what is today Nunavut, Canada, in the farthest northern reaches of North America, sparked the interest of investors eager to finance subsequent voyages. They sought a charter from Queen Elizabeth I for the Company of Cathay, with the goal of founding a North American colony to mine gold and serve as a transit point for future expeditions to the Far East.

  Frobisher’s second westward voyage to the same region in 1577 involved collecting more ore. Expedition members also kidnapped two Inuit adults and a child, and claimed territory in the name of Elizabeth, who’d given it the name Meta Incognita (The Unknown Shore). Frobisher’s third voyage to the area in 1578 dropped off prospective colonists, who were dismayed to find it snowing in July. By the time Frobisher began to prepare for his return voyage that August, the colonists had decided to abandon the settlement and head home with him.