Experts soon determined that despite initial test results, the mineral unearthed wasn’t gold at all but fairly worthless amphibolite and pyroxenite. Three voyages to North America had led to nothing but ruin. With no easy northwest passage in sight, no colony, and no gold ore, the Company of Cathay went bankrupt.
Shortly after Frobisher went in search of a Northwest Passage, Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman headed east. Sent by England’s Muscovy Company to “discover Cathay,” they spent the summer of 1580 following the coastline over Norway toward Asia, sailing shores that were already frequented by the Pomor, Russian sailors who’d begun exploring northward centuries before.
Pet and Jackman met with indigenous people and managed to get through the strait between the Russian mainland and an island called Vaigach. Sitting below Nova Zembla, which lay farther north, the strait at Vaigach Island seemed to offer a viable path toward China, but the explorers’ progress eventually ground to a halt. A diary entry for the voyage from July 27, 1580, explains, “At one in the afternoon, master Pet and master Jackman did conferre together what was to be done considering that the winde was goode for us and we not able to passe for ice.”14 Despite their small ships that sat high in the water—one had a crew of only five men and a boy—Pet and Jackman ran both vessels aground during the effort to return home.
During the first weeks of his voyage, Barents’s course would mirror Pet and Jackman’s early route. With that in mind, Barents carried among his personal belongings a Dutch translation of their journals. Their voyage had taken them farther north than any Western European had gone before. But Barents would go farther.
In the wake of Pet and Jackman’s failed pilgrimage, the Dutch trader Balthazar de Moucheron had sent another ship out on the same quest along the coast of Russia. The expedition managed to establish overland trade between the Netherlands and Russia, but de Moucheron’s agent on the voyage, Olivier Brunel, died on the Pechora River still trying to make his way eastward.
As a result, sailing to China by sticking close to Russian shores became an even more speculative idea. After the birth of the Dutch Republic, de Moucheron requested permission from the new nation to launch another voyage.
The difficulties encountered by prior explorers sailing eastward led some to suspect that staying close to the mainland and sailing through Vaigach Strait wouldn’t offer a reliable route to China. Geographer Petrus Plancius settled on a course that would ignore the strait altogether, leaving behind even Vaigach Island. Barents would head north of Europe, then make his way east, sailing over the Arctic land of Nova Zembla.
While it wasn’t the dominant theory, Plancius wasn’t alone in his belief in a polar route. He’d initially adopted the hypothesis from the world’s most celebrated mapmaker, Gerardus Mercator of Flanders. Already famous for his atlases and spinning globes, Mercator had long pondered northern routes to China and believed that polar regions offered a more direct path to the Far East. Mercator would die in the year of William Barents’s first Arctic voyage, his tomb inscribed to honor his brilliance at “showing the heavens from the inside and the Earth from the outside.”
Over centuries, the idea of a warm North Pole had also infiltrated the minds of adventurous sailors and merchants, who began to dream of an easily navigable sea, one that might carry them over the top of the world and deliver them to profitable lands. It’s a mark of both the draw of the unknown and the solidity of Plancius’s reputation as a geographer that both Barents and Dutch merchants took the idea seriously, because it would turn out to be a lethal delusion.
The enthusiasm of investor Balthazar de Moucheron, however, was contagious. The province of Zeeland bought out his interest in the expedition and provisioned one ship, Enkhuizen agreed to send a second, and Plancius convinced Amsterdam to sponsor a third ship, along with a reconnaissance craft. In the end, the provincial and city councils decided that two routes would be explored, with the Amsterdam vessels following one course, and the ships from Enkhuizen and Zeeland remaining together to follow the other.
The Dutch merchants of Enkhuizen assigned a representative named Jan Huygen van Linschoten to look after their interests and goods on the trip. Van Linschoten was less known for any Arctic theory than for his time spent in warmer latitudes. Born in Haarlem, a city thirteen miles west of Amsterdam, van Linschoten had moved to Spain while still a boy to live with his brother. At the age of twenty, he secured a post as secretary to the archbishop of Goa, on the western side of India. Spending several years there, he copied or memorized details from a century’s worth of political intrigue and secret maps—including coastal dangers, soundings, and navigation charts for how to sail from Europe south around Africa to eastern lands. At nearly the same moment that Barents’s new atlas of the Mediterranean was ready for print, van Linschoten’s cache of secrets about southern navigation routes would go off in the Netherlands like a bomb, igniting a Dutch-Portuguese rivalry.
With newly established navies, merchant ships, and tradable commodities in place during the last years of the sixteenth century, the principal remaining allies needed by explorers were businessmen and political leaders who could support the cost of expeditions. Polar navigation promised a foundation on which to build a nation, and van Linschoten had exposed closely held intelligence on which the Portuguese had kept a monopoly for decades. He not only laid out their navigation routes but also provided political analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various alliances. He’d effectively written a how-to manual on how to reach the East, destabilize imperial colonies, and, perhaps, conquer the world.
After stealing secrets for the Dutch Republic, van Linschoten would now head into the Arctic on the same expedition as Barents, aboard a ship named Mercury, invoking not only the speed of the messenger for the gods but also his temperamental nature. Both men were committed to finding a route to the Far East, but they’d soon find themselves in opposition about how to get there—along with many other things.
In his journal, van Linschoten wrote that the Mercury would join the Swan to head north of Norway then eastward to the narrow Vaigach Strait above the Russian mainland. Meanwhile, Barents would take the unnamed Amsterdam boat and its smaller scouting craft on a course north of Vaigach Island up the western coast of Nova Zembla, to see how close to the North Pole it might lead him. If this mysterious land were, as Barents hoped, an island, there should be a polar sea above it.
To this end, Barents had been given control of his boat, with backing from Amsterdam merchants and the blessing of Prince Maurice, the leader of the Dutch Republic. He was no military commander. But on this voyage, Barents held broad responsibility for the route the ship would sail, as well as the success or failure of his part of the expedition. The fleet wasn’t expected to make its way to China on this exploratory voyage, but was charged with charting reliable seas that a full expedition could travel, perhaps the following year.
The Swan, the Mercury, and the vessels from Amsterdam sailed out from the walls of their home cities. Items carried into the Arctic with Barents included ship’s biscuit, barrels of meat and beer, crowbars, axes, hand drills and hacksaws, scrub brushes, muskets, musket balls, cooking pots, spears, halberds, gunpowder horns, swords, knives, low-cut leather shoes, hatchets, and dreams of discovery. The vessels held enough to feed their crews for eight months, though they planned to supplement their provisions along the way.15
As they set forth, they knew some things. They knew how to set the sails on a tall ship to catch the wind. They knew how to steer. They knew how to work wood, and hunt, and trap. Barents could reckon latitude and knew the stars, and those he didn’t know, he had charts for. Sailors understood that icebergs haunted the northern regions and could stretch for miles. Sometimes rising more than two hundred feet above the waterline, they were capable of dwarfing vessels and the tiny human presence guiding them.
Barents and his fellow crew members knew some things, but it wasn’t enough. They possessed no scientific understanding of gravity, n
o telescopes, and no calculus. Though they could find their latitude, they couldn’t yet determine longitude from aboard a ship. They were centuries away from deciphering the germ theory of disease. More than a hundred years would pass before humanity would discover that lightning was electricity. Decades remained before doctors would realize that blood circulates in the body, and that a cell is the unit of life. As he sailed into the Arctic, Barents would, in time, encounter wonders and terrors without understanding most of the forces at play in his universe.
He’d likely never heard the groan and crack of ice above the creak of the ship, the noise that carries across the water before its source can be seen. The crew had never seen a polar bear, and hadn’t yet learned how white bears could move almost invisibly in a landscape of ice. They knew of scurvy, a disease that created sore afflictions among sailors, but they didn’t yet know its cause. Its cure would be identified, forgotten, rediscovered, and doubted again for another three centuries.
As Barents prepared to sail, he left behind a wife and five children who were dependent on his fortunes. In his forties by now, he’d already seen more of the world than most humans. Taking into account the life expectancy for Northern European nobility in the era—a social class higher than his own—he likely had only a few more years left to live.
The crew boarded the ship in the crowded bustle of Amsterdam harbor, amid the single-masted longboats with oarsmen, the larger cargo-carrying hulks, and the tiny yachts and rowboats carrying sailors to and from land. Barents’s vessel was one of many ships preparing to sail. Each had its own possibilities and was charged with its own mission. But with this voyage north, the Dutch were staking a claim to the future. In the history that followed, no sailor aboard any of the vessels there that day would eclipse the headstrong navigator bound for the Arctic. As William Barents’s crew left home behind, along with the burghers of Amsterdam and the port itself, they began to make their way outside the annals of all recorded voyages. The ship sailed north in fear and wonder to pierce the veil of the unknown world.
CHAPTER TWO Off the Edge of the Map
The dispute over which route to take had sparked ill will that would linger on the expedition. Jan van Linschoten was deeply skeptical of the plan for two ships to round Nova Zembla from the north. While he considered Barents an expert navigator, he thought Plancius had misled the burghers of Amsterdam with a wild-eyed polar theory. According to van Linschoten, Plancius insisted that the high northern route was “surely, most certainly, and without a doubt” correct. The geographer had given “a thousand kinds of questionable examples” in making those arguments while declaring that the route south around Nova Zembla—the route van Linschoten’s ship would take—“was not there at all.”1
The plan for a two-pronged expedition, however, was set in stone. Barents’s ship and its smaller companion slipped out of the harbor at Amsterdam on May 29, 1594, taking almost a week to get to the Dutch island of Texel on the North Sea. At Texel, the Amsterdam contingent found the other two ships waiting for them. The four vessels would, in theory, set out together. With Enkhuizen represented by van Linschoten, the province of Zeeland sponsored Cornelis Nay—captain of the Swan and the commander of the modest fleet.
Along with his helmsman, Nay had sailed the Norwegian coast and spent time in Russian waters. His cousin, who had also lived there, came aboard as a Russian interpreter. Given the possibilities of human contact on the mainland below Nova Zembla, Nay also brought along a young Slav who’d been studying in the Netherlands.
The next day, June 5, an east wind rose at their backs. It was a favorable sign for departure, but the Amsterdam ships weren’t ready on time. The Mercury and Swan left without them. Barents soon came trailing after, chasing the other ships up the coast.
They prepared to sail into the open sea and had planned to stay together as far as Kildin Island, a well-charted location off the Russian mainland just past the kingdom of Norway. From there, according to prior agreement, Barents would split off and sail his ship and the scouting vessel “above Nova Zembla, that is, underneath the Polus Arcticus”—the North Pole. He would answer the question of whether Nova Zembla was part of a land mass stretching all the way to the top of the world.
With the route as far as Kildin Island on the Norwegian-Russian border fully mapped, and a straightforward passage ahead of them for the first weeks at sea, the weather remained the only variable. Aboard the Mercury, Jan van Linschoten wrote that he’d been overcome by a “burning desire” to sail to the Arctic. He’d survived the dangerous Portuguese route rounding the Cape of Good Hope twice coming and going from Asia, only to be chased by English pirates and see the ship’s cargo lost on the way home. If a northern route to China could be discovered, the dangers of that roundabout Cape passage could be avoided. Van Linschoten was convinced that any northern route would be six times shorter.2
As the fleet followed the North Sea toward the Pole, the sun spiraled overhead. The life of a sailor at sea is a wheel of routine, and each ship quickly established a daily rhythm. Crews were divided into staggered groups eating meals, sleeping belowdeck, and keeping watch in rotation, bringing on ballast to weight and balance the ship, furling and unfurling sails, dropping and weighing anchor, cleaning the ship, repairing lines, patching sails, and mending clothes.
Above decks, the sun might bake everything stiff and dry, but in the orlop—above the cargo hold but below the main deck— it would be hard to avoid the reek of unwashed bodies in unrelieved proximity. The many languages of water surrounded them day and night, slapping the sides of the ship at anchor, spraying out from a hull cutting through open sea, then thundering down from overhead.
Once at sea, the men were subject to the captain’s authority in every matter and had little hope of subverting his will except through mutiny. He could order a range of punishments for infractions from confinement to execution, with little or no accountability until the ship returned to its home port, if then. Voyages that required hundreds of able seamen might mean that sailors who were collared into work would have few skills upon setting out. But as seasoned sailors needing only small crews, the captains sailing with William Barents into the Arctic in 1594 had likely been able to visit local establishments in their home cities and secure sailors they knew or who’d been recommended to them.
The fleet headed out from Amsterdam with sixteen continuous hours of sunlight and outran more darkness every day until they sat far enough north that night was banished altogether. As they made their way up the western coast of Norway, the ships spied Trondheim and the islands of Lofoten, rounding the farthest northern reaches of the Norwegian coastline. They passed the jagged rocks leading up to the high plateaus at Nordkapp and Nordkinn, then the mounded cliffs of Stappane.
Despite occasional rough weather, they made good time and crossed from Norway to Russia. On the Russian side of the peninsula at Kildin Island, the fastest ships dropped anchor to wait for the rest of the fleet. By June 23, the ships were reunited. With the sun’s circuit now entirely above the horizon, they could sail anytime the wind came to their aid.
Kildin had become a well-known trading station and a waypoint for sailors heading to Russia. The small outpost rose high out of the water on piles, flashing inhospitable steep faces and a rocky plateau that lay an hour’s climb away from the accessible shores. But near its eastern end sat a peaceful harbor as protected as any city port. Lying just inside the Arctic Circle, Kildin had no trees or tall grasses, but occasional mosses and moor brambles sat low to the ground. There were said to be bears and wolves.
Ten miles long and some three miles across, Kildin was a crossroads for Europeans and Russians, as well as Finns and indigenous Sami people, who moved eastward onto the island during summer months. Sami clothes and shoes were made of reindeer fur, and reindeer the size of adult rams pulled the Sami sleds. Some of the Dutchmen looked down on the Finns and Sami crowded into turf huts. Both groups made a living selling fish to the Russians, who dried it fo
r resale to passing ships.
Disembarking from the Mercury to take stock of these groups, van Linschoten described them as dirty pigs, penniless, and misshapen, “living a poor miserable life.” Though van Linschoten had lived in other lands among other peoples than his own, whatever curiosity or empathy he’d picked up wasn’t extended to the Sami, whom he described as barely more than animals.
Despite van Linschoten’s uncharitable bile, it wasn’t the Sami who gave the Dutchmen trouble at Kildin. The captain of a Danish cargo ship came aboard the Mercury, wondering why the first ships of the fleet to arrive weren’t continuing south into the White Sea above Russia, given the favorable winds. He demanded to see their papers, but they pretended to be confused over language issues, ignoring his request and sending him away.
They found themselves beset by Russians as well. A customs official for the grand duke of Moscow complained bitterly that they shouldn’t fish in the waters at Kildin day after day without asking permission. His tone implied some kind of present was due. After visitors didn’t offer a gift, the Russians took advantage of the midnight sun while the Dutchmen were asleep.
At one point in the bright night, the Dutch sailor on watch saw the Russians paddling furiously toward shore. In their small boat lay the fishing nets that Dutch sailors had cast against the customs officer’s wishes. The thieves made it back to land, only to be chased by the watchman, who woke his shipmates and with them fell into the ship’s small boat while yelling at the Russians. Landing just ahead of their pursuers, the Russians dropped their coats in the dinghy, the better to run on foot. The furious Dutchmen caught the fleeing thieves and beat them. Returning to shore, they rowed the Russian dingy back to their ship, bringing their nets and the Russians’ coats with them.
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