Icebound

by Andrea Pitzer

  This sea-horse is a wonderfull strong monster of the sea, much bigger than an oxe, which keepes continually in the seas, hauing a skinne like a sea-calfe or seale, with very short hair, mouthed like a lyon, and many times they lie vpon the ice; they are hardly killed vnlesse you strike them iust upon the forehead.4

  Barents and his shipmates had been out from Kildin for five weeks, and at sea for two months. Though they were eating up their rations, months of provisions remained. Still, the endless tacking and slow progress made the sailors weary. The inexorable ice piling higher all around them was unlikely to diminish as fall arrived.

  Ice had destroyed ships before their voyage, and would, in time, crush larger and sturdier vessels than any Barents sailed. In January 1915, after almost reaching his planned landing site on Antarctica, British explorer Ernest Shackleton would find his exquisitely crafted ship The Endurance frozen into the ice. The ship and crew drifted for months, traveling hundreds of miles west and nearly a thousand miles north, listening to the solid sea grind away at their hull. Sometimes it sounded like moaning; at other moments, the wood at the mercy of the ice cracked like pistol shots.5

  Under the worst conditions, the sea could take a whole fleet. In 1871, a group of thirty-three whaling ships sailing between the far northern coast of Alaska and an expanding ice pack were destroyed when the wind shifted and trapped the vessels. The men were rescued, but the ships had to be abandoned where they sat, with their crews leaving them to be torn apart by the sea.

  It wouldn’t take much imagination for the sailors past Nova Zembla at the far end of the world to fear what would come next: the thud of drifting chunks hitting the hull of the ship between decks, the watch for icebergs that might be large enough to stove or sink the ship, or the inevitable closure of any dim passage they might find now as winter came on. Even if they wanted to continue, it wasn’t clear how they could. They’d surely end up spending the winter in a polar climate, keeping the ship as safe as they could in the ice and parceling out remaining rations, which wouldn’t be enough to last until spring. The crew began to balk at the idea of sailing farther.

  Mutiny against a captain was punishable by death, but crews did sometimes turn against ship’s officers. After being trapped ashore on the eastern coast of South America during the winter of 1519, Ferdinand Magellan’s men had been put on short rations as they tried to find a southern route to the Spice Islands for the Spanish crown. The next April, captains in the fleet led Magellan’s men in rebellion against him.6

  In May 1504, while marooned on Jamaica for a year during his final voyage, Christopher Columbus used lunar declination tables to predict an eclipse and pretend to the indigenous Arawak population that he had divine knowledge. He also faced a mutiny led by the brothers Diego and Francisco de Porras—a mutiny put down only after a swordfight that one of the brothers lost to Columbus’s own brother, Bartholomew.

  Some captains whose sailors turned against them were greedy mercenaries. Others were simply tyrants. Nothing in the historical record suggests William Barents was either. Seeing no way forward with the sea as it was, Barents agreed to give up hope of circling Nova Zembla and following its eastern coastline down to meet the Mercury and the Swan. On August 1, 1594, they turned the ship around.

  The men worked their way back from the walruses of the Orange Islands to Ice Point, and then miles along the coast, where a group of low dark hills stood like the mirage of some lost country huts. Sailing away from land, they passed the wrecked Pomor vessels they’d seen on their way north. Freed of the paralyzing menace of the ice, the return was easier than the voyage out. By August 8, just a week after they’d turned around, they had traveled four hundred miles south along the sweeping line of Nova Zembla’s western coast, a long, narrow, arc of land curved like the neck of a goose. (The fat southern portion of Nova Zembla would in time be called Goose Land.)

  The sailors came to an island of black earth in the fog. Unable to see any safe distance beyond the bow of the ship, they headed out to sea to be sure to keep clear of the shore. When the sun returned, they sailed back and saw that they’d arrived at the inlet of Kostin Shar toward the southern end of the island mapped a decade before by Olivier Brunel on a mission financed by Dutch merchants.

  Barents had wanted to hold to the shore, but the ice that had stymied them in the north made a return visit. The crew headed west into the sea until they worked their way clear of it. Sailing close to land again, they spied more black rock, and a cross near the shore. They knew they were nearing the southern tip of Nova Zembla and had returned to lands rumored and described on prior expeditions. The men couldn’t be sure that no other travelers, traders, or Sami or Nenets herders were in the vicinity.

  Taking the small boat ashore, they saw signs of a human presence, but the residents seemed to have fled recently, perhaps from Barents and his crew. The Dutchmen explored the area and identified the carcass of a broken Russian ladya with its long keel, along with six buried sacks of rye meal, a stray bullet for a long gun, a second cross, and several staves for barrels. In all, they found three wooden houses built in a northern style. Nearby lay five or six coffins filled with bones and stones.

  Seeing no living thing, they called the site Mealhaven and sailed on. During six more days of fog and sun, they worked their way to the bottom of Nova Zembla and came to the islands of Matfloe and Delgoy, where, against any reasonable odds, they spotted Cornelis Nay and the rest of the fleet.

  Greeting their mates from Amsterdam with gunpowder and celebratory explosions, the crews of the Swan and the Mercury at first thought that Barents had circumnavigated Nova Zembla as planned, sailing up its western shore, over the top, and down its eastern coastline all the way to Vaigach Island. Before long, this impression was corrected, to everyone’s disappointment, and the captains told Barents and his men what they had seen while sailing near Vaigach Island during their six weeks apart.

  The Mercury and Swan had made their way from Kildin Island into the open sea and had found the ship surrounded by whales and black-throated arctic loons. Within a week, they’d encountered imposing sections of hard, flat ice on the surface of the water, as well as icebergs twenty feet high or taller floating with the current. Making their way between the floating islands, ice surrounded them on all sides. They could see little water and no land, with no apparent exit. After some three miles of sailing in the blank labyrinth, seeing mist rise in the distance, they thought they might be approaching land. “Sea dogs”—seals—littered the tops of icebergs, while geese flew overhead. Eventually, they’d made their way out of the maze of ice, sailed back to the sea, and continued heading southeast.

  Two days later, they caught sight of snow-topped high terrain that stretched level and even, though fog blocked any clear view. Later the same the day, they came to an island with a hillock near the shore at the top of which sat a cross. Soon after, they stumbled again into a terrifying seascape of icebergs that seemed to change moment to moment, some with grim caves, and others big enough for the sound of water crashing against them to sound like waves battering the shore—a fate that would be disastrous for their ships. They had little idea of where they were. They saw plants, feathers, roots, bark, branches, and the wood of trees like relics of some shattered landscape. Small birds floated overhead as if looking for land, and two that might have been swans winged their way northeast in the distance.

  Ice blocked their route again and again, covering the water so snugly and seamlessly that they appeared to be lodged in a continent of ice that stretched away into the distance—even from the bird’s-eye view atop the mast. There was no longer any water to sail in, only ice.

  When they finally managed to get free, they turned to avoid floating icebergs and to watch for land, which was hard to match with the known geography of the region, due to mist and fog obscuring everything. When they sent out their small yacht, which could navigate the glaciers with less danger, it found a harbor safe from the threat of ice, and the ships m
ade their way to safety.

  The Swan and Mercury soon had company. The crew of a Russian ladya plying the coast told them that they were at least a day’s sail from where they thought themselves to be, having covered more than half of the distance between Kildin and Vaigach Island, south of Nova Zembla. The captain of the Russian ship made a sketch of the coastline for them, but it was a collection of landmarks with no indication of latitude. The captain said he had no personal knowledge of Vaigach Island but had heard rumors that the passage between Vaigach and the Russian mainland was narrow and blocked by ice. On the other side, he said, lay a southern sea known as the Warm Sea, as opposed to the northern sea, known as the Cold Sea.

  They ran into two more Russian ships, which gave them similar news of the strait between Vaigach Island and the mainland, although one added that it would be possible to get through, if it weren’t for the vast numbers of whales and walruses there. They’d also have difficulty, the Russians added, with the sandbanks, the rocks, and the waves driving their ships onto the shores of the passage. As if that weren’t enough, these new acquaintances reported that the grand duke or tsar had recently sent three ships to navigate Vaigach Strait, only to lose all three, along with several sailors, in the ice.

  Seeing more Russians on shore, Nay’s men brought them aboard and learned that the coast was peopled with foreign hunters and trappers, but some had hidden themselves at the sight of the Dutch ships. Told that there was nothing to fear, those who were hidden came out, later inviting the ships’ crews to join them on hunting and fishing expeditions.

  The Dutchmen had seen footprints of bears, as well as wild geese and duck on the wing, but the living things that most distracted them on windless days were the pervasive gnats. More exciting was the arrival of whales surrounding the ship in mid-July. Without harpoons, they couldn’t easily capture or kill the creatures. Instead, the men drove them into the shallows to wear them out. They finally managed to finish one whale off after a long chase by stabbing it in the back. The dying whale fought as it bled out, painting the sea red. They dragged it to shore, chopped it to pieces, and dumped the blubber into barrels for oil. While they were cutting it up, another whale approached the shore where they worked, but they didn’t try to kill it, having no room left to bring aboard blubber from a second creature.

  Russian fishermen on their way to the Pechora River gave them fresh fish and reassured them that the icebergs that had begun to surround them would melt in the next several days. Sometimes the frost and mist were such that the sun was blotted out; on other days it hung in the sky, ominous and crimson. The icebergs loomed larger, as big as floating islands, but they were porous and prone to breaking into pieces and vanishing into the depths before the sailors’ eyes.

  On July 22, they caught sight of land, which they mistakenly believed to be connected to Nova Zembla itself. The ships sat trapped in fog, but when the sky cleared, they took a reading and found they’d reached a latitude of 70 degrees 20 minutes. They’d come to Vaigach Island. As with Barents finding the northern tip of Nova Zembla a week later and hundreds of miles north of them, they hadn’t found the Arctic to be hospitable or helpful, but they’d managed to reach their destination.

  Again they encountered driftwood, trunks, roots, and branches of trees entirely covering the surface of the dark water. Their soundings revealed a shallow waterway over pebbles, then more dangerous stones and boulders. They came to a place with twin crosses; believing it inhabited, they rowed their small boat in to look around. They wandered near the coast and spotted a man. They hurried to catch up and surprised him. He didn’t say much and clearly didn’t want to talk to them, but he understood a little Russian. They advanced on him to seize him. He was frightened and managed to escape.

  Jan van Linschoten, who kept a diary, said that the escapee reminded him of the inhabitants of Kildin Island whom they’d left behind when the ships had split to follow their separate routes. Having heard from the Russians that the coast along Vaigach was inhabited by groups of these people, the men aboard van Linschoten’s ship became even more certain that they were navigating the strait as planned.

  They had sailed a lusher landscape than the one seen by William Barents—at times a beautiful terrain of hills and mountains, with whole fields covered in every color of flower, whose scents reached them. Yet in other places along the coast, vegetation was sparse, and there were no forests. They’d seen walruses and reindeer, as well as scat from a number of animals they couldn’t identify, but few birds other than an occasional passing chaffinch, swallow, or seagull. They far more often saw an entire tree, from roots to crown, floating in the water, or even thrown whole onto high land, the magnificent corpse of a storm.

  Still above the Arctic Circle, they were nonetheless far enough south that, on the night of July 23, the sun dipped below the horizon before rising in almost the same corner of the sky a short time later—the first time in more than a month that they’d seen a sunset. They could tell again by the presence of crosses that Russians had preceded them in that place, but by the character of the landscape to the south, and the currents carrying ice toward them, they were now fully convinced that they’d been sailing the waters between the mainland and Vaigach Island. As they pressed on, the dark water turned blue and salty, recalling the open ocean.

  On July 26, though the sky was clear, the weather was cold and a strong wind began to blow. They dropped anchor to venture ashore and found reindeer horns on skulls that had been gnawed to the bone. Snow and hail drove in hard under dark skies, sending them back to the ship to wait out the weather. Van Linschoten brought with him a walrus head likewise chewed clean, for further study.

  Icebergs began to come in thick, some headed straight for the vessel. As the ship was pulled toward a strong current, the speed of the flow didn’t leave time for escape maneuvers. One near miss struck the northern coastline instead and ricocheted back at them too quickly for the crew to hoist anchor and flee. To try to give the ship room to move with the ice, they ran out the anchor cable. But it snapped like a match. They lost their anchor and were swept deep into the current amid the icebergs.

  A ship of any size carried more than one anchor for just such occasions. After hoisting the mizzen sail, they managed to get clear of the ice and cast out a second anchor. Again the ice rose all around them. As they fed out line to drift and avoid one threat, icebergs struck the other side of the ship like a collision with rocks. The anchor cable got twisted under the floating mountains of ice. The current dragged the ship again.

  Then the arms of the second anchor broke off and remained trapped in the seafloor, leaving the sailors holding only the anchor rod on the end of the line. They were adrift once more. They set the sails up to tack against the ice. Making their way to a calm strip on the north shore, they found enough shelter from the storm and good ground to drop a third anchor within cannon-range of land. They recorded a latitude of 69 degrees 43 minutes and paused to christen the unsettling passage in which they found themselves the Strait of Nassau.

  Sailors went out in the small boat and returned just as night came in. They came back carrying the bower—the first of the two anchors that had been lost—trailing the strip of cable that had snapped in the gale. The sky had gone to storm again, and the east wind drove a damp cold into them without mercy.

  As they set out near noon on the next day, they spied a southern coastline with raised pieces of wood, and at first took them for the Russian crosses they’d spotted before. Coming closer, they saw instead hundreds of wooden idols of all sizes on a stretch of beach choked with reindeer antlers. The idols were male and female, adult and child, and all had their carved faces turned to the east. The sailors assumed they’d stumbled onto some sacred or sacrificial land. Because some were newer and others were riddled with rot or worms, van Linschoten came to think that perhaps each idol honored a dead native. Some were cut totem-style, with several faces stacked above one another on a single piece of wood. Nearby stretchers
with hewn feet seemed to be some kind of bier on which to carry the idols. Though it was clear that people came there regularly, the men could see no sign of current inhabitants. Nearby, more driftwood and pieces of rotten walrus carcasses floated in the water.

  The land itself was rich and green with small basins and lakes filled with snowmelt, which could be brought down in barrels as needed. Despite the sea rubbing right against rocky shores, this spit of land might make a good stop for refilling stores of water on future voyages.

  But every good piece of news was overshadowed by grimmer events. The Swan and Mercury were pinned in for two days by storms and the constant deadly threat of ice. On the morning of the third day, July 29, they spotted an iceberg at least half a mile long moving through the channel. If the current nudged it sideways, it could close the strait entirely. Up to that point, Admiral Nay had stayed aboard the Swan, but seeing the vast approaching danger and knowing it could smash the ships, he headed to shore with the crew. The visible parts of the behemoth blocked their view, filling the sailors with awe as it approached. It pulled alongside them in all its grandeur, then moved on without turning, and passed them by. They began to wonder where else such massive islands of ice could come from but the open sea.

  The sailors went ashore the same day and found a small cabin, along with more elegantly worked idols than those they’d seen on the shore. In the distance, they spotted three reindeer pulling a man on a sled. They called to him, with an idea that they might capture the newcomer. But as the crew moved in to take him, he raised a cry. Dozens of similar people appeared, likewise on sleds pulled by reindeer, surrounding the sailors. They barely escaped to their small boat, which carried them back to the ship as arrows chased them out of range. It became apparent that the next time they wanted to ask questions about what lay on the other side of the strait, they’d need to make a bid for friendship rather than abduction.