Icebound

by Andrea Pitzer

  Amsterdam intended to hedge its bets. The Dutch authorized a second, separate voyage slated to leave in spring of 1595—one that would take a southern route. By this time, Jan van Linschoten’s accounts of his time in Goa working for the Portuguese—the maps he copied, the records he took, and a vast bundle of intelligence collected through his earlier position overseas—had been assembled for print by an Amsterdam publisher experienced in marketing books on travel and navigation.

  Van Linschoten used his own experiences and accounts from others to describe countless new regions and their idiosyncratic features, from the use of elephants in Burma to freakish animals to tea drinking in Japan. With the publication of his massive project, van Linschoten’s name would become known among Dutch political leaders and merchants. His writing about his travels included routes and landing sites that had taken decades for the Portuguese to find and establish.

  New Dutch knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese voyages into the Southern Hemisphere made it possible to imagine a way to defy these rivals—to steal proven routes and trade partners from under their noses. To that end, van Linschoten’s intelligence was consulted to determine a course. The plan was for another fleet to sail south around Africa while Barents and van Linschoten made their second northern voyage.

  Equipping a small fleet for reconnaissance was one thing. Preparing a trade convoy was another. Merchants sent goods to the respective ports, and ships were outfitted with a year and a half of provisions, double the usual personnel, and ammunition in the event of complications.

  Cornelis Nay returned as admiral of the fleet heading north, weighing anchor from Zeeland aboard the Griffin, a ship capable of carrying about twenty-two tons of cargo. Enkhuizen and Amsterdam sent the smaller Hope and the Greyhound, respectively, both newly built vessels roughly half the size of the Griffin but decked out for fighting if an enemy appeared. All three ships would also bring a companion yacht.

  Barents would sail as “captain and coxswain” and “first pilot” for the expedition.1 Joining Barents in the Amsterdam ships was Gerrit de Veer, from an established Amsterdam family. His father was a notary, and his brother a legal scholar. De Veer would record the journey for history, as would van Linschoten. Van Linschoten would sail again—this time joined by a young sailor still in his twenties named Jacob van Heemskerck, who would serve as supercargo, and Jan Cornelis Rijp, who would captain one of the ships. Each man was sworn in prior to departure, and on June 18, the Amsterdam ships left the harbor for Texel to join the fleet.

  Their homeland, however, wasn’t ready to let them go yet. They were delayed two more weeks on the island due to complex preparations that threatened to ruin everything. The men who’d sailed the prior year surely remembered the ice they’d encountered, and the narrow, uncertain window for safe travel. But despair couldn’t move men and commerce any more than it could shift heaven and earth. By the time they all set out from the southern end of Texel, it was July 2, nearly a month later than they had sailed north from the same island the prior year.

  They were charged with making arrangements for trading vessels to harbor in foreign lands, and to conduct “pious, faithful and sincere steady dealings, traffic and navigation for common prosperity.” They were expected to model the behavior they hoped to meet with themselves. They had food and ships and cargo and men to protect it all. They’d been provided everything they needed to make history.

  After their delayed launch, the first weeks of the voyage led them through well-known territory, offering few surprises. But shifting weather and the necessity of so many ships staying together even when it caused delays didn’t work in their favor. They had days of rain and storms, and a rough wind from the north blocked their progress.

  The wind was a sailor’s best friend—making it possible to move unbelievable amounts of cargo as if it were weightless. But it could also wreck and destroy ships. A vessel trapped between a hard wind and an unforgiving shore was a captain’s worst nightmare, and storms at sea could unleash danger in an instant, especially if no known harbors lay nearby.

  Ships weren’t the only thing at risk. A tossing deck at night or in poor visibility had led to the disappearance of countless sailors across the centuries. Most European sailors, even experienced ones, often had no idea how to swim and could be superstitious about going in the sea—with good reason. Any sailor going overboard unnoticed could easily be dead in short order. Even if he were sighted, unless he were thrown a line within reach, a large ship skating on a good wind might not double back in time to rescue even a proficient swimmer. To be at sea without a vessel, even near shore, was often a death sentence.

  After the late start out of Texel, the ship from Amsterdam was delayed by its pinnace, forcing it to catch up to the fleet. On July 21, they came upon a whale that they nearly rammed head-on as it slept. But it woke in time and cleared the way for the ship to pass by.

  Two weeks later, two miles from shore, they’d almost completed the first leg of their northern route up the Norwegian coast and were making steady progress toward Nordkapp, where they would change course and head east. The fleet was sailing as a group when, without warning, one of the ships ran hard onto a rock at high speed, splintering the prow. The captain called out in dismay and warning.

  The crew flocked to the pumps to start drawing out the water that would flood in after any rupture of the hull. The other crews, hearing the warning, jumped into action and steered clear of the damaged vessel. Sailors running down to check the cargo hold found that somehow the rocks hadn’t punched entirely through. The wind turned the ship a little, and the ship’s crew managed to creak and heave it away from the jagged shore. Their hull intact, they sailed on.

  Between the bad weather and the encroaching rocks, they might have earned a reprieve. But after rain days later, fog descended. The seas began to rise, and clouds rolled in from the southeast. Amid pitching waves and wind, the fleet continued to sail. The Greyhound, with William Barents aboard, sped along at the back of the convoy but suddenly came careening from behind.

  The ship was thrown forward by the storm. Sailors called out for Barents’s vessel to tack away, but neither time nor weather allowed a change in course. The ship drove in again, its prow plowing into the starboard side of the Hope. The grinding of the ships against one another and the sound of splitting wood seemed to announce the destruction of both vessels. The nose of the Greyhound plowed over the deck of the Hope.

  The horror was compounded when the mizzenmast on the Hope—the rear of its three tall masts—came crashing down at the stern among the waves and the splintered wood, smashing everything in its path. The Greyhound’s mizzenmast soon fell, too. As the force of impact turned the ships, the built-up wood of the beakhead at the prow of the Hope was sheared off.

  Two masts coming down between ships that had run afoul of each other in a storm meant double the risk of punching a hole in either or both hulls. Yet the wind and sea didn’t smash the two ships together again. Instead, the ricochet from their impact dragged them apart. While the wind raged on, each crew took stock of the situation in fear, fury, and blame. The damage to both ships was extensive.

  But all was not lost. The structures below the waterline weren’t breached. Though the mizzenmasts had fallen, the spars hadn’t been lost in the storm or cut adrift deliberately by a captain worried about the damage they might do. Still, the news was horrifying: four men who fell overboard during the mayhem had drowned.

  The sailors moved the debris and secured the masts. If they faced a grim scene and couldn’t bring back their mates, they at least had a solution at hand to deal with the rest of the disaster. In a feat of engineering that was part of the skilled repertoire of any captain and ship’s carpenter, the crews used the main masts as cranes to hoist their junior neighbors back into place, where they could be bound and braced into their former position. Any such effort ran a small but real risk of capsizing the vessel, and many hands were required to manage the project. Though it took
the rest of the day, and the weather still refused to cooperate, both ships managed to raise their mizzenmasts again. The damage to the prow was addressed as much as it could be in short order on open water; the rest would have to wait for a time at anchor or better weather.

  The following day they spied a Dutch ship gaining on them. In time, the vessel, out of Enkhuizen like the Hope, caught up, and they exchanged messages with the captain. He was on his way to the White Sea to trade, which didn’t affect them at all. But he let them know that he’d also set out from Texel leaving the Netherlands, and had left two weeks after the first ships had set out. Despite his later departure, he’d managed to catch them. They’d lost two full weeks to foul weather and the inconveniences of sailing together. They’d now been out more than a month and were still on the Norwegian coast.

  The ship joined their fleet. They soon caught sight of the Iron Pig out of Amsterdam as well, and sailed on as a nine-ship company. They rounded Nordkinn as a group, cresting the European continent once more. After four days of travel together, the two latest members of the convoy split off to make their own way south toward the White Sea. On August 13, Barents and the original fleet headed east and southeast toward Vaigach Island.

  Four days later, they encountered the first bright sun they’d seen in days. But near noon, they spotted a familiar ghost on the landscape, as ice began its creeping return. One iceberg stretched in a flat, broad plane as far north as they could see, until sailors went up the mast and imagined perhaps that they caught a glimpse of open water beyond it in the distance.

  They sailed southward along its edge during the rest of the day and all night, as if along a coastline, but mile after mile, the iceberg—if it was only an iceberg—had no end. Their ships lay perhaps thirty or forty miles from the shores of Nova Zembla. The men decided to take matters into their own hands. Using a hand-cranked drill, they began to seed cracks in the wall that lay before them, trying to wedge small gaps into fissures to break through the ice. Sections of the iceberg began to crumble. They moved the ships into the gap and pressed the ice ahead of them. In time sailors came to open water again, with only small, occasional floes to guard against. They cautiously raised their topsails and sailed on.

  The sighting marked the end of the smooth sailing. From then on, ice could appear at any moment. The ships began a familiar jagged route of tack and tack again, as their course began to depend not only on the wind, but on the various ways the frozen sea could become impassable. Faced the next day with blocks of ice that filled the horizon before them, men braced themselves and surged again into the chasms between masses of ice, once more making their way through to the other side.

  They didn’t remember seeing this kind of ice this far west the summer before, and began to worry that the sea to the east had frozen solid, and that the ice might run all the way to shore. Based on the first expedition, they guessed they sat only two or three dozen miles out from the strait. But the passage between Vaigach and the mainland might already be closed for the winter.

  On August 18, the ships came to the trio of islands at which they had reunited on the first voyage. Seeing familiar land was a tremendous relief, and boosted their confidence. They remembered that, on their way home during the last voyage, the stretch between the straits and the islands had sometimes been treacherous, but had at least been free of ice. They hoped to find navigation easier going forward. The sailors continued to vacillate between hope and anxiety right up until they came in sight of Vaigach Island and the strait. The sun was just above the horizon as they floated toward the entrance, giving them a clear look at their portal to the East.

  Ice choked the whole span of the route, as if some pale extension of the mainland had overgrown the passage to form a new landscape. It was August 19. By the same date on their trip the prior year, van Linschoten and his companions had already made it through the strait, reunited with the company, and begun to head home. But on this trip, they’d lost weeks to bad weather and ice. And they still hadn’t faced anything like what lay before them. Two thousand miles into the journey that had begun with such certainty of success, they lost heart.

  If they couldn’t sail through, Commander Nay decided, they would at least try to clear their way to the southern part of Vaigach Island and the Cape of the Idols, where they’d seen hundreds of carvings the year before. At the Cape, they could move out of the current, and decide what strategy to take. Perhaps they might find a way to go on.

  It seemed impossible that they might have to turn back after having carried their cargo so far, but the strait was clogged with ice. Even if they somehow managed to get in, they might well get stuck. And if the ice froze them in farther along the western side, even if they turned around, they might not be able to make their way back.

  The floes crowding on their way out of the strait rode the current toward the vast slabs that had already accumulated there, forcing some of the icebergs back on themselves in a ring. The sailors guided the fleet through the tightening whirlpool of ice and took refuge under the shelter of a point on the coast of Vaigach Island, where they dropped anchor for the night.

  In the morning, a group of sailors went ashore from the convoy to investigate the terrain and get a fuller view of the ice blocking the waterways. They looked out to the west from where they’d just come, and saw ice everywhere, with no entrance other than the one they’d already made. They spotted a Russian ship near the shore. Meanwhile, the recognizable crack of gunfire traveled over the ice. The sound had come from the Griffin, a summons from the admiral to come aboard. They watched a group of men in the distance hurry onto the ladya and push off in alarm at the noise, leaving behind their fishing nets.

  Going over to the beach, they found leather bags, whale oil, and a sled made of wooden sticks pegged together. Their orders from the States General were to engage only in good-faith trade, which meant leaving supplies like this as they found them. The crew hadn’t spotted any homes or people near the straits so far on this voyage, but it seemed as if the area might be populated. Some ashore thought they spied the roofs of huts.

  Meeting with the admiral later that day, the officers decided to go ashore and look for settlers and make a more thorough survey of the ice. They couldn’t row across to the mainland because the strait to their south was too packed with ice even for their small yachts. But the next day, fifty-four men were dispatched with weapons to make a sweep of Vaigach Island. They spent the day ashore walking eight miles across the land and back without finding a living being. But they did come to a range of hills where they found more leather bags filled with whale oil half-hidden under rocks, along with reindeer bridles and walrus skins—the gray patches they’d mistaken for roofs the prior day.

  Farther along, they discovered sleds piled high with the skins of reindeer and foxes, as well as tracks from not just animals but humans of every size and age. Their arrival must have interrupted a whole group of people, who were no doubt now hiding from the Dutchmen. The sailors realized they’d come to a trading post of sorts, where Russians visited with locals who had hunted and trapped and could barter with them for furs and whale oil. They set out bread and cheese, along with trinkets, near the items already on the ground. Finding no living creatures or signs of other outposts, they returned to the shore and made their way back to the ships.

  Though the men had been instructed to leave things where they lay, the fleet’s officers discovered that some of the crew had taken hides on board in violation of orders. Their crime went directly against those orders, though it was, perhaps, no worse than van Linschoten’s theft of the wooden idol on the prior voyage, for which he was never punished. Common sailors, however, were entirely subject to any captain’s wrath, doubly so the commander of a fleet. The perpetrators were sentenced to be keelhauled.

  Keelhauling went at least as far back as the Greeks. The ordeal was sometimes administered as a punishment for piracy, the infraction committed at Vaigach Island. The Dutch practiced it more often t
han their contemporaries did, yet it remained brutal enough that it still wasn’t common practice. The sailor in question was tied to a rope line and dragged underneath his ship from one side to the other. Significant injuries were to be expected. The penalty was especially brutal in Arctic weather with bitter temperatures in water and air alike, as well as the possibility of hitting ice during the journey under the ship. One of the sailors keelhauled off Vaigach Island didn’t survive his punishment but was instead torn in half, another grim omen for a voyage that had already seen tragedy. The punishment would have serious repercussions, but the fleet went on with its mission.

  One of the yachts soon returned from a day of exploring the strait, a feat made easier without the burden of keeping the larger ships of the convoy together. The boat had sailed as far as Cross Cape, where ice barred progress completely. The sailors then went ashore, where ice jammed even the waterway near the mainland. Far from shore, however, they reported seeing open water. They thought all the ships together might be able to make a run at clearing the strait. The men regretted not getting to talk to the reindeer herders, who might regularly cross the passage with the seasons and could advise them on what lay ahead.

  Conditions in the bay where they sat at anchor grew more treacherous. The very point of the anchors was to limit the ships’ mobility, but as a flotilla of icebergs began careening into the bay, anchors left them with no ability to dodge oncoming objects. They brought their ships closer to shore, which ended up trapping them even more. They began to think that they might have to drag the vessels aground in order to save them. In the meantime, the Hope sent a small boat to the island near the Cape of the Idols to get fresh water, but the water surrounding the boat froze over so quickly while they were ashore that the vessel got trapped. The sailors ended up abandoning half a dozen barrels of water, trying to fight their way back to the ship before they were entirely frozen in. The Griffin’s yacht had gone to the other side of the same island into the strait itself and was similarly besieged by ice. Unable to break through, they dragged their yacht ashore and left it, walking back over the island to the bay side on foot to rejoin the fleet.