Icebound

by Andrea Pitzer

  That night, a fierce storm struck, driving the rest of the ships together and bringing the ice piling into the bay. But in the morning, they found that the tempest had loosened the small channel through the ice that had let them into the inlet. It now lay open. They dared to hope for similar conditions across the remainder of the strait. Maybe they could find a way to go on. Warm weather the next day farther encouraged them. On August 24, enough ice had melted to send a yacht on patrol again. They sailed back to the site where a Russian ship had been spotted before. Finding the sailors had returned to their ship, the Dutchmen saw that some were cooking barley flour on a fire while others skinned a walrus. They sailed closer, and the Russians came toward them without making any aggressive signs or threats.

  The Russians described sailing from near the city of Archangel at the southern end of the White Sea. After spending all summer at the southern end of Nova Zembla trapped by the ice, they’d arrived on the strait only the day before. Another ship had been trapped with them farther north, and they were waiting to be reunited.

  Seeking advice, the Dutch heard a litany covering most of what they’d been told the year before—that while conditions changed year to year, the ice would vanish for a period of ten weeks or so ahead of the true and brutal winter. The sea on the far side wouldn’t be frozen, even in winter. They called the island Vaigach, pronouncing it “Way-gatz.”

  Vaigach lay south of Nova Zembla but was separate from it. Another strait existed between Nova Zembla and Vaigach, they explained, but it was impassable due to ice. Nobody lived year-round north of the mainland. Instead, everyone came during the summer to trade with the indigenous population from south of Vaigach, returning home before winter set in. These Russians had never seen the open sea on the other side of the strait, but said that their countrymen regularly took shipments to the far side of Vaigach Island and even beyond.

  The carved figures they’d seen on both voyages were idols worshipped by the Nenets, the Russians claimed, whereas they were themselves Greek Orthodox Christians. The Russians didn’t want to trade with the Dutchmen but accepted an old compass as a gift in thanks for their advice.

  The sailors went back to the ships and waited for their other yacht to return from its second day of scouting. Near midnight, the report came that they’d seen more ice, but it was clearing, and before they’d turned to come back to the ship, they spotted a clear route for the convoy to sail.

  The next morning, crews began to make their way east with high hopes. They expected some ice and weren’t surprised when it rose again on their starboard side. Once into the sea, they sailed along the coast of Vaigach Island, thinking to head north of the shore along which the icebergs congregated.

  In time, they cleared the strait altogether, and the coast of Vaigach began to arc away from them to the north. But as they sailed on, the ice visible on the starboard side of the ship began to swallow more and more of their view, coming closer and closer to the island coastline on their port side. The path of water ahead grew narrower and narrower until finally there was no route forward at all. Looking back, they sat in an expansive half-moon of ice curving from the shore of the island in front of them all the way to the mainland below. Everything that lay to the east was a plain of ice. They couldn’t cut their way through the whole frozen sea. There was nowhere to go.

  After a time, they turned from the sea back near the entrance of the strait they had driven their vessels through with so much hardship, only beginning to reckon with the failure of their quest. They anchored safely for the night, but in the morning, they saw the wall of ice advancing on them. They worked their way for miles along the shoreline, but the ice pursued them as they went. Within hours they had to set sail once more, returning to the bay that had sheltered them before. It was August 27 when they saw more ice riding the current toward them, coming to crowd them further. They retreated into perilous waters less than twenty feet deep to keep their hulls from being breached. And still the impassable wall moved closer. As if laying claim to the ships, ice began forming on the vessels themselves, locking the vessels inside a transparent skin a half-inch thick.

  By the next day, the surface of the bay had turned solid. Men climbed down over the sides of the ships and found they could walk from the Greyhound to the Hope and the Griffin and find the going as solid as any street at home without fear of getting their feet wet. The window of weeks without ice promised by the Russians seemed to have vanished. The sailors commended themselves to God’s mercy and waited. If weather didn’t work its alchemy in the coming days, they might be stuck until spring. If that happened, they feared they would die.

  On August 29, a Tuesday, they lay at anchor, biding their time. William Barents went to meet with the admiral at length. They had words over the fate of the expedition, with Barents rejecting the idea of turning for home and finding himself opposed by many of the other officers. He had tacked hundreds more miles in order to work his way around the ice on his previous expedition, giving up only when his men had refused to go on. They hadn’t yet tried nearly as persistently to find a way into the sea beyond Vaigach Island. Barents returned to his ship with the matter still unsettled.

  Nighttime brought rain and a storm, which they were desperate enough to welcome. They hoped it would melt some of the ice without sending any loose slabs to batter the ships. In the morning, they watched the weather clear and saw their narrow space had expanded again as the icebergs shifted away in the wake of the storm. The only likely exit—the way they’d come in—was still blocked. They remained trapped, but not so narrowly as before. The small circle of water they sat in had expanded.

  William Barents boarded his yacht with the Amsterdam interpreter and a company of sailors and headed to Vaigach to investigate the view of the sea from higher land. Ashore, they caught sight of some twenty Nenets men, whose presence took them by surprise. Not expecting to find human company, they’d landed only nine men and were outnumbered. Their young interpreter stepped out unaccompanied and unarmed to meet the strangers. A lone Nenets man walked forward from the other group in turn. Just as he neared the interpreter, the Nenets representative took an arrow and notched it in his bow, as if to shoot his counterpart. The interpreter cried out in Russian, “Don’t shoot! We are friends.” In response, the archer dropped his bow to the ground.

  The two greeted each other and knelt down, touching their heads to the earth, as the impromptu hosts bid the newcomers welcome. The conversation quickly turned to seeking advice on ice, navigating the strait, and what lay to the east. Pointing to the northeast, the Nenets responded that some five days’ sail from there, they’d come to a great open sea, one that he knew himself, having sailed it as a captain with his king and his people.

  Barents took these locals for people of reasonable judgment. Gerrit de Veer recorded in his journal of the voyage that the women and men dressed alike, had long hair, and wore reindeer hides with the fur against the skin. Bowlegged, flat-faced, and fleet-footed, they remained wary of the Dutchmen. Barents went back to the ship to make a report, and the next day, they returned to get more information. The sailors tried a second time to get a look at one of the Nenets bows, but were again refused. They brought ship’s biscuit to the leader of the Nenets, who ate it and thanked them. The Nenets responded by taking the Dutchmen on sleds pulled by reindeer, which seemed faster than horses. Conversation stayed civil until one of the Dutchmen gave a demonstration of his musket, firing a shot out over the sea. The noise launched pandemonium until the Nenets could be reassured it wasn’t meant as a threat. The visitors explained how their guns worked and demonstrated shooting a small stone two or three inches across from a distance, which the Nenets wondered over.

  They bowed heads toward each other and left again, saluting their new acquaintances with a trumpet while the Nenets went off in their sleds. A few minutes later, one returned alone in a sled and rode up to the shore. He approached the small boat and went aboard to find a carved idol that one of the Dutc
hmen had carried onto the ship. With hundreds of the rough-carved images around, the Dutchmen hadn’t taken any individual artifact to be of any particular value. Their host chided them for stealing something that his people revered, and they returned it to him.

  The sailors shoreside headed back to the fleet. Admiral Nay again came to speak with the men on the Hope, to let them know that they had surveyed the strait for miles. It was choked with more ice than they’d seen yet, with icebergs running aground in waters they knew to be more than forty feet deep. Pushing floes and floating slabs out of the way was dangerous enough, but moving large icebergs that had settled on the bottom would be impossible.

  Admiral Nay also spoke with Barents. The captain asked once more what Barents thought best. Barents again said he wanted the expedition to press on. The admiral wasn’t convinced, and remained cautious about the idea of violating the instructions on their commission by splitting the fleet. He was also aware of the toll the ice had already taken on the sailors. Barents was the fleet’s senior navigator, but Nay was the commander, and he had grim advice: “William Barents, mind what you say.”2

  More information came on September 1 from a talk between the Nenets and the interpreter for the Griffin, whose long residence in Russia made for more fluent conversation. Since the Nenets didn’t spend the winter on the strait, they couldn’t answer some of the most important questions put to them, but they offered that the deep seas on each side of the strait didn’t freeze over in winter, though the area in and around the strait, once fully frozen, would stay solid until May.

  The crews woke to clear weather on September 2, and weighed anchor. The Hope set sail with only minor tribulations, but the Griffin had a harder time, and the Hope’s yacht was so wedged in the ice that it had to be dragged out by kedging.

  Like hoisting a mast at sea, kedging was an almost miraculous process and well known to any seasoned sailor. The kedge anchor was attached to a line, put on a small boat, and carefully rowed out some distance from the ship. If the weight of the anchor didn’t tip the boat and drown anyone on the way out, the anchor was dropped, and sailors hauled on the line, not to bring the anchor toward the ship but to move the ship toward the anchor. The yacht’s crew spent the day dragging themselves along as best they could and then carrying the kedge anchor out again.

  They eventually moved the ship, but the yacht lost the anchor that had helped trap it in the ice and bent a second one. The wind then began to come in hard with a storm behind it. The rest of the fleet could go no farther and dropped anchor to ride out the weather and wait for the Griffin and the yacht from the Hope.

  By the morning of September 3, the storm had stopped. The ice blocking the entrance where they had sailed in days before seemed to have cleared. The convoy set out as a group again and made it through the opening. They saw whales spouting water and felt sure they were close to an open sea that would carry them directly to China, if only they could get past the ice.

  But then it grew hazy, from the water in front of them all the way to the horizon, and they lost the ability to tell one from the other. The weather remained warm, and they couldn’t help but think the temperatures might reduce the threat from ice. Soon, however, they began to see the tallest icebergs they’d ever encountered. Then haze turned to a dark fog on the water, erasing visibility as it descended. Looking out from the deck, they couldn’t even see the sailors on the next ship, or how close one prow lay to another’s stern. The only visibility they had left was an occasional clearing far up in the sky, where they could sometimes spy the masts and topsails of other vessels and the high silhouettes of icebergs above them.

  Without wind, they couldn’t steer in the current and began feeling the impact from ice floes “which seemed to be mountains of steel and rocks of stone.” They were thrown blindly into disarray, turned in different directions, unable to see one another, and strung out in tunnels of ice. As twilight came on, they called out from the deck and could sometimes hear other ships respond in the darkness, but they couldn’t locate each other at all.

  The fog lifted, and they rushed to find each other before night fully set in. Three ships reunited, still on the eastern side of the strait. Faraway shots rang out soon after, and the three found their way back to the rest of the convoy, which had managed to gather. To their relief, they caught sight of States Island in the distance, where last year’s expedition had anchored and men had gone hunting for crystals ashore.

  They made a beeline for familiar terrain and dropped anchor just as the sky unleashed a tempest. A mountain of ice rammed the Hope, making the whole ship shudder as the men stared up at the iceberg in fear. Sailors spent half the night working with a grappling anchor to drag the ship off its frozen slopes. The other ships passed the night in much the same way, fending off or recovering from assaults by icebergs.

  The morning of September 4, they looked out at the eastern sea they’d come to, after so much effort, in hopes of crossing, and saw, from their northwest across to their southeast, nothing but sheets of ice. They were nearly socked into their small harbor, with only a small opening to a slip of water between States Island and the mainland in which to sail. They moved into the opening, and navigated to that side of the island, where they made the ships fast to shore with a cable, to get away from the encroaching ice.

  Those who’d been there before knew that the island had good hunting. Some men went ashore in search of Arctic hares, while the admiral called a meeting of the officers and merchants’ representatives to assess their situation. The council agreed that the next day they’d try the plan Barents had advocated, one last attempt to fulfill their mission and cross the sea on whose shores they now sat. Come morning, they’d sail toward the ice, and look for a path through. But if they didn’t find one, it would be God’s will for them to return home. In case they were separated from one another’s line of vision by ice or fog again, they set up a series of signs and signals by which they could track each other. They settled in for the night and prepared to go out and meet the worst the day could bring.

  There was no need to sail out in the morning. The worst had arrived on their doorstep by daybreak. Before dawn, ice had filled their old harbor as well as the route by which they’d rounded the island, and was now moving in toward the shore. They shifted the fleet once more, now to the far end of the island, to try to distance themselves from the grinding advance. Tying the ships together “board to board” between cliffs and near land, they went ashore to look for any way out of the trap.

  When they looked out from land onto the sea, the view was no better. The ice had pressed in so thick and without mercy that they couldn’t see any water at all. Filled with despair, the sailors began to grumble, complaining that they’d never be free, and that those in charge had willfully risked the lives of everyone aboard. They were terrified of being stranded for the winter and couldn’t imagine how they might survive.

  Along with the rabbits they caught, the men spotted a white bear. Chased with guns, the creature left the island and climbed onto the ice, headed out to sea. The men wanted to follow but didn’t dare do so. To fill the time during which there was nothing to do but wait, they began looking for crystals again, which some had seen on the prior year’s visit to the islands.

  On September 6, the weather continued to clear and warm a little, but there was no chance of leaving yet. The men took out the small boats again and sailed ashore at their whim, wandering the coast to occupy themselves. Those who wanted to gather more crystals headed not far from shore, kneeling and lying on the ground to dig, with dozens of other sailors and officers wandering nearby.

  A cry rang out. The kneeling men looked up to see a sailor from the Griffin’s yacht rise up in the air, his neck clamped in the jaws of a polar bear. The huge creature had somehow approached the company unnoticed. As the sailor called for help and pulled out his knife, the mate who’d been digging beside him ran in fear. The bear bit away its prey’s jaw and cheek while the bleeding man st
abbed ineffectively at it. A group of sailors began to assemble, planning to run the bear off in time to save their shipmate.

  The men ashore gathered themselves and ran at the bear with the weapons they had on hand, in the hopes of saving their mate’s life, however unlikely salvation might be by then. Showing no signs of fear, the creature dropped her prize and ran directly at the group, driving them to flee in terror. The bear seized the slowest of those making their retreat—the boatswain from the Hope’s yacht—and tore him to pieces.

  The fleeing men gathered on the shore. Their shouts and screams drew attention from the ships, which were close to land. More men rowed over in the small boats to help. William Barents arrived with the newcomers to make a group of thirty in all. The new arrivals pressed the men to band together with their weapons and kill the creature at once, while those who’d already seen two shipmates slaughtered advised getting additional weapons and taking the time to plot a more strategic approach.

  Meanwhile, the bear returned to eating one of the sailors it had killed. The skipper of the yacht, its helmsman, and the purser stepped to the front of the group of men. Three times the helmsman and the skipper took aim and shot at the bear. Three times they missed, the accuracy and range of their guns leaving much to be desired. The purser set up for another try and shot the bear between the eyes. The animal didn’t drop the man it held in its mouth, but the blow staggered it. The purser and a Scotsman drew their cutlasses and ran hard at the animal, breaking the blades of their swords as they struck. Still she kept hold of her prey. Struck again with a blade on the snout by the helmsman, she howled and went to the ground, where he leaped on her and slit her throat. Opening her stomach, they found only the pieces of the dead men inside, and assumed she’d been without food for some time.