Icebound

by Andrea Pitzer

  The next day they buried the men in a shallow grave on States Island and skinned the bear. No one felt eager to go ashore, and those who did carried heavy arms and kept watch. The wind and ice pinned the ships in their makeshift harbor the next day, with an inch of ice forming over the small patches of water that remained.

  On September 8 the admiral again called a meeting of the captains and navigators on the expedition. There was some discussion of pressing on. The officers on the Hope were of the opinion that the expedition had done as much as it could, and came out against the idea. The men from Amsterdam, however, wanted to leave two ships on the eastern side of the strait, where they’d winter and could explore the northern Nova Zemblan route, heading into the sea early the next season.

  The admiral replied that the impromptu plan wasn’t part of the orders they’d been given, and that if they wished to stay, they’d have to do it without his authority and find out what would happen if they made that choice. He refused to give his blessing under any circumstances. Despite the admiral’s warning, Barents and his fellow officers from Amsterdam pushed the idea of wintering once more. The admiral thought they should either proceed or go home as a group, but didn’t yet demand they turn for home.

  The uncertainty was too much under the constant strain of terror in the ice. In just over a month, the crew had seen four shipmates drowned in the collision between ships, two eaten by a polar bear, and another killed by the admiral’s chosen punishment. The crew had had enough. Faced with the possibilities of going on or being forced to stay the winter near States Island, they mutinied.

  No record exists of whether the men brandished weapons, or took a hostage, or tried to seize a ship. They must have felt extraordinarily desperate, because even if they gained control of part or all of the fleet, there was likely nowhere for them to go. They were surrounded by ice.

  The rebellion was put down the same day. After naming five men as ringleaders, Admiral Nay ordered them taken ashore and hanged on States Island.

  Any ship can reliably be counted on to have a ready supply of rope. The men died in the place where the bear had eaten their friends, a place from which it wasn’t at all clear that any of them could escape. The mass execution brought the death toll so far for the expedition to twelve.

  Like keelhauling, mutiny had been around since ancient times. Julius Caesar personally put down a mutiny in 49 BCE, executing the leaders of long-serving forces who’d rebelled.3 An order from a captain at sea was the law; even civilians were required to obey it.

  The uncertainties of long voyages made possible by advances in navigation offered more time and space for anxieties to take root. On Easter in 1520, during Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, captains in his fleet led a mutiny. It took time and trickery to regain the ships—he cut one of the anchor cables, setting one ship adrift—but in the end Magellan drew and quartered most of the mutineers, leaving one captain and a priest alive but marooned together on an island.

  Nearly a century later, as Henry Hudson tried to find a northwest passage over North America, his crew mutinied more successfully, setting him and his teenage son adrift in a small boat with some provisions. Neither father nor son was seen again.

  A mutiny was also a vote against the leadership of an expedition—a vote a sailor staked with his life. It was either such a regular event or such a shameful one that neither van Linschoten nor Gerrit de Veer mentioned the uprising or the hangings in their public accounts of the expedition. They likewise never mentioned the keelhauling for theft. Even Julius Caesar neglected to mention mutinies against himself.

  Sailors might head out on a voyage without being told of the exact dangers that awaited them. Magellan misled his crew about the ambition of his expedition so as not to spook them. Columbus gave his crew a false tally of miles traveled each day, so they wouldn’t realize how far from home they were.

  In misery and weariness, the Dutch fleet tried to set sail on September 9, but with the wind against them, they couldn’t get through the ice. The Griffin turned back to the island once more, keeping away from the ice and near the coastline, only to slam blindly into an underwater cliff. The crew of the ship from Rotterdam, thinking the Griffin was only stuck in the ice, came close to help and drove their own vessel onto the hidden rock shelf, too. As the ice moved in, the rest of the fleet was entirely occupied with sending barges and trying to tow them out of danger. Throwing ballast and even some of their merchandise overboard, they managed to lighten their loads, and dragged the two ships off the reef without damaging their hulls.

  The next day, the fleet made its way around to the other side of the island, and on September 11, tried to escape its clutches altogether. They voted to sail all the way to the ice in the east one last time, to make sure there was no visible passage. They got as far as Cruyshoek, where the fleet had reunited before, but the wind pinned them there. Some of the men took a barge ashore onto Vaigach Island and found a decomposing dead whale with a sixteen-foot jawbone. They chopped it into pieces and carried part of it back to the ship, not only as a keepsake but also to prove the existence of an open sea on the eastern side of the strait.

  Socked in at anchor for the night in a hard storm on the thirteenth, sailors watched the wind rage with enough fury to pull their barges and small rowboats off the decks and fling them on the ground. The next day they recovered all but a few oars that had been sitting loose in the open boats. At midday, they readied themselves to sail. On the fifteenth, the officers met with the admiral aboard the Griffin, with everyone acknowledging that navigation couldn’t defeat or elude the threat all around them. The captains, navigators, and merchants’ representatives signed a statement drafted by van Linschoten acknowledging that “because the Lord God has not wanted to allow for this journey, they find themselves forced (indeed and enough against their will, because of the lapse of time) to have to give up the same journey this time, due to the hindrance of the ice.”

  Once they began their retreat in earnest, the ice soon became less of an obstacle, but the approaching winter made itself felt in other ways. Their first day sailing for home began brightly, but devolved into snow, hail, and such ferocious winds that at times they could carry no more than a mainsail without fearing damage to the vessels. Snow and hail lacquered the vessels white, turning them into ghost ships.

  By morning, each ship of the fleet found itself alone on the sea; they’d been scattered overnight in the storm. The Hope, with van Linschoten aboard, sailed on alone, and was eventually rejoined by its yacht. Barents in the Greyhound reunited with the Griffin’s yacht a day later, but they were soon separated again.

  Barents spent two weeks fighting unhelpful winds making his way to Kildin Island, where conditions wouldn’t let him get to land. The temperatures continued to drop each day and more hail fell as he continued sailing north. He arrived at Wardhuys, just shy of the Norwegian border, on September 30.

  Van Linschoten in the Hope would come to Kildin days after Barents reached the same spot. But the crew of the Hope found it equally unattainable. In the end, they sailed past Kildin and Wardhuys as well, continuing on without stopping. Despite all the hail and storms, they nearly lost the ship to fire when a serving boy accidentally set the kitchen ablaze.

  Darkness had swallowed more and more of each day, with only six hours of daylight left to them as they rounded Nordkinn. On the few clear nights, a captivating aurora borealis played in the vault of the sky. (If one had never heard about it before seeing it, wrote van Linschoten, “it would give one enough to think about.”)

  They’d been out nearly four months, and the men had begun to suffer stiffness in their legs and backs, as well as loose teeth and diseased gums. The officers recognized the signs of scurvy, but misattributed its cause as coming from the damp, cold conditions. The crew likely had little in the way of clothes, and certainly not enough in the way of winter garments for the Arctic voyage.

  As they sailed closer and closer to home, th
e days grew slightly longer. The snow thinned then vanished altogether, with the occasional summer day taking them by surprise. Ships of the fleet staggered in separately between late October and mid-November, with no news about the other vessels along the way. It was impossible to know who might be delayed or lost until a ship glided into harbor or simply never returned. Barents, who hadn’t wanted to come back that winter at all, was the last to appear, sailing into harbor on November 18, marking the safe arrival of all the ships.

  They praised God for their survival, but noted that, for unknown reasons, their deity didn’t want them to succeed on this trip, sending a long winter and excessive ice to end their journey. Van Linschoten argued that another trip during a milder summer could easily meet with success. The more difficult a thing is to accomplish, he noted, the greater the glory would be in achieving it. After all, the Portuguese didn’t establish their Eastern trade empire on the first, second, or third voyage. They’d spent time and money investing in the project with a long view toward what success would mean, and as a consequence, were reaping untold riches from trade there.

  The trick, van Linschoten argued, would be to find the right time of year in which to make the passage between Vaigach Island and the mainland, and to hit it perfectly. He advised sending two yachts to survey the area and gather intelligence on the weather and the currents before sending another convoy. But William Barents, who likewise advocated for a third voyage, would never return to Vaigach Island.

  CHAPTER FOUR Sailing for the Pole

  When the Arctic fleet returned to the Netherlands for the second time, the jawbones of the dead whale were given to the cities of Enkhuizen and Haarlem as keepsakes. But no animal, living or dead, would have satisfied the burghers of the Netherlands, who hadn’t expected to see the ships for at least a year—and had hoped they’d return carrying Chinese cargo. Instead, the investors wound up with two damaged ships, missing merchandise thrown overboard to get off a rock ledge, and the expenses of outfitting a seven-ship fleet with no return on the investment.

  Despite the poor results from the second voyage, Barents immediately began proposing a third attempt. He prepared a prospectus for sailing to the eastern side of Nova Zembla, which he submitted to the Dutch provincial council. It was rejected.1

  The other Dutch expedition sent to sail south around Africa when Barents had headed north for the second time hadn’t returned yet. It remained to be seen whether the southern quest would succeed or fail. Business and political interests agreed that a northeast passage was still a worthy goal, but merchants had no intention of losing money. Instead, they offered a twenty-five-thousand-florin prize (worth nearly half a million US dollars in twenty-first-century currency). Potential explorers were also offered a share of the sale of imports for the first vessel to successfully sail a northern route to China.

  Petrus Plancius, who’d created maps for both the northern and southern Dutch expeditions, also supported a third northern expedition, but this time recommended an even more radical course. It was clear that masses of ice sometimes congregated close to shore. Vaigach, near the mainland, had been choked with it. Barents had run into it in northern Nova Zembla. But the key might lie in finding a path through the ring of ice believed to surround the North Pole. Plancius thought the next expedition should set out from the Norwegian coast and cross over the top of the world.2

  After the spectacular failures of the second voyage, Enkhuizen, Rotterdam, and Zeeland were unwilling to continue as patrons. But the city of Amsterdam agreed to make a third attempt. Two ships were chartered. Owing to the unrest on the first voyage and the open mutiny and executions on the second, unmarried men were sought for the trip. Warned that they might be at sea a long time, they were promised one wage for joining the voyage, and a second, larger purse if the expedition arrived in China. Without van Linschoten and the other cities’ merchants to contend with, Plancius could effectively direct the route of the expedition toward the North Pole.

  Jan Cornelis Rijp, who had sailed on the second voyage as a merchant’s representative, was named captain of one ship. Jacob van Heemskerck, who had sailed in the same role for the representatives of the merchants of Amsterdam, was named captain of the second ship. William Barents would serve as navigator, sailing with van Heemskerck. Plancius could imagine how they might sail toward the Pole, but it would be Barents’s responsibility to find a navigable route in the real world.

  Goods would be sent for trade, in case van Heemskerck and Barents could deliver them to China. But this time, merchants wouldn’t send their most valuable items, the things they’d most regret losing. They’d send second-tier wares instead. And the men would sail due north.

  William Barents’s ship on his third outing has no name in the historical record but was of a typical Dutch style known as a yacht. It was constructed of wooden planks wrapped and sealed around ribs and braced by knees. A cargo area sat at the bottom of the hull, which the crew crammed with a wide assortment of goods—mostly second-rate items, but a few impressive articles with which to initiate trade relations. Tucked among the rope and lumber that might be required for various repairs stood chests with cloth, pewter housewares, and thousands of paper prints. Along with the cargo and spare parts, a small boat or two would be stored in pieces for use in the event of damage to or loss of the one on deck.

  Fifteen men would ship out under Barents and van Heemskerck. If they weren’t on duty or eating, they would sleep in rotations on the orlop deck above the cargo area. Crew members likely did so without mattresses, using their clothes for padding. They would’ve bedded down in makeshift bunks under and between portholes built to accommodate the wheeled cannons they carried in the event of an attack.

  A ship at sea is a crowded space. The cook’s stove, which sat on the same level where the men slept, was a low rectangular box that could be hoisted aloft for use on deck because of the smoke it generated in any confined space. But in the deep cold, sometimes the heat provided by the stove in the men’s quarters could offer enough comfort to offset the irritation from the smoke. A hatch leading to the main deck offered the simplest way to load cargo. At the far end of the orlop, another hatch offered a set of stairs as another way to climb to the main deck. Topside, lattice work and beams added on to the main structure of the boat provided some additional protection from the elements. Slightly shielded from view, a section of open toilets perched near the bow, with captain’s quarters inside a cabin at the stern of the ship.

  With shipbuilding still an artisanal occupation in Barents’s era, no plans of the vessel exist. But from illustrations made in the era, we know its general dimensions. A typical yacht, it stretched about sixty feet from bow to stern, and spanned sixteen feet at its broadest point. Its foremast and mainmast rose into the air sixty feet or more, with the mainmast the taller of the two. Crew members furled or unfurled sails by loosening ties that held them, hauling on lines to pull the cloth taut while leaving enough play to catch the wind. If every sail were unfurled at once, the ship would fly a half-dozen sheets of canvas, like a bird flashing all its plumage.

  The two-ship fleet took less time to prepare than the large convoy the year before. Crews were complete for both ships by May 5; five days later they set sail. They’d wound their way out to the barrier islands of the Vlie by the thirteenth. With wind and tide against them, however, they couldn’t escape. In one attempt to set out, Rijp’s ship went aground. Once he managed to leverage the craft off the bar, both ships anchored at the Vlie, where they were pinned down for five more days.

  Given a third chance, Barents had to know that the burghers of Amsterdam, as well as his own mortality, were unlikely to offer many more opportunities for Arctic seafaring. Many years older than van Heemskerck, he knew that his desire to find a northern passage was now pitted against the promise of the southern route. The southern course might be treacherous or incapable of being seized by the Dutch in that moment, but it had already been proven to exist.

  On May
18, Barents finally sailed due north from the Netherlands. Both captains directed their ships toward the pole star for two weeks, and by June 1, they found themselves in the land of the midnight sun. They’d expected as much, but were more surprised three days later when they looked up from the deck into the sky and saw not one sun as usual, but three—“a wonderful phenomenon in the heavens.” On each side of the large, regular sun sat another, smaller one. Two rainbows arched through the trio of discs, a third encircled them all, and a fourth one cut through the middle of the third.

  The parhelia they witnessed were caused by the refraction of light on plate-like ice crystals in the atmosphere. In the Arctic, low-lying clouds of ice crystals known as “diamond dust” can sit suspended for days, triggering visions of false suns, or sun dogs, that mimic the real sun, as well as the rainbow halo connecting them that was seen by Barents’s men.

  Sailors were superstitious creatures, and the Dutch had their fair share of signs and omens. Ships that tilted slightly to starboard fully loaded were lucky. Water sprites could curse those who killed them. A mermaid was kept on display in the Royal Museum at the Hague. It was later investigated in the eighteenth century by one minister, Mr. Valentyn, who reported that there could be no doubt about its authenticity. “If, after all this, there shall be found those who disbelieve the existence of such creatures as mermaids, let them please themselves.”

  As more ships headed south from Europe and crossed the equator, complex hazing rituals of dousing and fines for those who were making the journey for the first time would be invented. To honor Neptune, god of the sea, Dutch sailors fined any shipmate crossing the equator for the first time. If he couldn’t pay the fine, the crew tied a rope around his torso, strung him up from the yardarm of the ship, and dunked him three times in the sea.3