Moving from a minor trading nation to a global maritime powerhouse in just a handful of years, the Netherlands produced sailors who’d craft many rituals of protection for unknown waters in foreign lands, but in the time of Barents’s voyage they had few special ceremonies. It may have been a measure of confidence in their leadership that the sighting of the triple suns didn’t provoke deep unease. Or the sailors might have already heard of the parhelia that shone above them. Aristotle had described them in his Meteorology. Hearing reports from witnesses, Roman orator Cicero called for an investigation into them in place of outright disbelief. Even for those who might have felt a twinge of awe in the face of the wonders they witnessed in the sky, multiple suns and rainbows would surely be a good omen.
Not that the expedition’s leadership was in an agreeable mood. Hardly away from Europe, Barents and Rijp had already begun to quarrel over their bearings. Rijp refused to keep with Barents’s ship because he thought they needed to keep sailing north, while Barents insisted they needed to turn farther toward the east. Rijp insisted that if he did so, the ships would be forced toward Vaigach Island, and he wasn’t willing to risk going through the strait again. Barents insisted that they were so far west that they’d already abandoned the planned northern route. The two men argued bitterly, with Barents eventually shifting course to keep with Rijp.
They were still shy of the summer solstice, but the weather was turning colder. On June 5, a sailor standing on the foredeck cried out to shipmates below that he’d spotted white swans. As they climbed above decks to look for a bevy of birds floating across the water, they realized that the sailor was wrong. The swans were splinters from an iceberg that loomed somewhere out of sight. Around midnight, they moved through the wedge of disenchanted ice, like some magic spell undone. The inevitable had happened: ice had returned. They were back in the north.
Their plight made itself clearer in daylight, when the crews found themselves up against walls and mountains of ice. For four hours, they shifted sails, moving southwest and west to escape the mass before them, skirting its edges in an attempt to find a way around it. When they reached 74 degrees of latitude north of the equator on June 7, they found the water as green as grass, and moved between vast icebergs, as if land and sea had reversed. They thought perhaps they’d come to Greenland.
The ships approached a maze of ice too dense to be navigated. The on-deck hourglass ran in thirty-minute increments, turned again and again for hours as they sailed southwest, south-southwest, and finally directly south back the way they’d come to look for an opening. On June 9, an island that didn’t exist on their map—or any map—rose up before them.
The next morning, eight sailors rowed their small boat ashore. As they passed by Rijp’s ship, the same number of men rowed over from Rijp’s vessel to Barents’s ship. Barents asked Rijp’s navigator whether he now agreed that the fleet was too far to the west, but this question only provoked more ill will, spurring an argument. Barents swore that in time he’d prove that he was right.
Going to the island again the next day, the sailors found seagull eggs on the beach—a treat after weeks of eating food mostly stored in barrels. But even in the midst of such discoveries, every element of the voyage threatened to turn treacherous. Scaling a steep mountain of snow, a thing that didn’t exist in the Netherlands, the island explorers turned around to realize their danger. Without experience climbing, they’d given no thought on the way up as to how they’d get down. The slope was too steep to allow them to return the way they’d gone up without falling. They couldn’t devise a solution other than sliding down the mountain on their backsides without any control, despite their fear of breaking an arm or a leg on the jagged rocks at the foot of the slope. Standing aboard the ship and watching the men descend, William Barents was horrified.
They’d sailed once more into merciless terrain without even basic strategies to survive in it. Though they didn’t have the skills that would’ve helped them most, they were growing accustomed to their deficiencies, and finding a way to press on. They also learned that danger could disappear as arbitrarily as it had arisen. After surviving the trip down the mountain, the sailors collected the eggs they’d found earlier in the day and gathered on Rijp’s ship to eat them.
On June 12, they caught sight of a white bear in the water and set out in their rowboat to collar her. Drawing closer, they realized she was far too strong to subdue. Since abduction seemed impossible, they decided to kill her. Returning to the ship, they called for more men, along with muskets and arquebuses, the latter a long gun that had to be balanced on a stick to sight a target. Along with firearms, they brought hatchets and halberds—long poles with axe blades mounted on the end—and rowed their way back to the animal. One man swung an axe and buried it squarely in the bear’s back. Yet the bear swam away. After chasing it in their two rowboats, they managed to corral the beast and split its head open. The battle lasted two hours, after which they skinned the twelve-foot pelt and tried eating some of the bear’s flesh, which tasted unpleasant.
They weighed anchor and left the coast the next day, christening the place Beyren Eylandt—Bear Island. Heading north and, they thought, a whisper to the east, they lowered their weighted lead line more than six hundred feet, but the sea had no bottom. They spied a ship in the distance, but drawing closer, realized it was a dead whale. Covered in seagulls, the carcass reeked of decay.
Sailing into mist and gray weather, they could no longer tell sea, ice, and sky apart. Bits of floating ice released tiny bubbles of air, hissing like oil in a skillet. Larger blocks with air pockets growled at a lower register. Flat pancakes of ice moved with the tides, creaking like hinges. And vast icebergs ground against each other, whistling and keening through the friction like the winds of distant hurricanes. As they made their way north of Bear Island in fog or drizzle, the crew sometimes heard the ice before they could see it.
They sailed three more days, working their way around the ice, nearing one floating mountain so enormous they couldn’t navigate around it, though they tacked and tacked again when the wind pushed them too close. On June 19, they spotted land. Taking the height of the sun, they worked out their location and found that they were more than a hundred miles north of the farthest northern point to which Barents had sailed on his first voyage, when he crested Nova Zembla—and likely well west of there. Barents was sure they were on the eastern coast of Greenland. What appeared before them was nothing like Bear Island—a tiny speck of land in the sea—but a substantial landmass that had never been recorded or mapped. They would later give it the name Spitsbergen—or pointed mountains—after the peaks they found lining its shores.
The coast stretched on and on for miles. They saw a good route to shore, but the wind held them at bay. Finally dropping anchor on June 21, both crews took their rowboats in to collect stones for ballast, without which the vessels would ride too high in the water and become unstable. Sometimes used to replace the weight of rations as they diminished or in trading ships as a placeholder for cargo until cargo was acquired, ballast could also be used to shift the balance of a listing vessel.
Barents’s men were loading up their small boat when they spotted a polar bear on the water headed toward their ship. They ran to the men in the boat from Rijp’s ship and climbed aboard, rowing out together to cut it off. The creature went farther into the sea, and they chased it, but it was faster. The sailors went mile after mile in pursuit, eventually using not only both small boats but an even smaller craft they thought might be nimbler. In the end, most of the crew from both ships had crowded into the boats and were hacking at the creature as they went by, drawing its blood and breaking their blades. The animal slashed Barents’s small boat near the stern, landing a blow that sheared wood away and might have flipped it had it struck closer to the middle of the boat.
In time, they wore the bear down and killed it, dragging the corpse from the boat back to the ship. Though they had no taste for the meat, they skinned t
he beast and measured the pelt at thirteen feet. Slaughter emerged as the instinctive Dutch response to the Arctic landscape, a new theater that would see the same performance again and again with every European wave of arrivals. As historical archaeologist P. J. Capelotti observed about the killing of animals in the high Arctic that accompanied modern exploration, “It’s amazing there’s anything left alive.”4
The crew took the smallest rowboat toward land and explored the coastline, heading into the mouth of a river with an island at its center. On the island, they discovered several barnacle geese sitting on nests. They killed one with a stone, and after others flew off, picked up some sixty eggs. Geese were far more appetizing than polar bear meat. They ate the bird they’d killed then carried the eggs back to the ship.
Along with being the first known humans to set foot on this newfound island, they’d accidentally solved a long-standing mystery about the geese. Because these birds vanished each year from their European habitats and returned the following year but were never seen laying or nesting their eggs, it had been a matter of folk superstition common in England and Europe since the twelfth century that they grew out of driftwood, or perhaps shells grown on a “barnacle tree” that fell in the water and matured. The theory had skeptics from the beginning but was accepted even by birding authorities well into Barents’s time and beyond.
The records of the expedition directly discredit the theory: “It is not to bee wondered at that no man could tell where they lay their egges,” Gerrit de Veer wrote, noting that as far as anyone knew, no one had ever traveled that far north and been able to see the nests for himself. Though the discovery was recorded on the voyage with an understanding of its importance, and Barents would be widely credited with upending the myth, centuries would pass before it died out entirely.
The Scientific Revolution was blossoming in Europe, promoting the idea that careful observation of the natural world would yield secrets about how it worked—secrets previously assumed by many authorities to be mystical in nature. In the years before Barents sailed, Copernicus had laid a path for understanding the unknown by collecting data to test and revise hypotheses about the heavens.
The first patent applications for a microscope and a telescope would both be received in 1608, a little over a decade later. Soon after that, Europe would begin to embrace the scientific method, with René Descartes believing even something as complicated as the mind could be understood through examining physical processes. Though Arab astronomer Hasan Ibn al-Haytham had posited the basics of the scientific method centuries before, Francis Bacon, advocating empirical observation and experimentation, laid the basis for a rational approach to the world that would come to shape nearly every branch of Western science in the seventeenth century. The modern conception of science was just taking root in Renaissance Europe.
As had been understood when the parhelion showed multiple suns in the sky, Barents and his crew recognized they could do more than wonder over the unknown parts of the landscape they’d entered. They took the height of the suns and rainbows they’d never encountered before, just as they did the heavenly bodies well known to them. They checked their instruments against one another. They took depth soundings of the sea. They recorded the length of polar bear pelts. They found walrus tusks along the coast and measured their weight as six pounds. Barents and his men went into the unknown not just as navigators and sailors but, also, as proto-scientists documenting a new world.
The day after their bird discovery, the crew returned to its more conventional mission, cranking the line around the horizontal winch that lay like an overturned spool at the back of the main deck to hoist the anchor again. But heading north, they quickly found their progress blocked by ice. After returning to the spot they’d just left, Barents worked his way along the western shore in search of other ways forward.
Some of the men went ashore to check their compass on land. Its usefulness lay in that it would point north and could orient a sailor even in a storm or darkness. But since it relied on magnetic attraction, the needle didn’t point to true geographic north, but instead toward Earth’s magnetic pole, which moved over time but always lay somewhere shy of true polar north.
When exactly this gap between magnetic and polar north was discovered isn’t clear—in earlier maps the North Pole itself was generally depicted as a mountain of magnetite. But German compass- and clockmakers seem to have made accommodations for the discrepancy as early as the 1400s, and Christopher Columbus definitely understood it during his travels to North America. Barents knew the difference—the map made from the records of the voyage would still depict magnetic north as a magnetite mountain, but distinct and some distance away from the pole itself.
During the time of Barents’s third voyage, magnetic north was located far to the west in a part of Arctic North America sailed and settled by the Inuit. More than two hundred years after Barents’s death, the area would be mapped by British explorer William Parry, who got stuck in the ice while looking for a northwest passage to China and had to overwinter there.
After exploring part of what Barents thought might be Greenland, the sailors took a compass reading along the shore, noting a 16-degree variation from what might have been predicted, owing to the gap between Earth’s magnetic and polar north. Meanwhile, the crew of the ship that hadn’t yet anchored saw a polar bear swimming toward them. The animal moved as if to climb aboard, threatening an encounter the men knew by now could easily end with sailors overboard or dead. One man ran to grab a gun, but firing a sixteenth-century long gun wasn’t a point-and-shoot process. It was an improvement over prior centuries, in which a lit match had to be held to a pan holding a small amount of gunpowder to start the fire that would pass through a touchhole and the main charge, leading to actual gunfire. But the weapon still took time to load, remained hard to aim, and sometimes didn’t fire at all.
When the sailor finally did fire a shot, the bear, startled, made for the beach and the men who’d taken the compass reading. Those ashore had no weapons with them and would be easy prey. The crew steered the ship after the bear, while they made a racket to get the attention of their mates on land. Hearing their cries, the sailors on shore thought the ship had smashed onto the rocks. Everyone ended up frightened, including the bear, which went back into the water and swam off.
Pinned near shore by the wind the following day, both ships were unable to sail far enough north to clear the island they’d discovered, and wound up anchoring sixteen miles away on the other side of the inlet. The next day, June 25, they headed into the waterway, but it became apparent that their course wouldn’t safely lead them to another sea. It took them two more days to tack their way out, repeatedly shifting the bow of the ship into the wind using sails to make some minimal progress back toward the sea.
On June 28, they worked their way around the far western point that had blocked their progress northward along the coast. By this point, they’d grown accustomed to wonders in the sky, but all at once, the air was full of birds. So many filled the sky that several crashed into their sails. Ice, however, remained the real danger. The ships made their way south and west to try to avoid the threat, with the effort eventually taking them far from land. After spending the next four days trying to find an open route north, they wound up back at Bear Island again. Rijp and his officers came over to Barents’s ship to devise a plan.
The ice would clearly do them no favors. Rather than trying their luck pressing north into the unknown on an open sea that appeared to be blocked, Rijp wanted the ships to return to 80 degrees of latitude, hundreds of miles north, near where they’d gathered eggs from the nests of barnacle geese. Once there, they’d look along the coast for a waterway through to the island’s eastern side.
As was so often the case, Barents disagreed about the best route. Given that they’d just come from the area Rijp wanted to sail back to, Barents thought the effort to return and find a river or strait that might take them inland to the other side of Spits
bergen would be futile. Instead, he wanted to revisit the promise of his first expedition by heading to Nova Zembla and sailing north of it into the eastern sea.
It was July 1, a week past the summer solstice. Four days remained until the first anniversary of their departure from the Netherlands the year before on the second Arctic voyage. On that expedition, Barents had accepted the fleet’s decision to try to make a way south of Nova Zembla through the strait at Vaigach Island into the eastern sea. When that failed, he’d also accepted that he wouldn’t be permitted to overwinter with one or two ships from the fleet, or to try his hand again at sailing north over Nova Zembla. He’d come so close on his first Arctic voyage. It must have seemed then as if only the bad luck of inclement weather and the reluctance of his men had held him back. He wanted to return to Nova Zembla.
Rijp and Barents had words for the last time and decided to go their separate ways. Rijp climbed back over the side of Barents’s ship and down into his small boat. Soon the sound of oars carried him away to his ship and his men. Aboard his own ship, finally loosed from the obligation to accommodate anyone else’s wishes about his route, William Barents prepared to set out with Captain Jacob van Heemskerck, fifteen other men, and a portion of the cargo. Rijp and Barents would never see each other again.
Barents immediately set a southward course away from the ice. The next day—July 2—he turned east toward Nova Zembla. He wouldn’t need to dip back down to the Norwegian coast and work his way across, as he had two years before. Knowing he was on a latitude that intersected with Nova Zembla, he could keep a course that was as close to due east as the ice permitted.
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