Icebound

by Andrea Pitzer

  They were by now accustomed to weaving their way through frozen mountains, keeping their distance from the translucent palaces or monstrous shapes in the dusk, and shifting sails to retreat from unassailable walls that crowded in from the north. For weeks, they sailed more or less due east, edging south or north depending on the accommodation made by the ice, which went so far as to vanish from the horizon one morning, yet returned by sunset to drive them into a hasty retreat, as if under orders from an unseen enemy.

  On July 14, they entered a canyon of ice, casting out their line, recording a depth of six hundred feet to the bottom, and then five hundred forty feet soon after. They made their way into the labyrinth without incident, but once inside, they couldn’t find any path out except the way they’d entered. The breeze, which had helped them sail in, was against them once they turned back. It took hours of tacking into the wind just to escape.

  Other days, they were becalmed and could make no progress with sails but instead had to drift with the ice. On the sixteenth, they spotted a polar bear floating on an iceberg. When it noticed the ship, the bear leaped into the water. They steered in its wake, thinking to kill it. But the animal made its way back onto the ice, eluding capture. They couldn’t safely climb on the icebergs, and regardless, should anything go wrong, no one wanted to get left behind by a ship under sail. Out of disappointment or spite, they took a shot at the animal on the way by.

  Even after losing their prey, they still thought its presence a good sign. Using floating ice as a barge, the bear, they thought, shouldn’t be too far out at sea. They were surely nearing Nova Zembla again.

  On July 17, Gerrit de Veer spotted land in the distance. Wanting to follow the coast, they turned to the northeast and raised nearly every sail to take advantage of the wind. The next day, they spied land again and recognized it as Admiralty Island. Two years earlier, Barents had passed it by because of its dangerous coastline. But he knew that it lay at almost the same latitude as Bear Island, which meant that it sat about two-thirds of the way up the western coast of Nova Zembla. Now confident of their bearings, the crew sailed on, soon coming to an island with two crosses upright in the ground—an island they’d also spotted on the first expedition. At that point, however, the ice asserted itself once more, and they couldn’t work their way around it.

  Dropping anchor, the men lowered their small boat into the water and rowed to land. The sailors visited one cross, where they stayed for a while before walking toward the other one. As they drew closer, two polar bears came into view. The Dutchmen were aware that the bears could smell farther than they could see, but they didn’t know that the creatures could likely scent prey from a mile away, even buried in three feet of snow.

  Soon enough, however, the sailors realized that the bears had noticed them. Rising on their hind legs, the animals moved toward van Heemskerck and his men. Failing to learn the lesson already offered more than once by the high Arctic, the crew had disembarked without a single gun. The sailors were in no mood to laugh at their predictable predicament. They made their way toward the small boat, watching to see if the bears kept on their trail. Their impulse was to run, but they’d seen bears outswim them in the water already. Even if the men made it to the boat, their chances on the water seemed slim. (The bears could in fact outswim the Dutchmen’s small boats and, if necessary to survive, swim continuously for days.) On the last expedition, it had taken hours for three boats of men armed with guns to corner and kill one bear. A small boat on the water filled with men—many of whom were unlikely to be able to swim—could prove easy prey for two bears.

  But the boat was all they had, if they could get to it. In one hand, van Heemskerck was carrying a boat hook, used for pushing vessels away or closer, or hoisting cables from the water. Addressing his men, he told them to stay together as a group and not run away. They should be safer clustered together and making a racket as a group to intimidate the creatures rather than trying to flee separately, which would make it easier for the bears to pick them off. The first man to bolt, he explained, would find the hook shoved between his ribs.

  The captain and his men stole softly toward their boat, restraining the impulse to panic. They got to the craft and climbed in, having lost sight of the bears. Rowing back to the ship, they realized their good fortune. When they went back to the same spot the next day, armed to the teeth, there were no bears to be seen. But they found fresh footprints, showing that the bears had tracked them for a hundred paces or more. What would’ve been a massacre had the bears charged became a hair-raising story to tell their mates from the relative comfort of a ship edging its way north in the Arctic, or at home, if they were lucky enough to return. To leave a record of their voyage that would stand whatever the fate of the expedition, they built a third cross and made their marks on it. They had no shortage of time, because the ship remained stuck for almost two weeks. The sailors passed the days bleaching their dirty linens and taking care of menial tasks.

  They didn’t have to wonder for long where the bears had gone. Near the end of July, one came up to the ship, and they shot it in the foot to scare it away. The next day, another bear was spotted, and seven men combined their efforts to kill it and skin it, tossing the body into the water. On August 1, a third bear appeared in the vicinity but was spooked by the sailors’ presence.

  Three days later, they clawed their way out of the ice and made it to the other side of the island. Rowing a boat in, they began the grueling task of gathering more stones for ballast and getting them back to the ship. They set sail for Ice Point at the tip of Nova Zembla on August 5, with no ice in sight. As the wind shifted against them, they had to tack and tack again.

  The weather turned misty the following evening, and visibility grew too poor to sail. The ship had come up near an iceberg that had wedged itself aground and seemed stuck. Over half of it lay invisible underwater, descending more than two hundred feet to the seafloor. The expanse visible above the waterline measured nearly a hundred feet more, dwarfing their wooden ship by comparison. With the fog already surrounding them, they were forced to moor the ship to the grounded iceberg.

  They lay there the next day with fog haunting them. A snowstorm set in. As always, they kept watch. Late in the morning, Barents walked the deck in the driving snow and heard a snuffling sound. Looking over the side of the ship, he saw something climbing up. His cry of “A bear! A bear!” drew the crew from belowdeck. They made a huge commotion and frightened the bear, which turned and swam away.

  Not long after, the creature returned, working its way behind the blocks of ice where they’d moored the ship. Visibility was poor, but the sailors kept watch as best they could. Pulling off the sail of their small boat, they used it as a tarpaulin to cover the deck. Four men crowded beneath it, holding guns trained in the direction of the ice. The bear suddenly appeared above them, having scaled the ice from behind. The animal moved to climb into the bow of the ship. The men fired a volley at the bear, shooting it in the body and driving it away. But they’d seen injured bears fight on before. The animal, they were sure, was hiding behind one of the many frozen slabs that crowned the field of ice before them. At times, they could hardly see in the storm, but they didn’t spy any sign of the bear above them or in the water.

  The next day, the ice field began to fracture, with currents shearing the frozen landscape. It was August 10. At one point, with the ice moving around them, they realized that the part of the iceberg to which they’d moored the ship still sat grounded, but most of the ice was in motion. Fearing they’d be crushed in the chaos, they unmoored the ship and set sail. Though the surface of the water was frozen, they skated over it, hearing the hull cracking through in places as they slid along.

  Once in calmer waters, the crew used their kedge anchor to fasten the bow of the ship to another iceberg. When evening came, the new iceberg exploded without warning into hundreds of pieces that scattered far and wide. Slabs tumbled overhead, while whole submerged sections of ice burst unde
rwater. Waves rose in the wake of the pieces that fell, and the Dutchmen worried that shards of ice might punch a hole in the hull or capsize their ship. Hauling their cable and anchor in, they escaped again.

  The ship sailed a landscape full of wonders—but between the bears and the ice, no safe harbor existed. They made the vessel fast to a third iceberg and hoped for the best. Nearby, the spire of a frozen tower rose to a point more than seventy feet in the air, with a base that extended more than a hundred feet below the water.

  On August 12, they had to move yet again to another iceberg, which they nicknamed Little Ice Point. They drew even closer to land to try to escape the drift ice, which ran with the current and whose bulk, like that of the stationary icebergs, often lay deep below the surface. If they kept to the shallows, the larger pieces of ice couldn’t reach the ship.

  Once close to land, however, they had to contend with bears again. While they fought the wind and couldn’t move far easily, a bear came to the ship. They shot it in the leg. Fearing that it would return unannounced at a later date, they pursued it as it limped away, caught it, and killed it, adding its skin to their collection of pelts. The next day they finally broke free of the ice when the wind they’d been fighting eventually turned in their favor.

  Sailing up and past the coast that fell away to the east, they crested Nova Zembla. By August 15, they were near the Orange Islands when ice came for them again. They managed to work the ship free and get to one of the islands, but when the wind changed directions, they had to shift the ship’s position to keep it out of danger. Making a racket as they tried to save themselves from crashing into the rocks, the sailors woke a sleeping bear on shore.

  The animal rose up and came for them. They had to abandon the work of turning the ship in order to fight the bear. But before they could kill it, they had to chase it into the water and onto the ice then back onto land again to catch it. After dispatching it, they returned to saving the ship. Whenever things looked bad, there was always something worse waiting to happen.

  Once they were as safe as they could be while made fast to an iceberg that seemed to be lodged on land well below the waterline, William Barents sent ten men ashore in a boat. It was August 16. Climbing a high hill, they surveyed the view. With their backs to the North Pole, they saw only land straight ahead to the south. But to their left, toward the southeast, they saw open water. At the sight of a navigable sea, the sailors were sure they’d won the reward set out as a prize when they signed on for the voyage. They scrambled to return to the ship to tell Barents the news.

  Hoping to make for that open sea, they prepared to sail in earnest on August 18. But ice broke in hard on them and would’ve swept them away if not for their kedge anchor and more than a thousand feet of cable they’d used to hold the ship in place. Barents could barely navigate the ship back to the place from which they’d been swept away. They decided to spend the night there, which still passed without any true darkness. The next day, they had good weather and set out again, turning slightly south along the coast, and spotted a bleak line of dark earth that stretched out into the water like a long, narrow finger. They named it Cape Desire.

  Making steady progress, the crew had great expectations of reaching the open sea at any moment. They managed to work their way around the point of Cape Desire before the ice crowded them in once more, forcing them back toward shore. They crept their way south along the coast, which began to curve back toward the west as they descended in latitude.

  They knew they’d entered the sea east of Nova Zembla, but the ice wouldn’t let them break free to sail across it. On they crawled, close to land, naming as they went. On August 21, they were able to anchor at Ice Harbor, some fifty miles from where they’d rounded the northernmost part of the island. The next morning as they set out, the current drew them hard to the east. The wind began to blow. They moored themselves to a grounded iceberg once again—one that was entirely a shade of blue they’d never seen before. Climbing sixty feet above the waterline until they were on top of it, they found a layer of dirt and eggs. They waited out the storm, and an argument broke out over whether what they sat on was truly an iceberg or a shelf of land.

  They headed out on the twenty-third, but the frozen yet mobile landscape pressed them back to Ice Harbor. Even in the harbor, the wind drove ice toward them, breaking both the tiller and rudder on their vessel. Pinned between their ship and the frozen wall crowding them in, their small boat was smashed. It seemed the ship itself might meet the same fate. They were stuck fast in place until August 25, when the weather grew calmer. The men decided to try to break up some of the ice and hack themselves free, but had no success. By mid-afternoon, however, the calved icebergs began to move on the current, without any help from the sailors. Though it didn’t seem possible to go directly east, they could at least continue south along the coast and follow it down to Vaigach Island. If no opportunity to go in a more eastward direction made itself available, they could sail around the southern end of Nova Zembla and return home.

  The plan was hardly hatched before it was spoiled. The wind was of no help, and the crew couldn’t cut a path in the frozen sea to the south any more than it could to the east. The water had hardened everywhere against them, and any southward navigation became impossible. The next day, a gale rose up that seemed as if it could carry them north. Barents decided they’d give up on the southern course, and instead would try to get back around Cape Desire, making their way home by heading back the way they came.

  As they approached Ice Harbor, however, their northward progress was checked. The wind past that point was a gale that drove the drift ice to turn solid all around them, even as they sailed. Three sailors climbed overboard and began hacking with hand-axes and a pickaxe to try to free the ship. As the ship surged back into the current, the men were nearly left behind. But the current pulled the ice they stood on in the same direction, and the crew members made a leap for the ship. One man held on to the beakhead around the bowsprit on the prow of the ship. Farther back, another caught hold of a cable strung through the corner of one of the sails. And a third grabbed hold of the end of a line that ran from the mainsail down to the stern of the ship. The sailors held on for dear life.

  Despite the close call, all three were saved. They could control almost nothing about where the ice would take or release the ship. If the men hadn’t caught hold at just that moment, the ship would’ve shot off, with no way to circle back to save them. They would’ve been left on the ice to die.

  That evening, the ship finally reached the western side of Ice Harbor and dropped anchor. On August 27, the weather turned fair, but drift ice closed the ship in again. Sailors lowered one of the small boats and headed to land. As the wind picked up, icebergs drove into the harbor toward the ship, slipping under the bow of the ship. Lifting it four feet straight up, the iceberg began tipping the ship backward. The stern had been pushed down so far, it felt like it might be touching ground, or ice. The entire ship tilted unsteadily. Those still aboard put out a signal flag to catch the attention of the men ashore. Expecting they’d soon be submerged, the rest of the crew abandoned ship, fleeing in the other small boat.

  After the crew had reassembled in the water, Barents got them back on board to inspect the ship. It hadn’t, as they feared, overturned or been crushed. By the next day, the ice had relaxed its grip a little, allowing the boat to right itself somewhat. Barents and the other pilot went off the ship to inspect the bow, getting down on the ice on their knees and elbows to check its position and displacement. In the midst of their measurement, a loud crack sounded. The ship overhead sprang off the ice so suddenly that Barents and the pilot thought they’d be lost at sea.

  But the ship, though it now sat upright in the water, was still trapped. Barents and the pilot made their way back aboard. The situation was no better a day later, and so on August 29, they began to work at the solid sea with crowbars. Making little headway, they commended themselves to the mercy of God. But the n
ext day, the current from the sea they couldn’t reach drove in more ice, grinding blocks and pieces against each other, packing them even closer together, and clamping the ship in a vise. A snowstorm set in, and under the pressure of the new ice and the wind chill, the ice began to crack and groan all around them. They could only watch and listen in terror as they sat aboard and felt the ship slowly rise out of the water.

  By the time the storm was done and conditions had settled enough for them to explore their plight, Barents saw that, again, the front end of the ship had been lifted so that the bow sat several feet above where it would when floating on open water. Yet the stern of the ship hadn’t risen with it, but instead appeared to be stuck in a crevice of ice. Rather than protecting the tiller and the rudder, getting wedged in the crevice had somehow helped to shear the steering mechanism off, breaking it into pieces again. But the part of the stern that remained wedged in the crevice appeared to keep the entire ship from being lifted up and run aground while yet more ice was driven into the harbor. They pulled out the small boats and set them on the ice away from the ship, in case it capsized.

  Later in the day, the current pulled the new ice out. The ship eventually came back to level and sat upright in the water once more. But the men had no time to celebrate. They quickly set about making a new rudder and tiller, which they hung so that the equipment could be easily protected if the ship were wrenched upward once more. Water ran hundreds of feet deep not far away, but there was still no path for them on the surface of the sea. Their return to Nova Zembla had so far consisted largely of a series of dangers punctuated by temporary relief that didn’t offer salvation but only a return to their former dire straits.

  The next day was Sunday; they held a prayer service. Even as they prayed, the current drove the ice back in, pressing on the wood in and outside the ship. The vessel began to rise again. The men feared for the hull, but the hull held. The crew dragged the small boats once more onto the ice then up onto land to keep them safe and at the ready.