Icebound

by Andrea Pitzer

  September 2 brought more of the same, as the ship was vaulted even higher by the ice. A blizzard began, and they considered using a small boat to carry barrels of bread and wine ashore, where at least they wouldn’t have to worry about death by iceberg or drowning.

  The next day, still sitting in high wind but with less snow, the ship began to pull from its mooring, and lost the cable the men had used to fasten it to the ice. The ice-knees that had been built onto the sternpost to protect the hull from collisions started to buckle, but their collapse was stopped by wooden planking that managed to keep them attached, though only barely. Despite the new ice surrounding the ship, the hull held and didn’t flood belowdeck, which they took as a wonder, because of the mountains hundreds of feet high pressing in toward them.

  Barents and the crew waited three days in fear as the weather slowly improved, with ice surging and withdrawing like the tide. After dinner on September 5, the ship began to list hard to one side. The hull held again, but there was no simple way to right the vessel on the seething ice more than a thousand miles from home. Any one of the cataclysmic iceberg explosions they’d already seen might drop it into water that could sink a listing ship. After a meeting to confer on their options, they took their old foresail and used it to transport powder, lead, small and large guns, and some furniture ashore. Making a tent of it under an overturned boat, they stocked it with bread and wine. They also brought tools to mend the small boat that had been crushed, as it might become particularly valuable if the ship were lost to them.

  They spent most of the following week shuttling between land and the ship. Some of the crew went inland and found a fresh water source, as well as wood that had washed up on the shore. Meanwhile, the ice-knees protecting the stern finally gave way, and the ship lay encased in more than three feet of ice. Two bears approached the ship by night, but were scared off by the sound of the ship’s trumpet and shots fired in their direction. There was no relief in sight.

  On September 11, a party of eight men went ashore armed to the teeth. They verified that there was fresh water and found the wood that the scouts had described. The ship lay pinned as it had for two weeks, with the fall equinox coming on. Twilight would soon give way to night, and behind it, winter. Their spectacular efforts, which had saved them in every crisis so far—sometimes flailing, sometimes inspired, and often both—couldn’t draw the ship from the ice or carve a path in the frozen sea. The sailors assembled together again and acknowledged that God wouldn’t intervene to aid their departure. Gerrit de Veer wrote in his journal that Barents and his men began making plans to spend the winter on Nova Zembla “in great cold, poverty, misery, and griefe.”

  CHAPTER FIVE Castaways

  Hope of rescue is the sustaining dream of castaways. In May 1630, the commander of The Salutation, a British vessel in Arctic Greenland, sent out a party of eight in a small boat with “a musket, two lances, a tinderbox, and a brace of dogs.” They were told to hunt deer as part of provisioning of the ship for its return voyage. While the men were on shore, ice moved in and drove the ship farther out to sea. Not knowing why the vessel had vanished, the men decided to make their way to where another ship in their fleet had been ordered to anchor for several days. Arriving to find that ship gone as well, they tried to get to a third ship that was supposed to leave with them and return to England—only to realize that without a compass or a pilot, they’d overshot the last reunion point altogether. Though they had only the clothes on their back and no food except what they could catch or find, they believed that help would be sent eventually. Despite tremendous suffering, they managed to survive for most of a year, until a rescue ship arrived.1

  More than two centuries later, Sir John Franklin set sail from Britain in The Terror and The Erebus, both battle-ready bomb ships with hulls further reinforced to withstand collisions with icebergs. Franklin had already made his way to the Arctic on two earlier trips, the first of which aimed, as Barents had planned long before him, to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific by sailing near the North Pole. The plan worked no better for him than it did for Barents, but in 1845, he sailed over northern Canada in two ships with a crew of one hundred thirty-four men and at least three years of provisions in search of a northwest passage to the Far East. The expedition carried with it extraordinary technology of the day: steam engines to power the ship when the wind didn’t cooperate and desalinization equipment that could transform the sea into drinkable water. At the end of their first year out, they wintered not far from Beechey Island in what would become Nunavut, Canada. With plenty of food and coal for fuel—as well as a central-heating system and a twelve-hundred-book library—they managed their first winter. But following the thaw in the spring of 1846, they sailed into Victoria Strait and were trapped by ice. They spent the next two years descending from disappointment into horror. No one aboard was ever heard from again.

  Two rescue expeditions were sent out in 1848, one on land and one by sea, but they found no signs of Franklin or his party. In 1850, Franklin’s wife sponsored a third expedition to search for the ships; several more attempts to find the lost sailors followed. No news came until John Rae—who had led the first overland search party—returned to map the Canadian coastline in 1854 and heard a story from the local Inuit. They talked about men whose large ships remained trapped in the ice until their food had run out. Before the last of them had died, the Inuit said, the men had resorted to eating each other.

  When Rae came home to England, he scandalized his countrymen by suggesting that a national saint had been reduced to cannibalism. Attacked over his account, he defended the indigenous Inuit he’d interviewed about the Franklin party, painting them as “a bright example to the most civilized people,” as well as “honest and trustworthy,” contrasting them with the desperate state to which Franklin’s men would’ve been reduced as they sat trapped in the ice. When critics provided examples of British castaways who died without eating each other, Rae noted that typically in a shipwreck, the more immediate demon of thirst would displace that of hunger. But with the desalinization equipment Franklin’s group had on hand, thirst wouldn’t have been an issue. Fully hydrated, they would’ve had nothing but time to think about but their hunger, in a place that offered only “a barren waste with scarcely a blade of grass upon it.”2

  Rae’s reports of cannibalism infuriated novelist Charles Dickens, who dissected them by detailing the near-death hardships that Franklin and his partners had endured on previous expeditions without eating human flesh. Dickens explained for his readers that “the lost Arctic voyagers were carefully selected for the service,” dismissing the oral reports from the Inuit as “Esquimaux kettle-stories.” He listed secondhand accounts in which British explorers claimed to have held fast, while Native Americans had advocated cannibalism, implying that perhaps the “Esquimaux” themselves had eaten the crew.

  At the time of its departure, all England had its eyes on the Franklin expedition. Once they were trapped and sent no news home, the castaways might have hoped that rescuers would find them eventually. This hope likely kept them going for a time, even as their first year frozen in turned into a second year then approached a third. But despite years of provisions and the beginnings of modern equipment for defying Arctic conditions, they couldn’t hold out. Over a hundred fifty years after the expedition vanished, after more than a dozen rescue or recovery expeditions, casual observations by local Inuit would be the means by which both shipwrecks were discovered.

  The need for rescue from a place that had a local population underlined how alien Europeans were to the Arctic terrain in which they became castaways. By the time the Franklin expedition vanished, Inuit were already living in the region, having migrated into the northern reaches of North America and Greenland centuries before. They’d learned how to fish and hunt whales, and traded with groups they encountered going all the way back to the Viking era during the Norsemen’s westernmost voyages. But the Arctic was their home. It had dangers but didn
’t hold the same terrors for them that it did for European sailors in the post-Viking era, who typically wanted only to pass through the region unscathed.

  In time, some explorers would come to recognize that Arctic populations would be helpful sources of training for polar expeditions. As he crossed the interior of Greenland in 1888, Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen took a very different tack. He brought two Sami crewmen from northern Norway along with him. He carried Inuit-style snowshoes, adapted Lapp skis, and could speak Inuit. Most important, unlike the massive company assembled for the Franklin expedition, Nansen organized only small bands of collaborators for his trips and used indigenous survival tactics. In a testament to his approach, every man and piece of equipment he ever set out with came back.3

  In the 1860s, American explorers Isaac Israel Hayes and Charles Francis Hall had headed on separate expeditions to Arctic Canada with the aid of Inuit men and women. Hall stayed five years before returning home. At the beginning of his second Greenland expedition in 1891, American explorer Robert Peary lived ashore for a time with a broken leg, communicating with the local Inughuit, the world’s northernmost group of Inuit. Later, on his expeditions even farther north, Peary moved whole indigenous families to key transit points for support, having the women sew his clothing and the men accompany him on the final legs of each trek.4

  Others would go without local help and stumble their way to death or glory. American Walter Wellman, a journalist with no Arctic experience, announced in February 1894 in the Philadelphia Inquirer that he would set out for the pole. Wellman had no interest in immersing himself long term in the Arctic and understanding its profundities. “What Wellman was truly after was a shortcut to the North Pole,” wrote P. J. Capelotti.5 Wellman imagined that superior technology, from aluminum sleds to hydrogen airships, could provide that shortcut. And though he wasn’t above bringing along veterans of others’ expeditions, he wasn’t interested in picking up skills from indigenous people. His airship engine self-destructed when it was turned on in 1906, and the rebuilt models failed him twice in subsequent years, getting just a few miles north of the location at the northern end of Spitsbergen where William Barents had been forced to turn back more than three hundred years earlier.

  Barents and his men didn’t have Wellman’s aluminum boats. Nor did the Dutchmen have the steam engines, heated rooms, and library that Franklin had at his disposal. They’d observed the Nenets people they met—their use of sleds and their clothing—and sought their advice on navigation. But they didn’t seem to have thought to emulate their ways in adapting to the climate. To a man, the Dutchmen stranded on Nova Zembla were phenomenally unprepared to overwinter in the Arctic.

  They’d experienced cold winters in the Netherlands as mountain glaciers expanded in the Alps and elsewhere, causing a Little Ice Age to cool Europe. Yet they lacked real Arctic clothing; the men weren’t provided any particular gear when they signed on to sail with the expedition. And even experienced sailors knew little to nothing about survival in the far north. They skinned polar bears, but apparently the hides were seen as so valuable as trophies or gifts for patrons that they never stitched the fur pelts into protection for themselves. Despite Barents’s desire to overwinter on the second voyage, and how close ships came to getting frozen in on the prior trips, history records no special materials being brought along in the case of this eventuality.

  Though its scenery might appear monotonous at first glance, daily life in the high Arctic involves constant change. A world of vegetation lies close to the ground—dwarf bushes, mosses, lichens, and yellow Arctic poppies, which, at three inches tall, tower like giants over much of the landscape. The sky is just as subtle. The clouds over one area of land often differ from those over an adjacent fjord, which stand distinct from the vapor moving over the open sea. This combination makes for volatile weather.

  Equipment fails. The tide doesn’t cooperate. Wind shifts. Things may not go wrong any more often in the Arctic than they do in other landscapes, but in the far north misfortune is far more likely to have a cascade of consequences. In the Arctic, a single wrong thing triggers several more wrong things, because food and shelter are so contingent.

  Even knowledge of Arctic survival methods was no guarantee of success. An expedition that would set out for the North Pole in 1871 aboard the Polaris was led by Charles Francis Hall, who had lived with the Inuit. But the voyage quickly descended into crisis when a schism between the Germans and Americans aboard became open conflict, and Hall fell ill and died, after saying he’d been poisoned. More than a dozen members of the expedition were separated from the ship and drifted on an ice floe for months before they were rescued. The remaining crew and ship were likewise stranded after the vessel ran aground, forcing its passengers to overwinter and pray for deliverance, which came the next summer.6

  But the sailors stranded on Nova Zembla had no hope of rescue. By the time Barents and his men made plans to spend the winter, Jan Cornelis Rijp and his crew were tacking somewhere north of the island they’d named Spitsbergen, headed for the North Pole or even China. Or maybe they were themselves stranded. Or perhaps they’d turned back before the ice could take them and had already made it home.

  Wherever Rijp had ended up, no passing ship would sail by the shores of Nova Zembla at Ice Harbor, and no Sami or Nenets with reindeer would venture so far north. Even if Rijp tried to send help, no one would know where to find them. Their location appeared on no chart; they were off every map in existence.

  On his first Arctic voyage, Barents had pressed eastward until his men refused to go farther. On his second trip, Barents had argued for staying behind with two ships to overwinter and scout out clear passage at the first spring thaw—a plan that likely helped provoke open mutiny and executions. On this, the third voyage, he’d finally sailed the route he’d hoped to with no one forcing him home, and now he would overwinter. As in some dark fairy tale, he received everything he’d asked for, but none of it came as good tidings. The issue of mutiny, which had haunted his prior voyages, was finally transcended—but only because any possibility of sailing for home had vanished.

  Seventeen men remained. Along with William Barents as navigator for the expedition, Jacob van Heemskerck captained the ship and had control over the cargo. As he had on the second trip, Gerrit de Veer was present to record the events of the voyage. The rest of the crew included a pilot, who had some fraction of Barents’s navigation skills, and a barber-surgeon—both with the last name Vos. Claes Andries was joined by his nephew, John. As was typical, the voyage had a cook, a carpenter, a gunner in charge of the cannons, and a variety of sailors, along with a ship’s boy charged with helping to hoist and lower sails and maintain the ship.

  The ship lay too vulnerable to the elements to protect the men for the winter. Even if the hull could’ve provided enough shelter, the ice threatened daily to destroy it, making the first order of business to build a cabin. Every sailor had basic woodworking skills, and even at sea, a ship’s carpenter could nearly do magic. With the broad range of tools they had with them, the task of building a home would be a challenge but far from impossible. The bigger difficulty lay in finding enough wood along the coastline of an Arctic desert that couldn’t grow anything taller than miniature shrubs. The entire trees they’d seen on prior voyages washed ashore from the continent were a promising start, but looking closer to where the ship lay, they found little else to help them.

  Their first days on land, they were spared snow and rain, but fog sometimes forced them to stay aboard the ship or near the shore, peering into the mist and listening for the crunch of paws on ice. Even on a clear day, polar bears might smell the crew before the crew could see the bears. In a blanket of fog, the men would have no chance at all.

  On September 14, sunshine made it possible to hike out to gather driftwood, which they began to drag into piles that could be easily found if snow covered the land again. Early the next morning, the cook had a tub of salted beef put out on the sho
re. Once a barrel of salted meat was opened, it had to be soaked in fresh water for hours to leach the salt from it and rehydrate it; then hours more of cooking were required to make it edible. Along with salted meat, their provisions included smoked bacon and ham, as well as fish, both dried and smoked. Every vessel carried ship’s biscuit—the omnipresent food of European voyages, because it never went bad, being made of only flour and water and perhaps a little salt. The sailors also ate bread loaves, groats, barley, peas, and beans. They had oil and vinegar to cook with, salt and mustard to add flavor, and to drink (in addition to water) there was beer, wine, and brandy.

  Though not intended as such, an open barrel of meat made good bait for bears, bringing three unwelcome creatures down to the shore. Spotting the visitors, the sailor on watch called his mates to come on deck and bring their guns. One bear lay at a distance, behind a piece of ice, while two more approached the ship. The closest animal bobbed its head into the tub and paid dearly for its ambition: a shot in the head killed it outright. The second bear sniffed the fallen creature and pondered it a moment before running off. The sailors watched for its return. When it came back at them, rearing onto its hind legs, they shot it in the belly, which sent it fleeing again. Taking up the carcass of the dead bear, the sailors gutted it and stood the animal upright to freeze. Though the surface of the sea had turned solid, more than an inch thick all around the blocks of ice, they still fantasized that they’d somehow get the ship loose and carry the frozen beast back to Amsterdam.

  The sky remained in twilight rather than full darkness, but nights were growing colder. In the daytime, ice would thaw into water, but as the sun dimmed, the surface of the water froze again before morning. They realized they should start constructing a shelter as soon as possible. Some of the wood they’d found included large branches and trees, making one of the first orders of business the building of sleds to haul lumber nearer to the ship.