Icebound

by Andrea Pitzer

  On September 17, they made their first trip with the sleds, dragging four logs for miles over ice and snow. When the sun rose again, more than a dozen crew members left with the sleds on another run, piling beams higher, with five men pulling each sled from the front and three staying behind to cut the wood down to logs that could be moved on the sleds. With more people, they could make two round trips each day, starting a lumberyard near the building site.

  They worked wearing trousers that stopped at the calf, loose tunic-style shirts, as well as hats, jackets, and leather slippers—but no heavy winter coats. On September 18 they hauled wood in driving snow, and once the weather cleared, moved even more loads during the next two days.

  While they worked on framing the cabin, sailors still spent the nights aboard the ship. The ship’s stove, which was portable, was carried on deck to feed the men, but it grew so cold on September 21 that everything outside froze, and they had to bring it belowdeck.

  There was little surprise in the temperatures dropping perceptibly: the fall equinox arrived the next day. The sun, which had stood so high, spinning a tight circle all summer in the dome of the sky, had been slowly making wider loops like a top winding down, swinging closer and closer to the horizon each evening then barely grazing it. That evening it vanished again just for a moment into darkness.

  The return of night was ominous, but they’d expected it to happen. The surprise came the next day, on September 23. Weary from dragging sleds full of wood to build a shelter, several crew members trudged back over the rough snow and ice, only to find that the carpenter had died.

  He’d come to Nova Zembla from the town of Purmerend bordering Lake Purmer, a few miles north of Amsterdam. He’d instantly become the most valuable person among the castaways in terms of assuring their survival, but he was the first to succumb to the brutal conditions. In a bad omen for the house they were to build, the ground was already frozen too solid to dig a grave. Short on time and with few options available, they tucked his body beneath the overhanging rock of a crevice on a hill the next morning, leaving his corpse to the elements and the bears before taking the sleds to get more wood.

  Bitter cold had become the baseline, but the sky had at least remained clear for a few days when a fierce gale blew toward the west. On a flat section of peninsula, they plotted a rectangle thirty-six feet long and just over twenty-two feet wide. To make a level base, they gathered and spread flat stones. With the ground frozen so hard, the idea of using familiar Dutch construction methods or digging a foundation became as impossible as it had been to give their carpenter any proper burial. Instead, they likely borrowed from the Norwegian cabins they’d seen on their voyages. Swinging an adze to peel spirals of wood off the curved trunks and flatten the top side of the trees they’d gathered, they also brought in raw timber from storage on the ship. Notching the ends of the large bottom beams to nest one into the other at the corners of the house, they built a base four beams high in a recognizable log-cabin style. Since it was impossible to drive piles into the ground, aboveground pins were used in pairs to brace the building’s corners and hold the stacked, notched beams in place.

  They began to frame out the first timbers of their temporary home.7 On one end of the stacked logs, they cut the top beam to support a doorframe. While they worked, they watched the current come and go. Some ice slipped out to sea, leaving an open space on the water. They looked at the sliver of open sea, then at their ship some distance away from it, still trapped and damaged. If they hadn’t had to spend their days hauling lumber, they could’ve repaired the ice-knees and battered stern, preparing it for a homeward voyage. If the ship weren’t locked in ice, the prevailing wind was just the kind that could carry them away from Ice Harbor.

  But this was wishful thinking. There was no chance of escape at this point, and they had no faith that they’d survive the approaching winter. The sight of open water persisted into the next day, taunting them. They continued work on their house and burned scrap wood to try to keep warm.

  On September 27, the wind whipped the air around their cabin. They paused, still wondering if some miracle might loose the ship and set them free. The frigid air affected them all. Holding nails between their teeth as they hammered planks, the men discovered that when they went to use one, the metal had frozen to their lips and tore the skin from their mouths, drawing blood. The ice drove in again. It was too cold to work on the house, but they had no choice if they hoped to survive.

  They still had daylight left, but night was overtaking them. They’d learned to never walk alone and to travel in armed groups to protect themselves. On their way to the house, they ran into a mother bear and her cub, which they frightened off with shots. The next day, a second group dragging their tools from the ship to the cabin saw three bears, which began to track them. They shouted and postured, but the bears didn’t halt their approach. The humans felt much more vulnerable than the bears appeared to. But their mates already working at the cabin saw what was happening and set up a clamor, too, driving the animals away.

  The castaways built a low ridge in the middle of the roof so that snow and water could run off, though for the time being, everything seemed to be made of ice. They knew they’d need a fireplace inside the house to survive, so a chimney was indispensable. Yet they could hardly imagine the strange uses to which it would be put during the winter.

  On the night of September 30, the wind spun up a snowstorm so heavy that the crew couldn’t fetch more wood. They thought to thaw the ground outside the house where they might pack earth around the base of the cabin to seal and insulate the building. But the ground turned out to be frozen harder than they’d realized. Wood was too scarce to burn in the quantities they would have to use to be able to dig in the earth.

  Another storm the next day blew fierce enough to make it hard to move against the wind on shore. Snowdrifts rose everywhere, dropping visibility to a hundred feet or less. Yet by October 2, they’d completed framing the house. To the timbers they had nailed together, they added a May tree decoration made of snow. The next two days were spent in painful temperatures that grew too bitter to let them go outside on the first day, and so much snow fell that work became impossible on the second. Meanwhile, open water had crept its way closer to the ship. They secured the bower anchor on the ice to keep the vessel in place, in case the wind should try to pull it out to sea in their absence. On October 5, the sea lay wide open, except for where their ship was still frozen in ice, sitting two to three feet deep above the waterline. Below the surface, twenty feet or more of solid ice ran all the way to the ground.

  They continued to work when they could, but eventually, the moment they’d been dreading came. Given that they were on an Arctic island without substantial vegetation, they’d found an inordinate amount of wood. The current from Siberia had pulled the timber up to the same shore for centuries, and they’d hiked miles to get it, dragging it wearily to the construction site over and over. But in the end, it wasn’t enough wood to build a cabin. They began prying planks off the ship, taking them from the forecastle, the deck at the front of the vessel sitting a little higher than the main deck. Using these planks to cover part of the exterior of the house, they also laid them on the roof.

  They hadn’t removed the hull of the ship, or anything that would be impossible to restore come spring, if they made repairs. But dismantling any part of the ship was a final acknowledgment that in a choice between the ship and the cabin, their future for now lay snowbound on the icy shore.

  On October 6, conditions were too harsh to permit work, so they stayed indoors. The next day, despite the cold, they took down the poop deck, which had been built up over the stern of the ship, and used those planks to finish enclosing the cabin. They caulked between the planks to seal them as best they could from the brutal winds and exposed terrain atop their modest hill. In the farthest reaches of the planet, they’d raised a house to live in.

  Moving into the cabin was almost as much of a proj
ect as building it. On October 8, snow blasted their shelter on the exposed plateau, making it too hard to stand in the wind at all. It became impossible to walk more than a few feet outdoors. The following day brought no improvement, trapping them all in the ship again.

  On October 10, the water rose two feet higher than normal, but the weather turned clear and allowed them to go to shore. They’d suffered for days in the choking smoke, sleeping between decks while the cook was forced to use his oven there, with the trade-off being that at least they could eat and be warm. Delighted to finally be at liberty, one sailor wandered off the ship.

  He soon returned yelling, “A bear! A bear!” He’d been nearly taken by surprise and had been chased all the way back to the ship. The creature stayed on his heels until he got to the disemboweled bear they’d killed before and left frozen standing upright. The animal was mostly covered in snow by this point, but one paw protruded visibly in the air, and the live bear briefly stopped chasing its prey to examine the mysterious neighbor. Meanwhile, the fleeing sailor climbed into the ship, where the deck was filled with men crawling out of the hatches, smoke-blind and squinting. Trying to help, they were at first unable to even see the bear. Luckily, it wandered off before committing to climbing aboard the ship.

  A break in the weather finally let them begin to move their provisions. That evening they shifted the bulk of their bread into a small boat and dragged it ashore. The next day, as they lowered the wine and barrels of food over the side of the ship, a bear—the same bear, perhaps, or maybe some new animal—rose out of the ice and began to move on them. It must have been napping, because they’d seen the lump on the ground as they came and went, but thought it was a piece of ice. They fired guns at the animal to spook it off, and the bear abandoned the hunt.

  On October 12, eight men moved their belongings over to the house and stayed overnight in it for the first time. But they suffered terribly; they hadn’t yet built bunks off the ground in which to sleep. More critically, though the sailors planned an opening for a chimney, they hadn’t yet finished its construction. And no chimney meant no fire at which to warm themselves.

  The following day brought savage winds. They began to move their barrels of beer, hoisting them over the side and onto a sled on the ice. But the wind spun up a storm that soon sent them fleeing back to the ship. The beer sat abandoned on the ice, while they huddled a few feet away, between decks. When they emerged the next day, they found the cask of spruce beer had frozen at the top. From there, the beer had kept expanding and burst the bottom of its barrel, freezing solid to the displaced panel as if glued to it. They loaded up the sled and dragged the barrel to their house, only to find the beer had separated. All the alcoholic spirits lay in yeasty unfrozen sludge, while the beery ice was little more than water. Melting the contents of the barrel, they tried to remix them, with disappointing results.

  On October 15, the crew shoveled snow from the doorway of the house and laid stones to make a raised area outside the cabin in front of it. The next morning, when the men headed back for more provisions, they saw a polar bear on deck, which had apparently made its way onto the ship overnight. Whether the oncoming group unnerved it, or it thought better of its new den, upon catching sight of the sailors coming over the ice toward the ship, it slipped away.

  Climbing aboard, the sailors began to take apart the cabin on the quarterdeck and carried the wood to shore to frame an enclosed porch for their shelter. An entrance hall would shield the interior door, keeping frigid air from sweeping through the cabin with every entrance or exit. Long attuned to the changeable nature of the wind, the men left openings for three exterior doors on the porch, one on each side of it. They’d be able to test the wind before going outside, and leave through whichever door would best shield them from the wind and snow.

  It took two days to build the porch. On October 18, they finally unloaded the bread and wine from the small boat filled with temporary provisions they’d dragged to land weeks before, when they first feared the loss of their ship. Looking out from the shore, it dawned on them that the sea had finally frozen completely. They could no longer see any water at all. Water in its liquid form had vanished.

  The same day, they spotted another bear, in what had become almost a daily occurrence. Some bears came after them; others were easier to scare off.

  As with people, bears have personalities. Some reveal themselves to be persistent hunters, returning again and again to test the humans, while another bear might simply investigate and move on. Hunger likely affects the direction and depth of their investigations, making the bears more aggressive in dealing with humans.

  Their roaming habits also reflect a certain variety. Using the sea ice as bridges, some bears cover geographical territories that stretch thousands of square miles, while others tend to stay closer to one location. Aside from the bears killed by the crew, which were permanently accounted for, the creatures seen by Barents and his men might have been a repeating cycle of the same animals or could’ve been new creatures just wandering through. In either case, polar bears clearly outnumbered humans at Ice Harbor.

  Barents’s men had already learned a lot about polar bears. In its natural habitat, each bear offered the same fusion of the mundane and the mythic as the Arctic itself. With its nonretractable claws and forty-two teeth, the animal possessed a lethal magnificence, yet the men had to find a way to live on a day-to-day basis with it. Polar bears weren’t easily scared. They were used to the boom and crack and groan of the ice. They had no natural predators. There was nothing this far north that polar bears had to fear attack from—not reindeer, nor the seals they ate. Humans were new enough to spark curiosity but not yet familiar enough to spark fear.

  In 1773, fourteen-year-old Horatio Nelson, later to become an admiral and hero of Britain, enlisted as coxswain on the HMS Carcass and set out on a polar expedition, trying the same route that Barents had taken almost two hundred years before. He got as far north as Spitsbergen, where he set off on the ice with a friend to attempt to capture a polar bear. He carried a musket with him and tried to shoot at the animal, but saw only a flash in the pan. The fuse burned but failed to ignite the gunpowder. He was unable to fire at the bear and had to be rescued by the ship, which fired a cannon to frighten off the creature. The bear, it’s said, was on a floating piece that came away from the part that Nelson stood on, further keeping the ambitious, foolhardy teenager alive.

  The lone child on Barents’s ship didn’t travel in any such honored role. But he’d get as much experience with polar bears as Nelson would find nearly two hundred years later—and perhaps more. On October 19, the boy and two men were working alone on the ship when a polar bear climbed the side of the listing vessel to force its way aboard. All three were unarmed. Faced with a raging bear making its way on deck, they panicked. They threw firewood at the animal, but it charged them in fury, sending the men scrambling into the hold. The boy, trapped on deck alone with the bear, climbed the rigging on the foremast. By this time, men on shore had heard the commotion and came running, firing muskets and driving the bear away.

  As with all the bear attacks, once they ended, the crew had to go back to their duties. To make the decision to leave the ship even more bitter, the next morning, they caught glimpses again of open sea in the distance. Going below for more of their provisions, they found that the iron hoops on some barrels had frozen and shattered. Some of the barrels themselves had likewise exploded. The Dutchmen had dragged their alcohol all the way from Amsterdam but wouldn’t have the consolation of drinking it.

  Two days of clear, calm weather enabled a steady process of moving what still amounted to several months of rations. The sailors’ small house slowly filled with casks and barrels. But on October 22, it snowed. The wind drove the snow harder as it came down, piling it all around the house. The eight men who were staying inside couldn’t get out.

  They’d hoped to move the rest of the crew the following day, and the sun rose to calm skies. But t
hey feared the tempest would start up again, and the hike from the ship to the cabin loomed large for one of the sailors who was already very ill. On the twenty-fourth the rest of the company finally made their winter pilgrimage, pulling the sick man on a sled and dragging the hull of the scute—the larger of their two small boats—over the gritty, unforgiving landscape. Upon arrival, they carried their sick shipmate and left the boat outdoors, turning it over to protect it against the coming winter. They hoped it might be of use again come spring, if they survived that long.

  Returning to the ship, they surveyed its plaintive hulk planted in a field of ice. Looking at the sweep of immobile sea, the last possible thing they could imagine at this point was that the waters would open up again and free the vessel. They picked up the spare anchor they’d laid out on the ice and coiled its cable back into the ship so that it wouldn’t be lost under new layers of snow that would surely arrive. On the way back to the cabin, they carried the last of their food, leaving the ship empty of human life overnight for the first time.

  They returned again the following days, climbing back into the ship, gathering supplies for the small boats, and clearing out the last of the equipment they wanted to bring with them. Once it was loaded onto the sleds, they got into formation and picked up the ropes with which to haul the sleds. Suddenly, Captain van Heemskerck noticed three bears heading from the far side of the ship toward them, lumbering over the frozen sea.

  He shouted to sound the alarm for the crew and to frighten the bears. The sailors dropped the ropes they were hauling and looked around for any means to defend themselves. Two halberds lay on the sled with the equipment to be ferried over. Gerrit de Veer picked one up, and van Heemskerck seized the other. They began to protect the crew as best they could. Luckily, the halberd was a distance weapon, and didn’t require them to fight within immediate reach of the bears. But with three bears, no guns, and two blades, they were overmatched.