Icebound

by Andrea Pitzer

  While van Heemskerck and de Veer faced the bears on the ice, the rest of the crew made a break for the ship, where they could shut themselves in belowdeck. But as they ran, one sailor slipped and fell into a fissure in the ice and got stuck. Disheartened by the armed men, the bears turned toward the fleeing prey. De Veer was sure the fallen man was done for. But somehow the animals didn’t notice or pay attention to the sailor on the ground, who lay mostly out of sight below the surface of the ice. They ran instead at those boarding the ship. The stranded sailor climbed out of the ice as van Heemskerck and de Veer caught up to him, and the three of them circled the ship, to climb it from the other side.

  The bears, enraged, switched up their efforts to chase the smaller contingent. The crew picked up firewood and other stray objects, throwing everything within reach at their attackers. De Veer and van Heemskerck braced themselves with their lone halberds, realizing these weapons would likely be just as ineffective as firewood for killing the beasts.

  The bears, however, didn’t seem cowed by the assault. Instead, they grew curious and went to investigate the wood and other items that had been thrown at them, like dogs playing fetch. A sailor scrambled below to get pikes and bring back fire from the stove, but they couldn’t start a fire quickly enough, making the guns aboard the ship useless to them.

  When the bears finally turned on them for good, one man threw a halberd at the biggest animal and managed to split open its snout. Startled, the creature pulled back and realized its injury. After a moment, it began to flee, alarming the two smaller bears, which turned to run after it.

  Once they were gone, the sailors took up the task they’d left off. In relief and exhaustion, the men harnessed themselves again to the sleds, which they hauled, bumping along without incident to the house. They’d moved entirely onto land, surrendering the ship to the sea. Not all of them would live long enough to return to it.

  CHAPTER SIX The Safe House

  At Ice Harbor, the shelter Barents’s men hewed out of materials they had at hand stood as alien as the Dutchmen themselves in the Arctic landscape. From a low spit of land almost level with the sea and covered in ice, a short rise led inland and up to a flat plateau of ground. On the higher ground, a rectangular wooden box, half log cabin and half cottage, sat facing the sea on three sides. The roof angled upward to a ridge at its center, and in the middle of the ridge, a small, square tower narrowed like a pyramid, ending with an empty barrel for a chimney.

  Later explorers arriving in the high Arctic would embrace many styles of shelter. At Jackson Island on Franz Josef Land in 1895, Fridtjof Nansen and his partner Hjalmar Johansen dug a three-foot depression in the ground then erected a hut over the hollow out of moss and stones. Other kinds of housing appeared that were even less permanent. On Robert Peary’s attempt to reach the North Pole in 1909, Inuit assistance meant igloos could be built to cache supplies and provide sleeping quarters, saving explorers the trouble of carrying camping gear.

  By the time Nansen was trekking on foot closer and closer to the Pole, steamships were already ferrying tourists from Europe to Spitsbergen during summer months. Along the northwestern coast of the island, the construction of a tiny shack just a few feet wide called Lloyd’s Hotel made it possible for adventurous aristocrats to have a drink in front of a miniature cottage and get their photos taken in a remote corner of the Arctic before returning to their ship.

  Later, European-style builders would labor at other projects in the high Arctic. Less than two decades after Barents’s mates cobbled together a cabin on Nova Zembla, whalers would visit Spitsbergen hundreds of miles to the west to hunt. Their worksites and sleeping quarters would evolve from tents to wooden barracks and low brick tryworks—furnaces for boiling whale oil—that they would return to year after year.1 The sailors who were abandoned in 1630 while deer-hunting on the coast of Greenland as The Salutation fled approaching ice had borrowed tiles, timber, boards, and bricks from nearby tryworks to build a refuge while they waited for their ship to return the following spring.

  Over time, some shelters would become more elegant. As coal mining took root in the high Arctic, accommodations were designed for company executives during their brief stays. Later, in 1926, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen would take over one such building on Spitsbergen, living in a two-story house at the harbor of Ny-Ålesund, where he waited to launch his airship Norge and drift aloft over the North Pole.

  Several of these cabins would survive for a century or more, serving as partially or fully stocked outposts for hardy tourists or as lifesaving landmarks to re-orient lost explorers. Over time, several were transformed into research outposts. But before Barents’s arrival at Ice Harbor, no shelter had ever been built so far north by Europeans. The only human architecture this close to the Pole had been constructed by indigenous peoples, who’d typically moved south over time in search of more resources and a kinder climate in which to thrive.

  Forerunners of the Inuit who migrated to the coasts of northern Greenland centuries before Barents sailed, the Thule made skin tents in warmer months and dug out homes in winter. Before them, the Dorset culture in North America and Greenland built stone longhouses thirty or more feet long with hip-height walls but no roofs, likely pitching sleeping tents inside their rock enclosures.2

  Artifacts of these civilizations would, in time, be unearthed and painstakingly interpreted. But deciphering the structure and use of William Barents’s cabin would require far less work. Het Behouden Huys—the Safe House—as the Dutchmen came to call the structure, would stand largely intact for more than three hundred years.

  By late October, when all the Dutchmen had settled into their new cabin, the large, long room was filled with provisions and equipment. Away from the door and off the floor, six raised bunks for sleeping, likely in rotating shifts, perched along one wall. A fireplace sat in the middle of the cabin, its smoke drifting up toward the chimney and barrel overhead. The sailor who had been too ill to transport for a time had room for a pallet near the fire, for warmth. The long guns leaned upright against a wall near the entrance, ready for use.

  Not everything aboard the ship would fit in the cabin, and many items couldn’t be easily carried to land, but the crew brought what seemed necessary and practical. They dragged their most valuable cargo: pewter plates and candlesticks, and a packet of expensive scarlet fabric. Inexplicably, they also preserved some less valuable items intended for trade, including thousands of pages of cheap prints in stacks, poor representations of the budding of one of the richest eras in art history. In time, they might return as many items as possible to the merchants who’d supplied them for the voyage, to show they’d been responsible stewards.

  Yet the cargo they saved hardly represented their most important possessions. After their food, the most valuable items were tools and clothing, along with Barents’s maps and charts. These were the things that might help them survive or to make their way home. They had any number of bladed weapons, from swords to halberds and axes. They had their guns. They had hammers, a dozen or more sizes of awls and chisels for piercing or gouging, a hand drill, a handsaw, and an adze for planing wood flat. They had wooden and metal beer taps for their barrels, a marking compass for measuring distances on maps and charting routes, and a shoemaker’s last—a smooth block of wood in the shape of a foot. They also carried with them a parchment-covered small book titled The History or Description of the Great Empire of China—though by then the promise of the Far East lay even farther away than it had when they’d set out from Amsterdam.

  The first day that everyone sat together in the cabin, it grew too cold to work outdoors for long. But the men managed to kill an Arctic fox. They skinned the animal then roasted it, deciding it tasted like rabbit. The rest of the day was spent doing practical chores that let them stay indoors.

  Except for the presence of human life in a place with so little to sustain it, perhaps the most extraordinary thing in the Safe House was the ship’s clock. It reached k
nee height from the cabin floor, stretching as wide as the fingers of a spread hand and almost as deep. Framed in the shape and size of a lantern, it had an elegant cast bell on its crown. Made of forged iron, the clock had a round face with arrow clock hands, a winding key, and exposed sides, revealing the motion of gears marking orderly time in a place where the sun and sky seemed to change each minute. Along with the clock, the cabin’s occupants had their hourglass, which they turned and tracked as another way to divide the twenty-four hours of their darkening days.

  Everyone on the ship had just spent weeks together under a midnight sun. By logical extension, polar night would follow. But what would permanent night mean for the bears that stalked them? What about the animals that might keep the men alive when their rations dwindled—would Barents and his fellow sailors still be able to catch foxes? What would it be like to live in complete darkness once it came? With the ship’s clock and hourglass, they would have a way to cross-check the passage of time, to throw a net of predictability over their lives. They could count the remaining weeks until the New Year, the sun’s return, and the arrival of spring. Accurately marking the passage of time offered one way to keep some sense of control as the sailors braced for winter.

  The day after the clock was wound and first struck the hour in their new home, the men set out to gather firewood for the long winter. The supply they’d found up the coastline as a prelude to building the house remained a reliable source of fuel. Driftwood would continue to wash up in the same place, but the site lay miles from the cabin.

  The crew members began their hike, but along the way, a storm blew in, forcing them to turn for home. When the storm subsided that evening, three men ventured out to visit the bear they’d killed and left frozen upright. They wanted to extract its teeth. Despite its impressive height, however, the bear was nowhere to be seen. Wind and snow had buried it. While they searched for the posed carcass, the storm rose again, catching them by surprise. More snow came down in torrents until they lost all visibility and were walking blind. The snow in the air and on the ground and the sky in evening blurred the boundary between them. They staggered through the blizzard back the way they thought they’d come. Searching for the house, the sailors nearly missed it altogether, which would’ve meant death.

  Other disasters loomed. The roof turned out not to be weatherproof; the planks of pine they’d pounded onto the frame didn’t sit tight enough against one another to keep storms out. On October 29, they gathered pieces of slate from the beach, stretched the sail they’d brought to shore over the top of the house, and weighted it with the flat stones. The following day was clear, but on the last day of October and the beginning of the new month, the new roof was tested by a tempest that trapped them in the house.

  The sun still made an appearance on November 2, half-rising and rolling along the ditch of the horizon before going down without fully revealing its face. Taking advantage of the visibility that remained, one of the sailors killed a fox with a hatchet, providing everyone a good dinner.

  The bears that had terrorized them just a week before seemed to have disappeared. Daylight fled with them. The next day, only the tip of the sun was visible, the last remnant of a beacon that had lit their way for months. Barents took the height of the sun’s thin top sliver to reckon his latitude. The next day it was gone.

  As soon as all sixteen surviving sailors had moved into the cabin, Hans Vos, the ship’s surgeon, imposed a health regimen for the crew. Water or snow dumped over hot rocks laid underneath a seat in the middle of an empty wine barrel served as a hygienic sauna. By the time each sailor took a turn in the steam bath on November 4, they’d likely not washed for some time.

  Their filth was not unusual. During the Middle Ages, which French historian Jules Michelet sweepingly dismissed as “a thousand years without a bath,” bathing didn’t vanish as a practice, but it was often done on limited occasions for particular reasons. Bathhouses existed, but in the fourteenth century the Black Death had reduced their popularity. Rising Protestantism in Barents’s century remained suspicious of the social license and sexual promiscuity attached to bathhouses’ reputation.

  But on land and aboard ships, baths were still believed to have their uses. In the eighteenth century, British captain James Cook—who sailed to New Zealand and Australia and died trying to kidnap the king of Hawaii—would prescribe cold baths for his men, along with other hygienic measures. Even in Barents’s era, doctors sometimes asserted medicinal purposes for certain practices, treating the crew preemptively in the name of health.

  But Dutch ship’s surgeons suffered from poor reputations—reputations largely deserved. Many had trained as little more than barbers and ad-hoc dentists, getting minimal formal study. Ship’s surgeons as young as thirteen appeared on the books, but more often were at least twenty years old when entering service as a junior surgeon on a ship. Yet even junior surgeons might find themselves in charge of all medical care if the first surgeon and surgeon’s mates fell ill or died.3

  With the risks of contagious diseases shipboard, the lack of expertise among ship’s doctors could take a real toll. Decades after Barents’s voyages, Dutch captain William Bontekoe wrote in his journal of surgeons who “wandered the high seas… like executioners,” tormenting the helpless crews.4

  Sometimes, however, surgeons did no harm, or even helped. During their first week in the house at Ice Harbor, the men enjoyed their steam baths. “It did us much good,” wrote Gerrit de Veer, “and was a great meanes of our health.” It’s possible the men may simply have felt grateful for a few fleeting minutes of warmth.

  The next morning, some of the sailors headed out to look at their ship. From a distance, they could see it still lay on its side, locked in its winter prison. As they trekked out onto the solid sea, the moon lit their way. With the sun’s disappearance, the idea of day and night became less and less relevant. A dull predawn or twilight glow still lingered, diminishing by another few minutes each day. But the echoes of the sun dully lighting the sky from below the horizon became harder and harder to distinguish from the light of the moon, which sometimes stayed aloft and visible in the sky for a week at a time.

  In a clear sky, the moon could light the entire landscape well enough to see for a mile or more. For practical purposes, night became the absence of the moon on a cloudy day, or its cyclical waning in the sky each month. But whenever its light was blocked, the treacherous Nova Zemblan terrain was smothered in darkness.

  On November 6, the sailors managed to haul a sled of firewood to the cabin. The next day they realized that the clock had stopped, and they found themselves altogether unsure of the time. They had stayed in bed that day and hadn’t yet gone out to relieve themselves in the snow. But after the clock failed, they couldn’t tell by standing outside whether it was day or if day had turned to night. With close observation of the sky, they eventually deduced it was around noon. But the clear routine that they’d lived on the ship—which both drove and was driven by the demands of the day—was gone.

  On November 8, the crew dragged another sled piled with wood from miles up the coast, and trapped another Arctic fox. Open water in the sea caught their attention, but any return to the sea was months away or more; they’d committed themselves to the shore. They pried open a barrel and divided out their portion of hard bread for the next eight days, which came to just under five pounds each. Previously, a barrel had only to last five or six days. Now they began to think about how to make the provisions they’d set out with that summer last a full year or more.

  The saddest discovery that day, however, was that their beer was already running short. Though much of it had spilled, and the barrels that had separated into yeast and ice when frozen didn’t taste at all the same as before, the residents of the Safe House were nonetheless disappointed to find their ration cut.

  In Barents’s era, sailors drank nearly a half-gallon of beer each day in winter—and more in summer—for as long as their ship’s stores lasted.5
It was weaker than beer produced centuries later, but it did contain alcohol. Along with bread or ship’s biscuit, beer was a source of B vitamins and calories. More than ship’s biscuit, it was also a diversion, and a way to sustain life.

  Sailors were suspicious of drinking water in general, and rightfully so. Though they didn’t understand the dangers of bacteria, and the germ theory of disease had yet to appear, they understood that water sources in unfamiliar lands could make them sick. Mixing beer with water also killed the algae and bacteria growing in freshwater barrels that sat for months in the hold.

  Alcohol in its various forms provided many sailors with their chief means of hydration.6 Trapped in the Arctic, Barents’s men were lucky on this front—they could melt snow without fear of drinking it. But drinking large quantities of water was alien to sailors, except those in the most dire straits. Losing part of their alcohol rations meant that the dependable world was out of kilter.

  On November 9, it grew dark. The next day, they hiked out to the ship to see how it lay on the ice. Opening the hatches and climbing down to the orlop deck, they peered the next level down into the hold. The space was filled with water that covered the stones used for ballast. But the water that had crept in through crevices and cracks had frozen fast, leaving the hull of the ship a diminishing barrier slowly losing the battle to keep the sea outside separate from the sea within. In any floating ship, even one with a hole in the side or irreparable damage, the answer was to pump the water out. But ice couldn’t be pumped, and for the time being, they would have to let the sea possess their ship.