Icebound

by Andrea Pitzer

  The sailors also turned their attention to matters more under their control. Foxes were good eating, but not always at hand, particularly when the men were spending most of their time indoors and had only moonlight or darkness to hunt by. To automate the process, they wove a round hoop of cable rope, knitting it into a net, and built a trap that would fall on any foxes creeping under it. They put out their trap on November 11 and were rewarded with a hot dinner.

  Trapping in the Arctic was an art and a heritage, one owned almost entirely before and during Barents’s era by native northern populations. The Thule people, forerunners of the Inuit, built fox traps in Greenland that had sliding stone doors and narrowed to just the width of the animal at the end, drawing them in with bait but leaving them no room to turn around and escape. Propped stones might drop a stone directly onto a trapped animal, crushing it. Or a suspended flat stone door would be tripped, sliding shut.

  Traps for polar bears could work the same way. By the time the animal got deep inside, there was no room to turn and use its powerful forepaws to dismantle the opening. With any luck, before the trappers would come back, the creature had starved or frozen to death. But Barents’s men weren’t yet so proficient at trapping northern animals, and had to make do with the foxes, whose meat they preferred anyway.

  The surplus fresh meat came as good news, but on November 12, the wine came in for rationing as well. They began to drink fresh water to stay hydrated, melting it daily out of snow. The men spent the rest of the week indoors without much to do. On November 18, the weather was bitter. Van Heemskerck, in charge of the merchandise for trade, pulled out a bolt of coarse woolen cloth from the cargo. Unfolding it, he began to cut it up and distribute it among the crew, who needed warmer clothes. The next day, he opened a chest of linen, from which they stitched shirts for themselves.

  The day that followed revealed itself to be clear and calm. The sailors went to wash their clothes in a pot of water boiling on the fire in the cabin. As they lay out their shirts to dry, the edges of the cloth closest to the fire remained wet, while the far end froze solid, flat as a board, and couldn’t be opened. The men had to throw their laundry back in the boiling water again just to separate the layers of fabric.

  While the sailors were more at their leisure than they would’ve been aboard the ship, the cook had the challenge of melting enough water for everyone, chopping wood to keep the stove going, and cooking meals twice a day. On November 21, to share the burden, the rest of the men agreed to take over splitting logs, with everyone working in rotation except the leaders of the expedition, Barents and van Heemskerck.

  The next day, the company neared the end of the store of cheeses that they’d carried from Amsterdam and off the ship. Seventeen blocks remained. After dividing one among themselves, they each received a whole one, to eat when they wished.

  As winter came in, they saw more and more foxes. The sailors built new traps, in the hopes of taking advantage of the greater numbers. These were traps of a different kind: heavy planks weighted by stones surrounded by bit ends of spars. The traps tricked foxes into triggering the plank’s fall, pinning the animals in place, while the spars kept them from digging their way out the side of the trap.

  On November 24, a storm raged outside, and several men inside began to feel ill. Four sailors took turns in the barrel sauna before being given a purgative by the surgeon. The purgative emptied their bowels in a manner meant to cleanse them of toxic elements, but the trauma of the treatment was more likely to do violence to their systems than to provide any real benefit. Yet sailors sometimes took the extreme response of their bodies as evidence of the treatment’s very effectiveness. As Gerrit de Veer wrote, the purgative “did us much good.”

  If they were seeking more good omens, they could find them in the four foxes they caught that day with their new plank traps. Improving on the design by adding a spring, they quickly caught two more of the creatures. But the weather never stayed clear for very long. On November 26, a blizzard struck. Snow blanketed the ground before climbing higher and higher up the sides of their cabin, over the base logs, past the steps, covering the doors, and eventually blocking all exits. Unable to leave and reduced to desperation, the men relieved themselves inside, on the enclosed front porch.

  The next day, they built more spring traps and caught more foxes. Low on salted beef, they were happy to supplement their aging rations with fresh meat. But November 28 brought another storm, pinning them in the house again. The next day, they wormed their way out of the cabin and used a shovel to dig out one door, but their traps lay completely covered in snow. They had to clear the planks to make it possible for foxes to even enter them.

  Worse events were underway. They didn’t know it yet, but they were already afflicted by scurvy. The signs of the disease that had appeared in some sailors during Barents’s second voyage inevitably began to appear on this voyage, too: joint stiffness, loose teeth, and diseased gums. Symptoms of scurvy had been observed just four months into the prior expedition, and the sixteen sailors socked in for the winter at the Safe House on Nova Zembla had now been at sea for more than six months.

  Ascorbic acid—vitamin C—is critical for building connective tissue, making its absence felt there first. A condition brought on by a deficiency in vitamin C, scurvy works quietly but inexorably, stripping the body of its ability to stay in one piece. As it worsens, the scar tissue over old wounds dissolves, bowels loosen, and bones grow fragile. Humans have no way to store ascorbic acid long-term, which means that scurvy wreaks havoc on even the strongest of bodies, starting with minor changes as early as two months without vitamin C.

  Scurvy begins with lethargy, fatigue, and symptoms like those experienced on the 1595 expedition to Vaigach Island. Without access to vitamin C, the sailors would in time face swelling, jaundice, severe spontaneous bleeding, convulsions, then death, as their bodies slowly disintegrated. In the meantime, as their cartilage vanished, they’d begin to creak when they moved.7 The symptoms would go beyond physical distress—depression and hallucinations would develop as the disease progressed.

  Much to the crew’s misfortune, Barents had set sail in the middle of a bleak age for scurvy. It had developed into a common ailment only once improvements in navigation allowed voyages to last several months. Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries—from the first Spanish conquests in the Americas to the colonization of much of the globe—nearly two million sailors would die of the disease.

  Yet its cure was already known by some. Mexicans treated Spanish sailors who arrived scurvy-ridden on their shores in the sixteenth century, giving them oranges, lemons, and limes. British explorer and pirate Richard Hawkins delivered hundreds of citrus fruits to his crew in Brazil, hypothesizing on their value fighting scurvy in a 1622 letter: “that which I have seene most fruitful is sower oranges and lemons… I wish that some learned man would write of it, for it is the plague of the sea, and the spoyle of mariners.”8 Hawkins claimed during his two decades at sea to have seen thousands of men afflicted with scurvy. Many individual captains from seafaring nations would, like Hawkins, bring along preventatives, yet others would fail to do so, leaving scurvy as a significant threat to sailors well into the nineteenth century.

  Because little in the way of vegetation grew on the far northern end of Nova Zembla, even if Barents’s men had understood the illness, they wouldn’t have had any oranges and lemons, or even potatoes or broccoli, to save themselves. No plant they could find to eat in their corner of the high Arctic would cure scurvy. Most animals automatically synthesize their own vitamin C. Humans—along with bats, primates, and guinea pigs—are among the few that can’t. But Arctic foxes can. Consumed fresh without being overcooked, the flesh of the foxes eaten by Barents’s men carried small amounts of vitamin C. The fox meat was the key thing that was now keeping them alive—or at least slowing their death. Without knowing it, their survival had become a race between the accelerating disease and how many foxes they could
eat.

  Meanwhile, trapping kept the men busy and gave them something to look forward to. They liked the meat and thought to make another use of the animals by skinning the creatures and turning their pelts into fox-fur hats, finally taking a step toward appropriate clothing for the climate.

  Clear weather came in on the last day of November. Six armed men made their way to the ship at midday, to see if it had shifted position. Going belowdeck, they caught a curious fox and killed it but didn’t see any bears. The next day’s weather was much worse, unloading torrents of snow, blocking up the doors yet again, and covering the entire house. With no ventilation out the barrel chimney above the fire, the house filled with smoke, and the castaways were presented with a choice of freezing to death or suffocating from smoke. Solomon-style, they split the baby and went without a fire for part of the day, huddling in their bunks, but suffering through the smoke and enjoying the heat when it came time to cook meat for dinner. On December 2, the same dilemma presented itself, but they heated stones and carried them into their beds for warmth.

  When they had no fire or lantern lit, the cabin was dark day and night, with the rank smell of scurvy-ridden men and fireplace smoke. Even in the quiet, the breathing of sixteen men could be heard, as could the groan and crack of ice as it shifted or shattered out on the sea. The sound was such that they wondered if the largest hills of ice they’d seen were being driven into each other.

  With only intermittent fire, the remaining heat bled out of the cabin, which was far from airtight. First frost, then ice began to build up on the inside walls, eventually lining the interior—even the roof—in a frozen layer more than an inch thick. The intricate ship’s clock, which had stopped more than once, finally froze altogether. They hung heavier weights on its gears, to try to make them turn. But the machinery didn’t budge. For three days, the sailors stayed in their bunks, the sides of which were also lined with ice. They hardly moved at all, except to turn the hourglass, so as not to lose track of time altogether.

  On December 4, the storms stopped. Realizing that digging out the doors would be a miserable ongoing project, they divided the task into rotations, with each man having a turn. Once again, van Heemskerck and Barents remained exempt from the chores. They were not only the leaders of the expedition but the likeliest members to be able to deliver the crew home next spring, if anyone could survive that long. The two men had become precious in a very practical sense.

  The next day brought clear weather again, and the sailors grew ambitious, going outside to clear and reset their traps. But the hope and energy that came to them when the storm ended fled on December 6 in the face of more bad weather. Stung by the bitter wind that made itself felt throughout the cabin, they likewise dreaded the cold that crawled in with it. The sailors began to fear that they might freeze to death in their beds. They tried to make a fire, but despite the flames, the ice-filled cabin couldn’t be heated. Their sherry ration, which they’d hoped might at least warm their insides, had frozen solid. They tried to melt it over the fire, and ended up with enough for each man to have a cup.

  The foul weather persisted into the next day, and the men conferred on what else they could do to survive. Believing that they wouldn’t be able to endure the bitter temperatures much longer, one of the sailors remembered the mineral coal they’d carried from the ship to the cabin. They were sure that it would raise the temperature in the room enough to keep them alive.

  Coal burns hotter than regular wood, but it was known to smell awful—so awful it couldn’t be used to cook meat without ruining the taste. So the men waited until evening to start a good-sized blaze with the coal. It burned so warm that they agreed to stop up the chimney and doors to trap the heat in the cabin as long as possible. For the first time, perhaps, since their arrival, they lay comfortably in their beds talking to one another as they began to nod off.

  But those still awake began to feel dizzy, with the sailor who’d long been ill feeling the effects of the smoke first. Everyone suddenly realized they were all sick. Recognizing that it was a result of burning coal, the least affected among them jumped out of their beds to unstop the chimney and throw open the doors. The first man to open a door groaned and collapsed in the snow. Hearing the moan, Gerrit de Veer jumped from his bed and saw his shipmate on the ground. He grabbed vinegar and splashed it on the unconscious man’s face. The fallen man woke and stood up. They opened the rest of the doors. De Veer realized that the cold air which had threatened to kill them only hours before now offered their only salvation. As the frigid temperatures invaded the house, the smoke cleared.

  They’d nearly gone to sleep for the last time. If their hard-earned heat had now fled, at least they were alive. The captain doled out an extra ration of wine to commemorate the close call. The weather the next day remained vile, but cold as it was, they found themselves without any inclination to burn coal again.

  On December 9, the wind and snow let up, and following their new routine, they cleared the doors and reset their traps once again. Two foxes stumbled in and were eaten with gusto—leading to more hats for the sailors. The eleventh found them facing such bitter temperatures that their leather shoes froze solid and could no longer be worn. Going barefoot wasn’t a possibility, so the men carved wooden clogs to wear as slippers, attaching uppers made of sheepskin. When temperatures dropped even further the next day, frost crystallized on their shirts as they sat in the cabin, and icicles began to form on their clothes. They convened to debate building another coal fire indoors, but decided against it, fearing it would kill them even more quickly than the savage temperatures.

  A warm day on Nova Zembla might approach thirty-two degrees, but in the winter months temperatures of minus thirty could be expected. At that temperature, ten minutes of under-protected exposure can trigger hypothermia. At ten degrees colder than that, five minutes might suffice.

  No deep plunge in body temperature is required for serious harm to take place. As body temperature drops past three degrees below normal, shivering, weakness, and confusion set in, and the body diverts blood flow from the extremities to try to stay warm. As the body’s core gets colder, amnesia and unconsciousness follow. By the time the human body reaches eighty degrees, death can occur.9

  Once hypothermia takes hold, it’s possible to revive a victim. But it must be done carefully. Hundreds of years after Barents sailed north, a group of Danish fishermen would be rescued from the North Sea after floating in water for an hour and a half. Brought to safety aboard another ship, they went to get a warm drink. Their body temperatures rose too quickly, and all sixteen died instantly.10

  But if the temperature of the men in the cabin on Nova Zembla were to slip below the danger point, no one would stumble ashore and fish them off the coast. No one would take them aboard or resurrect them. Their cabin would sit undiscovered on Ice Harbor for centuries.

  On December 13, they caught another fox and worked carefully to clear and reset all the traps. This had become a complicated labor. Staying outside more than a few minutes led to swelling and blisters on ears and faces.

  Yet certain tasks had become reflexive. Though the sun was gone, William Barents went out and instead took the height of a star in the constellation of the Giant—Orion, the hunter and slayer of beasts—to reckon their latitude. The star representing the shoulder of Orion, either Beatrix or Betelgeuse, told Barents what the vanished sun couldn’t. Standing with a view of the snow leading down to the frozen sea on three sides, he recorded their position in the cabin at Ice Harbor.

  Any thaw was still months away, and water sat higher in their icebound ship with every visit they made. Van Heemskerck and Barents already realized they might not be able to sail for home in the vessel that had brought them. With no rescue forthcoming, when it came time to set out, the men might have to take to the sea in their two small boats, with Barents at the helm of one and van Heemskerck captaining the other. Scurvy was already making its presence felt. They were sick and likely to get sic
ker before they left. As navigation historian Siebren van der Werf wrote, “It was important that not only they, but as many of the mates as possible… master navigation.”11 Barents likely repeated his measurements again and again with different celestial bodies to train the crew and give them practice. In the event that he or van Heemskerck died or became too sick to navigate, the crew would be able to carry on.

  By December 16, they’d burned all the wood stored in the house, and they began to dig in the snow outside for the stack of logs that lay buried there. They went out in pairs in turn. Though no one could endure the cold for long, the crew had to shovel the high drifts all the way down to the ground to find wood. They hoped to save themselves from having to drag their sleds over the uneven landscape all the way to the driftwood shore and back. Even when the men heading out doubled up on clothing and wore their fox-fur hats, it was a painful chore, due to the “inexpressible, intolerable cold” and because the terrain around the house was covered in high drifts.

  On the second day of fair weather, December 18, seven sailors made their way in darkness to the ship for the first time that month. Climbing aboard, they crossed the deck. The men hoped to assess the state of the vessel, and also to catch another fox. Just in case, they closed all the cannon portholes and openings on the ship to trap any hidden animal. Stepping onto the stairway to go belowdeck, they made their way into darkness.

  No deeper night exists than in the hold of a cargo ship frozen into the Arctic ice during polar night. Looking into the hold, they lit a flame to see in the pitch black. The light revealed a fox, which they killed. Measuring the water in the hold, they found it had risen a finger length. But the new water, like the old, was frozen fast, and remained beyond the ability of the pumps to remove. The barrels full of fresh water, surely now frozen inside, were sitting surrounded by seawater and stuck fast to the inside of the hull.