Calm weather stayed with them for one more day, and they realized that the date was December 19. Though the longest days of darkness still lay ahead, they reasoned that with the winter solstice approaching, they’d soon pass the midpoint of polar night. With so little to console them on the frozen shore, they longed for sunlight, “the greatest comfort that God sendeth unto man here upon the earth, and that which rejoiceth euery living thing.”
They caught another fox the next day, but bad weather that evening drove them back into the house, making the cabin into a tomb. They had a brief respite, during which they dug themselves out again and fixed the traps. But the following day a storm came, and they had to begin shoveling all over again. Months more of the same drudgery lay ahead. But on December 23, their spirits rose again. Even the simplest sailors understood the sun was in the south. Barents knew that it was shining its warmth directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, thousands of miles away. But the men in the cabin also knew that it was at the farthest point on its arc away from them. Each passing day would bring it closer.
After hearing the ice crash and crack out at sea, they woke to fair weather on Christmas Eve. Opening the door, they noticed that the sky was clear and the moon shone so brightly, they could see all the way to open water. Visible trails between sections of ice beckoned, but they might as well have been hallucinations. As evening came on, a storm spiraled in, burying them alive once more.
On Christmas Day, there was little to do but sit inside and listen to the wind and snow. Drifts had piled ramps of packed powder up the sides of the house. Despite the noise of the tempest, the sailors heard the scrabble of footsteps overhead. Any initial panicky fear of bears gave way to reality. A bear would’ve been a heavy presence on their fragile jury-rigged plank-and-sail roof. Their visitors were surely only foxes. Still, some of the more superstitious men announced it as a bad omen.
The moon stood in the twenty-sixth day of its cycle in the sign of Scorpio. Like the footsteps on the roof of the Safe House, star signs could be interpreted as superstition or science—and sometimes both at once. During Barents’s first decades at sea, Belgian astrologer Cornelius Gemma would try to use the stars and divination to understand humanity’s place in a godly cosmos. Yet he would also be among the earliest to observe a supernova in 1572 and to identify the location of a comet that passed over the Earth in 1577. (He was also the first to draw the humble tapeworm for posterity.12)
Like many contemporaries of their era when confronted with the uncanny, the Dutchmen trapped on Nova Zembla for the winter tended to focus on the practical even when they remained respectful of a supernatural influence on events. While some of the sailors in the cabin feared the footsteps on the roof, others took issue, wondering why they should mean anything bad at all. They resolved that it was a bad sign only in that the weather was too rough for the crew to be able to trap and cook the trespassing foxes, because it would’ve been much nicer to have the creatures in their stomachs than on the roof.
The storm continued as they tried every strategy they could think of—building a wood fire, piling on layers of clothing, and heating stones and cannonballs for their beds. On December 27, they sat before the fire as close as they could, scorching their shins. Yet their backs remained covered in frost, reminding them of Dutch peasants who would arrive at the town gates on winter mornings riding sleds after traveling all night. For three days, between the storms and the cold, none of the cabin dwellers dared to go outside.
On the fourth day, one intrepid sailor dug a small tunnel in the snow in front of a doorway and went out to take stock of their situation. He came back in fear of losing his ears from cold, telling them that the snow had surrounded the house and had piled up as high as the roof. They were completely buried.
On December 29, seeing that the storms had stopped again, the next man on shoveling duty dug a tunnel out and cut a set of stairs into the packed snow so they could climb up to get to air. They hadn’t taken any foxes in days but set about clearing the traps, and discovered one dead animal for their trouble, frozen stiff and not at all decomposed: a gift.
The following day came and wiped out all their work, with snow piling even higher overhead. The next morning brought more. They felt like prisoners, and when they sat before the stove to warm their feet, their stockings began to burn before they felt the heat—only the smell of scorched fabric alerted them to the danger. Barents’s men spent the last days of 1596 crouched by the fire in doubt and misery, patching holes in their stockings and imagining months ahead in which they’d be buried in their cabin and resurrected over and over in eternal darkness, a little closer to their final deaths each time.
CHAPTER SEVEN The King of Nova Zembla
After that with great cold, danger, and hardship, we had brought the yeare vnto an end,” wrote Gerrit de Veer in his journal. “We entered into ye yeare of our Lord God 1597, ye beginning whereof was in ye same maner as ye end of anno 1596 had been.”
The landscape held no relief in store, with snow, tempests, and always the cold haunting them. They spent New Year’s Day trapped in the cabin. Offered their ration of wine, a small serving every other day, some of the men abstained for the time being, imagining how much hardship lay ahead and thinking it might be better to bank their luxuries against some future need.
No light appeared except moonlight and what they created with fire. The ice on the inside of the walls muffled outside sounds, but the smell of humans trapped in tight quarters remained sharp enough. The scurvy spreading through the crew would lend its hallmark stench to unwashed clothes and bodies, making the cabin even more oppressive. Worst of all would be the urine and feces piling up at one end of the shelter.
January 2 unfolded much as New Year’s had: trapped inside again, they were reduced to using the last of the firewood they’d gathered from around the house. There was no question of getting more in that moment; it wasn’t possible to be outside for any length of time and survive. Instead they began to pry off non-essential parts of the doorframe. Next they chopped up a wooden block on which they usually prepared their fish when it came out of the barrels.
Not many superfluous things remained to burn in the cabin, however. And the following day was no better than those that had gone before. No matter how careful they were with their wood, the supply dwindled again to nothing.
A sailor’s destiny was tied to the weather and the wind. Along with a ship’s location, these were often the first details that went into the log after each date, even when sailors were ashore. But by January 4, conditions grew so bitter that they didn’t dare to open the doors for even the seconds it would take to determine the direction of the wind for the log. Instead, they hoisted a bit of scrap tied to one of their half-pikes, pushing it up through the chimney and watching to see which way it blew. Even that was tricky—they had to notice which direction it rose as soon as the pike went aloft. Within seconds, the separate parts of the impromptu windsock froze into one solid staff.
It was fitting that they continued to record the wind direction day after day, because they were still very much at sea. Trapped in their cabin like a ship battened down in a storm, their barrel chimney in place of a crow’s nest, not only had night crowded out day for them, but space and time had changed places, too. They no longer moved through the water, cresting wave after wave and trying to stay afloat; their shelter had become stationary. Yet a whole sea of weather was borne aloft in the sky and set in motion around them. Just as they’d gone in search of safe harbors along the way, the men now waited for days of calm weather in which to disembark from their cabin. As in unknown waters, they had little idea what might come next, or how they would survive long enough to find themselves warm and dry, or when they might be able to leave their temporary quarters to walk on land and hunt for provisions.
At sea, William Barents had been the expedition leader, setting the course and keeping them to it, watching the sky and sea and interpreting them. The men trusted in his knowledge a
nd accepted his vision for a route to China.
They’d come as far as they could. Their dream of China and Cathay was gone. The knees of the ship were damaged; the timbers were leaking, and most of winter still lay ahead. Rather than crossing innumerable miles and unknown seas to find their way to the Far East, they were now forced to move entirely through the medium of time. If they lived to reach daylight’s return, they would’ve attained the only goal left for them to pursue. They would make a run for home.
If they survived long enough to leave, Barents’s role was to offer that earlier vision inverted. Just as they’d once believed he might lead the way to China, they now understood his role would be to deliver them back to the Netherlands. Van Heemskerck still had charge of the men—the sailors reported to him. But Barents’s role in the daily affairs of the house had become largely ceremonial. He would read and interpret the sky until such time as the currents and weather thawed the sea and set it in motion again.
On January 5, calmer weather arrived. They got to work while they could. They went out for wood and scooped out their waste from the house. They cleaned and straightened up the cabin as best they could. Once again, the house lay covered in snow up to the roof. Anticipating that they’d soon become captives again, they removed one of the three doors to the porch and dug a vault in the snow outside the porch to serve as a latrine.
Near the end of their workday, they remembered that it was Twelfth Night, the eve of the feast of the Epiphany, which celebrates the long journey and arrival of the three kings, or Wise Men, who followed a star to the Christ child twelve days after his birth. Epiphany itself was a holy day in the Catholic Church, but it hadn’t been included in the shortened lists of religious holidays in the Netherlands. Yet the Twelfth Night feast was both religious and secular—and remained the most important Dutch family celebration of the year.
At home in Amsterdam, people would be out in processions singing and carrying lit paper and candle stars, stopping at houses and asking for gifts. Others would gather in taverns or homes to draw paper lots assigning them a role. Depending on the lot they drew, partygoers would fill any one of a number of identities for the night: pourer of drinks, servant, gatekeeper, jester, cook, confessor, queen, or king. Servants and peasants and burghers might sit down together. Children would jump over lit candlesticks, sometimes a triple candelabra, one flame for each of the kings. The poor would be fed, and charitable donations made.
Anyone who drew the right lot or ate a piece of cake that had the lone ceremonial bean baked into it might be king. He or she might be a servant or a master in regular life, an adult or a child, but as king, the lucky partygoer would spark the feast into motion by taking the first sip while the room cheered, “The King drinks!” Wearing a paper crown, often bearing medallions, the king would be in charge of the evening. If the celebration happened at a tavern, he might have to foot the bill for everyone.1 All customary social interactions would be upended for one night, as the world turned upside down.
When the Nova Zemblan castaways realized it was Twelfth Night, they asked their captain for permission to celebrate with the kind of feast they would’ve had back home. Van Heemskerck agreed, and the sailors opened two pounds of ground meal that had been intended as glue to make paper cartridges for their firearms. The ground meal instead became pancakes cooked in oil. As a bigger treat, each man got one of the captain’s wheat-flour biscuits. With several men having saved their ration of every-other-day wine for days, enough remained for everyone.
That night, they made a banquet to celebrate the holiday and drank to the three kings, who were also explorers led by stars into unknown mysteries. And in the European tradition, they distributed tickets and drew lots to see who would be king. The ship’s gunner won the honor, becoming more privileged than his shipmates and more honored in the cabin for the evening than William Barents or Jacob van Heemskerck. For a single night he became king of the feast, and king of Nova Zembla as well, monarch of a harrowing, inhospitable land in which they feared they would die.
They weren’t the only expedition to throw a party in the face of the unknown. Sent out into Northern Canadian waters in search of the lost Franklin expedition, the whaling barque George Henry got trapped in ice in the winter of 1860 but celebrated Christmas optimistically, with a feast and a gift exchange in which Captain Charles Francis Hall gave his Inuit guide Taqulittuq a Bible provided by the Young Men’s Christian Union of Cincinnati. Stranded in their small cabin on Franz Josef Land at New Year’s in 1896, Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen would turn their clothes inside out to welcome new life and a new year, finally agreeing to stop using formal titles of “Mister” and “Professor” with each other more than two years into their travels together. For centuries, Europeans tried to re-create the pageants of their habitable world in a North that regularly thwarted their dreams of easy passage.
But the feasts, improvised celebrations, and gifts couldn’t always overcome the longing for home that they evoked. Sailing with Nansen aboard the Fram before their inside-out New Year’s Day, Johansen wrote of the crew’s celebration over the course of their three-year voyage. For their first Christmas in 1893, Nansen showed up at dinner with small gifts from home for everyone: knives, cigarettes, pipes, and a dartboard. Their beer had lasted until Christmas, and they had cakes, almonds, and raisins to go with their meal. But by the following year, their high spirits and their beer had both vanished. Despite the invention of a baking-powder-and-cloudberry-jam “polar champagne,” Johansen noted they were all too aware of the time and distance away from home to enjoy any celebration.2
It seemed however, as if the true festive spirit was wanting, for this Christmas was not a very lively one… we were well and warmly housed there in the ice desert, but we were prisoners. We lay, far away from the world, fast in a frozen sea, where all life was extinct.
By the time the heroic age of explorers arrived—in the age of transatlantic telegraph and airplanes—the Nansens and Amundsens of the era knew that their exploits would be recorded, that whether they succeeded or failed in their polar journeys, whether they lived or died, they’d become legends. But Barents and his men lived without that promise. No one knew where they were. They had no idea what would happen to them. As they sat in the cabin on Twelfth Night with their frozen clothes, their three cups of wine, and their new king, they remained as close to mortality as any humans on the planet.
Barents and his men gathered atop the earth and stone floor, not far from the residue of their filth, drinking the dregs of their wine. They couldn’t yet know who among them might or might not survive the winter—or even the night. But they sat toasting the three kings, who traveled far from home and witnessed wonders never seen before by man.
CHAPTER EIGHT The Midnight Sun and the False Dawn
The morning after their celebration, Barents and his men returned to the monotony of survival. Making use of a break in the harsh weather, they cleared their traps and dug a second vault—this one for firewood. But then the storms resumed, which frightened them, because they weren’t sure how much longer they could endure the worst of the weather they’d already experienced. Nevertheless, the sailors took heart the next day, when they began to see a glimmer at the horizon. The sun remained out of view, but its rays began to send up a whisper of dawn at the edge of the world each morning.
Yet grimmer portents persisted. One shipmate had lain in his pallet by the fireplace for weeks. Each of the sailors was getting sicker, their bodies wasting in starts and surges. Scurvy afflicted all of them. Its outcome, based in chemistry, was inevitable: in time, the lack of vitamin C would kill them. And those who had other illnesses or infirmities due to age might succumb more quickly; Barents, for example, was decades older than many of his shipmates. His health would be a fraught topic for everyone. Van Heemskerck and de Veer had sailed with Barents on his second Arctic voyage—the trip to Vaigach—but not the first. Which meant that not only was Barents their navigator, he was the o
nly man among them who’d sailed the western coast of Nova Zembla all the way from its northern end to its southern tip—the route they’d surely have to take to go home again.
On January 10, a company of sailors hiked to the ship in clear weather. They went out heavily armed. They hadn’t encountered any bears during polar night, but neither had they spent much time outside. Climbing up the side of the ship, they found round, fat footprints from several bears, adult and young, that had been haunting the ship in their absence. Opening the hatches, the sailors went belowdeck and lit a fire so that they could take a candle down into the hold. With the threat of bears and darkness overhead, they stopped to measure the new ice that had formed and realized it had risen a foot since their visit three weeks before.
The temperature the following day was less bitter, so they ventured a mile to a rise where they found more stones suitable for heating their beds. The next night showed itself clear and starry, and the men went outside to spot the constellation of Taurus in the sky and record the height of the star called Aldebaran. From there, they again reckoned their latitude. They had less than three months until spring.
The air felt even warmer on January 13, and the crew ventured outside long enough to try to play with the round ball from the top of the flagpole that they’d brought over from the ship. The next day they caught two foxes. A contingent returned to the vessel again on the fifteenth, finding that a sailor’s jacket they had used to plug a hole on a prior visit had been dragged out by a bear. After months at sea, the coat likely smelled heavily of its owner, yet the creature that discovered it found no meat despite the whiff of prey. The coat had been torn to pieces.
A belief that exercise could stem or cure scurvy was common, so the men went outside the next nice day to run and play ball again. Though it was still winter, even the light from below the horizon seemed to warm them. Chunks of ice slid from the roof and sides of the cabin, and ice on the inside of the wall anchoring their beds likewise began to thaw. Yet all the warmth dissipated in darkness, and ice formed again.
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