Fire remained their means of day-to-day survival, but they seemed to go through wood faster than they could scavenge it. Driven once more to desperation by the cold, they agreed that they should try to burn their mineral coal again, as long as they didn’t stop up the doors and chimney, trapping the fumes that nearly killed them before.
But they were also crafting another plan—one that made them hesitant to burn the coal. If they did end up having to try to sail for home over arctic seas in their small boats, they couldn’t cross the open sea but would have to hug the coastline all the way heading north over Nova Zembla and descending hundreds of miles to its southern tip before making a jump toward the mainland.
Any plan to take the small boats would mean approximately eight men in each craft. Space for anything else would be tight. Their coal burned hotter and longer than wood and took up less room. Departure surely seemed like a distant dream in that moment, yet they had to imagine it, and hope. Banking on finding other ways to survive the winter, they decided to save their coal.
They’d have to find a way to endure other hardships as well. They had counted their barrels of bread and been opening them at set intervals. But some, they discovered, weren’t full, meaning rations would have to be cut. An extra barrel of bread had been left on the ship and counted in the tally for the remaining days of provisions. But sailors hiking to the ship had been surreptitiously taking biscuits out of it over time, making the count even shorter.
Under a cloudy sky on January 20, they stayed in the house and broke up empty barrels to burn for heat. The foxes, which had been plentiful during their first weeks in the cabin, had become scarce. Perhaps it was just that the smart ones had learned to elude their traps, and the less intelligent ones had been eaten. But the sailors also recalled that the foxes had appeared in earnest once the bears began to vanish. The departure of their food source made them fearful not only about their dwindling supply of fresh meat, but also the prospect of returning bears.
Throwing a ball on January 22, some men began to believe that the sun was so close to the horizon that daylight would soon arrive. But William Barents said that it was still too early to expect the heavens to realign, that weeks remained before they’d see the sun. Gerrit de Veer accompanied three other men to the ship, where they thanked God for their survival thus far, talked of going home one day, and pried the lid off the bonus barrel to steal more of the ship’s biscuits.
De Veer and van Heemskerck headed out with a third man on January 24 to see the view of the sea facing south toward Nova Zembla. While they were making observations, they glimpsed the edge of the sun’s disc slipping just above the horizon. They could hardly believe their good fortune. In fact, it seemed impossible. Barents had said that weeks remained before the sun’s return. They rushed back to the cabin with the story of what they’d seen. Barents, too, was puzzled. Though the ship’s clock had stopped, they’d kept time with their twelve-hour glass and checked it against celestial observations. How could they have managed to lose two full weeks?
It seemed so impossible that the sun would appear in their far northern latitude on that early a date that Barents declared the men mistaken about what three of them had seen with their own eyes. De Veer and van Heemskerck didn’t back down, relying on their own account, though they realized that it was somehow “contrary to the nature and roundnesse both of heaven and earth.” The crew began to wager on whether they’d see the sun in its glory the next morning.
But clouds or haze blocked the horizon the next two days, making it impossible to tell whether the light on the horizon was only a predawn glow, or if the sun had really returned. Meanwhile, they faced more immediate concerns. They spotted a bear coming from the southwest toward the cabin—the first bear they’d seen in months. Making a racket by shouting, they drove the animal away without a fight.
On the second of the two hazy days, the man who’d lain ill in bed by the fire for months grew even frailer. As night came on, they tried to comfort him, but whether scurvy opened the door to another affliction or was by itself enough to end his life, they had no cure. Just after midnight, in the early hours of January 27, 1597, he became the first shipmate they’d lost since the carpenter died. Fifteen sailors remained.
While the sky stayed clear, they sawed at the ground to chip out a grave for their companion. It was nearly impossible to dig, and in spite of the calm weather, the air froze their lungs and skin. They worked in shifts, to allow those outside to come in and warm themselves by the fire while others went out to take a turn. When they’d excavated seven feet of earth from the unforgiving land, they improvised a funeral service. Reading prayers and singing psalms over their mate’s body, they lowered him into the hole they’d made. Returning to an emptier cabin, they ate breakfast. They honored their time with the dead man and commemorated his life, but his name is lost to history.
Their carpenter had died late in September just as the sun began to vanish below the horizon; the next sailor had left them just as they waited for it to reappear. In between, they had learned ways to survive, but they also realized that they would remain in danger as long as they stayed on Nova Zembla. At their funeral meal, they contemplated how to survive if storms blocked their doors and covered the house over and over, as had happened thus far. They struck on the idea of climbing up and out the chimney instead of using the porch doors to exit the cabin. On the spot, van Heemskerck left his dinner to try the new route, pulling himself through the roof of the cabin and out the open barrel.
The men inside the cabin suddenly heard him cry out. As they ran outside, they looked up and saw the sun. The sailors stood confounded by the view. Before them lay not just the thin line of a narrow blade of the sun creeping into view, but a whole celestial disc sitting above the horizon. The sight made no sense, because it broke the dependable laws of the heavens, which had been used to sail the globe for more than a century. Yet there was no mistaking the presence of what they’d all waited months to behold.
Barents had no answer for it. But they agreed that “seeing God is wonderfull in all his workes, we will referre that to his almightie power.” The men would continue to count off the times they had turned the hourglass and recorded the passing days, and think such a thing was impossible. But they’d all seen it. They couldn’t reckon it as either sense or nonsense, and in the end, simply described what they saw and stood by it.
In February 1894, almost exactly three hundred years after de Veer’s sighting, Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen would witness the same phenomenon. He was also shocked, but likewise confident in what he’d seen, describing it in Farthest North, his memoir of the voyage.
We had not expected to see [the sun] for some days yet, so that my feeling was rather one of pain, of disappointment, that we must have drifted farther south than we thought. So it was with pleasure that I soon discovered that it could not be the sun itself. The mirage was at first like a flattened-out glowing red streak of fire on the horizon; later there were two streaks, the one above the other, with a dark space between; and from the main-top I could see four, or even five, such horizontal lines directly over one another, and all of equal length; as if one could only imagine a square dull-red sun with horizontal dark streaks across it. An astronomical observation we took in the afternoon showed that the sun must in reality have been 2° 22’ below the horizon at noon.
In the polar regions, where the sun disappears entirely for part of the year, it’s possible for an inversion layer, where warmer air is trapped above cooler air, to generate a mirage that’s both real and unreal. If the inversion layer stretches uninterrupted for hundreds of miles, and the rate of temperature changes inside the inversion hit just the right window, sunlight can bend along a tunnel in the atmosphere, refracting sunlight. The real sun sitting below the horizon can be refracted over distance to appear in a shimmering, distorted shape above it.
Nearly four centuries would pass before the mystery of the prematurely appearing sun would be unlocked
.1 Using the Russian name for Nova Zembla, the mirage would come to be called the Novaya Zemlya effect, commemorating the location of the early sun that Barents and company saw in January 1597.
In documenting the atmospheric event, Barents and his men had passed even further into the realm of pure science. Their mission as merchants had been suspended, but nearly every observation de Veer made, down to the smallest references to plants and animals and weather, provided a wealth of information in deciphering the Arctic.
Beyond their mundane observations in 1597, as well as the wonders in the heavens that they couldn’t explain, the Dutchmen were simply grateful to see the sun again in any form. On January 28, they went outside again to throw the flagpole ball and run, to to try to work off the lethargy imposed on them by their confinement and their scurvy.
Hemmed in by snow the next two days, they dug a short distance from one door. But mostly they stayed inside until fair weather on the last day of January brought them back out to clear the house and set their traps again. Spying a bear heading in their direction, they slipped discreetly inside and let it get close before they shot it nearly point blank. The blast spooked the bear but didn’t kill it, sending it skittering away over the snow.
The first days of February were spent battened down in the cabin during storms, the sailors berating themselves for thinking that the early sight of the sun would mean warmer temperatures. It wasn’t only a philosophical reflection: counting on milder weather meant that they had cut short their usual foraging for wood. Now they once again found themselves out in the stinging cold, rooting in the snow near the cabin in search of stray fuel.
When ugly weather socked them in again the next day, the sailors finally followed van Heemskerck’s earlier example, surrendering the porch doors to the new-packed snow that kept them from opening. Instead, they climbed out the barrel on the roof. Those who were too sick to hoist themselves out through the ceiling were forced to relieve themselves indoors for four days in a row. The sun’s early visit came to feel like trickery. Trapped inside the cabin with the ceiling their only sky, they had even less light than before.
On February 9—when they’d expected direct daylight to make a return—they felt the warmth of the sun, and their claustrophobia began to ease. During a string of days with good weather, they heard foxes on the roof once more, but also saw another bear. In their weakened state, they had no intention of fighting the animal, but only hoped to find a way to shoot any bears at close enough range to guarantee a quick kill.
Things had calmed enough by February 12 that they went out to clear the fox traps, which drew the attention of yet another bear, this one more curious than other recent visitors. As it came toward them, they slipped once more into the house to see if they could tempt it toward the entrance. When it reached the doorway, they shot it through the heart, the bullet driving through the breast of the animal and coming out its backside as flat as a coin. The bear recoiled from the blow and turned to run from the cabin. But before it got far, it fell to the ground. As the sailors approached its body stretched out on the snow, the creature lifted its head “as if he wanted to see who had done this to him.” Unwilling to battle the bear even in its weakened state, they shot it two more times until they were sure it was dead.
The crew slit open its belly and gutted it, then dragged the body back to the cabin, where they skinned it and pulled a hundred pounds or more of fat from its belly. They melted the fat down for oil, which gave them enough of a supply to burn a lamp all night—something they hadn’t been able to do for lack of oil. The slaughter of the bear provided enough for every man to light a lantern in his bed for sewing or writing or just for pleasure. The gift might have been even more appreciated in polar night, but the men took advantage of it all the same.
On February 14, they went to visit the ship and found little had changed, but the water in the cargo hold continued to creep higher and higher as the sea took greater possession of the ship. The next day found them stuck in the cabin once more, but they heard the tapping of foxes’ footsteps outside, gathering to scavenge the corpse of the dead bear. Only then did it occur to them that the carcass might draw another predator, one that might catch them unawares. They vowed that as soon as the weather cleared, they’d bury the bear deep in the snow. But the following day was just as bleak, dumping snow once again. Realizing it was Shrove Tuesday—Fat Tuesday, a day of celebration and indulgence before the sacrifices of Lent—the men had a glass of wine each in their “great griefe and trouble” and pretended spring would come again.
The sky was clear enough to go out on February 17. They dragged the carcass of the polar bear out from where the foxes had been eating it and heaved it into the vault for their wood, which they’d since burned up. Once it lay in its snowy grave, they filled the opening and stopped it up, in the hopes of keeping the smell from traveling—a strategy unlikely to succeed, given polar bears’ ability to smell prey thousands of feet away. They cleared their traps once more and again visited the ship, this time observing so many comings and goings in the clawed tracks that they realized polar bears had made it a way station.
The next night, they lay in the lamplight and again heard noises on the roof. This time, the crack and crunch of ice they were hearing sounded less like foxes and more like a bear. They listened with dread. But when they went up on the roof to scout the area the next morning, all they saw around the chimney were the footprints of foxes. They’d grown more fearful over the long winter and managed to spook themselves.
For some time, they hadn’t been able to take the height of the sun, needing a clearer view in the sky, a clean line at the horizon, and enough sunlight to shine through the hole of their mariner’s astrolabe. They improvised by making a quadrant, using two sights set in a line, and a lead weight suspended by a string. Combining the height of the sun with its declination from the equator, they again recorded their latitude.
February 20 arrived with brutal force, reminding them that winter wasn’t gone yet. Wind and snow worked their fury around the cabin the following day, much to their despair. They had no wood left to burn. The sailors hunted the floor for loose scraps and broke off more wood from the interior of the cabin.
When the sun rose in clear skies on the twenty-second, eleven men set out with guns, blades, and a sled to hunt for more driftwood. But the inlet where they normally went lay so deep under the snow that there was no way to find wood, and they had to walk, weak and cold, farther up the coastline to find anything at all. By the time they managed to scavenge a few logs, they felt hollowed out by the trip but had little to show for it. They wondered to one another whether they’d have enough strength to even make the trip again. As they drew close to the cabin, they looked out at the sea and saw open water for the first time since Christmas Day. The thought of leaving would have to sustain them for now. They went back inside and began again the monotonous, unbearable task of survival.
The next day they caught two foxes, unwittingly delaying the effects of scurvy once again. Without vitamin C, scurvy can kill a human being in as little as five months.2 More than nine months had now passed since the cabin’s residents had set out from Amsterdam.
On February 24, they emerged under a dark sky and reset the traps in hopes of repeating the previous night’s dinner, but caught nothing. After another day bottled up inside during a storm, they came out again to gloom and went through the motions of exercising. Again, their wood had vanished. They hardly had the heart to hunt for fuel, but on March 1 they prepared themselves and set out with the sled once more. Some of the sailors were too sick to join the group. One who stayed behind had lost his big toe to frostbite.
They managed to haul their sleds up the shoreline that day, but decided that going forward, they’d ration their wood, to limit the number of agonizing trips they had to make. Heating stones for the sick, they stayed in their beds and tried to get through the day with just one good fire during the night. Sometimes this was hard, but on other days
, conditions became tolerable. Better weather on March 3 even led some of the sickest men to feel better and sit up in their beds to pass the time. But they soon found that their exertions took a toll and only made them feel worse.
Meanwhile, polar bears had returned in full force. A bear wandered up to the cabin the next day and got shot for its trouble, but the animal managed to escape alive. The same day, five men went out to visit the ship and found the now-expected signs of bears taking up residence in the vessel, but also something new. The bears had been busy, ripping off the hatch over the galley from under the snow, dragging it off the ship and over the ice.
They had to dig their way out again on March 5, but their reward was the sight of more open water flowing in the distance. As if to mock any hope of what it meant, a storm buried them yet again the following day. But climbing out the chimney, they once more spotted the open water, which seemed to be almost everywhere. The ship sat in the same pocket of ice where it had lain for months, still frozen in. With the storms that kept coming in and the winds that drove them, Barents and his men began to fear that they’d wake up one morning to discover that their ship had drifted away.
The haze and fog lifted a few days later and let them see even farther out to sea. Though there seemed to be a clear path through the water the way they’d come, ice and snow still packed the route to the east and southeast—in the direction of China. They dug out the doorways and cleaned their waste from the porch again as they discussed the possibilities. If only the ship could slip loose, the sea looked as if it might carry them away that day. The small boats they had on shore seemed so much frailer than their big yacht. But even if they were willing to consider the idea, it was still too cold to leave in the open boats.
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