On June 15, the ice moved away, and they set out once more. They covered fifty-two miles, following the jagged coast north to Cape Desire. The next day, they sailed another thirty-two miles, making it to the tiny Orange Islands off the northeastern coast of Nova Zembla. Sailors hauled barrels and a kettle ashore, to melt snow and ice for drinking water to carry with them out to sea. They built a fire and looked for more birds or eggs to cook for the sickest men, but they came up empty-handed.
Van Heemskerck and de Veer had better luck, going with a third sailor across the ice to the smaller of the two islands. Jagged paths led up to the top of steep cliffs, where they could edge their way within arm’s reach of any number of birds nesting in stone crevices. With the birds unaccustomed to any human presence, the sailors managed to grab three. But while they were carrying their prey back across the short distance between the two islands, van Heemskerck fell through the ice. A strong current underneath the frozen surface dragged him away, but he managed to pull himself out of the frigid water and claw his way back, where he sat by the fire until he was dry. Meanwhile, the birds were dressed and fed to the men most afflicted by scurvy. Like the foxes, the birds’ flesh contained vitamin C. If it wasn’t enough to rid them of scurvy, at least it might let them live a little longer.
After melting sixteen gallons of fresh water and loading it into the boats, the crew set out again in the “drowsie miseling weather.” The boats offered no cover to the men, and everyone was damp or wet. They headed toward Ice Point, which stood out in relief on the map they’d made. Once both vessels had arrived, they drew up against each other to allow clear communication. Van Heemskerck called out to Barents in the other boat to see how he was feeling. Barents called back, “Quite well, mate. I still hope to be able to walk before we get to Wardhuys.”
They all knew that passing Ice Point meant they were rounding northern Nova Zembla and could soon head south, where temperatures would begin to rise and ice might plague them less. Barents had de Veer in the boat with him. The navigator turned from talking to van Heemskerck and asked, “Gerrit, if we are near the Ice Point, just lift me up again. I must see that Point once more.”
They stopped soon afterward, fastening the boats to drift ice so they could eat. As they had their meal, the weather only grew more miserable, and soon they were pinned in again by floating ice. They spent the night under the midnight sun, but morning only brought more danger piling in around them. It had been frightening enough to be at sea amid colliding icebergs in the ship a year ago at the same time. Sitting in the fragile, makeshift boats as the current drew them pell-mell among frozen blocks was terrifying. They felt the ship would be smashed to pieces any moment, and realized that if they couldn’t find a way to secure the boats away from the treacherous moving landscape, they’d die. As they were swept away, they looked at one another in despair.
Someone suggested that if they could only secure a rope or tackle on the fast ice—ice attached to the coast or sitting on land below the water’s surface—they might be able to pull the boats to safety. But far from shore and caught in the current, how could they manage it? One of them would have to leave the boat and carry a rope toward land across the moving lanes of ice—all shapes and sizes, many of them slippery. Anyone who dared to go out would have to climb from one floating platform to the next without knowing how it might shift or whether it could support the weight of a man.
Gerrit de Veer believed that whoever tried to reach the fast ice could easily end up carried away on the frigid current. But if someone didn’t try, they’d surely all perish. Knowing he was the lightest of the sailors, de Veer seized a rope and climbed out of the boat. Stepping onto a piece of moving ice, he worked his way toward the shore, creeping from block to block, trailing the cable behind him. Coming to a frozen ledge that was anchored to land, he looped the rope over a hill and tied it off. If de Veer had tried to pull the craft filled with sailors to shore on his own, he would’ve made little progress, but a secure line made all the difference. Sailors on the other end began to haul, slowly dragging themselves toward safety.
Once both boats had been brought alongside the ice, those sailors still strong enough to carry their mates lifted Barents and the other invalids out onto the frozen surface, laying clothing under them to keep them comfortable and as warm as possible. After the sick men came the provisions, hoisted in haste before the boats could be smashed to pieces. Once the boats sat empty, the crew dragged them up from the water, too. Staying there all that day, the men made repairs to the craft, which had been stoved and battered by the ice. Enough extra wood could be scavenged to build a fire, which let them melt pitch to repair seams on the boats. They laid tarpaulin for waterproofing.
Once the boats were seaworthy again, some of the sailors went ashore to hunt eggs for their sick mates. They fell and got wet on the hunt, nearly losing their lives as they slipped between ice and land. No eggs could be found, but they returned with four birds. The next day, with ice surrounding their ledge, they saw no way to escape. After abandoning the shelter of their cabin, which had so often felt insufficient to protect them from the cold, they now had to huddle in their boats atop the ice. They came to think that they might die there, but made light of the possibility. Consoling one another, they recalled the other scrapes they’d escaped through what felt like divine intervention.
On the morning of June 20, the ailing Claes Andries declined further. The sailors from his boat realized he was dying. His nephew John was also on the voyage, and also ailing, but wasn’t as close to slipping away. The chief boatswain came over to William Barents and the sailors in the other boat to tell them that Andries didn’t have long to live.
After the boatswain made his announcement, Barents spoke up, saying, “Methinks for me, too, it will not last long.”
The comment took de Veer and the other sailors by surprise, because they hadn’t thought Barents lay near death. De Veer spoke with his mate at length. He showed Barents the chart he’d made of their voyage so far. Barents discussed the map with him, until finally he put it aside. “Gerrit,” he said, “give me something to drink.”
Barents drank what he was offered, but just as he finished, his body quivered where it lay. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he lost consciousness. His pulse soon vanished. There wasn’t even time to call for van Heemskerck to come from the other boat and exchange last words with his navigator. William Barents was dead.
* * *
Claes Andries managed to outlive Barents, but died soon afterward. Yet it was Barents’s name that would become immortal.
Even during his life, Barents had lived a larger life than most humans. He’d been the first to publish an atlas of the Mediterranean, a survivor of nearly ten months in some of the most extreme conditions on the planet, a three-time explorer into the unknown, mapping places no European—and in some cases, perhaps no human—had ever seen. In Barents’s day, the Russians called the sea between Scandinavia and Nova Zembla the sea of Murmans, referring to the Norwegians they encountered there. But in 1853, Barents’s name would come to replace the earlier one, and the waters he sailed three times on his way east would come to be known worldwide as the Barents Sea. Four hundred years later its treacherous conditions would lead some to call it the devil’s dance floor.1
In time, the machinery of commemoration would take fierce hold of Barents’s name, and the Dutch would embrace him as a national hero. He’d be transformed into an icon whose actual achievements and heroics were warped into a tribute to the greatness of empire. It wasn’t enough to have been a skilled seaman, a scientific observer, and a committed explorer who held steady in the face of terrifying conditions. The sparse biographical details left to history would be taken up, filled in, and transformed. The possibility that Barents had come from the island of Terschelling would, for many, morph from likelihood into a clear statement of his origins. A backstory of his life—that he was the son of a farmer, a veteran at the age of twenty of a naval battle on th
e Zuiderzee—would be invented when verifiable information couldn’t be found.2 Two towns would claim to be his birthplace.
Before Barents, other Europeans—Columbus, Magellan, and Vasco da Gama—had gained renown for their explorations, either because they helped to find new continents unknown to Europeans, or a sea route around them. Their exploits had brought tangible assets: gold, silver, or trade and a stake in habitable new lands.
Barents, too, mapped new lands, but his legend took on a different form. Though he’d sailed farther north than any European on record, he failed to find an open sea route. Others would continue the quest for a northeastern or northwestern passage, with Swedish-Finnish explorer Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld completing the former in 1879 and Norwegian Roald Amundsen the latter in 1906.
Yet Barents’s name would come to possess surprising staying power. After Barents, the polar regions weren’t simply a byway to the East, but a new frontier in and of themselves, a force to be reckoned with, an obstacle.
This shift happened in part because while Barents and his fellow castaways tried to sail home from Nova Zembla, other Dutch sailors were making their way back to the Netherlands as well. The remnants of the fleet that had set out to find a southern route during Barents’s second voyage two years before were headed home and would arrive that August. Four ships carrying two hundred forty-eight men had rounded Africa then continued on to the East Indies. The maps prepared by Petrus Plancius had carried the fleet as far as Java and Bali in the South Pacific—halfway around the world.
Petrus Plancius’s charts, based on Portuguese and other intelligence reports, had worked well enough to get the ships to their destination. But carnage and incompetence had dogged every other part of the voyage. Scurvy ran rampant in the first months of the expedition. Widespread contagious disease led to the deliberate burning of one of the ships to forestall a fleet-wide epidemic. The eventual commander of the fleet, Cornelis de Houtman, had botched negotiations with a sultan who’d hoped to trade with the Dutch, and was met with resistance and occasional open hostility. Misrepresenting the approach of an indigenous royal family on its way to greet him, de Houtman opened cannon fire on them. And perhaps unsurprisingly, given the events of the voyage, he inspired a revolt against his leadership. The fleet returned missing one ship and carrying only eighty-seven men and a tiny cargo of spices and black peppercorns. Nearly two thirds of the crew had died of illness or been killed in fighting.
Outside of the shared, and nearly universal, experience of scurvy on the high seas, Barents’s final voyage stood largely in opposition to that of the southern expedition. The Nova Zemblan crew had set out to deliberately sail into unknown waters, rather than to follow a trade route established by prior explorers. On their mission, they hadn’t murdered native populations or mutinied in the face of inhuman conditions. Though Barents and the captain of the other ship on the expedition had argued and gone their separate ways, their disagreement didn’t end in a revolt between factions. Yet Barents, van Heemskerck, and their crew had failed at the one thing that the other expedition had accomplished: securing the Dutch a navigable route to the Pacific.
The expedition to the East Indies, however miserable its execution, did establish viable trading partners that could be coaxed or bullied away from the Portuguese. For this reason, along with its small but lucrative haul of spices, it was hailed as a success. A second voyage would quickly be planned.
With the East Indies expedition capturing the future of global trade for the young Dutch nation, William Barents’s futile effort in the north would transform into something else altogether. Barents’s expeditions and death launched another identity for explorers: the beleaguered polar hero. Rather than successfully connecting one part of the habitable world to another, these heroic explorers would find their legends bound up with unfathomable suffering and endurance.
The alternate version of history—in which a trade route could be found that didn’t originate in the massacre of native populations or the African waypoints that would in time bring the Dutch into the slave trade—vanished into the ether. After the science and mapping that Barents and the crew had conducted on the voyage, all that was left was cold, suffering, and their attempts to survive.
Before Barents ever set out, Pomor sailors in Russia, as well as Englishmen Hugh Willoughby and Martin Frobisher, had each searched for a northern route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman had sailed all the way through the strait at Vaigach and had, like Barents, seen the Kara Sea. But by heading due north as far as he could sail at the beginning of his third expedition, Barents made—as nineteenth-century Dutch explorer L. R. Koolemans Beynen called it—“the first true polar voyage.” The fact that the other ship, helmed by Jan Cornelis Rijp, tried to follow that mission more devotedly by continuing northward after Barents split the fleet, or that Barents ended up overwintering on Nova Zembla hundreds of miles from the Pole, is simply emblematic of his larger story. Barents’s failures came from the immense adversity he faced. In time, that adversity itself would become the source of his fame.
With his time in the high Arctic and his overwintering, however inadvertent it had been, Barents would become the first face of the many polar explorers who followed in his wake. After Barents would come Henry Hudson, who in 1608 would fail to get even as far as Barents in his effort to sail over and beyond Nova Zembla. Nearly three centuries later, a series of expeditions would try to reach Barents’s cabin, only to fail.
A melodramatic and wildly inaccurate 1819 poem about the overwintering written by Hendrik Tollens—who also wrote the Dutch national anthem of the era—recast the story in telling ways. In the jingoistic poem, it’s Jacob van Heemskerck who decides to set out, looking for another challenge once the Dutch had already established a southern trade route to the Indies. The two ships on the voyage are driven apart by a storm, rather than the navigation dispute that actually split the expedition. Once on Nova Zembla for the winter, the men sleep in the snow in darkness while a bear sneaks up on them and drags away one of the sailors, taking him back to its den to eat. The crew wakes up but has no idea what’s happened. Only when they do a roll call of names do they realize one of them is missing. In the morning they see the bloody trail left by their doomed friend. After they build their hut, the men are besieged by several polar bears at once. The poem would lionize Barents and etch his reputation into the heart of every Dutch schoolchild and many foreigners as well, but it would do so at the cost of accuracy.
The century in which Barents would become larger than life—the nineteenth century—would also turn out to be the era in which the modern mythology of polar explorers crystallized. As technology delivered newspapers, telegraph wires, and later radio, each medium made it possible to track the progress of explorers heading farther and farther north, until they eventually flew over, landed on, and trudged to the North Pole itself.
But during the nineteenth century, expeditions would still go awry in horrible ways. Technology and money were no guarantee of success. After the horrors of cannibalism on the Franklin expedition, historian Beau Riffenburgh explains, the love affair with nature, and the romance of sailing into the unknown was replaced by the obligation to subjugate nature by “filling in blank spaces on the map.” It’s no wonder that Barents’s reputation grew during this era: his suffering and death could be warped to fit cleanly inside this new view of Arctic exploration as man’s struggle against nature and his attempt to dominate it.
Meanwhile, as the end of the century approached, a cult of suffering emerged. Circulation wars between newspapers promoting various explorers and expeditions dramatized stiff-upper-lip accounts in which audiences could agonize along with their heroes almost in real time. These newspapers would play a key role, but just as the book narrating Pet and Jackman’s expedition had crossed Europe in his day, books would remain the chief vehicle by which the celebrity of explorers would be established.
Books paired with worldwide
lecture tours for explorers would become the expectation, though not everyone who aspired to that status managed to achieve it. Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Scott, Robert Peary, and Roald Amundsen all became public heroes—their physical prowess and fearlessness transforming them into minor gods. But men like Umberto Nobile, who designed and piloted the airship Norge to sail over the North Pole, or Hjalmar Johansen, who went to sea on polar expeditions with Nansen and Amundsen, would find their contributions diminished or ignored. Even those who achieved fame and ran successful expeditions still often struggled to attract patrons.
Barents, of course, had failed to deliver on his Arctic mission in nearly every way. He’d lived through one near-mutiny and witnessed another full-fledged revolt before succumbing to death far from home—not fighting a bear, not poisoned by his crew, but on the ice still in view of the land whose hardships he’d defied for nearly a year, but in the end, couldn’t escape.
Still, there was something larger than life in Barents’s living long enough to see all of his epic plans fail. He’d staked the ship and his life on his pursuit of a northern route, and he’d lost everything. He was the patron saint of devoted error, living the consequences of his mistakes. He found no northern route and no path to China. He wasn’t even fully in charge of the expedition. Yet it was to him the men came when they desperately wanted to convince the captain to abandon the Safe House and head home. If van Heemskerck had become their knight, the one they sparred with over leaving the island, the one who’d stood with Gerrit de Veer against three bears at once to save his crew, the one who held the door of the porch against another angry beast, Barents had been their magician. He could look into the sun and fix their ship’s position on the globe. He could watch the stars and tell them the day of the year. He knew when the sun was in its fixed place and when time had slipped out of kilter.
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