The letter was written by someone who obviously knew them well. The author was amazed by their arrival at Kildin and Kola, because all of van Heemskerck’s and Barents’s men had been assumed dead. He was “exceeding glad” at their arrival, and would soon appear with food and anything else they might need, and would take care of them. The missive was signed “Jan Cornelis Rijp.”
They were sure it couldn’t be their Rijp—the Rijp whose ship had set out with them from Amsterdam in spring of the prior year. Rijp had gone his separate way more than a year ago at Spitsbergen, some five hundred miles away. Who had any idea where he was now? For all they knew, he might have sailed north and arrived in China, and still be there. He might have turned for home. Most likely, he was dead. Perhaps it was some other man also named Rijp.
But the letter was a wonder, and it seemed nothing bad had befallen the shipmate they’d sent off with the Sami escort. They paid the man his fee, and gave him hose, britches, and other clothing, so he could dress like a Dutchman any time he liked.
They sat debating the identity of the author of the letter, and van Heemskerck recalled that he had among his papers something that had been written by Rijp. Going to fetch it to compare the handwriting, he put the two papers side by side. The sailors then realized it was one and the same, that this Rijp was their Rijp, the one whom Barents had quarreled with, and to whom they’d said their goodbyes before all the misfortunes and salvations of the last year had taken place.
Yet some men refused to believe it was true, right until the moment that a Russian boat appeared the next day rowing to shore with Jan Cornelis himself aboard. They greeted each other as only those who have mutually risen from the dead can. Rijp had brought with him a barrel of Swedish beer, wine, and liquor, as well as bread, meat, salmon, sugar, and other food. They gave thanks to God in his mercy for preserving them all.
They learned that after William Barents and Rijp had split the fleet at Bear Island more than a year before, Rijp had tried again to sail due north toward the pole. After again being foiled by ice, he had safely returned to the Netherlands that summer. The following spring, he set out on a trading mission to Kola. He hadn’t been searching for Barents, van Heemskerck, and the other men, who were assumed to have perished. They’d found each other by sheer chance.
On August 31, a wind rose up which could carry them from Kildin Island to the town of Kola. Rijp’s ship was busy taking on cargo and stores for the return voyage and couldn’t come to them. They’d have to make their way into the long mouth of the bay down to Kola. They thanked the Russians for their food and drink and hospitality, giving them money as they said goodbye.
They set out at night and high tide, arriving the next morning on the west side of the river mouth that would lead them to Kola. They cast out their stones for anchors and waited there during low tide. When the water returned, they set out once more. They repeated the process until the morning of September 2 brought them in sight of trees and buildings, where they stopped for a short while in what felt like a return to human society. Continuing another twelve miles, they came to the ship captained by Rijp and stopped to visit and have a drink with some of the men who’d been in the fleet that sailed with them to Amsterdam the year before.
After a time, they rowed on to Kola itself by evening, where some kept an eye on their cargo and others went ashore. They came back with treasures like milk for the men who’d stayed in the boats. They were by no means in Amsterdam—the culture remained very foreign to them—but for the first time they felt safe.
They unloaded the boats the following day, and spent the next week eating and sleeping, making some semblance of recovery. On September 11, with the blessing and permission of the local representative of the grand duke of Moscow, they hauled their rowboat and scute into the merchants’ house, where they’d be left as a memorial to the voyage, having sailed sixteen hundred miles from lands the sight of which had never before been recorded.
On September 15, all the men but van Heemskerck climbed aboard a Russian ship, which carried them and their belongings, along with the surviving cargo, to Jan Cornelis Rijp’s vessel, which was anchored outside town. At noon, the ship weighed anchor and sailed until they’d passed the narrowest section of the river, where they waited for Rijp and van Heemskerck to come from town to join them.
Rijp’s ship floated out of the mouth of the Kola River around six in the morning on September 18. Two days later, they landed at Wardhuys, where William Barents had told van Heemskerck he might one day return to walk on shore. Those who’d sailed with Barents had three more weeks to recover from scurvy and build their strength for the voyage home, while Rijp did business and made arrangements to take on more cargo. They left on October 6, with a passage over Norway so familiar and unextraordinary that it hardly merited more than the captain’s record of the wind and weather. Across three weeks, they sailed back over the farthest northern points of Scandinavia down into the North Sea, finally reaching the Dutch coast on October 29 at the mouth of the Meuse River. They continued on to Delft, making their way north to the Hague and Harlem before finally reaching Amsterdam.
As they sailed back into the Zuiderzee, following a tightening spiral until they came to the fortifications of the harbor, it was as if they were undoing the burden of the misery and sorrows they’d collected on the way out. They’d finally come home. But the weight of the loss at sea of the carpenter in the first weeks on Nova Zembla, of a second mate in January, of Claes Andries and his nephew John—and especially of William Barents—couldn’t be undone. Not everything would be restored.
Near noon on November 1, the twelve surviving sailors from William Barents’s ship arrived in the port of Amsterdam. As they caught sight of the city, they stood on the deck of the ship in the same clothes they’d worn since leaving the summer before, the same leather shoes that had frozen to uselessness in the Arctic winter and then thawed again in spring. On their heads sat the white fox-fur hats they’d stitched together in the cabin on Nova Zembla. Aside from their hats, they reentered the world more empty-handed than they’d left it, their survival story the only thing they had to share other than the pelts of dead animals.
Once ashore, they headed to the house of Peter Hasselaer, the merchant who’d fitted out their ships the year before for the city of Amsterdam. Believing Barents and van Heemskerck and all their men to “have been dead and rotten,” those who greeted the returning sailors were amazed by their reappearance. The news spread quickly through town. The sheriff and two town council members came to get the sailors and escorted them to the Court of the Admiralty.
In front of the visiting lord chancellor of Denmark—and the leading men of Amsterdam who’d gathered for dinner—they told their tale. They and no one before them had sailed north to Spitsbergen, split with Jan Cornelis Rijp, and turned east toward Nova Zembla. Their ship seized by ice, they sat stranded all winter in great hardship and danger with no hope of rescue. They alone had to fight polar bears and poisoning and snow and wind for nearly ten months ashore, and even after surviving polar night, had to find their way back in open boats after suffering so much and almost losing their lives. The way home had been even more bitter than the voyage out and their overwintering ordeal, yet they’d not only survived but returned to tell the story.
In the centuries that followed, master of the heroic couplet Alexander Pope would mention Zembla in his eighteenth-century poem “An Essay on Man.” Pope notes that vice, like the idea of the distant north, is something all humans are acquainted with while still believing that it’s located at some distance from themselves. Everything is relative, depending on how far gone you are—or how far you go. From Scotland, north means the Orkney Islands, but on the Orkneys, north means faraway Zembla.
In the “Battle of the Books” from 1704, Jonathan Swift set a “malignant deity called Criticism,” who was both daughter and wife to Ignorance, as far as possible from any human civilization on a throne in a cave on the remotest heights
of Nova Zembla. Charlotte Brontë, in the opening pages of Jane Eyre in 1847, mentioned both Spitsbergen and Nova Zembla to summon the desolate feeling of the far north. For Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, Jules Verne would trap his narrator near the end of the novel in a runaway submarine veering off toward Spitsbergen or Nova Zembla. “I could no longer judge of the time that was passing,” writes the narrator. “The clocks had been stopped on board. It seemed, as in polar countries, that night and day no longer followed their regular course.”
In 1962, Vladimir Nabokov would publish a novel with a mad narrator named Charles Kinbote, who believes he is the exiled king of Zembla. Salman Rushdie included a perpetual night covering part of the world in his 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, with a phrase in his dedication mentioning
Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:
All our dream-worlds may come true.
Fairy lands are fearsome too.
Zembla would never lose its hold on the literary imagination. Writer William Boyd would fold the idea of Zembla into his 1998 novel Armadillo, coining a new word from it. Serendipity, he noted, came from Horace Walpole, who invented the word out of a folktale about the island of Serendip (now Sri Lanka), in which “heroes were always making discoveries of things they were not in quest of… serendipity, the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by design.”
So what is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth, lush greenery and hummingbirds, sea-washed, sunbasted? Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound, cold, a world of flint and stone. Call it Zembla. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky, and expected discoveries by design.
Along with making Zembla legendary, Barents and his men would themselves become famous. By 1600, less than four years after their frozen Twelfth Night feast on Nova Zembla, William Shakespeare would write his own play about the same holiday. Twelfth Night likewise tells the story of a world turned upside down on this strangest of holidays, in which the high are brought low and everything spins topsy-turvy. A not-quite-dead dead twin, cross-dressing, and a plot nested around switched identities lead to a comedy of errors with its own holiday feast at the center—and a reference to Barents. When one character earns another’s disdain, he’s told, “[Y]ou are now sailed into the north of my lady’s opinion; where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard.” In the space of a handful of years, the tale of Dutchmen covered in ice at the northern edge of the world would cross borders to become an international cultural touchstone.
Gerrit de Veer’s account, The Three Voyages of William Barents to the Arctic Regions, would enter the historical record as a survival story beyond compare. His narrative would reinforce the mystery that the far north had held since before even the days of Pytheas sailing from Marseille to the Arctic Circle nearly two thousand years before. The hand-to-hand combat with bears, the trapping of foxes, the hewing of shelter from unyielding ice—and beyond everything, the misery of the men—made the tale irresistible. Within a year, it would arrive in Dutch, German, Latin, and French: an Italian edition would appear months later. An English translation would find publication in 1609.
In time, through their winter ordeal, their temporary island home would come to symbolize the frigid North and a place of untold suffering. Because of Barents and his men, Nova Zembla would represent the impassable, opaque, and unconquerable Arctic.
Barents’s expeditions bound triumph and tragedy inextricably together. Though the sailors hadn’t signed up or sailed in the name of science, their discoveries would change the understanding of barnacle geese, of mirages, and the very geography of their planet, with observations that would take centuries to be fully understood. Yet the crew’s final voyage would also mark the permanent opening of the far north to Europeans, launching a harvest and devastation that would never stop.
Triumph and tragedy were also writ small on the lives of the sailors themselves. Despite all the luck, skill, and heroics by which they managed to save one another again and again, the men who survived a winter on Nova Zembla could neither rescue, nor preserve, nor even bring home the body of their peerless navigator. But because of their survival, William Barents would become immortal.
CODA The Shores of Nova Zembla
Standing on the deck of a boat passing by Russia’s Kildin Island, I felt the four centuries since William Barents had sailed across this sea to Nova Zembla vanish. As our small company of ten set out on a fifty-nine-foot boat in August 2019 to follow in Barents’s wake, the captain, Mikhail, suggested we fill up on food while we could. Once we left land behind, he told us, we probably wouldn’t feel like eating.
I’d never felt sick on any boat before, but Misha was right. Less than a day’s sail from Murmansk, Russia’s northernmost city, the crossing became a nausea-inducing pilgrimage—even for those not prone to seasickness. Waves seemed to tilt the boat in several directions at once, and the churning of the sea couldn’t be expected to fully stop until arrival at the far shore. Crossing the Barents Sea, I spent nearly four days miserable in every position unless I stood on deck looking at the reassuring stability of the horizon.
For almost a decade I’d been hoping to go to Nova Zembla to see the ruins of the cabin where William Barents and his fellow travelers overwintered in 1596. But by day four, in the throes of seasickness and wondering if it would continue for the whole expedition, I found myself thinking in the middle of a sleepless night that it would be fine if a storm came and the crew decided to turn around and head back to the mainland.
Luckily, my nausea vanished as soon as we came in sight of land. And as if to redeem the queasy passage, it soon became apparent we were echoing Barents’s Arctic travels in more ways than one. Not only were we sailing where he’d sailed, in a boat of almost exactly the same length (if not the same volume), but we were about to relive parts of his voyages.
Barents reached the small outposts of rock and moss that he’d christened the Orange Islands in 1594 on his first voyage. Gerrit de Veer wrote of the explorers cresting Nova Zembla’s northern coasts and seeing “about 200 walrushen or sea horses… a wonderful strong monster of the sea.” When our 2019 expedition reached the same island, we spotted countless walruses lolling ashore at the same spot. Sasha, one of the crew members, pulled out an accordion-like instrument known as a garmonica and began playing a haunting Soviet-era waltz. Dozens of walruses swam out to meet us, watching the performance with fascination, and snorting at us in response.
Even the heavens and air re-created the past for us. Looking back at the islands after we sailed by, the crew watched the square-cornered plateau of what we called “Big Orange” Island suddenly change shape. As more of us came on deck and grabbed cameras or binoculars, the flat surface of the island sprouted a skyline of buildings. Something like smoke rose above one of the tiny stone outcroppings nearby. Someone eventually recognized the puzzling vista as a mirage. And I recalled the Nova Zembla effect, another more profound kind of optical displacement that left Barents and his men confused and unsettled during their overwintering on the islands.
Half the castaways’ voyage home seemed to have involved pantomimed conversations with Russian sailors. Though my friend Tatiana had come along as an interpreter, I was caught alone many times and had to communicate with even less functional Russian at my disposal than Barents’s crew had. Just as had happened with van Heemskerck and his men, my Russian sailors tried to inform me of any number of things that I tried and failed to understand along the way.
At the same cliffs where de Veer described sailors stealing eggs from nesting birds, we, too, were able to step quietly and slowly up within arm’s reach of a variety of island residents, from cartoonish puffins to sleek murres. And when we landed at the site where Barents’s cabin had stood more than four hundred years ago, long timbers from the shelter lay in a rectangle on the original site, though they’d been moved and put back repeatedly since the cabin’s rediscovery
in 1871. Hundreds of artifacts have been collected from the earth there. I visited some relics in Amsterdam, on Spitsbergen at Svalbard, and in St. Petersburg, Russia—and no doubt walked over and around many that had woven their way into the soil of Nova Zembla itself.
On the way home, we repeated a part of Barents’s trip that we hadn’t intended to duplicate. Hours after we left the Nova Zemblan coast to set out across the Barents Sea, the boat’s engine broke down. Suddenly, like Barents, we had little idea how long it would take to get to our destination, and had to sail nearly perpendicular to the wind when it ran against us to make the smallest forward progress. We continued using only sails for over a week, dependent on moving air to push us forward, and more than once sitting motionless in its absence. One forlorn day, we watched birds next to us in the water paddling with their feet, moving faster than the boat.
Despite so many of the elements recorded during Barents’s voyages persisting into the twenty-first century, Nova Zembla today isn’t entirely the same. The sticks, branches, and whole trees that littered the shore in Barents’s day are now just as likely to be real litter: trash piled along the shoreline. The plastic flotsam that has washed up has changed the landscape, though perhaps not as much as the glaciers and ice that have retreated or vanished—a gradual reduction visible in satellite imagery over the last several decades, with a dramatic drop-off after 2006.
Our response to the Arctic was different, too. We didn’t need the birds or their eggs for food. We put on a concert for the walruses, instead of trying to kill them or steal their tusks. Though we saw just one polar bear, as opposed to the dozens encountered by Barents and his men, if we had somehow managed to kill it, even in self-defense, it would’ve provoked a serious investigation. We had no need for shelter off the boat, and could try to minimize our presence. We even tried to avoid crushing the sparse, low-lying vegetation, which can take years to recover.
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