Icebound

by Andrea Pitzer

  Our journeys differed, too, in that once we’d crossed the Barents Sea coming home, we bypassed Kildin Island and headed straight to the port of Murmansk, where our company disbanded, and we went our separate ways. But van Heemskerck and the surviving castaways sailed together all the way back to the Netherlands, telling their story as a group in more dramatic fashion to the notables of Amsterdam, who’d gathered for a feast.

  After that dinner on November 1, 1597, the men who lived in the city returned to friends or family. Those who were from other towns found local lodging until they could be paid and go home. Though their work had been the engine of the voyage, providing the ingenuity and muscle for everything from building the cabin to rowing and dragging boats to trapping foxes, most of the sailors who’d joined Barents on his third journey north, once home, disappeared from the public record.

  Jacob van Heemskerck, however, would remain in history’s sights. Six months after his return from the Arctic, he sailed with the Verre Company to the East Indies. Well into the voyage, van Heemskerck became commander of the fleet. The prior expedition to the East Indies, which had set out in the spring of 1595, hadn’t taken aboard any fruits or vegetables to prevent scurvy. But on this voyage, the Dutch were more prepared. The ship they sent out on the same route in 1598 would carry lemon juice—and lose only fifteen men.

  Van Heemskerck later sailed to the region as commander of the fleet and helped shepherd the new Dutch nation as it supernovaed into a vast empire. In less than a century, the goods shipped by Dutch traders would eclipse the combined total of Spain, France, England, and Portugal, with several other European powers thrown in for good measure.1

  Just as he’d outlasted his time in the Arctic, van Heemskerck would survive his southern voyages and return home to take part in the war against Spain that would continue, at greater or lesser intensity, for another four decades. As admiral, he’d lead the Dutch navies against the Spanish fleet near Gibraltar in 1607, dying in battle after losing a leg to a cannonball.

  Like Barents, van Heemskerck became a martyr for his country. But in the end it was Barents’s name that surpassed even van Heemskerck’s. Though Barents never gained fame in battle and never found a trade route to China, he had planted a seed for a new kind of explorer, one whose fame lay in a combination of knowledge and endurance rather than martial glory. It still was a face of nationalism—merely the softer side of the imperial project—but it was a deeply human face.

  William Barents would become less and less real over time. The gaps left by his biography, and his death, create an emptiness that makes it possible to project or reflect whatever the viewer wants to see.

  Yet every famous Arctic explorer who endured horrifying ordeals, every adventurer to the North whose story became a bestselling book, every voyager vowing to fill in the map for national glory, every polar adventurer whose exploits were recorded with the newest technologies—from books to telegrams to photos to radio broadcasts to phones to satellite links—has walked in the path first blazed by William Barents.

  In later centuries, the failure to establish habitable colonies or make successful trade missions wouldn’t count against intrepid explorers. From a monetary perspective in Barents’s era, however, his final voyage was a disaster, so much so that when his wife applied for a widow’s pension from the council of Holland, asking for support for herself and the five children her husband had left behind, she was refused.2

  The Dutch didn’t immediately give up on the Arctic route to China, but a northeastern passage was centuries away, and the Dutch wouldn’t be the first to find it. It might be tempting to imagine that by not breaking through to China, Barents and his men greatly delayed the opening of the Arctic, but soon after Barents’s death the high Arctic became a commercial focus for a very different reason. Within fifteen years, Western European nations would establish whaling on the coast of Spitsbergen, and the search for a northern route would get sidetracked as huge profits were wrung from whaling, nearly wiping out the North Atlantic right whale.3 In time, European hunters and trappers would also join the Russian, Nenets, and Sami seasonal visitors to Vaigach Island and Nova Zembla.

  The high Arctic hadn’t been conquered, but it had been infiltrated and would never close. The process begun by the same States General that sent Barents north—the kind of process that had already led to the exploitation of the Americas over the prior century—would in time become part of the division and conquest of every region of the globe. Barents’s overwintering coincided with the end of any world that might have escaped the boot heel of colonialism.

  William Barents had sailed north with an idea that he would find a warm polar sea. But standing on the shore looking out from near the ruins of Barents’s cabin on a summer day, I put my fingers in the water to find that it’s achingly cold. When the wind stirs, this spit of land sticking out into the sea quickly becomes a numbing, desolate place. How much grimmer the view must have been during Barents’s months there, when great fragments of ice pressed in all around him.

  The land is now a Russian Arctic preserve and still very isolated, though each year there is talk of restarting a defunct cruise to bring tourists to the ruins of Barents’s cabin and abandoned research stations.

  Dutch experts in shipbuilding and navigation came together in recent years to build a replica of Barents’s ship. Using relics of typical yachts of the day in combination with the original illustrations published with the narrative of the voyages, shipwreck expert Gerald de Weerdt and mechanical engineer Koos Westra have guided a group of volunteers in the hand-built construction of a vessel that duplicates the details posterity has preserved about the original. The builders say they may try to sail it from the coast of the Netherlands all the way to the cabin at Ice Harbor, just as Barents did. If they do, they hope to avoid the ice that plagued Barents. But even with the challenges of sailing a historical replica, the trip will be easier than it once was.

  The fate that awaited Barents on Nova Zembla was part of a story that had been unfolding for more than a century before he set out and would continue for many more. The idea that Barents had started with—that navigation to China was possible, that by turning his ship farther north and avoiding the fate of prior voyages, he might crest the world and find an open polar sea—doomed his voyage.

  Yet, strangely enough, he was perfectly correct in his assumption. The world to which he belonged set machinery in motion that can now be slowed but not reversed. With some consistency, snow and ice surveys project that by 2040—perhaps as early as 2030—there will be no ice left at the North Pole in summer. By August 2017, the planet had changed so much that a Russian gas tanker equipped for Arctic voyages could travel for the first time without an icebreaker escort, sailing a northern route from Norway to South Korea in two-thirds the time required for the traditional route through the Suez Canal. The open polar sea Barents had forecast will soon exist every year during the hottest months. And the planet will continue to warm.

  This stupendous change will be the end result of a process in which Barents and his Arctic expeditions were in some ways the opening salvo. Though they returned with a dramatic tale of uninhabited lands and scientific insights, their ships still rode the wave of a tide that would unleash destruction as powerful and enduring as any force in human history.

  The sea free of polar ice that the Greeks had deliberated over and Barents’s own mentor had insisted was real wasn’t just a figment of their imaginations. The open polar sea that Barents had imagined, the idea for which he’d risked everything, has finally come to pass. He just sailed four hundred years too soon.

  Acknowledgments

  A book goes out under its author’s name, but a work of narrative historical nonfiction represents the effort and aid of countless people. To name some is surely to forget others who also deserve mention. But here are some of the key people with a role in helping to bring Icebound to life. I’m grateful to each one in different ways.

  Rick Horgan,
who acquired Icebound for Scribner and was my partner in crime, has an eagle eye for noticing what’s missing in a manuscript. I’m beyond grateful to Scribner publisher Nan Graham for seeing the potential in the book proposal, as well as Beckett Rueda, Laura Wise, copy editor Jane Herman, and the design, publicity, and marketing teams, for their help in delivering this book into the world.

  This is my third project with Katherine Boyle at Veritas Literary as my agent. Without her, none of this would have happened.

  The involvement of my dear friend Beth Macy during the writing process was, as it has been for the last decade, a gift. Vanessa Mobley, Michael Robinson, Blair Braverman, Anna Badkhen, and Dan Vergano were all early readers of my book proposal or the full manuscript. Each one gave invaluable advice on improvements. Graphic artist Robert Lunsford was generous with suggestions on improving the maps in this book.

  Translators were central to this project. Tjitske Kummer translated the Arctic voyages of Jan Huygen van Linschoten from Dutch, in what may have been the first such translation into English in history. She was also critical in helping to compare the English and Dutch editions of Gerrit de Veer’s diary—which appears not to have been retranslated and republished since its initial appearance in English more than four hundred years ago (which explains the archaic spellings in the excerpts quoted here). Robert Neugarten translated scholarly papers on Barents and van Linschoten for me on very short notice.

  Several scholars and researchers were unbelievably generous with their time—meeting me on days off, taking trains to accompany me to storage depots in other cities, copying materials, and answering questions ad infinitum. I’m particularly indebted to Diederick Wildeman at the Netherlands’ National Maritime Museum, Jan de Hond at the Rijksmuseum, and Russian Arctic explorer Pyotr V. Boyarsky, who met with me on short notice in Moscow for several hours to talk about his work at Barents’s landing sites. Historian Anne Goldgar, a longtime investigator into all things Nova Zemblan, caught and pointed out an error early on—one that I’m glad didn’t make it into the pages of this book.

  On a visit to Harlingen in the Netherlands, I was able to go aboard the replica of William Barents’s ship, which was under construction before and during the years I spent writing this book. Celestial navigation expert Dick Huges spent weeks chatting with me by video, teaching me the basics of sailing using only the sun and stars to determine one’s location on the planet. Dick also coordinated a series of meetings in the Netherlands with experts working on projects related to Barents, to which he then spent a week driving me. Physicist Siebren van der Werf has explored the genesis of historical navigation tables and written a whole book on the Nova Zembla effect, and he invited me into his home to discuss all of it. After years of work on shipwrecks and review of the drawings from the first account of Barents’s voyages, Gerald de Weerdt developed plans to rebuild Barents’s ship, and led the project to fruition, taking me aboard and answering questions for hours. Thanks also to Koos Westra, the mechanical engineer involved in rebuilding Barents’s ship, whose small-scale replica of the vessel answered so many of my questions.

  I’m likewise grateful for state museums and libraries. The archives of public institutions provided much of the material on which this book is based. Visits to the Rijksmuseum between 2015 and 2019 were particularly helpful. Actually examining the relics recovered from Barents’s cabin with Jan de Hond was a gift. Seeing the castaways’ buttons and shoes and hand tools made the crew come alive in my mind. The archives of the Netherlands’ National Maritime Museum provided many sources and resources that helped me get a better sense of Dutch seafaring during the era.

  The spine of this book is built from the first-person accounts of Gerrit de Veer and Jan Huygen van Linschoten. Countless visits to the Library of Congress, including a chance to photograph a four-hundred-year-old manuscript of van Linschoten’s work, provided material for translation and a whole second viewpoint on Barents’s first two voyages that had been missing from English-language accounts. As magnificent as any of these was the warm welcome and chance to enjoy the banya at the Russian Arctic National Park outpost on Cape Desire at the northern end of Nova Zembla.

  I was fortunate enough to go on three Arctic expeditions during the course of researching and writing this book—all to regions visited by William Barents. The first, in January 2018, during polar night, was a dogsled expedition to the interior of Spitsbergen, thanks to the companionship and skills of Marcel Starinsky, Traci Crippen, Sarah Marshall, Stina Stovring Andersen, and Lars Broens. Musher Blair Braverman was the inspiration for this trip, suggesting I look into kennels on Svalbard after she was generous enough to invite me to Wisconsin and teach me to dogsled in February 2017.

  My next trip to Svalbard, whose existence Barents was the first to record, happened in the fall of 2018 as part of the Arctic Circle residency program, which takes participants along the western coast for weeks aboard a tall ship, and teaches interested passengers to haul lines, shift sails, and reckon a course. I spent as much time as possible up the mast to try to see the places Barents sailed through the eyes of those who sailed with him. On that voyage, Captain Mario Czok, First Mate Marijn Achterkamp, Second Mate Annet Achterkamp, Piet Litjens, Jana Maxovà, Janine Jungermann, and Alex Renes were indispensable. Just as crucial were expedition leader Sarah Gerats and guides Kristin Jæger Wexsahl, Åshild Rye, and Emma Hoette—who led our hikes, provided historical context, guarded us from polar bears, and sacrificed their own comfort and safety to ferry several people over a rising current. While in Longyearbyen, I was also able to meet with Alexander Hovland and visit the replica of William Barents’s cabin, which had been re-created on Svalbard hundreds of miles from Nova Zembla.

  The third expedition I went on was to the Russian Arctic, sailing out of Murmansk to Nova Zembla (Novaya Zemlya in Russian), where I visited the most important sites mentioned in Gerrit de Veer’s account of William Barents’s voyages. That trip stands as one of the happiest experiences of my life. The other passengers on that voyage—Marthe Larsen Haarr, Michael Pantalos, Alexey Neumoin, our cook Olga Chumachenko, and especially Tatiana Ponomareva, who had the thankless task of interpreting for me—sailed on with grace and fortitude for a week longer than we expected to remain in such close quarters. Thank you to Mike Chernobylsky and Victor Boyarsky at VICAAR for organizing the expedition, and to Natalia Krutikova, Alexandr Chichaev, and Maria Gavrilo for making it possible for me to sail aboard the Alter Ego. Thanks, too, to Vadim and Alexander, the park rangers at the Nova Zembla station during our stops at Cape Desire.

  Thank you most of all to the crew on that expedition, each of whom was a wonder and a gift. Mikhail Tekuchev, the captain, let me try my hand at learning to sail and steer the boat from the start. First mate Andrey Ianushkevich, the ship’s mechanical wizard, likewise helped me learn the ropes and performed so many kindnesses on sea and land that my attempts to keep thanking him became embarrassing for both of us. Evgeny Fershter’s experience with polar bears and expertise on the Barents sites made each stop more productive than hours spent in any archive. Alexander Bogdanov’s hard work, joy, and musical accompaniment in the face of every unexpected event (engine failure, mirage, pods of walruses) carried the day. It wouldn’t be possible to travel with a more delightful group.

  As always, I am beyond grateful to my family. Patti Pitzer, Terri Ellis, Peter Vergano, and Kathy Vergano helped out with my kids in ways large and small, taking up tasks that I ran out of time for or abandoned altogether while working on this book. My two children got used to my staying up long after they went to bed, and vanishing on expeditions or research trips. They’ve become proficient at reminding me of things I forget to take care of, and have turned into wonderful human beings, despite sometimes being left to forage for themselves. And my husband, Dan, continues to be the steady one—the one who’s willing to hear out every wild idea, who embraces my eccentricities alongside whatever better traits I occasionally display, and who believes in me even when
I lose faith in myself.

  About the Author

  COURTESY OF JENNIFER BURNS

  Andrea Pitzer loves to unearth lost or forgotten history. Her journalism has appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country. Along with feature articles and historical narratives, she’s published poetry and peer-reviewed academic work. In addition to Icebound, she’s the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (2017) and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (2013).

  Andrea has spoken about her writing at the 92nd Street Y and Smithsonian Associates, and delivered panel presentations at the Modern Language Association, the International Journalism Festival, and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. She’s also lectured on history and narrative journalism in the United States and abroad.

  Events and ideas that were once common knowledge but have fallen from public memory fascinate Andrea, as does humanity’s tendency to not learn from the past. Though she’s reported from four continents—from Chile and Myanmar to the Arctic—she feels most at home in libraries or on a boat in the far north.

  In 2009, at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, she founded the narrative nonfiction site Nieman Storyboard, which she edited for three years. Before that, she was a freelance journalist, a music critic, a portrait painter, a French translator, a record store manager, and a martial-arts and self-defense instructor (but not all at the same time). She once stopped a runaway bus from crashing, but it wasn’t as exciting as it sounds.

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