Icebound

Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World

Andrea Pitzer

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781982113353
• eBook ISBN: 9781982113360
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito storico

In the bestselling tradition of Hampton Sides's In the Kingdom of Ice, a "gripping adventure tale" ( The Boston Globe ) recounting Dutch polar explorer William Barents' three harrowing Arctic expeditions—the last of which resulted in a relentlessly challenging year-long fight for survival. The human story has always been one of perseverance—often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing hunger, and endless winter.In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully combines a gripping tale of survival with a sweeping history of the great Age of Exploration—a time of hope, adventure, and seemingly unlimited geographic frontiers. At the story's center is William Barents, one of the 16th century's greatest navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory. Journalist Pitzer did extensive research, learning how to use four-hundred-year-old navigation equipment, setting out on three Arctic expeditions to retrace Barents's steps, and visiting replicas of Barents's ship and cabin."A resonant meditation on human ingenuity, resilience, and hope" ( The New Yorker ), Pitzer's reenactment of Barents's ill-fated journey shows us how the human body can function at twenty degrees below, the history of mutiny, the art of celestial navigation, and the intricacies of building shelters. But above all, it gives us a firsthand glimpse into the true nature of courage.

CHAPTER ONE The Open Polar Sea

In 1594, while Spain laid siege to the Netherlands in the third decade of a bloody war, Dutch navigator William Barents prepared to sail off the edge of the known world. He would leave in the spring for distant Nova Zembla, whose shores stretched hundreds of miles above the Russian mainland. He intended to follow its coastline north as far as he could go.

Money drove every part of the project, providing both the means and the goal of the expedition: investors were looking to discover a northern trade route to China. But the voyage might also answer fundamental questions about the Earth. Was Nova Zembla—“New Land” in Dutch—an island that could be circumnavigated, or was it part of a polar continent that would make a northeast passage impossible? The former might mean lucrative trade with the Far East. The latter would mean vast new lands to discover.

No ship in recorded history had ever sailed north over Nova Zembla, or that far north above Europe at all. As one half of a small fleet charged with mapping territory in waters known and unknown, William Barents intended to embrace this challenge and head into uncharted waters. Meanwhile, two other vessels would sail south of Nova Zembla, close to the mainland. The southern route had been tried by other explorers, but so far none had reached China.

Barents’s home country, the Dutch Republic, was just over a decade old at that moment. Across the next century, it would become the world’s leading economic and naval power. It would surpass all other countries in shipbuilding. The transcendent art of Rembrandt and Vermeer would appear. A flowering of the spice trade and slavery would also sustain the country through decade after decade of a forever war during the attempt to defeat Spain. The art, the war, the slaves, and the spices would all combine to transform the young, tiny republic into a country as powerful as any on the planet. William Barents would play a role in that drama, but as he readied himself for his first voyage into the Arctic, his country was a blank slate, its sins and achievements still unwritten.

The historical record on William Barents before this moment is nearly as blank. Born in the northern Netherlands near the midpoint of the sixteenth century, he was likely in his forties when he left home on his first Arctic voyage, but the year of his birth is unknown. He had trained as a steersman and had a childhood fascination with maps that endured into middle age. “I always had the inclination, from my youth onward,” he wrote of himself, “to use all my qualities to portray in maps the lands that I roamed and sailed with all the surrounding seas and waters.” His most famous portrait shows a receding hairline, dark hair, sloping shoulders, and a nose like a chisel. Given the image’s creation three centuries after Barents’s death, maritime historian Diederick Wildeman has suggested that any connection to the historical Barents is dubious.

With no aristocratic pedigree, it’s apparent from his writing that Barents had nonetheless gotten an education. Before he ever made preparations for the Arctic, he’d likely sailed all the shores of Western Europe, from the Baltic Sea to the Portuguese coast. At a time when war led most Dutch sailors to turn away from the Strait of Gibraltar between Spain and Morocco, Barents pioneered mapmaking in the region. His New Description and Atlas of the Mediterranean Sea, written with the influential preacher and geographer Petrus Plancius, would soon make its way into print.¹ Yet as he walked the long canals of Amsterdam, his voyages to the Mediterranean all lay behind him. He would never unfurl a sail in Spanish waters or see the coast of Italy again.

If his country’s future wasn’t yet written, he was as good a candidate as any to invent it. He couldn’t yet know—no one in the port, in the city, in the country that day could know—that after his death he’d be memorialized across the centuries. His name would appear everywhere: on the streets of countless cities and towns in his home country, as well as California, Bulgaria, and Bashkortostan—even on the door of a hotel bar in Longyearbyen, the northernmost town in the world.

But he wasn’t famous yet. He was simply a navigator hired to carry out commercial exploration thought up by others and backed by men of wealth. As he stood on the docks about to begin his long, painful trek into immortality, he was so far from fame that history would not even record the name of his boat.

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War between the Dutch Republic and Spain had begun in Barents’s youth, and would last until the end of his life. Spain’s claim to the Low Countries undergirded every part of the rebellion. In 1567, Spain sent the third duke of Alva to the Netherlands with an army of ten thousand men to establish order. That September, the count of Egmont—who’d previously fought in battle for Spain and been knighted—was arrested. Condemned for treason over his reluctance to punish his own people, he was beheaded the following June.

In the name of Roman Catholicism, Spanish troops laid waste to the port city of Antwerp and besieged Haarlem farther north before slaughtering some two thousand soldiers in a series of massacres that became known as the Spanish Fury. At the eastern city of Zutphen, Dutch rebels looted churches and killed priests. When Spain regained the town in the dead of winter, troops got their revenge, drowning some five hundred people by pushing them into the frozen river through holes in the ice.

In 1576, the atrocities drove all seventeen provinces of the Netherlands to briefly join together and oppose Spain. Though Dutch forces couldn’t oust their rulers from the Low Countries, the Spanish crackdown likewise failed to rout the rebels. In 1581, the Dutch renounced loyalty to the king of Spain, stating in the Act of Abjuration that they rejected “being enslaved by the Spaniards” and would “pursue such methods as appear to us to most likely secure our ancient liberties and privileges.”

An independent republic was declared the same year. William, the wealthy prince of Orange, who’d long functioned as the symbolic leader of the revolt, was unable to make more than fleeting gains on the ground. He would be assassinated three years later.

The rebels’ bald assertion of human liberty in the face of tyrannical rule predated the American Declaration of Independence by nearly two hundred years and was no better received by the monarch at which it was directed. Antwerp became the de facto capital of the rebellious territory, but the Spanish laid siege to the city for more than a year, encircling it and blocking the river that led to its gates. Eventually, in 1585, the confederacy of provinces surrendered the city. Under the terms of surrender, Protestants had a generous four years to relocate. Half of Antwerp’s population of seventy-six thousand fled sooner rather than later, most to Amsterdam.²

Tens of thousands of additional religious refugees elsewhere on both sides of the conflict left for other nations or moved to towns within the Low Countries that were more sympathetic to their beliefs. An influx of Sephardic Jews arrived from Portugal, seeking religious freedom away from Spanish rule, further influencing the character of the north. These shifts would crystallize cultural and religious differences, driving a wedge between regions and shaping national identity.

The Dutch rebellion was Europe’s first modern revolution against a monarch—then the first to reject monarchy itself. Unsettling to neighbors and adjacent royalty, Dutch resistance would become a blueprint and an inspiration for uprisings around the globe for the next three centuries. City and provincial identity remained strong, but some million and a half Dutch residents had gained a foothold on national independence.³

Securing that independence took nearly a century and tore their homeland in half. All of William Barents’s adult life unfolded inside upheaval or war. Due to events far beyond his control, when he sailed into the Arctic, he would sail as a herald of the new Dutch nation.

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A fleet had been formed. The expedition had financial backing. The monthslong process to plan a route, find ships, gather a crew, and provision vessels was complete. Now the voyagers would have to rely on a very old idea that Amsterdam geographers had embraced: that the North Pole would be warm. Though men had died, and whole ships had vanished into the ice, mapmakers claimed that beyond the frozen waste that cracked rudders and crushed hulls each winter, the polar region hid waters that might be sailed, even an open sea.

Across millennia, the idea of a navigable sea had tantalized explorers, opening up a wealth of possibilities. The Greeks had described an island “beyond the point where the north wind blows,” with such a mild climate its people harvested crops twice a year.⁴ In 1527, a merchant had written to King Henry VIII to argue that “sayling Northwarde and passing the pole” would prove shorter than any known route to India. The first part of the voyage would be treacherous, the argument went, but with sturdy vessels, an expedition breaking through the mountains of ice north of Europe would discover a sanctuary at the top of the world.

In May 1594, as he packed possessions for his first voyage into the Arctic, William Barents knew he hadn’t invented the concept of a temperate North, which had haunted mapmakers for two thousand years—he was only the latest navigator to adopt it. But as one of only a few who would ever have a chance to try to prove it correct, he embraced the idea, pondering northern sea routes. Other earlier expeditions had set out for high latitudes, following the coastline along Norway to Russia, establishing relations with locals, or bringing promising news of new potential paths into the unknown. As of yet, none had found a northern passage to the far side of the world. Barents aimed to be the first.

The port of Amsterdam nestled behind a peninsula at the southern end of the shallow bay known as the Zuiderzee. Outside the entrance to the Zuiderzee, a chain of islands ran parallel to the coastline, shielding the bay from the North Sea. Inside the bay, countless towns and landings carried on the brisk business of a rising nation. Shielded by fortifications and surrounded by a moat, Amsterdam sat the most protected among them.

Amid the bristling bustle of a harbor in wartime, a ship with three masts floated in the harbor. Stretching less than a hundred feet from bow to stern, it was nonetheless big enough to carry cargo. On this trip, however, hauling cargo wouldn’t be the ship’s central mission. And Barents’s craft wouldn’t be the largest setting out. But the master navigator would hold sway over his own journey and direct the ship’s exploration into unmapped worlds. Embracing the idea of an open passage through the high Arctic to far Eastern empires, William Barents stood ready to risk vessels, crew, and his own life to prove its existence.

Barents set out in a time of cataclysmic change, with upheaval reshaping every corner of Dutch life. Violence and enterprise were transforming national identity, religion, government, industry, science, and art—all at once. No one thing could be separated from the other; wild revolution had worked its way down to the smallest details of existence. In the world that was emerging, each element was in flux.

Barents had begun exploration just as the Dutch dominated European shipbuilding. Though the craft was evolving, ships remained in that moment artisanal projects, in which each vessel was made by hand with little in the way of diagrams or written plans. Builders began with a set of blocks in a line on which they set the keel—the spine of the ship. Perpendicular to the keel, arcing planks known as ribs rose to breathe a shape into the cage of the hull. With the ribs in place, planks running parallel to the waterline could be attached, and L-shaped knees set inside to brace and bind the structure. Planks, keels, and ribs were all still cut and shaped by hand. They had to be hammered and plugged, with joining pegs pounded in then cut flush to the exterior planks. One or more decks could be laid to divide the ship into levels, from the cargo hold at the very bottom of the ship; to the orlop in the middle, which held the guns and sleeping sailors; and the upper deck, which sat open to the elements topside. The “ceiling” of the ship—not the roof but the planks along the sides of the vessel—would finish off the interior.

The Dutch had just perfected the fluyt, a pear-bottomed craft meant for trade, not war. Stripped of armaments and the marines needed to man them, fluyts could carry twice the cargo of traditional merchant ships and be built at half the cost of other vessels. The lack of written plans meant design improvements couldn’t be quickly cribbed and implemented by other countries, putting the Dutch at tremendous advantage for a time.

But beyond design improvements, the Dutch made their biggest advance by decreasing the time needed for preparing wood to use in shipbuilding. The year Barents set sail, the first patented windmill-driven saw went into service. A floating mill used wind power to run a large saw blade back and forth, delivering both greater precision and exponentially improved productivity. In a little over a decade, the entirety of the northern terrain across from Amsterdam harbor would be transformed into a vast industrial basin, with twenty shipyards in operation and more on the way.⁵

Barents’s expedition couldn’t command the most innovative or newest craft, but a state-of-the-art design was hardly necessary. Instead, he prepared to sail in a slightly older vessel of middling size—one maximized not for cargo but with portholes and cannons for use in potential battle with enemy ships.

Yet a shift was already underway. The first fluyt devoted to cargo instead of battle would be launched that year.⁶ With the flexibility, speed, and economy of its shipbuilding ascendant, the new Dutch Republic found itself in the perfect position to stake a claim as a maritime empire.

Crews had readied three other ships for departure. With the republic a loose alliance of provinces still in the process of becoming a nation, individual cities and regions played a central role in backing new projects. The province of Zeeland, south of Amsterdam, would send the Zwaan (Swan). Enkhuizen, another city on the Zuiderzee less than thirty miles from Amsterdam, would provision the Mercurius (Mercury). And in addition to one full-size ship, Amsterdam would send a smaller vessel to help explore the coastline.

The question of the best course to sail had been disputed from the beginning. Barents and his mentor Petrus Plancius came down on the side of a high northern route, staking their reputations on the high Arctic being navigable.

The audacity of this idea was matched by the ambition of their upstart country. Any reliable sea route to the East would carry a flood of goods and money into North Sea ports, allowing the Dutch to establish a global presence and compete with existing European powers. Explorers from the Netherlands dreamed of sailing from Amsterdam north over Scandinavia and then Asia. Cresting the top of the world, they hoped to arrive at the kingdoms of China and Cathay. The latter had been mentioned in Marco Polo’s travelogue centuries before and was thought to lie north of China proper. Europeans knew so little about the region that several more years would pass before they came to realize the two kingdoms were one and the same.

Meanwhile, the sea held dangers for everyone. A territory with hundreds of miles of coastline, the Netherlands in 1594 had yet to formally establish a national navy. Early in the war with Spain, a group of disenfranchised local noblemen and pirates called the Sea Beggars had harassed ships and raided Spanish vessels for goods. William of Orange had granted them letters of marque authorizing their piracy, and for a time they used England as a base for operations with the blessing of Queen Elizabeth I, a Protestant ruler who had no love for Spain.

Later, however, support for the Sea Beggars became too problematic for her, and in 1572 Elizabeth barred them from English shores. With no remaining port as a haven, they grew desperate. They sailed back home and managed to seize the Dutch town of Brielle from Spanish control, establishing the revolt as a force to be reckoned with. William of Orange’s tactical accomplishments on the ground were few and far between, but the Sea Beggars’ successes laid the foundation for future Dutch naval forces.

For the time being, in place of a national navy, individual towns and provinces had admiralty boards to defend their shores. By 1574, an admiralty had been formed at Rotterdam, but it was initially incapable of reliably protecting even merchant ships from pillage. Over the next fifteen years, other regional boards would be establishe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• List of Maps
• Chapter One: The Open Polar Sea
• Chapter Two: Off the Edge of the Map
• Chapter Three: Death in the Arctic
• Chapter Four: Sailing for the Pole
• Chapter Five: Castaways
• Chapter Six: The Safe House
• Chapter Seven: The King of Nova Zembla
• Chapter Eight: The Midnight Sun and the False Dawn
• Chapter Nine: Escape
• Chapter Ten: Staggering Homeward
• Coda: The Shores of Nova Zembla
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright