Icebound Read online

  The customs official was obliged to sail out to them the next day and plead with the captain for the return of the dinghy and coats. It wasn’t possible to punish the Russians who’d stolen the nets, the officer explained, because they’d fled to the mountains. The Dutchmen relented and returned the Russians’ belongings, and after that were left alone.

  By Wednesday, June 29, the two groups had finished their last preparations. Events on Kildin had been unpredictable, but not too different in spirit from encounters that could have taken place in any port on any number of voyages. Now, however, the fleet prepared to split in two, with each group making its way into wilder terrain.

  William Barents took the Amsterdam ship and its yacht and set a course northeast toward Nova Zembla. As he sailed away, Admiral Nay in the Swan and van Linschoten in the Mercury stayed together, heading nearly due east, aiming to stay below Nova Zembla and make for Vaigach Island. If all went well, Barents would round Nova Zembla from the north and Nay from the south. The two groups hoped to meet in a few weeks on the other side. But anything could happen in the coming days, and no one knew where wind and weather would take them.

  Based on the instructions given to them by the States General, if they couldn’t find each other on the eastern side of Nova Zembla, they vowed to set a course for Kildin and wait there for the rest of the fleet until the end of September, when they’d return home as a group. Given the ongoing conflict with Spain, it remained wiser to stay together as a show of force when sailing back toward Dutch waters.

  The next day, Barents found a breeze to sail on, unfurling two large sails to catch it squarely. Tracking the seafloor under them as they sped along, the crew lowered a lead plumb line hardly more advanced than the one used by the Vikings. On June 30, the line sank more than five hundred feet into the depths without touching bottom. Every man aboard could have stood on the shoulders of the next sailor to make a tower, and still they wouldn’t have covered even a third of the depth between the ship and the seafloor.

  As they sailed east during their first week after leaving Kildin, they hauled in the plumb line to find it coated with black and white, gray, then red sand, along with broken shells. Their fourth day out, they were making good speed on a stiff wind from the southeast when a fog rose up around them. Trimming sails, they cast out the line again to be sure they wouldn’t run aground while they were sailing half-blind. But once more, sailors found only a bottomless sea.

  The North Sea near home had its difficult moments, but while sailing the waters between Kildin Island and Nova Zembla, the crew encountered new challenges. The relatively warm water sweeping in from the west on the last dregs of the gulf current crossing the Atlantic Ocean ran hard into colder water that lay to the east. Any given ship could find itself moving several directions at once on the choppy waves, and in high winds, sailing could become impossible.

  On July 3, William Barents pulled out his cross-staff, a wooden pole with a sliding crossbar that could be used to determine the height of celestial bodies. Hoisting the main bar up between his eye and the horizon, he slid the crossbar along its length until, at great long-term risk to his retina, he looked into the sun and saw its lower rim touching the crossbar. After recording its height from the horizon, he reckoned his location and adjusted course.

  The next day—not yet a week after setting out from Kildin—they caught sight of land. William Barents had successfully crossed the sea that in time would bear his name. The western shore of Nova Zembla lay in view. They’d left Europe behind.

  Barents shifted his course again and sailed toward unmapped terrain. The low coasts of the island, or islands—it was not yet clear whether Nova Zembla was an archipelago—sat strewn with earth and rock beaches some yards in from the shore, rising to flat plateaus above them, and sometimes tall hills or low mountains as well. Glaciers dotted the landscape, but in the short summer months, lichens or moss tinted the visible earth and sides of the cliffs with spring or autumn colors.

  The Dutchmen came to a long spit of land they named Langenes and found a bay just to its east where they rowed a boat to land. But finding no people there, they returned to the ship and sailed on. They wound their way northeast up the coast, sailing into bays and inlets. Capo Baxo—their bastardization of Spanish for “Low Point”—and Lombsbay came next along the coast. At Lombsbay, they went ashore again, stepping into a bleak landscape, and found a coven of guillemots. As they waddled, the birds’ charcoal heads and wings bobbed in sharp contrast with the white breasts puffed before them like shields.

  Other signs of life—or former life—appeared as well. The scouting party came across an old mast lying on the ground and recognized the relic as part of a Russian Pomor ship. The spear of wrecked lumber could be taken as both good and bad news. Someone had sailed this far up the coast of Nova Zembla before, meaning the area was navigable. But the mast—or perhaps the whole ship—had been a casualty of the voyage. The sailors hoisted the timber upright and left it in that position, making a beacon of it to leave as a sign of their passage.

  Barents sailed on, naming as he went. Capo Negro referred to the black terrain there, which reminded the sailors of a bar of slimy mud back home on the Zuiderzee. Admiralty Island, in honor of their commission, had uneven shores with dangerous shallows and couldn’t be safely approached. They tried to re-create the new lands they sailed through in the image of their home country, to flatter funders and political leaders, and perhaps to imagine some future in which this northern world could become theirs.

  At Williams Island—for William of Orange, not for Barents—the navigator again took the height of the sun. They had sailed more than two thousand miles from Amsterdam. It was July 7 when they came across more wood from a Russian ship that seemed to have made it as far up the coast as they had.

  As the expedition left behind the realms of even indigenous Arctic peoples and made its way into lands unsuitable for human habitation, the calendar showed that the men were six weeks out of Amsterdam and less than two from Kildin. Again beset by fog, they entered a fjord by Williams Island and noticed movement. They saw something they’d never seen before. They recognized it as a bear, but it was a white bear. An enormous white bear swimming in the water.

  Barents and his men jumped from the ship into their small boat. They had the idea that they’d try to take the bear back to the Netherlands with them and show it as a foreign wonder. Loading a musket, one of the sailors shot the bear full in the body. It reared up and began to swim off. The crew chased the animal, with several men rowing to close the distance while one managed to swing a lasso and rope its neck. Dragging the creature back toward them, the men pulled it along in their wake.

  Barents had no prior experience with polar bears to prepare him. But he and his men would not be the only explorers to feel the impulse to capture a bear and bend it to their will. Even after the fierce nature and strength of polar bears was widely known throughout Europe, twentieth-century polar explorer Roald Amundsen asked the director of the Hamburg Zoo to transform polar bears into pack animals capable of pulling sleds on a polar expedition. Fellow explorer Fridtjof Nansen thought the plan worth attempting but remained dubious about its feasibility.3 It seemed likely that polar bears hauling on real ice would soon sense their power in their home environment and revolt.

  The optimism William Barents felt watching the first polar bear he’d ever seen was even shorter-lived. The lassoed animal roared and continued to fight, despite having taken a direct shot to the body. Though the Dutchmen didn’t yet see their full danger, they quickly realized the creature’s power. Revising their earlier fantasy, they decided it would be safer to kill and skin the animal than to keep it as a pet. While the bear fought to free itself, the sailors let the rope play out to hasten their quarry’s exhaustion.

  From time to time, Barents goaded the bear with his boat hook. After a while, the animal paddled up to the stern of the boat and gripped the wood with its forepaws. Thinking the creature wanted a br
eak from the struggle, Barents called the men’s attention to it, predicting “She will there reste her selfe.”

  The bear, perhaps sensing that it was in its own element, didn’t rest on the ledge. Instead, the animal heaved itself up and climbed halfway into the boat. The sailors fled to the other end of the craft in terror. But the far end of the noose they’d put around the bear’s neck caught under the rudder and leashed it in that vulnerable position, half in and half out of the boat, choking. The bear was trapped, not yet helpless but unable to close the distance with its attackers.

  Realizing their position, one of the sailors made his way from the front of the boat and gored the animal with a half-pike. The bear collapsed into the water and dragged the boat for a time. Once the creature grew tired, they beat it to death. Hauling the animal into the boat, they began skinning it. The first polar bear the Dutchmen encountered would, in time, make its way to Amsterdam after all.

  The sailors named the place Berenfort for their conquest. From there they went back to Williams Island, then on to the next bit of floating land in the tiny archipelago, where they left the ship once more. Taking their small boat to shore, they hiked through the cliffs and rocks up a hill to find a pair of large crosses on high. They weren’t quite past the bounds of history after all—at least one Pomor ship had been here before them. They christened the site Cross Island, and moved on, mapping and naming as they went. Heading north, it was the last sign of human life they’d see.

  Going to sea can be challenging enough with a plotted course and an endpoint in mind. Sailing day after day without a map into unknown territory is a completely different experience. It’s impossible to know which kinds of shores, or what animals, wind, and weather may appear next. Any given tomorrow might have brought Barents or his men within sight of an open sea beckoning them to China. Or they might have worked their way north against ice and snow month after month until they came to the top of the world—the first humans to arrive at the North Pole. Or the sea might have risen up and swallowed them whole. They had to continue on without knowledge of their destination or how long it might take to get there.

  The solstice marking the longest day had passed, but real darkness wouldn’t return for months, when the tables would reverse and polar night would begin to creep in. That summer in full sunlight, standing on the shores of Nova Zembla, William Barents had no reason as of yet to ponder the possibility that he might ever be away from home long enough to discover what it felt like when light gave way to endless darkness.

  They rounded a cape they named Nassau on July 10, and after that, the land curved away to the south. They continued along for the afternoon, avoiding a high sandbank that lay invisible far from shore. They’d come some two hundred miles north along the coastline of Nova Zembla. Were they merely heading into a bay, or had the ship already rounded the northern tip of Nova Zembla, proving it was one or more islands? In the far distance, they spied what appeared to be a new land far to the northeast.

  If they were correct, they might discover a new northern land themselves. They headed toward it, sails billowing. But the wind blew too fiercely from the west, making safe navigation impossible, and they had to take in the topsail. When the wind blew even harder, they feared losing the masts, and struck every sail on the ship.

  They lost sight entirely of the new land they’d seen, never realizing that it was likely only the curving Nova Zemblan coastline they’d spotted in the distance. They soon had bigger concerns. Late in the day, the waves rose higher, and between waves, the sea went hollow. With the water dropping and surging under the lurching ship, waves cracked overhead. They ran sixteen hours and some thirty miles without sails, limiting their ability to steer inside the fierce wind.

  All night, the weather didn’t relent. As the tempest drove them league after league over open water, now east, now south, the ship continued without sails. A vast wave rose up and swamped their small boat, tearing it away from where it had been secured to the ship and dragging it down toward the bottom of the sea, where the waters surged back over it and it vanished.

  They rode the gale for hours more before the wind began to drop. The waves lessened, and fog appeared. The crew finally hoisted sails, and they made their way tentatively north and east into the mist. After they’d gone a few miles, the seafloor rose beneath them, and the plumb line dredged up black mud, suggesting that they were closing in on land. For the first time, they noticed drift ice floating on the sea.

  During their time in the Arctic, Barents and his shipmates would see a staggering array of ice in various sizes and shapes. Pancake ice formed in circles that grew on the surface of the sea and gradually connected with one another as the air temperature dropped. Fast ice froze at the shore and worked its way out into open water. Tables of ice stretching like plateaus high above the boat could block a view entirely. At other times, fantastic towers and castles would rise in jagged Gothic architecture high above their heads. They were suddenly far from home.

  On July 12, they spent most of a day sailing back to look for their boat. The next day, as the ship headed north and east, the relentless sun turned in its tight circle high overhead with no thought of touching the horizon. They encountered more ice. A sailor who’d been sent up the mast returned, reporting a flat white plane ahead as far as the eye could see. As they tacked a southward path around it, they caught sight of the Nova Zembla coastline again.

  By July 14, Barents had the crew shift sails to follow the coast northward, but after several miles, ice surrounded the ship once more. Creeping nearer and nearer to an iceberg, they realized by the time they got close that it towered so far above them it was impossible to see over.

  A hard wind blew. They navigated south and west again, then stumbled northward until once more, they hit ice. Each day became a numbing ritual with a jagged stitch sailed forward over the sea and then reversed in the face of white walls, with occasional sighting of the shores of Nova Zembla. It might take as long as half an hour to tack each time they had to turn: drawing in some sails to let the wind catch others, bracing the yards perpendicular to the mast by hauling on its spokes until they turned, unfurling the sails that would catch corners of the wind to go in a new direction, then belaying each line and making it taut. Surrounded by fog and sun and ice, Barents and his crew staggered forward inch by inch, sailing more than twelve hundred miles in the last half of July—as far as it would take to get back to the west coast of Norway—while gaining less than two hundred miles of forward progress in their quest to see if Nova Zembla continued on forever. The bitter sailing began to take a toll on the crew.

  Barents sometimes measured the height of the noontime sun with his cross-staff. Less often, he used the mariner’s astrolabe, rotating its dial, threading sunlight through two pinholes, and reading the sun’s elevation. He calculated the ship’s latitude as far north as 77 degrees, closer to the North Pole than any European had been known to sail. Trees had given way to shrubs, and shrubs to lichens. The vista of water and terrain visible from shipboard became more and more barren, fusing and transforming into a vast frigid desert.

  Drifting white mountains moved in from the north as the sea itself began to freeze in chunks and flakes. Though the weather often remained fair, the presence of snow covering the land when it came in sight, not to mention the ice blocking their way, was a reminder that the height of summer had passed them by a month ago.

  On July 29, the ship reached a place they named Ice Point, from which the land curved away to the east. Going ashore, the sailors found stones on the ground shining like gold. The story of Martin Frobisher’s final expedition in 1578—which brought back fourteen hundred tons of stone that was determined to be nearly worthless—may have been on Barents’s mind. There’s no record of the sailors gathering any quantity of gold stone to bring with them back to Amsterdam.

  Leaving Ice Point, the Dutchmen couldn’t know at first that the land’s sweeping turn to the east wasn’t some bay or inlet. But in time,
they would realize that they’d passed the northern tip of Nova Zembla. They continued north, to two rocky offshore outposts that they christened the Orange Islands, after William of Orange and his son Maurice. On July 31, they set foot on the larger of the two islands and found hundreds of sunbathing walruses, which they called seahorses.

  The walruses lay huddled in clumps and piles along the beach. The Dutchmen headed to meet the animals, and watched with interest while the mothers swept their young into the water and protected them with oar-like flippers. After pushing their calves to safety, the adults moved to attack the invaders. The sailors had heard that walrus tusks could be as valuable as ivory. Seeing the animals out in the sun, the crew thought they appeared less coordinated and formidable on land. The men gathered hatchets and cutlasses and swept in, swinging their weapons. But the metal blades shattered on the animals’ skin, and they couldn’t manage to kill any of the creatures. They did, however, manage to crack off tusks, and fell back in order to carry them to the ship. There, they reasoned, they could get heavier guns and return, the better to kill all the walruses. Echoing explorers before and after them, the new arrivals’ first impulse was to slaughter and plunder.

  On the way to the ship, however, the sailors came across a lone polar bear asleep near the shore. They took the gun they did have at hand and shot the animal, chasing after it in their boat as the creature swam away. After killing the bear, they tied the carcass to a pike speared upright in the ice, thinking they would return for it when they came back with their guns to shoot the walruses.

  But the wind rose up and broke icebergs into sudden motion all around them, driving the men back to the ship. They returned with only a few walrus tusks. Details of the hunt ended up in the official account of the voyage: