ICEBOUND
Shipwreck suffered on the edge of the world
By Andrea Pitzer
Europeans once dreamed of an open sea at the top of the world. In 1606 Gerard Mercator, probably the most famous cartographer of his time or any other, published a map from top to bottom as he understood it. In the center of Mercator’s North Pole stood a magnetic mountain that pulled all compass needles northward; around the mass of gray rock revolves a warm sea surrounded by a thick circle of ice.
At the time, no one had any idea what the poles looked like. Mercator based his map on a theory proposed by Pytheas 1800 years earlier, the first Greek to cross the Strait of Gibraltar and examine the Atlantic Ocean himself. Pytheas sailed up the west coast of Europe, bypassing the British Isles and then continuing north until he hit ice, possibly Iceland. In addition, he can be a free flowing sea.
Pytheas’ travel story was recorded by Pliny and others. Fighting over the centuries, his polar sea theory became hard. Thoughts about the undiscovered ocean at the top of the world marinated in European imagination throughout the Middle Ages until the Portuguese found that they could sail through Africa and the Indian Ocean, causing a trade route bonanza.
By the 16th century, European ships were sinking into every bay, inlet and river. If there was a navigable ocean on the pole, it could offer a shortcut to Asia. In 1594, Dutch investors bet big on the theory and instructed the cartographer William Barents to lead an expedition to the northernmost point of Norway and then east across Russia in search of a northeastern route. If they were right, Barents would make the Dutch phenomenally rich.
In her new book, “Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World”, journalist Andrea Pitzer describes Barents’ three attempts to find a mythical corridor to Asia. As part of her research for the book, Pitzer joined three Arctic expeditions between 2018 and 2020, including two voyages that traced Barents’ travels. She also had access to enviable resources to reconstruct the story, including Barents’ own ship logbook; the magazines of Jan Huygen van Linschoten – a cartographer who published Portuguese trade route secrets he had learned in India; and the diary of the ship officer Gerrit de Veer, who accompanied Barents and perished on the way home during the third expedition.
It was the version of de Veer, published shortly after his death in 1596, which would become very popular at the time, which released an English edition shortly afterwards. But then, like so many historical reports, it darkened. Polar fever broke for several hundred years while European colonizers plundered America, Asia and Africa.
A fascination with all that raged the Arctic in the 19th century. Industrialization has conquered most of the natural world. Technology has tamed the wilderness. Railways shrank continents. Yet the earth’s poles remained undefeated. The frozen frontier stood pure and challenging – nature’s last challenge to man. Images of icebergs and polar bears penetrated popular culture and drove Americans, Norwegians and Englishmen with their ships, dogs, cans and compasses to the poles. For a few tones, a handful of happy survivors will get rich from their memoirs.
De Veer’s book felt as fresh as ever when the British Hakluyt Society published a new translation in 1853 and again in 1876. The expedition’s highlight role included everything a pool lover would want: hand-to-hand combat with polar bears and walruses; scurvy and vitamin A poisoning; carbon dioxide choking; freezing, sore throat and hangings; plus the observation of a rare atmospheric optical phenomenon called a parhelion. In the second edition of the society’s publication, long introductions, in florid prose, contextualized Barents’ pursuit, while repeatedly questioning de Veer’s accuracy. It seems that the editors want to discourage readers from using the book as a navigation aid.
“Icebound” re-introduces Barents’ journey to the English canon, reviving the story of polar exploration at the beginning of the era of technology.
For the 21st century reader who has seen one too many photos of emaciated polar bears lurking over the melting permafrost, ‘Icebound’ can read a bit like paradise really lost. The 16th-century Dutch did not hesitate to shoot, mutilate, scratch a collar, and sharpen everything they saw. ‘Slaughter arose as the instinctive Dutch response to the Arctic landscape, a new theater that would see the same performance over and over again with every European wave of arrivals,’ ‘Pitzer notes, and then she quotes historical archaeologist PJ Capelotti’s remark to: ‘It’s amazing there’s something left. ‘
Nature took revenge during Barents’ third attempt to find a sea route to China, and the ice eventually won. His ship was caught in a crushing embrace – à la Shackleton in Antarctica and Franklin in Canada – at the northern tip of Nova Zembla, an island at 74 degrees latitude that separated the Kara Sea from what was then Murmansee (now known as Barents). , to the same explorer), forcing the crew to camp in a temporary hut at Ice Harbor for almost a year. Five of them would die, including Barents.
“Icebound” – Pitzer’s third book, following “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps” and “The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov” – gives readers a useful account of the unique political context in which Barents left. The men on Barents’ expedition risked their lives not only for their investors, but also for the glory of the brand new Dutch Republic, a confederation of provinces founded by Protestant citizens about ten years earlier in an effort to drive out the Spaniards. The Catholic occupation led to massacre and church burning in the Low Countries, now known as the Eighty Years’ War. Instability was not ideal for business. On top of that, the tax was too high.
Secular efforts, especially trade with Asia via the high seas, promised a more prosperous future for the people of the Netherlands. To aid their worldwide conquest, the Dutch welcomed immigrants fleeing religious persecution in the south, some of whom brought valuable knowledge about shipbuilding and navigation. Armed with new wealth and technology, Dutch merchants established their self-determined government to ensure that banking and investment, backed by the rule of law, would flourish, without foreign tariffs. (Does this sound familiar?)
Stories about Arctic expeditions still fascinate us because they expose humanity in extremis – people are driven at their best and worst by hypothermia, hunger and despair. Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition in 1845 to find a north-western passage became a disgrace to Britain when it was discovered that his men, who had been trapped in Canada for months, had turned to cannibalism. Ernest Shackleton is a hero to save all but one of his crew in Antarctica after his ship, the Endurance, is lost.
The challenges that Barents faced are also elementary. Attacking an Arctic wind between towering icebergs while feeling through unknown waters is an extremely nerve-wracking task, and Barents’ men have been doing it for weeks and days to fight fatigue, scurvy, boredom and loneliness. The 11 months they spent in the dark in a windowless temporary hut, slowly starving to death, make the quarantine look like an endless spa day during the pandemic.
Pitzer writes with care about the Arctic landscape that Barents encountered – a dangerous world teeming with life and all the relentless ice, which would interest anyone who sailed in bad weather, or, for example, scraped ice from a windshield in temperature below zero. But “Icebound” is strange to its human subjects. More than 200 pages, the events are recorded in a conscientious manner, and this is very much in line with De Veer’s report. Yet Pitzer seems reluctant to venture into the minds of the individuals who have played so much and put so much effort into telling their stories. Her book follows “the men” – often anonymous and undifferentiated; Thus, this retelling enjoys the monotony of exploration from the 16th century. It took a lot of time to get from here to there, and sometimes you had to sit still and shiver.
‘Icebound’ comes amid a second polar revival, a moment drenched in melancholy. In the 19th century, when mankind first wrestled with the promise and threat of technology, stories like Barents offered a roadmap to the frozen frontier. In the 21st century we find ourselves equally ambivalent, but we now know what is at stake. Pytheas’ ancient vision of a polar sea could possibly become a reality in our lifetime.
‘Icebound’ is a reminder that things were once unknown. And as their ships pushed up against the edge of the North Pole, the Europeans, with horror and awe, looked at the sparkling ice and wondered what Edens lay further and waiting to be discovered.