ICEBOUND
Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
By Andrea Pitzer
Europeans have already dreamed of an open sea at the top of the world. In 1606, Gerard Mercator, arguably the most famous cartographer of his time or any other, published a top-down map of the earth as he understood it. At the center of Mercator’s North Pole was a magnetic mountain that pulled all the compass’s needles to the north; spinning around the gray rock mass was a warm sea surrounded by a thick circle of ice.
At the time, no one had any idea what the posts were like. Mercator based his map on a theory proposed 1,800 years earlier by Pitheas, the first Greek to break the Strait of Gibraltar and check the Atlantic for himself. Pythias sailed the west coast of Europe, circumnavigated the British Isles and continued north until reaching the ice, possibly Iceland. In addition, he theorized, there may be a sea of free flow.
Pythias’s travel diary was taken up by Pliny and others. Unchallenged over the centuries, his polar sea theory has come true. Thoughts of that unknown ocean at the top of the world marinated in the European imagination throughout the Middle Ages until the Portuguese discovered that they could sail through Africa and the Indian Ocean, generating a bonanza of trade route.
In the 16th century, European ships invaded all bays, inlets and rivers. If there was a navigable ocean at the pole, it could provide a shortcut to Asia. In 1594, Dutch investors bet heavily on this theory, commissioning cartographer William Barents to lead an expedition to the far north of Norway and then east of Russia in search of a route to the northeast. If they were right, Barents would make the Dutch incredibly wealthy.
In her new book, “Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World,” journalist Andrea Pitzer recounts three attempts by Barents to find a mythical passage to Asia. As part of his research for the book, Pitzer joined three expeditions to the Arctic between 2018 and 2020, including two boat trips retracing Barents’ trips. She also had access to enviable sources to reconstruct history, including Barents’ own logbook; the diaries of Jan Huygen van Linschoten – a cartographer who published secrets of the Portuguese trade routes he memorized while serving in India; and the diary of the ship’s officer Gerrit de Veer, who accompanied Barents and died on the way home during the third expedition.
It was De Veer’s account, published shortly after his death in 1596, that would become extremely popular at the time, leading to the release of an English edition shortly thereafter. But then, like so many historical accounts, he disappeared into obscurity. Polar fever went on a hiatus for a few hundred years as European colonists plundered the Americas, Asia and Africa.
The fascination with all things in the Arctic came back in full force in the 19th century. Industrialization had won over most of the natural world. Technology had tamed the desert. Railways were shrinking continents. However, the earth’s poles remained undefeated. The frozen frontier remained pure and challenging – nature’s ultimate challenge for man. Images of icebergs and polar bears have invaded popular culture, pushing Americans, Norwegians and British to the poles with their ships, dogs, cans and compasses. For the price of a few toes, a handful of lucky survivors would be rich with their memories.
De Veer’s book looked as fresh as ever when Britain’s Hakluyt Society published a new translation in 1853 and again in 1876. The highlight of the expedition included everything a polar fan could want: hand-to-hand combat with polar bears and walruses; scurvy and vitamin A poisoning; carbon dioxide asphyxiation; frostbite, keelhauling and curtains; plus the sighting of a rare atmospheric optical phenomenon called parelium. In the second edition of the society’s publication, long introductions, in flowery prose, contextualized Barents’ search while repeatedly questioning De Veer’s accuracy. Publishers seemed to want to discourage readers from using the book as an aid to navigation.
“Icebound” reintroduces Barents’ journey to the canon of the English language, reviving the history of polar exploration at the beginning of the technology era.
To the 21st century reader who has seen many pictures of emaciated polar bears galloping through the melting permafrost, “Icebound” may seem like a truly lost paradise. The 16th century Dutch did not hesitate to shoot, maim, beat, glue and impale everything they saw. “Slaughter emerged as the instinctive Dutch response to the Arctic landscape, a new theater that would see the same performance over and over again with each wave of European arrivals,” observes Pitzer, and then quotes the observation by historical archaeologist PJ Capelotti: living thing. “
Nature took revenge during Barents’ third attempt to find a sea route to China, the ice finally 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 separates the Kara sea from what was then called the Murman Sea (now known as Barents, after the same explorer), forcing the crew to camp for almost a year in a makeshift cabin on Ice Harbor. Five of them would die, including Barents.
“Icebound” – Pitzer’s third book, after “A long night: a global history of concentration camps” and “The secret history of Vladimir Nabokov” – offers readers a useful account of the unique political context in which Barents set sail. The men of the Barents expedition risked their lives not only for their investors, but for the glory of the new Dutch Republic, a confederation of provinces founded some 10 years earlier by Protestant bourgeois in an attempt to expel the Spaniards. The Catholic occupation led to massacres and church fires in the Netherlands, in what is now known as the Eighty Years’ War. Instability was not great for business. In addition, taxes were too high.
Secular ventures, especially trade with Asia via the high seas, promised a more prosperous future for the people of Holland. To help conquer global trade, the Dutch welcomed immigrants fleeing religious persecution in the south, some of whom brought valuable knowledge of shipbuilding and navigation with them. Armed with new wealth and technology, Dutch merchants established their self-determined government to ensure that banking and investment, supported by the rule of law, flourished, free of foreign tariffs. (Sound familiar?)
Stories of Arctic expeditions continue to fascinate us because they expose humanity in extremis – people pushed to their best and worst by hypothermia, hunger and despair. Sir John Franklin’s expedition to the Arctic in 1845 to find a passage to the northwest became a disgrace for Britain when it was discovered that his men, imprisoned for months in Canada, resorted to cannibalism. Ernest Shackleton is a hero for rescuing everyone except three of his crew in Antarctica after his ship, the Endurance, was lost.
The challenges that Barents faced are just as elementary. Attacking an arctic wind among imposing icebergs while groping through unknown waters is a deeply unnerving task, and Barents’ men did this day and night for weeks on end, fighting fatigue, scurvy, boredom and loneliness. The 11 months that spent huddled in the dark in a makeshift hut without windows, slowly starving to death, make quarantine during the pandemic seem like an endless spa day.
Pitzer writes carefully about the arctic landscape that Barents encountered – a dangerous world full of life and all that relentless ice that would interest anyone who sailed in bad weather or, say, scraped ice from a windshield at temperatures below zero. But “Icebound” is curiously dispassionate about its human affairs. In about 200 pages, the events are duly recorded, closely following de Veer’s account. Still, Pitzer seems reluctant to venture into the minds of individuals who have played so much and worked so hard to tell their stories. His book follows “men” – often nameless and undifferentiated; in doing so, this spare rereading reveals the monotony of 16th century exploration. It took a long time to get from here to there, and sometimes you were forced to stand and tremble.
“Icebound” arrives in the middle of a second polar renaissance, a moment steeped in melancholy. In the 19th century, when humanity first struggled with the promise and threat of technology, tales like Barents’ offered a roadmap to the frozen border. In the 21st century, we are equally ambivalent, but now we know what is at stake. Pytheas’ ancestral view of a polar sea may well become a reality in our lives.
“Icebound” is a reminder that there was a time when things were unknown. And when their ships hit the edge of the Arctic, Europeans looked in horror and awe at the sparkling ice and wondered what Edens was beyond, waiting to be discovered.