Barentsz’s voyage to find a Polar passage to the Indies failed

Posted in Exploration, Famous news stories, Historical articles, History, Ships on Saturday, 1 March 2014

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This edited article about Willem Barentsz first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 575 published on 20 January 1973.

Willem Barentsz,  picture, image, illustration

Barentsz and his men became prisoners of the Polar ice by Clive Uptton

They had made their house mainly from driftwood, and they had thatched the roof with sailcloth and seaweed. It was a poor enough shelter against the Arctic winter, but at least they were under cover and provisions were abundant.

Outside, the sun had just risen, but it was little more than a half disc above the horizon. The bears had disappeared and now there were only foxes, miserably snuffling the icy soil, barren of any trees or bushes. In time, those foxes were to be their salvation, providing flesh to eat and skins which could be made into caps and mittens.

It was the November of 1596, and Willem Barentsz and his companions were stranded on the ice off the Russian islands of Nova Zembla.

The voyage that had brought Barentsz and his companions there had started more than six months ago when they had all left Amsterdam with a companion ship, to seek out a north-east passage by water to the Indies, via the polar regions. It was an idea which had been in the mind of the Dutch since 1514, and Barentsz had already made two attempts to find it, and on both occasions he had been forced to turn back. His third attempt had proved to be even more disastrous than the others.

The voyage had been successful enough until they had arrived at Nova Zembla where the two ships had been accidentally separated. Shortly afterwards, Barentsz’s ship had become trapped in the drifting ice, and no efforts on their part could release her. The ice continued to pack even more tightly around them until the ship began groaning and heaving under the pressure. It was at this point that they had all agreed to leave the ship and build themselves a house upon the land.

The building of the house had proved to be something of a nightmare. Working in a cold that was so extreme that the skin peeled from their hands whenever they touched a metal object, they had painfully struggled backwards and forwards from the ship dragging provisions ashore. Snow storms had frequently interrupted their work on the house, and they had been attacked by bears on several occasions. One man who had been pursued by a bear had only been saved from death when the bear had paused in its tracks to examine another bear which the sailors had killed and left to freeze.

But now Barentsz and his men were settled in their house at last. Even so, the prospect before them was grim enough. Dried-fish and salt meat were abundant, but there was only half a pound of bread a day for each man. The beer, freezing in its caskets had become as tasteless as water. The chimney would not draw and the room was filled with a blinding smoke which everyone had to endure or die of the cold. To make matters worse they could hear the cracking and groaning of the ice as it tightened its grip on their ship. The same question was in everybody’s minds. Would the ship still be seaworthy after it had been subjected to such pressures?

When the foxes came, it was a little better. They set traps around their cabin, and on an average they caught a fox a day. They also had the good fortune to kill an enormous bear from which they obtained a hundred pounds of lard. This was used to keep their lamp burning constantly, day and night.

On Christmas eve it snowed so violently that they could not open the door. The next morning there was a white frost in the cabin. Standing away from the fire, one of the men held up a strip of linen to see if there was a wind blowing through the cabin. Within seconds the piece of linen was frozen as hard as a board. Surely they could not survive much longer, even though they had a fire burning day and night?

But survive they did, right into the May of the following year, when they were able at last to make their way to the ship. As they had all feared, it was found to be unfit to make the voyage home. Barentsz decided that their only hope now lay in the long boats, and these they dragged with infinite labour to the water, together with the last of their stores. Before they left Barentsz wrote a brief account of their voyage and the rigours they had experienced while living in their cabin. He then placed it in a musket barrel which he attached to the fireplace.

A week later Barentsz was dead.

He had been too ill to walk on the day they had left, so they had carried him to one of the boats and had set him gently in it, hoping that he would rally later. But he was already dying as they began to sail around the northernmost point of Nova Zembla. Realising that the end was near, they drew the boats up on the ice and laid him on the ground, where he quickly expired.

The rest of them struggled on through dangers and difficulties until then unparalleled in navigation. Often they were obliged to drag their boats across intervening fields of ice, where they sometimes camped for the night in makeshift tents made from their sails. In this manner they travelled down the western coast of Nova Zembla towards the northern shores of Russia and Lapland, where they finally came across three Dutch ships. One of them was their companion ship from which they had been separated ten months before.

On 1st November 1597, the twelve gaunt and haggard survivors, still wearing their caps of white fox and coats of bearskin, arrived in Amsterdam, much to the amazement of everyone who had long since given them up for dead. Their mission had been a complete failure. But at least they could console themselves with the fact that they had made a voyage of more than four hundred leagues over a tract of land and sea which had never been traversed before.

Barentsz’s winter quarters on Nova Zembla were not discovered until 1871. There in an almost complete state of preservation stood the cooking pans over the fireplace, the musket barrel with Barentsz’s account in it, the tools, the drinking vessels, the instruments and the books that had helped to beguile the weary hours of that long night 278 years before. Among the relics were a pair of small shoes and a flute which had belonged to a little cabin boy who had died just before they had left.

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