Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  The success of this reconnaissance encouraged the United Provinces to despatch a second fleet in 1595. Its seven ships carried trade goods, 18 months’ food, a Russian interpreter, an official chronicler named Gerrit de Veer, and a mixed company of merchants, factors and seamen. Rather than allow the fleet to separate, as had happened on the last expedition, the captains were given specific instructions: they were not to sail for Ice Point, but were to go through Nassau Strait, to the south of Vaigach Island. Barents, in command of the 200-ton Greyhound, was disappointed. But in the end it would not have mattered which route they took, because the ice that year was exceptionally thick. For weeks they hovered at the mouth of the Nassau Strait, waiting for a favourable wind. When it did not come Barents took matters into his own hands on 1 September and sailed anyway. Reluctantly the others followed him. They came to a halt at States Island, only a few miles into the Kara Sea. Here, with the ice stretching impenetrably to the east – ‘so that it had the appearance of a continent, which was most frightful to behold’ – Barents insisted they either carry on or, at the very least, leave two ships to overwinter before proceeding to Cathay the following summer. The senior three captains favoured an immediate retreat, but were unwilling to order it without unanimous agreement from the others. For almost a week the opposing factions squabbled over the state of the ice ahead, the likelihood of reaching Cathay, and the perils of overwintering so far north. While the captains deliberated, their men went ashore in search of crystals.

  On 6 September, during one of these forays, an event occurred that helped make up the leaders’ minds. Two men were grubbing through the rocks when, in de Veer’s words, ‘a great leane white beare came sodainly stealing out, and caught one of them fast by the necke, who not knowing what it was that tooke him by the necke, cried out and said, “Who is that that pulles me so by the necke?” Wherwith the other, that lay not farre from him, lifted up his head to see who it was, and perceiving it to be a monstrous beare, cryed and sayd, “Oh mate, it is a beare!” and therewith presently rose up and ran away.’ A group of 20 men, armed with muskets, came to their companion’s aid, but the polar bear had already started to eat him. It then ran at the rescuers, killing one and scattering the rest. Three valiant souls from the Greyhound mounted a counterattack, but it took four volleys to make any impression, and even when they shot it between the eyes the bear still did not die but reared up, its latest victim hanging from its jaws. They broke two cutlasses on it before a man darted in and cut the bear’s throat. If this was what they could look forward to during a winter on States Island then they would rather leave while it was still possible.

  Barents was recalcitrant. On 14 September he tried to sail into the ice, as he had done successfully in Nassau Strait. But this time his trick failed. Nobody followed him, and he was forced to join the others in a withdrawal to Holland. The United Provinces were less welcoming than they had been the year before. Two expeditions had now failed, and the most recent had involved a considerable amount of public money. Throwing the North-East Passage open to private enterprise, they placed a bounty on its head: 25,000 florins for its traverse, with lesser sums for discoveries that might lead to its completion. A consortium of Amsterdam merchants accepted the challenge. Barents was given two ships – their names are unknown – one of which was commanded by himself, with Jan Corneliszoon Rijp being given charge of the other. Rijp had sailed under Barents during his second voyage, as had another officer, Jacob van Heemskerck, who was appointed nominal commander of Barents’s ship. And de Veer came with them too. They carried all the food, water and wine they would need during their absence, as well as a selection of trade goods for the Chinese: bales of velvet, mugs made of silver and pewter, plus a selection of engravings by the popular artist Goltzius. And just in case, they took chests of gold and silver coins – some Dutch, some Portuguese. The two ships were in the sea by 18 May 1596. By the 22nd they were off the Shetlands and sailing due north.

  Barents had decided to take a new and riskier course, hoping that he might discover the open polar sea or that, if it did not exist, he would be able to follow the ice east until he hit Novaya Zemlya. His course took him to undiscovered lands – first Bear Island and then the archipelago of Spitsbergen – around which he dodged in a futile search for a gap in the ice. At 80° 10’, the furthest north any European had ever sailed, Barents admitted defeat and turned for the North-East Passage. So did Rijp. But they did not sail together. Rijp believed they were in the region of Novaya Zemlya and insisted on staying where he was. Barents, who knew better, argued only for a short while before leaving for the east. In the end, Barents was proved right. Rijp endured a horrible period in the ice off Spitsbergen, discovered nothing, and finally went home. Barents, meanwhile, sailed blind across the ocean, evading pack ice, until he reached Novaya Zemlya on 17 July.

  Continuing north along its coast, he reached Cross Island – so called because of the two wooden crosses that marked the graves of Russian mariners – where, on the 19th, his path was blocked by a mass of ice. He waited patiently for almost three weeks until, on 5 August, the sea cleared. He enjoyed open seas for only two days before the wind changed and the ice closed in again. Mooring the ship to one of the larger bergs in order to protect it from at least some of the jostling floes, he drifted with the current, battered all the while by a ferocious blizzard. It was a brave decision, for although the inside of the ship had been cross-braced to resist a squeeze by the ice, its unreinforced hull was vulnerable to the slightest knock. However, by luck, and by towing the ship from berg to berg, he emerged unscathed. By 15 August he had passed Ice Point and was within sight of the Orange Islands, the furthest he had sailed on his voyage of 1594. The Orange Islands were not much to speak of: rough, slatey and barren, they were so desolate that even seabirds seemed to avoid them. Their only value, as far as Barents was concerned, was that they offered a vantage point for spying the seas ahead. But, on climbing a small hill, he found the view was almost as disappointing as the islands themselves. To the north and east lay nothing but ice, confounding any hopes he may have had of a swift and trouble-free journey to Cathay. But there was one possible avenue: to the south, along the east coast of Novaya Zemlya, the sea was open for as far as he could see; it was a narrow channel, but it might lead to a warmer, ice-free part of the ocean. He went down it.

  The next few weeks were trying. Against all expectations, the coast of Novaya Zemlya led west, in exactly the direction they did not want to go, and although Barents tried repeatedly to break free of the channel he was driven back, again and again, by gales and ice. Their rudder was shattered and one of their three boats was crushed between a floe and the side of the ship. By 25 August – when the carpenter had repaired the rudder – it was obvious that they would never be able to cross the Kara Sea that season. Rather than retrace his route, Barents decided to continue south-west to Vaigach Island. If he could not reach Cathay he could at least circumnavigate Novaya Zemlya. A day later even that consolation was denied him. The coastal channel narrowed into a mess of sludgy ice, through which he could make no headway. Retreating north, Barents was caught by the early onset of winter. He anchored his ship in a nearby bay and, as the sea froze round it, prepared to overwinter. He called the place Ice Haven.

  Within 24 hours the Arctic pack was pressing against their anchorage. The first the crew knew of it was a grinding, booming noise that seemed to come from all directions. They did not understand what it could be. It was, in fact, the sound of ice grating against ice, as winds and currents compressed the pack into pressure ridges. The ridges zigzagged into Ice Haven and eventually reached the ship, lifting its bow four feet out of the water. It could have been worse: some of the pressure ridges were 20 feet high. But it was bad enough for Barents to have their two remaining boats dragged onto a solid piece of ice and stocked with provisions. The pressure ridges continued to snake forward, and at the same time a gale blew up. The cracking of the ice, combined with the buffets of the wi
nd, terrified de Veer: ‘[It was] most frightful both to see and heare, and made all ye haire of our heads to rise upright with feare.’

  On 16 September, with the ship tilted at a crazy angle thanks to a second pressure ridge,* Barents ordered his men to build a hut for the winter. Although Novaya Zemlya was treeless, there was a bay, four miles to the north of Ice Haven, that contained massive amounts of driftwood – not the usual collection of gnarled stumps, but whole trees that had been carried down Siberia’s rivers by the spring thaw and had ended up on this remote beach. They cut the logs into one-and-a-half-inch planks and dragged them to Ice Haven. Four corner posts were sunk into the ground – with difficulty, because even in summer the permafrost was only a foot or so beneath the surface – and were then boarded up to create a rough cabin. The driftwood being too unwieldy to make a roof, they raided the ship, ripping up its deck but taking care not to make it unseaworthy. Meanwhile, separate teams were deployed to cut and haul firewood for the winter. By the time they finished they had constructed a windowless shed, 50 feet by 30, with a single door protected by a porch. The roof was pyramidal, culminating in a chimney that vented the smoke from a central open fire. Logs were piled along the outside of one wall. Two tiers of bunks faced each other across the fire. Casks of wine, beer, flour, hard tack and salted meat were stacked nearby. They even built a one-person steam bath from empty barrels. When it was finished they called it het behouden huis, The House of Safety’ or ‘The House of the Unharmed’.

  They were neither safe nor unharmed. During the building process one man died of an unknown ailment, and when they finally transferred from the ship to the hut two men were so incapacitated that they had to be carried ashore in their bedding. As winter closed in, and the sun disappeared, it became apparent that they were all suffering from scurvy. Their gums swelled, their teeth loosened, their joints ached, and unaccountable bruises broke out across their bodies. In the worst cases their hamstrings contracted so that they could no longer walk upright, but crept crabwise in an awkward crouch. They did not know what caused the disease, having only a vague notion that it might be cured by eating fresh vegetables, but none at all that it was the result of Vitamin C deficiency, nor that the same vitamin could be found in raw meat. Throughout the winter they trapped and shot Arctic foxes, whose semi-roasted meat tasted somewhat like rabbit and temporarily alleviated their complaint. They refused stubbornly, however, to eat polar bear meat, killing and skinning the creatures, but throwing the carcases into the sea. As their supplies diminished, however, they tried eating one of them. They made the mistake of cooking the liver. The liver of a polar bear is a toxic source of Vitamin A, and the stew into which they threw it gave them indigestion and diarrhoea and made their skin peel. For several days they feared they would die. They did not repeat the experiment in a hurry – which was a pity, because the bears, whose constant encroachments made it necessary for the men to go in armed groups whenever they left the hut, would have provided a health-giving and plentiful source of meat. Still, once they had recovered from their food-poisoning they found that the bear’s fat (all 100 pounds of it) made a splendid fuel for their lamps. Hungry they may have been, but at least they now had light.

  Their worst enemy was the cold. Heemskerck broached the trade goods and issued them with cloth to make winter suits. They used fox pelts, too, to make hats. But with no sods or tussocks to plug the gaps between the planks, the wind whistled through the hut. Their bunks were frigid pallets, which they tried unsuccessfully to warm with heated stones and cannonballs. The men huddled round the fire, which was kept burning day and night, but its heat extended such a short distance from the flames that they felt cold even while their socks smouldered. Moreover, the wind blew the smoke around the room so that everyone was red-eyed and coughing. As the months wore on, the condensation from their cooking and their breath froze, covering roof, walls and bunks with an inch-thick sheet of ice. Although this had the benefit of keeping the wind out, it also deprived them of ventilation, as they discovered when they brought some sea-coal from the ship and piled it on the fire. They did not dare take too much, because they would need it when – or if – they made their escape. But it was a magnificent transformation: the coal burned longer and hotter than the driftwood, its heat reaching so far that the ice on the walls began to melt. To enjoy it to its fullest they closed the chimney, stopped up the door and ‘went into our cabans to sleepe, well comforted with the heat, and so lay a great while talking together’. They were only saved from carbon monoxide poisoning by a man who flung open the door and let in draughts of icy air. Even so, they had ‘great swounding and daseling in our heads’.

  It became colder and colder. One day they hoisted a rag on a pikestaff up the chimney to see which way the wind was blowing. It froze almost before it could flutter. In January 1597 snow fell so heavily that it covered the hut to the eaves. They dug a tunnel in the snow for their slops, but even so conditions became increasingly squalid, the pervading stench of bear fat being augmented by that of excrement. Worse still, they could no longer reach the log pile. Every superfluous piece of wood was burned, including the door to the porch and even their chopping board. Above them, meanwhile, they could hear the pattering of foxes, interspersed with the heavier tread of polar bears. Once, a bear tried to tear open the roof and was driven off only with difficulty. After a few weeks they were able to dig their way free, but almost their first act in the open was to conduct a burial service. The carpenter had died of scurvy on 27 January. Unable to find open ground, they buried him seven feet deep in the snow.

  A fortnight later the sun had reappeared and the wind had blown the snow from the log pile. As they stoked the fire, however, it became apparent that the driftwood could not last. Exhausted and bruised from scurvy, they set out for the beach where they had found the Siberian tree trunks. It took 11 men a whole day to saw the wood, load it onto sledges and drag it back to the hut. Their efforts produced only enough to last a week. Through February and March the wood-gathering trips became a dreaded ordeal – and one they had to undergo with increasing frequency. By now Barents and three others were so scorbutic that they were unable to move. The rest were in slightly better health, but as their legs contracted fewer and fewer could manage the journey to the beach and the amount of wood they brought back diminished proportionately.

  By May the weather was warm enough for firewood to be less of a concern. And as the ice began to melt they turned their minds to escape. Heemskerck, now no longer nominally but actually in charge, hoped they would be able to use the ship. But just in case, they prepared the two boats for a sea journey, raising their sides, rigging them with sails and packing them with the last, paltry casks of food and wine. It was a wise precaution, for by the second week of June the ship was still trapped. Heemskerck transferred the money, velvet and other valuables from its hold, loaded the sick into the boats, and set sail. Behind them, hanging from the chimney in a powder-horn, they left an abbreviated account of their ordeal. It was not discovered until 1876. Still legible in places, the note ended: ‘Our God will grant us safe voyage and bring us with good health in our fatherland.’ The signatory was Barents.

  Within three days they were at Ice Point, but Barents was now so ill that he had to ask de Veer to lift him up so that he could see it. He died on 20 June 1597, followed a few hours later by another man, Claes Andriesz. They were all sick now, but as they continued down the west coast of Novaya Zemlya they were able to kill seabirds that nested in astonishing numbers on the cliffs, and this small supply of meat prevented them deteriorating further. As well as eating the birds, they collected their eggs, hundreds at a time, and scrambled them in bear fat.* But they never killed enough birds or collected enough eggs to satisfy their appetites for long. Most of the time they lived on a thin porridge of ship’s biscuit. On 5 July Jan Fransz, the nephew of Claes Andriesz, died of starvation and scurvy.

  They were cheered by the sight of familiar features such as Cross Island, but d
isheartened by the state of the sea. They were imprisoned repeatedly by floes, and one day when camped on the ice they lost all their clothes, their chest of coins, their bales of velvet and most of their food when the ice split beneath them. On 18 July the wind changed, trapping them in a bay halfway down Novaya Zemlya where, with progress impossible, Heemskerck ordered the men ashore. They stayed there for more than a week, feasting off a colony of seabirds, before the wind changed again. On 28 July they rounded a headland and met two Russian fishing boats. For some time they had seen signs of life – huts, graves, stacks of firewood – but now they saw people. With sign language and the odd phrase he had picked up on his travels, Heemskerck explained that their ship had sunk. The Russians, whose boats were little larger than Heemskerck’s and who were themselves short of food, could do little to help. They gave the Dutchmen a meal, wished them good luck – as far as Heemskerck could make out – and left the following morning for Vaigach Island. The two Dutch boats wallowed slowly in the same direction. On the last day of July they were again stranded by a change in the wind, this time on an island that at first sight seemed as barren and unpleasant as the rest of Novaya Zemlya. Yet when they looked closely they found small clumps of bright green vegetation. It was Cochlearia groenlandica, or scurvy grass. They picked the leaves and ate them. The cure was miraculous. When they continued, three days later, their gums had sunk back to normal size, their legs had straightened and their bruising had vanished.