Willem Barentsz on Nova Zembla — the first Arctic winter killed its navigator, and saved his name

In May 1596 the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz set out on his third Arctic voyage, seeking a northeast passage over the top of Russia to the riches of Asia. The ship, captained by Jacob van Heemskerck with Barentsz as chief pilot, was trapped in the ice off the northeastern coast of Novaya Zemlya — Nova Zembla — in the late summer of 1596 and could not be freed. The party of 17 was forced to overwinter on the Arctic shore, building a timber lodge they called Het Behouden Huys, the Saved House, from the wreckage of their own ship. It was the first time Europeans are known to have survived a winter in the high Arctic. When the ice still held the ship the following June, the survivors abandoned it and set out south in two small open boats. Five men died, including Barentsz himself, who succumbed on 20 June 1597, days into the boat journey. Twelve survived to reach the Russian mainland and, eventually, Amsterdam.

The voyage failed at its object: there was no navigable northeast passage at that latitude, and the route to Asia was not found then or for centuries. What the expedition achieved instead was the demonstration — paid for with five lives and a winter of bears, cold and scurvy — that the polar night was survivable, and a meticulous written record of how. The carpenter Gerrit de Veer kept a journal that became one of the most famous accounts in the history of exploration, the first detailed European description of an Arctic overwintering, from the building of the house to the day Barentsz died.

The expedition is remembered chiefly through that record and through the Saved House itself, which stood frozen on the Novaya Zemlya coast for nearly three centuries until a Norwegian expedition rediscovered it in 1871, its contents — clocks, books, tools, the men’s possessions — preserved by the cold almost exactly as they had left them. Barentsz did not return, but his name endures on the sea he charted at the cost of his life, the Barents Sea.