Willem Barentsz on Nova Zembla — the first Arctic winter killed its navigator, and saved his name
Summary
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.
Timeline
The third attempt at a passage that did not exist
By 1596 Willem Barentsz was the most experienced Arctic navigator in the Dutch Republic, a state hungry for a sea route to Asia that bypassed the Iberian-controlled passages around Africa and South America. The theory of the age held that a northeast passage lay over the top of Russia, and Barentsz had already made two voyages searching for it, reaching Novaya Zemlya and being turned back by ice each time. The third voyage, mounted with two ships, took a more northerly track in the hope of finding open polar water — and in doing so discovered Bear Island and Spitsbergen, real geographic prizes, before the ships parted ways and Barentsz's vessel pressed east toward Novaya Zemlya.
The premise was wrong. There was no reliably navigable passage at that latitude; the Kara Sea beyond Novaya Zemlya is choked with ice for most of the year, and the route Barentsz sought would not be forced until the late nineteenth century. Driving a wooden sixteenth-century ship into those waters in search of open sea was a gamble against a geography that did not favour it, and in August 1596, rounding the island's northeastern cape, the gamble was lost. The ice closed around the ship and held it. There would be no going forward and, that season, no going back.
The party was now committed to something no European was known to have done: surviving a winter in the high Arctic. They had no model for it, no certainty that it could be done at all, and a ship that the ice was already beginning to destroy. Their response was to stop relying on the ship and build a shelter that did not depend on it.
Het Behouden Huys
As the ship was crushed and lifted by the ice, the men salvaged its timber and, with driftwood gathered from the shore, built a substantial lodge they named Het Behouden Huys — the Saved, or Preserved, House. It became their world for the winter: a single heated room against a cold so extreme that, by de Veer's account, the men slept with heated stones and warmed cannonballs, wine froze solid, and the fire's smoke at times nearly suffocated them when they sealed the house against the wind. Outside, polar bears prowled and attacked, and the men hunted them and the Arctic foxes that came to the shelter, fighting both for safety and for food.
That fox meat, unknown to them, mattered more than the bears. Scurvy — the vitamin-C deficiency that had killed countless mariners on long voyages — struck the crew through the dark months, and the only thing standing partly against it was the fresh flesh of the foxes they trapped, which carries small amounts of the vitamin. The men did not understand the chemistry, but they noticed they fared better when they ate it. In January 1597 they also became the first humans to record a strange optical phenomenon: the sun appearing above the horizon roughly two weeks before it should astronomically have returned, a polar atmospheric mirage now called the Novaya Zemlya effect. De Veer wrote it down, and was disbelieved for centuries, until the optics were understood and his observation vindicated.
They survived the night. But surviving the winter was only half the problem, and the smaller half. When the brief Arctic summer came, the ice still gripped the ship and showed no sign of releasing it. To wait for a second winter in their weakened, scorbutic condition would almost certainly have been fatal. So in early June 1597 the survivors made the decision that would cost Barentsz his life: to abandon the ship and the Saved House and attempt the long voyage south in two small open boats, exposed, along an ice-bound coast.
Death in the open boats
The boats set out around 13–14 June 1597, carrying the men and what stores they could, including the sick. Barentsz was among the ailing. He had weakened over the winter, and within days of leaving — on 20 June — he died in the open boat. De Veer recorded the moment with the plain economy that gives his account its force: Barentsz had been studying a chart, asked for a drink, and "after he had drunk, he suddenly fell sick, and in a short time died." Another man, the ailing Claes Andriesz, died at about the same time. In all, the open-boat journey and the winter that preceded it cost five of the 17 their lives; sources differ on exactly how the deaths divided between the ice and the boats.
The remaining twelve made one of the more remarkable small-boat voyages of the age, working the two open craft roughly 1,600 kilometres down and around the coast through ice and weather, until they reached the Russian Kola Peninsula at the end of August. There they were met, by chance, by a Dutch trading ship captained by Jan Rijp, who had commanded the second vessel that parted from Barentsz the previous year. The survivors reached Amsterdam on 1 November 1597, more than seventeen months after they had left.
They came home without the passage, without their navigator, and without the ship. What they carried instead was knowledge: that humans could survive the Arctic winter, the method by which they had done it, and de Veer's journal, which was printed almost immediately and translated across Europe. The Saved House and its frozen contents, left behind on the Novaya Zemlya shore, would remain there undisturbed for 274 years.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
Twelve of the seventeen returned, and Gerrit de Veer's The True and Perfect Description of Three Voyages turned the ordeal into one of the foundational survival narratives of European exploration, printed and translated widely within years. It gave the world its first detailed account of an Arctic winter survived — the cold, the bears, the scurvy, the optical wonder of the false sunrise — and it established that the polar night, which would kill so many later expeditions, could be endured. The Dutch did not find their northeast passage, and the search for one largely lapsed; the trade route to Asia would be won, when it was, by other means.
Barentsz's name outlived him on the map. The Barents Sea, which he had charted across three voyages, carries it still, as do the Barents region and a scattering of Arctic place names. In 1871 the Norwegian skipper Elling Carlsen reached the Novaya Zemlya coast and found Het Behouden Huys still standing, its interior a frozen time capsule of 1597 — clocks, navigational instruments, books, cooking gear and the men's possessions, undisturbed for nearly three centuries. The relics were recovered and are held in the Netherlands, principally at the Rijksmuseum, the physical remains of the first winter Europeans are known to have survived in the high Arctic.
Lessons
- Do not commit a vessel to a route the geography will not support; a passage that exists only in theory leaves no fallback when the ice proves real.
- Plan for entrapment before it happens — an expedition provisioned only for transit must improvise survival from nothing when the ice closes, and improvisation in the dark costs lives.
- When the ship is dying, build survival that does not depend on it: the party that ties its fate to a crushing hull dies with it; the one that builds a refuge lives.
- Prize fresh local food in the polar regions even without understanding why it works — diet, not stores, is what carries a party through the winter.
- Recognize when a refuge has become a trap, and leave while leaving is still possible; the certainty of a second winter can be deadlier than the risk of the boats.
References
- Willem Barentsz WIKIPEDIA
- Willem Barents | Arctic explorer, Arctic voyages ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
- Third expedition to the Arctic, led by Barentsz and Heemskerck ATLAS OF MUTUAL HERITAGE
- The Three Voyages of William Barents to the Arctic Regions (1594, 1595, and 1596) PROJECT GUTENBERG (GERRIT DE VEER)
- Third Time's a Charm: The Last Voyage of Willem Barentsz OCEANWIDE EXPEDITIONS