In August 1897 the Belgian naval officer Adrien de Gerlache sailed from Antwerp aboard the Belgica, a converted Norwegian whaler, with a crew of 19 drawn from five nations, intending to survey the Antarctic coast and press toward the South Magnetic Pole. In March 1898 the ship became trapped in the pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea and could not be freed before winter. The Belgica thus became the first vessel ever to overwinter in Antarctic waters — not by design that the crew welcomed, but as a trap. Locked in the ice through the months-long polar night, the men were struck by scurvy, paralyzing depression and, in at least one case, insanity. Two died: one washed overboard before the ship was beset, one of a heart condition during the winter. The rest survived, and in March 1899, after sawing and blasting a channel through the floe, the Belgica broke free and limped home.
The expedition’s place in history is double-edged. It opened the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration and proved that humans could survive a winter on the frozen Southern Ocean. It also served as a clinical demonstration of what that winter does to the unprepared body and mind: the slow assault of vitamin deficiency, the psychological collapse brought on by perpetual darkness and confinement, and the near-disintegration of a command structure as its officers fell ill. The ship was saved less by its nominal leadership than by two junior members — the American surgeon Frederick Cook and the young Norwegian first mate Roald Amundsen. As de Gerlache and the captain, Georges Lecointe, were laid low, Cook and Amundsen took charge, forcing the crew to eat fresh seal and penguin meat against the commander’s distaste, organizing the men against despair, and devising the scheme that finally cut the ship out of the ice. The Belgica is therefore both the first Antarctic winter and a case study in how a polar party survives one: by fresh food, enforced activity and the refusal to surrender to the dark.
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.
Six men of Robert Falcon Scott’s British Antarctic (Terra Nova) Expedition, cut off by pack ice on the coast of Victoria Land in early 1912, dug a snow cave on a barren rock they later named Inexpressible Island, endured the Antarctic winter on seal and penguin meat, and then walked roughly 200 miles back to the expedition base — and every one of them lived. The party was led by Lieutenant Victor Campbell of the Royal Navy and comprised the surgeon and naturalist George Murray Levick, the geologist Raymond Priestley, and three ratings: Petty Officer George Abbott, Petty Officer Frank Browning and Able Seaman Harry Dickason. Unlike Scott’s polar party, dying that same season on the far side of the Ross Ice Shelf, the Northern Party suffered and survived intact.
The ordeal was not the goal of any plan; it was the consequence of one failing. The party had been set ashore at Evans Coves, near Terra Nova Bay, in January 1912 to do a few weeks of geological survey, with provisions sized to match. When the ship Terra Nova could not return through the ice to retrieve them — twice it tried and was driven off — the six were left on an open coast as the brief Antarctic autumn closed, with sledging rations meant for weeks and a winter of darkness ahead.
What followed was an exercise in disciplined improvisation. The men hunted seals and penguins while any could be found, killing an estimated 120 penguins and 15 seals; they excavated a cave roughly 12 feet by 9 in a hard snowdrift, lit and heated it with blubber lamps and a blubber stove, and lay through the polar night in filth, smoke and near-starvation, rationing each day’s food and reading aloud to hold morale. Dysentery and enteritis, probably from tainted meat thawed in contaminated vessels, ran through the group, and Browning was reduced to near-collapse. When the light returned, they harnessed themselves and hauled south, crossing the treacherous Drygalski Ice Tongue, and reached the safety of the main base in early November 1912 — emaciated, scurvy-touched, but all six alive.