In the late 1500s, the era of European exploration continued at full tilt. The Dutch wondered if there was a passage to the north beyond the North Pole that could connect the Netherlands and China. Otherwise, they would have to sail west around Europe and loop around the southern tip of Africa to Asia, which was arduous and dangerous. Whether the passage into the deep north led to China or some other unknown land, it was a gamble the Dutch navigator William Barents considered worth taking. These explorations (1594, 1595, and 1596) would lead to mutiny, shipwreck, standoffs with polar bears, and using beams of the ship to build a makeshift home to defend against the Arctic tundra. Icebound is the story of those ventures into uncharted waters that the world remembers four centuries later.

At the time of Barents’ first maritime venture into the deep north in 1594, the decade-old Dutch Republic was still in its nascent stages. Its days as an economic powerhouse, of its military prowess, and world famous painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer, were still ahead of it. There is very little record of Barents before the voyage, but the explorer would have been in his forties when he first embarked for the Arctic unknown. He did not come from wealth or privilege, but his writing tells us he’d found a way to become educated. He wrote that since he was young he’d loved maps and navigating, and would mark down the contours of coastlines where he sailed.

This obscure seaman could not have known it when he first set out, but he would be remembered and celebrated through the centuries, memorialized in statues and street signs, in and beyond his native Netherlands. For now, he was just a simple seaman taking all the risks for politicians and merchants back home.

Nova Zembla. It’s Dutch for “New Land,” and the name of an island hundreds of miles north of Russia.  In the 16th century, no European had ventured north of it, but cartographers and navigators were taken with the idea of a warm North Pole. All one had to do was break through the ring of glaciers that surrounded it to find open seas on the other side. They reasoned that 24 hours of sunshine during certain seasons would melt the ice. Similar speculations had been floating around for thousands of years, as far back as the ancient Greeks.

The mountain of unknowns dwarfed what Barents and his crew knew as they set sail in 1594. It was a time before germ theory. Or Telescopes. Or electricity. They didn’t know about polar bears or how quickly ice could immobilize a ship. They were going in blind, with little more than rumor to guide them.

There was a lot riding on these voyages for Barents. He was leaving behind a wife and five kids. Their well being rested precariously on the success of this voyage. Moreover, Barents was not in the spring of his youth by any means. Life expectancy at that time was a fraction of the longevity much of the world enjoys today. Forty is midlife in the 21st century, but based on 16th century averages, he would have only a few more years left—even if he weren’t risking his life on the high seas.

Three ships headed north from Amsterdam on May 29, 1594, hugging the Norwegian coast until they arrived at the island of Kildin, just north of Russia and Finland. From there two main vessels diverged, following different courses into the unknown, wondering which would lead them to China. One vessel sailed due east, under the south side of Nova Zembla. The other vessel, Barents’ ship, was to head north and travel along the north side of Nova Zembla. The ships would rendezvous on the other side of Nova Zembla or, in the event that they couldn’t reestablish contact, they would return to the island of Kildin by Finland and Russia.

By July 7, the vessels had sailed more than 2,000 miles from Amsterdam. Barents pursued a northeasterly course, crossing from Kildin to Nova Zembla. Barents didn’t know it yet, but the watery expanse the ship had crossed would one day be named after him. The last half of July was slow going, thanks to lots of fog and little wind. And then, always in the background, was the gnawing and growing anxiety of not knowing what would come next and that no human on earth could tell them.

At the end of July, Barents measured his latitude: 77 degrees. This was further north than any European had yet ventured. The landscape became increasingly barren. No trees and eventually not even bushes or scrub. Just moss and lichens.

The men also were shocked to see walruses and enormous, pure white bears. Their first encounter with a polar bear almost resulted in a mauling when they tried to capture the animal alive. In the end, they impaled one that was attempting to enter the row boat. The walruses surprised the sailors, too. The crew wanted the tusks to sell, but after breaking and blunting their steel weapons on the tough walrus hides, realized that they could barely draw blood—let alone kill—these giant animals. All they got was part of a tusk for their trouble. Like many explorers who would come after them, the sailors’ first instinct when encountering wild unknown animals like polar bears and walruses was to kill them for fur and tusks.

The longest, warmest days ended with the summer solstice (June 21). The days were getting shorter and the cold began creeping back in again. The further north the vessel ventured, the larger and more threatening the chunks of ice, and the crew became increasingly disgruntled at the slow progress as fall approached.

By some kind of miracle, the vessels reunited near Vaygach Island, to the south of Nova Zembla. After traveling thousands of miles, reuniting in remote waters, and dodging the ice quickly building up around their vessels during the trek back, the ships managed to return to the Netherlands. They concluded there were two viable routes to China. Investors saw the first voyage as hugely successful, and eagerly planned for a second.

The governing bodies and investors back in Holland were elated to hear about the possibility of northern passages to China. The walrus tusks and polar bear hide that the crews returned with were a nice touch. For the second voyage, four Dutch cities commissioned seven ships. The fleet might draw unwanted attention, but there was also safety in numbers, and merchants wanted plenty of their wares on board to trade for spices and ceramics.

The plan was to send ships on northern and southern routes around the island of Nova Zembla once again; this time with an additional convoy to trek around the southern cape of Africa in hopes of competing with the Portuguese and Spanish traders and swaying Asian merchants to trade with the Dutch instead.

Like the first voyage, the ice proved an impediment their ships could not break through, but unlike the first voyage, when sailors were merely grumbling and restless, the second voyage devolved into mutiny and executions. It was likely Barents’ suggestion that the crew to stay in the deep north for the winter and wait for spring that catalyzed the rebellion and executions on the second voyage. For a sailor to commit mutiny was a potentially lethal gamble. In the end, the rebellion did not go the mutineers’ way. The captain rounded up and hanged the five mutinous ringleaders, and charted a course for home. Interestingly, Gerrit de Veer made no reference to the mutiny or executions. It could be that it was commonplace or shameful a moment to include the records. 

The ships returned to Holland in the late fall, as on the previous venture, but it was a year earlier than investors expected, and most of their wares intended for trade with China were damaged or at the bottom of some desolate sea in the far north thanks to inclement weather and near misses with glaciers.

Undeterred by a restless and discontented crew on the first voyage and outright mutiny and executions on the second—not to mention near entrapment within the ice on both occasions—Barents proposed a third voyage at a local council. It was swiftly shot down. After two northern voyages failed to find a way to China, it was hard to find investors eager to commission new fleets. Some offered prizes to any crew that could successfully get to China through the north passage. Most provinces and merchants said “no,” but Amsterdam agreed to two ships for a third go. One cartographer suggested they sail due north from Norway in search of a way through the ring of ice that many supposed surrounded the North Pole. Nova Zembla and Vaygach Island were as far as they got before getting trapped and forced to turn back.

For the third expedition they specifically sought out unmarried sailors. Merchants hedged their bets by loading up the vessel with less valuable goods than they had sent out previously. They wanted to trade with China, but they could not afford to keep taking losses. Based on models from that era, the ship was likely a yacht just 60 feet long and 16 feet at its widest section. This would have been tight quarters for even the modest 16-member crew.

The third and final voyage began May 18, 1596. The good news was that they discovered a number of islands north of Norway: Spitsbergen and Bear Island. The bad news was their vessel then became trapped in the ice in late August. Ice falling from glaciers hemmed them in, and the pieces collected and compacted around the vessel. They hacked at the ice with crowbars. They fended off curious polar bears. They prayed to God. But the winds and weather and currents thwarted every effort to dislodge the ship. A few days later, in early September, a blizzard blew in, further solidifying their ice encasement. They eventually resigned themselves to the fact that they would be wintering in one of the most hostile places imaginable—an island north of Russia, Nova Zembla. 

The small crew that emerged from the icebound ship was depressingly underprepared for the elements. The Netherlands could get cold, but this was the Arctic, and winter was coming. Even in September, Nova Zembla was frigid. The ship could not be dislodged, but it could become a shelter. The castaways used timbers from the ship to build a makeshift cabin, 36 by 20 feet. The carpenter on board was the first to die from the cold, which took the wind out of the builders’ sails. And with the ground frozen solid, a proper burial was impossible.

As they traversed between the ship and the building site, the men learned not to travel alone. The island was swarming with polar bears, and they frequently had standoffs with the predators. By early October they had constructed a home under desperate circumstances in one of the most hostile environments on the planet. To retrieve supplies from the ship, they fought off polar bears who had made themselves at home in the ship.

To mark the passage of time during the total darkness of polar night, they had a clock and an hourglass to tell the days apart. By telling the days apart, they could create a calendar of sorts and mark down the days until daylight began to return. It helped the castaways feel they had some control as they prepared to hunker for a long, dark winter. They were not able to bathe readily. They got scurvy, a condition brought on by a vitamin C deficiency that affects the gums and joints. Besides humans and a few other species, animals create their own vitamin C, so the men, without realizing it, alleviated their scurvy when they ate the occasional Arctic fox they managed to trap. But Arctic fox dinners were few and far between, so scurvy became a mounting problem for the crew.

After spending much of deep winter indoors in their safe house, often buried under snow and plagued by sickness, they contemplated a return journey—not in the yacht still tightly encased in ice, but in small boats that the men outfitted with a small mast, sail, and rudder. On June 14, about a year after they set out on their third voyage, the haggard, scurvy-weakened crew piled into the boats and made their way around the island of Nova Zembla and south toward Scandinavia. Even before the daring return voyage, Barents was at death’s door, and, somewhere along the way, the crew left his body on Nova Zembla or on the ice off the coast.

On September 15, after sailing 1,600 miles in the rowboats, they boarded a Russian ship that brought them to the vessel of Jan Cornelis Rijp, who had captained one of the vessels on previous voyages. From there, they made their way back to Holland.

On November 1, a year and a half after sailing off into the north, the remnant of the crew (12 sailors in total) returned to their native Netherlands. Donning hats made of Arctic fox pelts and the same clothes they left in a year earlier—now grungy and tattered—the castaways were ushered into the Court of the Admiralty, where they recounted for the royalty and foreign dignitaries present the story of their struggles for survival.

The talk of these Dutchmen surviving in the far north of Nova Zembla under the bleakest of conditions became a sensation that captivated all Europe within months of their return. Gerrit De Veer, who was present with the expressed purpose of recording the voyage, published the story as The Three Voyages of William Barents to the Arctic Regions. The account was promptly translated from Dutch into French, Latin, Italian, and English.

The sailors survived even if their fearless navigator did not, and his demise only made him more of a legend. The sea north of Finland and Russia would eventually be named the Barents Sea. The expedition itself became a cultural icon referenced for centuries in literature, from Charlotte Bronte to Jules Verne to Jonathan Swift to Vladimir Nabokov to Salman Rushdie. Shakespeare referenced the Dutch sailing in the deep north in his play Twelfth Night.

In our own day, Barents’ voyage would be far more doable than it was four centuries ago. Every summer, the polar ice cap shrinks to unprecedented levels, creating the conditions Barents, the Dutch, and even the ancient Greeks envisioned: a navigable polar sea. In summer 2017, a Russian tanker traversed the polar sea without the accompaniment of an ice breaker to clear the way, so free and open were the seas. The open seas allowed the transport of goods to Asia—to South Korea not China, as Barents had hoped for in his own day. It was, in fact, a time saving route for the Russian tanker, preventing it from having to travel via Africa’s Suez Canal. In an unexpected way, Barents’ quest was not outside the realm of possibility. He was just a few centuries too early.