While the men worked on the boats, Barents was ashore, prone on his back suffering from advanced scurvy and a helpless invalid. On June 14 the sea opened sufficiently and with the vessels fully loaded, he and another sufferer were carried by stretcher to the shoreline and gently placed on board, one in each boat. They then sailed away, “committing ourselves to the will and mercie of God, with a west north-west wind and an endifferent open water, we set saile and put to sea.” Left behind was the lovingly constructed house that had sheltered them during that dark, savage winter. A letter written by Barents was nailed on the chimney relating the tale of the expedition’s adventures and survival and signed by every member of the crew. The document told “how we came out of Holland to saile to the kingdom of China, and what had happened unto us being there on land, with all our crosses, that if any man chanced to come thither, they might know what happened unto us and how we had been forced in our extremity to make that house and had dwelt 10 monthes therein.” The two tiny crafts put out to sea and headed north. Their plan was to round Mys Zhelaniya, proceed south, hugging Novaya Zemlya’s west shore and make contact with Russians or Samoyeds on the mainland coast.
On the third day out they found themselves in a narrow channel with thick ice buffeting them about. With action of the floes growing increasingly rough and threatening to the insubstantial hulls, Heemskirk gave orders for the vessels to be hauled out of the water onto a large stable floe. Supplies were unloaded, the sick men laid out on piles of clothing, and the boats were duly dragged to safety. From time to time faults in the ice opened and a number of containers disappeared into the sea, including casks of bread, trunks of clothing, and the boxed astrolabe.[15] One sharp-eyed sailor, however, managed to grab hold of the ship’s moneybox just in the nick of time as it was about to be swallowed up — Dutch blood spoke.
Repairs were carried out on the hulls, “much bruised and crushed with the racking of the ice.” On the third day of their self-imposed idleness as they awaited the clearing of a passage, Barents suffered his last and died. His body was gently lowered into the water. “The death of Willem Barents put us in no small discomfort, as being the chief guide and only pilot on whom we reposed ourselves next under God …” writes de Veer. Shortly after the leader’s death, the other critically ill man also died.
On the 22nd, the waters cleared sufficiently for the boats to move on and after a few days more sail through ice, contrary winds, and then fog the two vessels managed to clear Novaya Zemlya and eventually reached Siberia where they were greeted by native fishermen. After days of rest and with strength renewed, they continued their two-hundred-mile passage, rounded the Kola Peninsula and arrived safely to a Lapland fishing village. The Russians received them with every sort of hospitality, taking them into their homes and offering them dry clothing. “We ate our bellies full which in long time we had not.” Then in early September, eleven weeks after setting out, they came across by pure serendipity their colleague from whom they separated in Spitzbergen on the outbound passage. The survivors reached Holland on November 1, eleven months after leaving.
Reflecting on this remarkable tale of endurance and survival, one stands in awe at the Dutchmen’s force of character. Imagine setting out on a sixty-foot wooden boat into unknown and uncharted reaches of the high Arctic, provisioned and equipped with four-hundred-year old technology. Imagine standing on a barren, bear-infested island in bitter cold and snow and watching your vessel being heaved up by ice and broken. Then, with little likelihood of rescue, being cloistered for over half a year with seventeen others, freezing in a gloomy, acrid shelter inexpertly constructed of planks and driftwood (your share of the floor space is forty square feet). And in that isolation: sickness and death, pitiable diet, dangerous bears, extreme monotony, and a profound sense of isolation and abandonment. One wonders at the mould from which these early Arctic intrepids were formed — exceptional people they were. Eighteen men had been drawn by the beguiling song of the Arctic Siren. Twelve returned home, six became enveloped in her deadly embrace.
Notes
1. Jeannette Mirsky, To the Arctic! (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 26.
2. G.B. Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, Publication #10 (New York: American Geographical Society, 1928), 56.
3. Richard Vaughan, The Arctic: A History (Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1994), 56.
4. Ibid., 27.
5. J. Hamel, England and Russia:Comprising the Voyages of Tradescant the Elder and Others (London: Frank Cass &Co. Ltd., 1965), 87.
6. L.H. Neatby, Discovery in Russian and Siberian Waters (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1973), 10.
7. J. Hamel, 100.
8. J. Watts De Peyster, The Dutch at the North Pole and the Dutch in Main (New York: New York Historical Society, 1857), 10.
9. Richard Vaughan, 60.
10. Gerrit De Veer, The Three Voyages of William Barents to the Arctic (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1876), 25.
11. Ibid., 63.
12. L.H. Neatby, 22.
13. A small town north of Amsterdam.
14. A large wine cask capable of holding 150 gallons.
15. An astrolabe is a primitive instrument used in determining latitudes, in bygone days essential for navigation.
3
First Western Thrust
AT THE TIME THAT the Muscovy Company and the Dutch were pushing eastward into the Arctic, the English sought the elusive passage to Cathay through the Arctic regions of the western hemisphere.
It was an Italian navigator in the service of King Henry VII of England, Giovanni Caboto — John Cabot — who was the first to follow upon Columbus’s initial voyages to “the Indies” half a decade earlier. Armed with the royal commission from His Majesty awarding him “full and free authoritie, leave, and Power, to sayle to all Partes, Countreys and Seas of the East, of the West and of the North under our banners and ensigns with five shippes …,”[1] Cabot set off in 1497 from Bristol, England’s second-largest seaport.[2] The voyage was short-lived. He made landfall in Iceland, which in itself was of no major significance since English fishermen had already been harvesting those rich waters and the island was familiar to them. Details of this particular voyage and the subsequent one are not known, and much of what has come down to us is speculation. In Iceland some sort of critical dispute took place between Cabot and the crews, which sadly resulted in an empty-handed return home.
In May of the following year, Cabot set off again, this time with only one vessel, the fifty-ton Matthew. We know that the ship reached Dursey Head in southernmost Ireland, that they pressed on, that the ship’s crew was deeply frightened by icebergs, and that they landed somewhere in North America on June 24, 1497. But where, exactly? Possibly Cape Breton or Labrador or even in Maine, and conflicting claims are made on the matter. The most likely landing spot was Cape Bonavista in eastern Newfoundland. But what matters is that John Cabot is acknowledged as being the first European to have set foot in North America since the Vikings a half millennium earlier — of whom nothing had been known at the time. Back in