Chilling with ‘Icebound’

Review by Bill Doughty––

As the summer heats up literally, here’s a way to cool off literarily: Andrea Pitzer’s goosebumps-inducing history-science-adventure true story, “Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World” (Scribner, Simon & Schuster, 2021).

It’s the otherworldly true story of Dutch sailors, led by navigator William Barents, as they attempt to find an open polar sea in the Arctic in the age of sail.

Barents, who pioneered map-making in the Mediterranean, made three voyages for the Dutch Republic in the 1590s. This book covers all three ventures, but zeroes in on the third and final fraught attempt. The Dutch, along with other nations, wanted to discover a northern trade route to China.

It was time of growing empires and growing sea trade in slaves and spices.

It was also a time of war between Spain (Catholic and monarchistic) and the Netherlands (Protestant and based in liberty). While war raged in western Europe, Barents and other Dutch sailors headed East and North, hoping to find a warm sea beyond the ice.

Barents was considered a “magician” for his ability at celestial navigation. “He could look into the sun and fix their ship’s position not he globe. He could watch the stars and tell them the day of the year.”

Though no navigable route was found, the young Dutch Republic would continue to expand over the next hundred years –– thanks to the slave trade, spice trade, exploration, and art –– to become the largest economy and naval power in the world at the time, according to Pitzer.

“William Barents would play a role in that drama, but as he readied himself for his first voyage into the Arctic, his country was a blank slate, its sins and achievements still unwritten,” she writes.

Navy readers will appreciate Pitzer’s recounting of history and science, naval lore, and the courage and commitment of sailors in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

For example, as regards history and science…

We are reminded that Vikings “discovered” Ukraine and that the science of navigation relied on the discovery of trigonometry in 1080 by Arab Astronomers, as well as inventions by Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Greeks, and Scandinavians. What they knew in the late 16th century, though, was dwarfed by what Barents and the sailors didn’t know. Many great scientific discoveries were yet to be made.

“As they set forth, they knew some things. They knew how to set the sails on the ship to catch the wind. They knew how to steer. They knew how to work wood, and hunt, and trap. Barents could reckon latitude and knew the stars, and those he didn’t know, he had charts for. Sailors understood that icebergs haunted the northern regions and could stretch for miles. Sometimes rising more than two hundred feet above the waterline, they were capable of rewarding vessels and the tiny human presence guiding them.

“Barents and his fellow crew members knew some things, but it wasn’t enough. They possessed no scientific understanding of gravity, no telescopes, and no calculus. Though they could find their latitude, they couldn’t yet determine longitude from aboard a ship. They were centuries away from deciphering the germ theory of disease. More than a hundred years could pass before humanity would discover that lightning was electricity. Decades remained before doctors would realize that blood circulates in the body, and that a cell is the unit of life. As he sailed into the Arctic, Barents would, in time encounter wonders and terrors without understanding most of the forces at play in his universe.”

Nenets idols, Vaigach Island.

Naturally, in the absence of information and in the embrace of superstition, early sailors believed good –– and bad –– fortune was the will of God. They believed their religion condoned slavery, for example, and ordained “man” to overcome and rule over nature.

Pitzer describes interactions with indigenous people in the far north, including the Sami and Nenets, who worshipped wooden idols, which fascinated the sailors. One sailor stole an idol and took it aboard ship only to be forced to return it later.

As the Scientific Revolution was beginning to blossom in Europe with Copernicus, Descartes, Francis Bacon, Barents and his crew were collecting and measuring polar bear pelts and walrus tusks and studying flora and fauna –– three hundred years before Darwin. Barents explained mirages, experienced the gap between Earth’s magnetic pole and true polar north, and mapped the geography at the edge of the Arctic. He also resolved a centuries-old superstition about barnacle geese: that they did not spontaneously hatch from barnacles (because no one had previously seen their nests and eggs).

Pitzer hides her history and science within harrowing tales of survival aboard their ship, at Vaigach Island, on boats, and at then-ice-covered Nova Zembla.

We feel the cold chill the crew to the bone. We hear chunks of ice hit the hull of the ship, see the men fend off frequent attacks by polar bears, smell the stink of sickness, and taste the desperation as the men are trapped in the ice over the winter: “Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World.”

Arctic fox

Navy history readers will appreciate passages about sails, masts, knees, joint pegs, and planks; scurvy; mutiny; keelhauling; and generally what life was like for age-of-sail sailors at sea –– endless routines, fear of storms, and trying to thrive in a crowded space.

Ultimately, this is a story of perseverance, the strength of the human spirit, and the will to survive.

The sailors relied on trapping Arctic foxes and finding birds and eggs. They rationed what food they could salvage from their ship. And they built a cabin and collected drift wood to keep warm.

Hampton Sides, author of the great “In the Kingdom of Ice,” blurbs: “Engrossing … Andrea Pitzer brings Barents’s three harrowing expeditions to vivid life –– while giving us fascinating insight into one of history’s most intrepid navigators.”

Pitzer visits Nova Zembla in 2019.

Pitzer bases her research on journals, material in museums, and interviews with scholars. She relies on entries in the original diary of Gerrit de Veer, one of the sailors who returned to tell the story.

She also makes a remarkable visit in August 2019 to Nova Zembla, “a numbing, desolate place,” near the ruins of Barents’s cabin. The land is now a Russian Arctic preserve.

The book concludes with a sobering account of the effects of global warming in the Arctic and the loss of ice during summer and over recent decades. Pitzer gives a stunning conclusion about the intersection of Barents’s exploration, our understanding and acceptance of science, and a context for how humans impact the planet.

Survival of individuals, and perhaps the species, depends on the will to endure, adapt, and overcome.

“Icebound” can be a springboard to confront cold, inconvenient truths.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG 71) prepares to replenish stores and fuel with the Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oiler USNS Laramie (T-AO-203) in the Barents Sea, Oct. 29, 2020. Ross is currently on its 10th Forward Deployed Naval Forces-Europe (FDNF-E) patrol in the U.S. Sixth Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe and Africa. (MCSN Christine Montgomery)