The Third Voyage of Willem Barentsz: Trapped in the Ice of Nova Zembla

Two ships, a search for the Northeast Passage, and the first European winter in the high Arctic

By the 1590s the Dutch were determined to reach the riches of Asia without passing through seas controlled by Spain and Portugal. The boldest idea was a Northeast Passage, a route over the top of Russia to Cathay and the Indies. Its greatest champion was Willem Barentsz, a master navigator from the island of Terschelling, who had already led two probing voyages north in 1594 and 1595.

When the States-General declined to fund a third state expedition, the city of Amsterdam took up the gamble itself, fitting out two ships for the attempt in 1596. Command was shared between Jan Cornelisz Rijp and Jacob van Heemskerck, with Barentsz sailing as chief pilot, the navigational mind of the enterprise. The chronicler Gerrit de Veer sailed too, and it is his vivid account, published by Cornelis Claesz in 1598, that preserves the story.

The voyage opened with real discovery. In June 1596 the ships found Bear Island, named for a polar bear the crew fought there, and then sighted the dramatic peaks of a new land they called Spitsbergen, today's Svalbard. After the two captains disagreed on which way to push, the ships parted. Rijp turned back north; Heemskerck and Barentsz bore east toward Nova Zembla, Novaya Zemlya, the long island guarding the Kara Sea.

There the ice closed in. Rounding the northern cape, their ship was gripped and crushed by pack ice, stranding the men far from any help as the Arctic winter bore down. With extraordinary resolve they hauled driftwood and timber from the dying ship and built a shelter on the frozen shore, Het Behouden Huys, the Saved House. It was the first time Europeans had deliberately wintered in the high Arctic.

The winter was a trial almost beyond belief. The men endured months of darkness, cold so fierce their clocks froze and the walls glittered with ice, dwindling food, the threat of scurvy, and the constant menace of polar bears prowling the camp. De Veer's engravings of bears attacking the hunters, of the ships locked in ice, and of the little house under a frozen sky became some of the most famous images of the age of exploration.

When the sun returned and the ice would not release the wreck, the survivors abandoned ship in June 1597 and set out in two small open boats along the brutal coast. Willem Barentsz did not live to see safety: he died on 20 June 1597, only days into the desperate journey. Under Heemskerck and de Veer the rest fought on for weeks, eventually reaching the Kola Peninsula, where, against all odds, they met Jan Rijp again and were carried home.

They never found the passage. But they had charted Svalbard and Nova Zembla, proved that men could survive an Arctic winter, and produced a narrative that gripped Europe. In 1871 the Behouden Huys was rediscovered, its relics astonishingly preserved. The sea Barentsz sailed still bears his name, a fitting monument to one of the most courageous failures in the history of discovery.