Willem Barentsz and the Northeast Passage

Three times, in 1594, 1595 and 1596, the Dutch sent ships north-east in search of a passage over Russia to China. On the third voyage Willem Barentsz and Jacob van Heemskerck discovered Spitsbergen, rounded the north of Nova Zembla and were caught by the ice; the crew built a house of driftwood, the Behouden Huys, and survived the Arctic winter, the first Europeans to do so. Barentsz died on the return in the open boats in June 1597. Gerrit de Veer, who sailed on the last two voyages, published the account at Amsterdam in 1598, with Cornelis Claesz, illustrated with engravings of the bears, the ships in the ice and the house, images that Europe never forgot.

The book was translated into Latin, French, German, Italian and English within a few years, and reprinted in the Dutch collections of voyages of the seventeenth century: Colijn's series of 1619, Commelin's Begin ende Voortgangh, the small editions of Hartgers and Saeghman.

Our collection holds the account in the Colijn edition of 1619 and the Hartgers edition of 1650.