Three Arctic tries left his name on a frozen sea
Willem Barentsz (c.1550–20 June 1597), Dutch navigator and cartographer, hunted a Northeast Passage three times. Ice blocked Novaya Zemlya and the Kara Sea twice; on the third voyage his crew found Spitsbergen and Bear Island, then wintered nearly a year on Novaya Zemlya before he died on the 1597 return.
Born around 1550 at Formerum on Terschelling, he carried a patronymic meaning ‘Barent’s son’ rather than a family name. A mapmaker, he sailed to Spain and the Mediterranean to finish an atlas published with Petrus Plancius. He believed open water had to lie north of Siberia, reasoning that round-the-clock summer sun would melt the ice and that it would thin the farther north a ship went.
His first voyage left Texel on 5 June 1594 in the small Mercury. The crew tried to take a wounded polar bear home alive, but it ran amok on deck and had to be killed; at the Orange Islands their hatchets and pikes shattered on walrus hide. He followed Novaya Zemlya north until icebergs turned him back. Prince Maurice, full of hope, sent him out again in 1595 with six ships of trade goods for China, but the Kara Sea had frozen and the trip was judged a failure.
With state subsidies withdrawn, Amsterdam fitted out two ships in 1596. They sighted Spitsbergen on 17 June and planted a post bearing Dutch arms, then split at Bear Island after Jan Rijp decided to head due north. Trapped off Novaya Zemlya, Barentsz’s men built a lodge, slept with heated stones and cannonballs, sewed trade cloth into blankets, and trapped Arctic foxes whose raw meat unknowingly eased their scurvy. In January 1597 they became the first to record the polar mirage now called the Novaya Zemlya effect.
In June the survivors set off in two open boats; Barentsz died on 20 June, aged about 47. Seven weeks later Rijp, by chance, picked up the last 12 men off the Kola Peninsula. In 1871 a Norwegian seal hunter found the lodge still standing, and a later visitor recovered a note Barentsz and Jacob van Heemskerck had left. The Barents Sea took his name in 1853.
Source: Willem Barentsz
