Book Review – Icebound: Shipwrecked At The Edge Of The World

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Thought your lockdown was tough? William Barents and his crew were stranded in the Arctic for nine agonising months, with barely any food and at the mercy of ravenous polar bears. Ice-olation as opposed to isolation

THE name of William Barents isn’t that familiar to us these days beyond perhaps a line of type on your atlas, marking a patch of blue north of Norway and Russia – the Barents Sea.

But this enthralling, elemental and (literally) spine-chilling epic of courage and endurance certainly deserves to change all that.

Barents was an energetic businessman and seafarer in the early days of the new-born Dutch republic at the end of the 16th century, a tiny country that would soon become the world’s leading economic and naval power.

It was an age of adventure and exploration, of burgeoning science and medicine, and of great art – Vermeer and Rembrandt would soon be along. It was also an era of limitless promise, as the undiscovered parts of the world opened-up their great and vast treasures.

Barents was the outstanding navigator of his age, and when the traders and merchants of the thriving port city of Amsterdam saw the chance to make a pile of money in the new world to the east, it was to him that they turned.

Barents hatched a plan to sail north to Nova Zembla (“New Land” in Dutch), an unmapped and infinitely desolate finger of rock and ice stretching hundreds of miles into the Arctic seas north of Russia.

If his little fleet could round that finger of rock, then maybe he could confirm the long-held (and very mistaken) view that there was a warm sea at the North Pole.

TWO

REACHING China would then be achieved much faster, and safer, than across the southern oceans and so bring untold wealth to the prosperous burghers of the fledgling Dutch republic.

It was, in today’s language, a no-brainer. And in William Barents, then in his 40s, the investors had just the man. An inveterate explorer, he had sailed all the shores of Western Europe and pioneered map-making and cartography in the region. This voyage was a chance to remake the geography of the world. It was too good to resist.

At the heart of this magnificent story – using two contemporary accounts from crewmen – is Barents’s third voyage, after a couple of early recces.

His ship was 60-odd feet long, about the length of a cricket pitch, and the crew numbered just 17.

In August 1597, they rounded the tip of Nova Zembla hoping to reach open seas, but they found themselves surrounded by icebergs – vast frozen cliffs moving dangerously around the boat, while the winds grew stronger, and the currents drove them into shore.

The icebergs began to tilt the vessel backwards and smashed parts of the stern. As the huge ice floes surged and withdrew like the ebbing of the tide, Barents realised the ship was finished and they would have to winter on dry land until the spring.

What an extraordinary decision it was: these bold, resourceful Dutchmen towed the contents of the ship by sled across the ice on to Nova Zembla, where they used driftwood to build a log cabin.

As the blizzards raged and the temperature dropped to -30C, it wasn’t just the devastating cold the men had to contend with. Food from the ship was limited so they hunted and cooked the marauding foxes. These were fortuitously a limited source of Vitamin C, but still the men fell ill with scurvy, which wrecked their bodies and loosened their teeth.

Besides the weather, their main enemy was the countless polar bears which were far from the loveable creatures to which they are often portrayed.

We might think of them floating, anxious and hungry, on a passing ice floe; for Barents and his men they were vast, cunning and savage enemies always ready to attack.

They were also a source of fuel: that is, if the sailors could kill the bears before they were killed themselves.

For the long winter, it was a matter of survival, with life on the very edge of mortality. These boundless and courageous Dutchmen did, however, find a way to celebrate Twelfth Night in January 1597, with the last of the wine from the boat, fox meat and ship’s biscuit. The blubber from a slaughtered polar bear fuelled their lights as they caroused.

When, after nine months imprisoned in their makeshift hut, the weather changed, the crew set sail in the little boats they had saved from the ship.

They went south in an epic of physical stamina, battling ice and foul weather before being rescued by Dutch traders near the Russian coast. On the way, even Barents’s endurance gave out and he could last no longer. His body may have been left to float away on a piece of ice, before he finally slipped below the freezing oceans that he had tried to conquer.

THREE

BACK in Amsterdam, the crew’s exploits were wildly celebrated, and chronicles of their ordeal were translated all over Europe. The voyage became a symbol of suffering: Shakespeare, writing about another Twelfth Night, has Sir Andrew Aguecheek dismissed thus: “You are now sailed into the north of my lady’s opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard.”

More than 400 years later, the remains of Barents’s little hut that kept his men alive through the long, frozen days can still be seen on Nova Zembla, as Ms Pitzer, a Washington-based journalist and historian who sailed Barents’s route, describes in a moving epilogue.

In exploration voyages today, every step of the journey becomes part of a daily Twitter blog or an Instagram update. But back then there was nothing; and after a while Barents and his band of crewmen were to all intents and purposes presumed dead.

As Ms Pitzer writes, he set the scale for a new kind of hero, based on knowledge, immense skill and endless endurance.

Barents may have been wrong about the warm Polar Sea, and his dream of an open trading route across the roof of the world wouldn’t arrive for centuries, but his heroism and the endurance of his small band of sailors became a shining example at that point in time. Perhaps it should be even now, especially at a time when many people are bellyaching about not being able to do exactly as they please.

. Appendage

– Long before Bering or Amundsen, long before Franklin or Shackleton, there was William Barents, in many ways the greatest polar explorer of them all. In this engrossing narrative of the Far North, enriched by her own adventurous sojourns in the Arctic, Andrea Pitzer brings Barents’ three harrowing expeditions to vivid life, while giving us fascinating insights into one of history’s most intrepid navigators.

Arts, History, Society

Former-MI6 chief tells tale of Cold War double agent

HISTORY FESTIVAL

SIR Richard Dearlove, the former-MI6 chief, has given a rare, personal insight into how he handled one of the West’s most important double agents during the Cold War.

He is not meant to talk about Secret Intelligence Service – the formal name for MI6 – operations, but said he has “licence to describe certain cases” if the material is “already to an extent in the public domain”.

He also revealed at a History Festival how the double agent’s daughter ended up very wealthy after receiving the thousands he was paid and hid in a London bank.

The case unfolded after Sir Richard was posted to the British embassy in Prague earlier in his career as a first secretary in communist Czechoslovakia in 1973 with his wife Rosalind.

“I had obvious diplomatic tasks, but I was there essentially as a member of SIS under diplomatic cover. My main job was to run an espionage case,” he said.

It involved what is called a “walk-in” – a man who had indicated to the British authorities he wanted to spy for them.

“He was a Czech intelligence officer in charge of the operations that the Czechs were running to try and penetrate British intelligence,” Sir Richard said.

He did not name the man but referred to how information about the case from the Czech archives had been publicised – a reference, it is understood, to reports about Miloslav Kroca, codenamed “Freed”, who was a KGB-trained major in the Czech secret-police force.

Sir Richard told the festival: “Running a case like this was a great risk – not to me, but to the source. If he were caught, he would be executed.

“Yet we were able to meet him regularly over a number of years. Because he himself was an intelligence officer he knew in detail the forces that were deployed against me by the Czechs on a continuous basis.

“If you were a young energetic diplomat in the British embassy who spoke Czech you were suspected of being a spy. You were constantly being examined to see if you were running a case like this.”

But when the Czech officer suffered a heart attack and ended up in hospital, his Russian wife handed a bundle of secret papers into his office – among which was one that revealed instructions for his next rendezvous with Sir Richard.

Sir Richard said the meetings were carefully planned so he and the source came independently from different directions. Because of his training, Sir Richard knew the surveillance on him would be in front of, rather than behind, him, “i.e., cars parked at strategic places”.

“We’re deep in the Czech countryside and I recognise them immediately because I know all the number plates that these are surveillance cars,” he said. “They’re clearly trying to find out who’s going to the meeting. Of course, the agent doesn’t turn up and eventually he dies of natural causes.”

But Sir Richard, who was head of MI6 between 1999 and 2004, said the story had a “wonderful ending”. The source’s motivation had partly been revenging on his colleagues but he also wanted his daughter to have a different life.

“He earned a lot of money that he never touched and went into a bank in London. Compound interest can make you very wealthy over a significant period of time,” he said. Years later, a British intelligence officer went to Prague to see the president Vaclav Havel and said: “I want you to find this girl.”

Sir Richard added: “She’s had a terrible life; she didn’t know what had happened to her father other than something catastrophic.

“She is summoned to meet Havel and he hands her a cheque which is her father’s money – many, many thousands of pounds. She is now a very, very wealthy Czech businesswoman.”