Willem Barentsz Explores the Arctic

In 1594 the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz sailed north from the Netherlands in search of a sea route to Asia along the northern coast of Russia. He never found the passage, but his expeditions in the 1590s pushed European knowledge of the Arctic far beyond what it had been, and they showed that the Dutch were ready to challenge Spanish and Portuguese dominance of the spice trade by new means.

The background was commercial and political. Portugal and Spain controlled the known routes to Asia, around Africa and across the Atlantic and Pacific, and the Dutch, then fighting for independence from Spanish rule, were largely shut out. Merchants in Amsterdam and other towns, encouraged by the geographer Petrus Plancius, backed the idea of a northeast passage along the Eurasian coast. Some believed that the Arctic summer sun would keep the northern seas ice-free, a theory that proved badly mistaken. Barentsz, an experienced pilot and chartmaker from the island of Terschelling, was chosen as a navigator.

In 1594 several ships set out, and Barentsz sailed in one that followed the coast of Novaya Zemlya, the long island group north of Russia. He reached its northern part before ice and uncertainty forced a return, while another ship in the expedition passed through the Kara Strait and returned with optimistic reports. That encouraged a much larger fleet in 1595, but it met heavy ice and failed. A third voyage in 1596, with two ships, discovered Bear Island and Spitsbergen, whose coasts were mapped for the first time by Europeans, before the ships separated.

Barentsz's ship became trapped in ice off Novaya Zemlya's northeast coast. The crew built a shelter from driftwood and ship timbers, later called the "Behouden Huys," and endured the polar winter with cold, scarce food and attacks from polar bears. In the summer of 1597 the survivors set out in two small open boats. Barentsz died during the journey, but most of the men reached the Kola Peninsula and were eventually carried home. The remains of their winter camp were found in the nineteenth century, and objects from it are now in Dutch museums.

The expeditions did not open a trade route, and the Dutch soon turned to the sea route around Africa, founding the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Yet the voyages had lasting effects. The charts and accounts, especially the narrative by crew member Gerrit de Veer, informed later Arctic exploration and contributed to Dutch whaling near Spitsbergen. The Barents Sea bears Barentsz's name today.