Regional History Librarian Liam Guthrie recommends Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World by Andrea Pitzer.
In 1594, Europe’s age of exploration was in its infancy. Spain and Portugal had only recently begun to establish their trading empires, and much of the world remained unknown to western Europeans. The newly independent Dutch Republic, barely a decade old after it’s revolution against the Spanish monarchy, sought to establish its own foothold in the realm of international trade. Lacking the naval power to compete with the Portuguese on the Indian Ocean, the Dutch decided to discover their own route to the East. They would go north over Eurasia.
Andrea Pitzer’s Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, describes in fantastic detail these Dutch expeditions, the very earliest of their kind, into the great white north.
Led by legendary Dutch navigator, William Barents, these expeditions pushed the frontiers of exploration, science, and survival in the Arctic. They would encounter things that no western European had ever seen before: polar bears, walruses, polar mirages, and unimaginable cold. Despite a severe lack of knowledge of and preparation for their environment, they pushed onward. On their third expedition they pushed too far and (as the title suggests) were shipwrecked on the ice. Barents and his sixteen men would have to survive the winter further north than possibly any human in history had ever done.
Icebound is often harrowing, sometimes humorous (these naïve 16th century Dutchmen at first believed they could capture a live polar bear to bring home to Amsterdam with halberds and pikes), and fascinating read throughout. Andrea Pitzer does an incredible job of putting the reader into the (sometimes wooden) shoes of these Renaissance-era Dutchmen experiencing a world entirely new and alien to them, sometimes coming up with ingenious solutions to their problems and other times making the most rudimentary of mistakes in their struggle for survival.
Icebound is a must read for any fan of history, adventure, and tragedy.
