Icebound: Shipwrecked on the Fringe of the World

The human story has all the time been certainly one of perseverance—usually in opposition to exceptional odds. Probably the most astonishing survival story of all may be that of Sixteenth-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans earlier than and, on their
third polar exploration, misplaced their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The boys would spend the following yr combating off ravenous polar bears, gnawing starvation, and infinite winter.

In
Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully combines a gripping story of survival with a sweeping historical past of the good Age of Exploration—a time of hope, journey, and seemingly limitless geographic frontiers. On the story’s middle is William Barents, one of many Sixteenth century’s best navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path by the deepest, most distant areas of the Arctic resulted in each tragedy and glory. Journalist Pitzer did intensive analysis, studying use four-hundred-year-old navigation gear, setting out on three Arctic expeditions to retrace Barents’s steps, and visiting replicas of Barents’s ship and cabin.

“A visceral, thrilling account filled with tantalizing surprises” (Andrea Barrett, creator of
The Voyage of the Narwhal ), Pitzer’s reenactment of Barents’s ill-fated journey reveals us how the human physique can operate at twenty levels beneath, the historical past of mutiny, the artwork of celestial navigation, and the intricacies of constructing shelters. However above all, it provides us a first-hand glimpse into the true nature of human braveness.