Icebound: Shipwrecked on the Fringe of the World

The human story has all the time been one among perseverance—usually towards exceptional odds. Probably the most astonishing survival story of all is likely to 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 lads would spend the following 12 months preventing 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 nice 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 biggest navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path by means of the deepest, most distant areas of the Arctic resulted in each tragedy and glory. Journalist Pitzer did intensive analysis, studying the right way to 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 stuffed 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 under, the historical past of mutiny, the artwork of celestial navigation, and the intricacies of constructing shelters. However above all, it offers us a first-hand glimpse into the true nature of human braveness.