We turn the compass north on this Dogwatch and thankfully are joined by Andrea Pitzer, a person who not only has been on multiple Arctic expeditions but has also written Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, a book about one of the early European polar explorers of the region, William Barents. Along with being a writer of books and a freelance journalist, Andrea has a wealth of other experiences that inform her perspectives. In our conversation, we discuss what life was like at the end of the 16th century, what questions Barents and others were trying to answer on their expeditions to the Arctic, and some of how those adventures turned out. Ultimately, Andrea helps us see Barents as someone who made his name not so much for his specific discoveries but for his ability to endure and persist in the face of incredible suffering, which became a template for later polar expeditions. She even points out how Shakespeare included a reference to Barents and his men in Twelfth Night, referring to an “icicle on a Dutchman’s beard,” and shows how widely this adventure was known despite the account of the voyages not being published in English at the time.
Given that this episode focuses on the Arctic, our feature is the late James McCarthy, who was a Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. H passed away in 2019 at the age of 75. The Harvard Gazette quoted Al Gore:
“Nobody communicated the importance of the climate crisis in the context of the oceans as eloquently and passionately as Jim.”
I definitely looked up to Jim in our interactions, and remember his generosity, passion, and particularly his commitment to understanding and taking action on climate issues. It is now up to us to follow Jim’s lead, to redouble our efforts, and commit each day to take on this challenge.
Transcript:
Icebound – Andrea Pitzer Transcript
Michael Canfield: Hello. This is Michael Canfield, and thank you for joining us today on The Dog Watch. The Dog Watch is an evening shift of early or late duty or the people who undertake it. This Dog Watch considers the natural world and the things that help us experience it, from dogs to watches and everything in between. Ultimately, it’s a place for us to go wherever curiosity takes us. We turn the Compass North on this Dog Watch and thankfully are joined by Andrea Pitzer, a person who not only has been on multiple Arctic expeditions, but who also has written a book about one of the early European polar explorers, William Barents. Along with being a writer of books and a freelance journalist, Andrea has a wealth of other experiences that inform her perspectives. In our conversation, we discuss what life was like at the end of the 16th century, what questions Barents and others were trying to answer on their expeditions to the Arctic, and some of how those adventures turned out. Ultimately, Andrea helps us see balance as someone who made his name not so much for his specific discoveries, but also for his ability to endure and persist in the face of incredible suffering, which became a template for later polar expeditions. She even points out how Shakespeare included a reference to Barrett’s and his men in 12th Night, referring to an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard, and shows how widely this adventure was known at the time, despite the account of the voyages not being published in English at the time. Given that this episode focuses on the Arctic, our feature is the late James McCarthy, who is professor of biological Oceanography at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He passed away in 2019 at the age of 75. The Harvard Gazette quoted Al Gore as saying, nobody communicated the importance of the climate crisis in the context of the oceans as eloquently and passionately as Jim. I definitely looked up to Jim in our interactions and remember his generosity, passion, and particularly how his commitment to understanding and taking action on climate issues. It is now up to us to follow Jim’s lead, to redouble our efforts and commit each day to take on this challenge. And with the spirit of Jim’s dedication and curiosity, we turn to our conversation with Andrea Pitzer.
Hello, Andrea. Thanks so much for joining us today on The Dog Watch.
Andrea Pitzer: Oh, I’m so excited to be here.
Michael Canfield: Well, I know from your writing and especially your recent article in the Journal Nautilus that you’ve been on four recent expeditions to the far north, and you suggested that you studied Russian cold water diving, navigation. So given those skills and travels, I’m wondering where I might find you today.
Andrea Pitzer: Well, I’m actually sitting about 5 miles outside Washington, DC at my home in Northern Virginia, so the pandemic has not entirely shut things down for me, but definitely has slowed the pace of my voyages.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. So the nice thing is that we can actually go places in our minds, too. And that’s one of the things you’re writing has really helped me do. So even though you’re not on an expedition right now, I guess we can really mind that. And I guess that’s a place I’d like to start by learning a bit more about your travels, especially trips to the far north and what you’ve done there. So can you give a sense of those activities and kind of how you ended up going to the far north four times and what led to that and what you experienced there? Just an overview.
Andrea Pitzer: Well, I’m 53 years old, and if you had told me even a decade ago you’re going to go on several Arctic expeditions, I would have said, I think you have the wrong person, because one of the things that I really hate is to be cold. And so there’s some humor to this. But I came across the story of these far Northern Islands above Siberia called Nova Zembla in English, and they were part of this story of William Barents, who was shipwrecked more than 400 years ago there. And I sort of sat on this story the Dutchmen more than 400 years ago trying to survive farther north than any European had sailed or mapped at that point. And I just thought it was such a neat story. And I kind of sat on it in my mind for a decade before I decided to write a book about it. But when I’m writing books, I really want to add something that just any journalist or any standard historian or academic historian who could all make really valuable literature about a story. I wanted to write something. Maybe they couldn’t. And so the answer for me was, I guess I have to go there. So my first three trips were in service to the Icebound Project, the story of William Barrett. And I went, let’s see, the first time was on Svalbard, halfway between Norway and the North Pole. That was during Polar night. And I went on a dog sled expedition to the interior. Since my characters had been in Polar Night at about the same latitude, I wanted to see what that was like. And then the second trip was even more sort of perfect for covering this story of Barren, because I was able to go on a tall ship. Now it’s not a 400 year old tall ship, and it wasn’t rigged exactly the same as Barents was back then. But there was an Arctic Circle residency I was able to go on, and I learned how to haul on those sales and how to Bellay the lines. I spent a lot of time up the mast as much time as the captain would let me spend to about 100ft off the deck, trying to imagine myself the first person to see the shoreline that we were seeing, because that was, in fact, some shoreline that Barents was the first to map and discover. It’s important to say a lot of times when we talk about discoveries with European explorers, we’re talking about places that were already settled, already known. But in this case, it was so far north and such an arid landscape that there weren’t Indigenous populations up this far north. But on that second expedition, I was able to be on a tall ship and be up the mast, and that was fantastic. And then the third one, I actually went to the Russian Arctic, the ruins of the cabin where Barents and his men were stranded for the winter in 1596. And I went with a Russian crew for that. And that was really a life changing event. And it’s kind of strange to talk about it in the context of this horrific war that Russia has launched against Ukraine. But I became very close to that crew. It was a small, independent scientific research vessel, and as a result of working with them, I studied cold water diving and studied Russian. I had already learned some navigation skills. They’ve been teaching me more. And I went back last summer with them even farther north in pursuit of another story I hope to write about later that took place on Franz Joseph land, which is an archipelago even farther north than Barents ever made it. So those are the four that I’ve been on, and each one of them has really kind of a treasure in my heart.
Michael Canfield: It sounds like that’s a pretty big stretch for you. For someone who didn’t initially like cold wouldn’t have anticipated that the person you are now. If I said, hey, I’ve got this expedition and it was something interesting to you, would you want to go back?
Andrea Pitzer: Oh, always my goal. I don’t want to make it sound too far afield from what I would have done, let’s say, 20 years ago. I have a black belt. I taught karate for a living for several years. I would say I am very interested in engaging in unusual things. The cold probably just wouldn’t have been what I would have predicted, but certainly something international, something to do with history, something that’s relevant today. These are all sort of themes that this fits into, and part of how that affects us today is why I would like to go back again and again and again. I don’t think there’s any more important story in the world right now than what is happening with climate, for the future of humanity, for the importance of the decisions we’re making today. And being in the Arctic, I think, is an opportunity to not just talk about the history of what’s happened there, but to document what’s happening this moment and also trying to preserve this moment because it is changing so quickly that I feel every time I’m up there that I bear witness. And I don’t really feel comfortable going just to write even a really exciting polar survival story. I really feel each time I go, I try to come back and do other reporting and write about it in different ways that get people to pay attention to this region. But to also understand there’s really serious stakes with what’s happening in the Arctic is changing so much more quickly than the lower latitudes. And we really need it to function to help keep us from more global warming rather than becoming a driver of global warming. And it’s getting near some tipping point.
Michael Canfield: Yeah, agreed. And I really appreciate you saying that and bringing that to the podcast, because I think it’s fun to talk about balance and other things, but I do think this is the most I agree it’s the most important issue of our time. And again, looking forward to how you can use your experiences and bring those things forward. And some of your writing, even the writing you just have done. So I appreciate that and look forward to more of it kind of on that topic in the sense of your biography. I know in your bio you were a Nieman fellow. You’ve been a freelance journalist. You’ve written for a lot of publications like The Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, USA Today. So a lot of major publications. But you’ve also been a music critic, a portrait painter, French translator, and a record store manager. You mentioned martial arts. You’ve done a sort of fascinating variety of things. And as we get to know you here, I’m wondering if you can point to any through lines or kind of themes that help us understand who you are as a person and sort of an academic or intellectual.
Andrea Pitzer: First of all, I just want to say I was not a Nieman fellow. I was a Nieman affiliate, which is, I would say, a lesser creature. But during my time associated with the Foundation, I ended up with the Nieman Foundation, which is the journalism foundation at Harvard. I launched a narrative nonfiction site for them called Nieman Storyboard, which is a project I’m really proud of. And it looked at how journalists tell stories in every medium. So everything from film to writing to photos to postmodern forms like how can we get across stories that matter in ways that people can the sort of universal attraction people have to narrative and story, but to also carry really important ideas along with it. I would say that’s one through line that we can kind of point to in my life is that since I was a very young child, I wanted to be a writer. And I sort of went through an early phase where I was a published poet right after College. And I certainly did a lot of writing in College. But Interestingly, I was in the School of Foreign Service. I went to Georgetown and I was in the School of Foreign Service. And my major was humanities and international affairs. And then I kind of did this hard break away from all of it. I had so much student debt. I mean, not even student loans only, but direct debt to University. I didn’t get my diploma for five years until I paid it off. It was just a staggering amount of debt which I know a lot of students today can empathize with. And so I kind of just feel like I guess I can’t be a writer. And so I spent about a dozen years not writing at all. And it’s so fascinating to me in the way that perhaps one is only fascinating to one’s self that somehow in my 40s, I sort of, I don’t know, turned the truck around and drove in a different direction and wound up exactly where I had hoped to as a child, which was as a writer. And in College, all my books have been this international affairs and humanities and arts and literature and history sort of folded into this international setting. And then the journalism side, these important stories. And I’ve really tried to sort of thread all these weird, fragmented parts of my life together into one thing that it’s like, okay, it’s not one thing, but I sort of made this nest for myself out of all these bits of things. And I think that would tell you something about me that it’s haphazard somewhat intentional stumbling into things, but in the end, probably pursuing the things that I’ve most wanted to pursue all along.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. And I wanted to follow up and paraphrase something that’s been used to describe some of the things that drive you sort of from an intellectual standpoint. And this suggests that events and ideas that were once common knowledge but have fallen from public memory fascinate her and as does humanity’s tendency not to learn from history. So that’s, again from your bio. But I’m curious kind of how you would describe what that means about you and how those things are important.
Andrea Pitzer: Well, I think that certainly in the world in general. I think in some ways the kinetic energy, the sort of fast pace of information and ideas and life in the US, it’s a real asset, but it also tends to mean we kind of forget what happened five minutes ago. And sometimes those things that happened in the past are really important. And so we’ll talk about events. I’m just thinking one or the Holocaust or it can be almost anything. And we think we know things about it yet we’ve forgotten some of the most important parts, often things that were well understood at the time. But then we look back through history and we’ve forgotten kind of how to make sense of even some of the things that we know. And so I really love going back to historical sources, archival sources, sometimes to survivors of different events and to talk to them and to realize there’s nothing more I like to do for readers and with readers because it’s a process for myself, too, then to kind of take something they think they know something about and take it up and rotate it like 15 degrees, and then suddenly we see it in a whole different way, and not just with new information and with a new understanding, but I think we get used to seeing things a certain way. My first book was the story of Vladimir Nabokov, the guy who wrote Lolita and his younger brother, barely younger than him, had died in a German concentration camp. And in the book, when I was writing the book, I took the readers through his desk when the ballcock found out about it right after World War II. And I realized that everybody has heard about deaths in the Holocaust. Everybody has heard about they have a way that they already interact with that concept. And I can’t break that shell. They’re going to have that reaction. And there’s nothing I can do about it to make this fresh and new in this moment. But I wanted people to understand that death in a different way. So actually, later in the book, when the Nabokov was writing a novel that I thought touched on his brother’s life in some ways that people hadn’t realized before then in that second moment in the book, I take people through when I went to that campsite, that German campsite and looked in the archives and found everything I could about what life was like when he was there. I took them back through a typical day in the life of a prisoner in that moment, and then had him basically die a second death, which is, as an author, is cruel. But I thought, having exhausted the Reader’s first reaction, like, oh, somebody died in a concentration camp. Then to bring it back and do it in a different way would let them see it anew. And so really, that’s a big goal with my writing, is to try to have people see things in some fresh way that they weren’t thinking before with new information and a new perspective.
Michael Canfield: Right. And you mentioned you wrote the first book, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, and you also had another book called One Long Night, A Global History of Concentration Camps. And again, I think those could be a subject of their own independent conversation, which eventually, maybe someday, I’d love to have. But today I’d like to turn to your most recent book, Icebound Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World. And it’s a fantastic book. We were just talking a bit ago about the physical object. I think it’s absolutely a beautiful cover. And I guess we’d call them the end papers. Are these maps? And you mentioned to me kind of how those came about. Can you just describe what those are? Because I think if somebody I encourage people to get the book, and the hardbound version is beautiful. These and paper check rates. So where did those come from?
Andrea Pitzer: So I had this idea. I was also an artist. I think he mentioned in the Bio that I was a portrait painter. I did a lot of work in oil paints, and so I always have these creative ideas, some of which are not really useful in the publishing industry, but sometimes they are. And maps are one of the things. It turns out that I’ve made the maps for the hardbound book. I made the maps for the concentration camps book. I did those myself in Photoshop, but I thought it would be nice to do something sort of more elegant for the endpapers on icebound. And I had this idea that I was going to take these bathroom tiles and shatter them and make a mosaic of blue and green tiles, blue for the Arctic areas and green for the subarctic areas. And it was clear that we were going to need maps of all these Islands and places that Barents went that were north of mainland Asia and mainland Europe. But how they would look, it wasn’t clear. And then there were just a whole series, as so many people had during the pandemic of catastrophes that fell into my life with family crises and things. I didn’t have a chance to actually build that, which would take them quite a bit of time, because I’d never actually made a mosaic that way before. So instead, I basically did all of it virtually, but use real grout lines and real tile colors and photos of all those things and just basically smash them up and Photoshop and built the maps out of that. And I wasn’t sure that they would really pass muster. It’s different when you have an idea for something and have a basic sketch of it as opposed to having it be polished enough. But they ended up quite happy with it. And then there’s a background to that map that is wood if you look around the edges, because, of course, Barents had a wooden ship back then. And there was a tree about three blocks from my house that was from the Civil War, and it had to be cut down right around the time that I was starting to work on these endpapers. And so once it had to be cut down, I went and took photos of cross sections of the trunk and that wood, even though it’s not 400 years old. I like the idea of a very old, very historic wood being used as a sort of framing for this map that I built.
Michael Canfield: Yeah, it’s beautiful. And as somebody comes to this object as a book again, you may listen to it, which I have both listened to it and read it, but it’s a nice thing to have around and to see in the flesh, so to speak, as you come to it, however you do. Icebound, set at the end of the 16th century, around 1594, is kind of when the main story starts. I’m curious when somebody comes to this, a lot of times with an Arctic exploration story or whatever. You might just think, okay, they’re on a ship. It’s back a long time ago. A long time ago means a lot of different things. And I’m curious if you might help us set the stage a little bit. What were things like in the late 1500s, especially in this part of Europe, kind of set the stage as far as daily life, health care, food, the economy. I mean, obviously that not a full European history course, but just kind of wondering if you could set the stage for kind of how things would be different than what we might imagine.
Andrea Pitzer: Well, this was one of the challenges was at some point you go far enough back in history and it does sort of all just fall into this murk. And there’s a phrase in Russian in English, it would basically be once upon a time. And once you categorize it with that, it just kind of becomes this lump like way long time ago. And I wanted to really make this vivid for readers instead, not this vague time, a long time ago. And Barents’s story lends itself to that really well, because this was in the first years of this Dutch Republic that was formed. So the Netherlands broke away from Spain, and they were in the middle of an 80 year war when Barents set sail, still working for this independence. And I wanted to capture that. People, I think, in the US, don’t often ponder revolutions before the American Revolution. Right. But yet the Dutch were sort of a template for that and for the Protestantism that would be in the US. And so there were these religious conflicts, there was a literal war, there was political conflict, and there was this new Dutch Republic that wanted to set big stakes and establish itself in all the good ways and all the horrific ways that a Dutch Empire would mean. And this is at the beginning of that time. And in addition, so I wanted to sort of set that geopolitical setting, that drama for people because it’s very exciting and very dramatic. They had cannons with them on the ship because they thought they might have to engage in war with the Spaniards. And so this wasn’t an abstract thing. It was a real thing. But just as interesting to me was this sort of scientific moment that these men set sail. They would during the course of the three expeditions that Barents went on, one in 1594, one in 95 and one in 96, even though they weren’t scientists in any way that we think of that today, the way that they would so accurately record everything that they saw actually added hugely not to just geographical understandings, but literally to fields of science. But in that moment, they knew so little in terms of understanding their world. And that was fascinating to me how they could sort of be these scientists without having any scientific background. And in such an age where so little was known, just to be clear with readers, they didn’t understand that the cell was a unit of life. They didn’t understand that blood circulated in the body. They didn’t know about germ theory of disease, that germs were how you could get sick. They didn’t even know. I think I mentioned the book that lightning was electricity. They had to encounter this amazingly difficult challenge in which science could have helped them without almost any of the modern tools. So not just the GPS and the great gear we would have today, but a literal understanding of the world of medicine, of health, of any of it. And so there was a daughter of an astronaut that I’m acquaintance with, and she was talking with her dad about this book, and he was saying that what Barents and his men did was actually sort of more impressive and more higher stakes in a lot of ways than what astronauts do, because we know more about space than they knew about that part of the world that far north at the time. And so what they did was extraordinary.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. And I think that’s one thing that in reading the book and thinking about these things, that really is a lesson that transcends just the story of these people that gives a sense of the time and also what it means to not know things, especially things that we take for granted in an age of massive amounts of information to just follow up on that a little bit. So I’m wondering how both lay people and geographers at that time thought of geography like the world. That is sort of what a map would have looked like in their mind and how they thought of the poles, et cetera. So from Barents’s perspective and his peers, how did they think of maps like the maps of the world, what was known and what wasn’t? And then kind of how did they think of the polls?
Andrea Pitzer: So in terms of maps and Barents and his peers, they were probably more informed than we would expect if you’re just thinking 400 years ago, because now don’t forget that Columbus had already been to the Americas 100 years ago at this point. And even before Columbus, it had been understood for a long time that the world was round. So some of these superstitions that might have still been true among several of the sailors were quite well known by the cartographers. People like Barents and people who actually sailed ships as captains and had to navigate the world was round. It was understood. They realized that the rough outlines of all of the main continents that we would know today, but not the polar situation. So the maps were inexact, but they did understand latitude quite well. So that is how far north or south you were above or below the equator. And they could determine that from a ship really accurately. And they could not, however, determine longitude from a moving ship with real accuracy, which meant that they knew how far they were above or below the equator, but not how far east or west they were of, let’s say, of Amsterdam, where Barents set out from. They didn’t really know that the maps are sometimes stretched a little are strange, but if they had the latitude, they could get back to that point. And so some of the maps were pretty exact for places that have been sailed a lot. Some were not as exact. But once you got toward the poles, they, of course, didn’t know that narcissisted at this point. And they weren’t sure if there was a Northern polar continent. They suspected that there might be. And going all the way back to the Greeks, there was this idea because even the Greeks understood that there was an Arctic Circle. There was a part of the world that during its summer would be in daylight 24 hours. And that part, if the land fell inside that circle, that Arctic Circle, that that would be the case. And so there was this not totally illogical idea that while it might be quite warm there in summer, and from that came this theory of the open polar sea. And the idea was just at some of these middle, high latitudes, as you headed north, you might hit a ton of ice, but if you could just break through that ice or get around it, you would come to not necessarily a warm sea, but one that was liquid and able to be sailed, where you wouldn’t be stuck in the ice. And this open polar sea actually held in some places until the early 20th century. It was never that late. I would say it wasn’t a majority theory, but there was always a significant minority who thought this and Varnish was one of them. And so the idea each time, of course, it was not ideal for the Dutch to sail south to try to trade with the east. This was the whole point of various three voyages was to get to trade with China and then the South Asian areas. But they didn’t want to go south because they would have to go along Spanish routes and they would have to go past Spanish territory. And because of the war, of course, this was a bad idea. It’s also quite far. So they had this idea, if they could just go north over Scandinavia and Asia, that they could pop down and have a faster route and a safer route. So three times variants set out going north. And the first two times it was very nearly frozen in, but turned back in time to get home. And then the third time, they were stranded on the Islands of Nova Zembla, north of Siberia. And let me say at that point, this was really an unknown place. It was off every map and the conundrum that put them in was that if they were going to get home, not only did no one know exactly where they were, they didn’t even know that place existed, which meant that the Dutch crew stranded there would have to find a way to get home themselves. So it was really very daunting from that point of view. And that’s really the story of the book. Right. That balance is motivated to go north to try to get through this ice and through the sea to China, and I guess India to trade. Right. To make that happen.
Michael Canfield: And I guess with that motivation, one of the things as a reader and someone coming to this relatively new is it just felt like and again, maybe this is naive, but it felt like they were. I guess here’s the question. Why Nova Zembla? Why did they kind of keep coming back to this one spot? It seems like if you sailed north, like, they would get to different spots each time or I know they weren’t exactly the same spot, but it felt like they were kind of beating their head against the wall. Do you see what I mean?
Andrea Pitzer: Yes. Well, there’s sort of two answers to that. One is they tried other things, and I’ll come back to that. And the second was that Nova Zembla is kind of think of it like, as a hot dog that you would try to stand up north of mainland Asia, and it would kind of flop to the right. So it was almost like this barrier coast that they felt like they had to get around if they were going to get to China. So I think in some ways, it felt like the impediment that they needed to go back to. But they did, in fact, try to go other places. On that first expedition, they found a path both north and south of Nova Zembla. And on the second expedition, Barents was overruled, and they actually because that was a seven ship fleet that went that had an Admiral named at the head of it, and they had cargo. They had everything they really thought they were going to get to China. And they decided to stick south of Nova Zembla between that leaning over hot dog and the mainland. And they thought that that would be the better route. So Baron sort of didn’t get his way on that second expedition, and it didn’t work. And then on the third expedition, the second one, I don’t want to give away too much of the story, but with such a disaster, there was a mutiny. Polar bears, eight men, men drowned. It was just almost everything that could go wrong went horrifically wrong. So when they had to turn around this whole seven ship fleet with the Admiral and all the cargo and the trade representatives and everybody that had been gathered to and it took a lot of money, of course, to put this together, the funders were horrified. They were no longer interested. So it was only a very small contingent that back to this third expedition. And for that third expedition, Balance, there were two ships, and Barents and the captain of the other ship were told in no uncertain terms, not necessarily you’re not going back to Nova Zembla. But they were told, go do north. Just go straight for the Pole, see if you can go right over the top of the planet, come down to China from that side. That was their express mission. However, they got up to that place I mentioned before, Swallowboard, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, to an island spittsburgh, which Barents was said to have named himself in the records. They couldn’t go any farther north. They got stuck, and then they had a fight about it. And Barents clearly comes out of the historical record. He’s a very stubborn man, and Barents doesn’t think that they can keep trying, that they’re just going to get stuck. And he wants to go back to Nova’s Embola. And so basically, this two ship expedition splits, and one of them stays and tries to keep going north there. And Baron and Captain Von Hintskirk end up heading back to Nova Zemba, which is where they then get stuck. And so it was both not intentional. That third expedition really wasn’t planning to go to Nova, Zimbabwe at all. But clearly Balance had this obsession in his head that that was going to be the path to get to China. And certainly it does lay between Amsterdam and China, so it’s not unreasonable. But it is kind of amazing that he gets stranded there, having already been quite near there and almost being frozen in one.
Michael Canfield: Yeah, I guess as you start to sort of look at it that way, it does make sense. But there’s something almost I don’t know if it’s poetic about it or ironic what the appropriate literary terms are, but it’s striking how there’s a big world out there, and especially with not having knowledge of longitude, et cetera, it would be hard to go to the same place twice in a way. But I guess if you follow the coast up, it does make sense that that’s helpful of the geography that you kind of end up in these places. So a clarifying point. You talk a lot about Barents and his role. It might be easy for people to sort of think of him as a captain. Right. But my understanding is he was a Navigator, which is a separate sort of role on the ship, and he worked very closely in tandem with the ship’s captain. Can you describe that relationship a little bit?
Andrea Pitzer: Sure. And it’s a little, I don’t want to say, lost to history. It’s not lost to history, but it’s a little undefined in history because we know he had different roles on each of the expeditions and in some cases, the terms that are used for that occupation aboard a ship have changed, and we don’t know always exactly what the same term meant 400 years ago, but here’s what we do know. On the first expedition, he was basically captaining the part of the expedition that split and tried to go north around Nova Zembla, and he was sent to do that. That wasn’t him breaking away from the rules at all. He was supposed to be sort of a scouting party with a smaller ship going north. And then on the second expedition, he was not the captain of any of the boats. He was the Navigator for the expedition. And so this seven ship fleet with the Admiral, there were captains for each ship, and he had a really critical role in being the experienced Navigator that they would rely on. But ultimately, the Admiral would do things like punish Mutinies, make decisions. If Barron said this is the way we should go, it would be the captain who would decide the captains together in a Council with the Admiral who would decide whether that was too foolhardy and whether they had to turn around when they turned that second expedition around. Barents actually opposed that, but was voted down. And then on the third expedition, he was, as I mentioned, with Captain Van Hemskirk in that setting on the ship that was stranded, the captain had the ultimate say over the safety of the ship and the safety of the men, and Barents set the route and how they would proceed and whether they could proceed with often his decision. So the captain outranked him, Barents, if you will, would be sort of the heart of the expedition, and the captain would be sort of the brain of the expedition in terms of making the final decisions about it. But when the men wanted to leave the next spring, even though the ship was still frozen in, the men were saying they didn’t think that the big ship would ever saw and they wanted to try to go home in their small boats, which was incredibly dangerous. But they felt strongly about it. It was Barents that they came to and they begged him to talk to the captain, and for the two of them to decide together that it was time to go. And so Barents sometimes was almost an intermediary as well. So it’s an interesting role because in some ways, he had all this knowledge, but ultimately, certain decisions weren’t his.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. And that gives context, I think, to his role and his centrality to the story, which I don’t want to give away too much. But really, I would say the second half of the book or whatever is really about that third voyage, and it’s a story about, in many ways, survival and leadership. And I’m curious, especially with the recent discovery of the Endurance. Right. And the Weddell Sea, the actual boat that Shackleton took, certainly in the public consciousness, the Trans Antarctic Exploring Expedition or the Shackleton Expedition as it’s sometimes known kind of looms large. It’s a big idea. It was early in the 1900s when that happened, three centuries after this story that we’re talking about. And it’s sometimes used as a sort of case study and leadership under harsh circumstances and survival. I’m curious how you think of the Barents story and what you’ve learned as sort of the antecedent of this, like what can be learned about leadership and survival and then sort of that part of the human experience that would then help contextualize what came later. So I’m wondering what you might be able to say about that.
Andrea Pitzer: This goes to the heart of so many things that fascinate me. And I actually just wrote an essay that I think will come out on the Nieman site. Interestingly enough, that is about the Endurance and discovering the Endurance. Yes. And how these certain stories seem just faded to be immortal stories. And this story, Shackleton, has really loomed so large in our consciousness. I mean, there’s TV shows, there’s documentary like you’re talking about leadership and Shackleton. They’re actually leadership books about Shackleton, you know, and it’s this whole world of its own. But one of the things I did for this essay was I went back and looked and Shackleton was certainly not forgotten. I mean, he had major accomplishments that were certainly remembered well in Britain by explorers around the world. He was not in any way an unknown person. But compared to Scott, let’s say, who was his contemporary, he had so many less statues built to him, so much less written about him in the years after his death. I mean, he was compared to his peers, much less well known. And it wasn’t until the 1957 book about the endurance and that this sort of really became a bigger part of modern consciousness. And even then, the book went out of print for more than two decades. And it wasn’t until it came back into print in the 80s that it started to pick up steam. And so all this knowledge that we have and veneration that we have for Shackleton is almost entirely from my lifetime, which is fascinating to me. So this goes back to what we were talking about before with what’s in popular memory, what falls out, what gets brought back. And so for Barents, writing this book was a little bit an attempt of my own to bring that story back. And I argue in the book that he is in many ways the first polar hero that we have because the men before him circumnavigated the Earth or discovered a new continent or did horrific things in new lands to bring money back to their home countries or their home empires. And Barents certainly didn’t mind being part of that project. He was trying to go to China to establish trade relations. So this was definitely part of the colonializing, part of the Imperial networking project that was underway in his time. But he failed in all of it. He didn’t get to China all three times. They fell thousands of miles short of their goal. And it was only on this third expedition that being in the north, that this group of men and I don’t want to ruin it. Some of them come back and some of them don’t. But the ones who do come back come back with this story of surviving in these incredibly harsh conditions off the face of the known Earth. And that story becomes legendary in that time. The story itself is translated into, I think, five or six languages in the first couple of years after it comes out, even before it’s translated to English. So there is no English translation at this time. But two years after they return, Shakespeare mentions these Dutchmen in the play the 12th Night, and he doesn’t even mention them by name. Their story is so well known, everybody understands what the reference is to these Dutchmen with ice in their beards. And so the way that this story knocked the socks off, obviously the King of contemporary literature at that time in another country before there was even a translation is astounding. And yet he fell into obscurity the further time moved on. And so I really was also interested in this idea of this sort of first polar Explorer who made his name through suffering and not through discoveries, not through other things. Certainly some of those happened, but what he really became legendary for was simply enduring. And I think that really became the template for all of those 19th and 20th century explorers that we now think of as sort of defining the genre.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. I wanted to ask you a question also that I think puts it into some relief, too. You mentioned the book The Expedition of John Franklin in 1845 when he took the ship Arabis and Terror into the Arctic. And despite having years of rations and the battleships, these are major ships, it was an unmitigated disaster. It sounds like. I’m curious whether that was a point you are trying to make in the book that a couple of centuries later a well equipped group with much more technology, much different knowledge like you were describing before, just the world, and they did not do nearly as well. I think it’s your point as our friends, Barents and contemporary. So was that what you were trying to say there?
Andrea Pitzer: It’s a little bit what I was trying to say. There were sort of two things, which is first of all, that one response to the situation that Barents was in was we’ll make it bigger. They had like central heating on. They had a library on the Arabic and Terror. They had water treatment. They had amazing technology with them. But sometimes one of the problems with technology is that it’s answering questions that you weren’t asking or it’s giving you things that weren’t what you needed. And I think that we see that technology alone is insufficient in the case of the Erebus and the Terror. And that one of the things that fascinated me was that they fell down in one of the ways that Barents and his men fell down, which was that even though there were no Indigenous populations as far north as Barents failed, he did encounter Indigenous populations on the way there. And what is today Canada, where the Arabs and Terror sailed and where they actually founded, there were populations living there. There were Indigenous people in the area. This was not completely unknown to humanity. These regions, there were people living there who understood how to live there. And it was the lack of the knowledge that they had was part of why the Erebus and Terror founded. And Interestingly, when the ships were rediscovered just in recent years, in both cases, it was actually Indigenous people who had a pretty good idea. In one case, it was like, oh, wait, I think I used to see a mass sticking out of the body of water. And so the expedition that went hunting for it, well, maybe we could stop there. I’m just paraphrasing, of course, but maybe we could stop there first on our way to look for it where we thought it would be. And then they found it, like, immediately. And so I don’t want to mock the serious efforts of scientists, but Indigenous knowledge was ignored in both cases. And so I would say one of the points I also wanted to make was that balance, as Franklin and others would later completely ignored this entire body of knowledge, such as, hey, those polar bears that you’re having to kill often to defend yourself, sometimes just for cruelty. Those skins that you have from them, I realize that they might be good like prizes for your patrons, but if you’re actually dying, maybe they would make clothes that would keep you warm when you have more than an inch of ice on the inside of your cabin walls and you are on the verge of death from scurvy. And yet they made Fox for hats for themselves, but they did not think to make warm clothes that they had seen the Nanites and Sammy people wearing. They had seen people in first. They understood this, but that they didn’t take advantage of it. And I think we later see, especially in the early 20th century, there are explorers like Perry, who actually learn various Indigenous languages, learn how to use skis and snowshoes build igloos. And it turns out that traveling with a much smaller party and moving quickly is a much more effective way to do this than this sort of battering Ram approach of the Franklin with the Arabic and Terror.
Michael Canfield: Yeah, fantastic. One other really short point. You mentioned the Polaris expedition in 1871 with Charles Francis Hall. I had understood, and you talked a little bit now about the endurance being found, et cetera, on the back of the Endurance. There’s that star. And my understanding is that Endurance used to be called the Polaris. Is that the same Polaris, or are they. No, my understanding and I will check this and let you know if I’m wrong. Let me start this over.
Andrea Pitzer: Okay. The Polaris was built. So the Endurance Shackleton’s boat was originally named the Polaris, and the Polaris was built for an expedition for another really good book, if you get a chance to read it, has recently been written about it. Okay. It’s called Madhouse at the End of the Earth, and it is about the first overwintering in the Antarctic. And Gerlosh was the expedition leader in that case. And that Polaris was built for his expedition, but did not ultimately get used for it. And so then it was sort of bought for a song and reconfigured to become the Endurance in the 20th century. So that was a recently built Polaris. Two different great.
Michael Canfield: Thank you. A couple of other questions. One, I guess hopefully quick question is just survival. You described people living in complete darkness. Right. And frigid cold without proper supplies, the risk of marauding polar bears, et cetera. You’ve been up there. How do people survive more than a couple of nights, right. Psychologically and otherwise? Do you have any insight on that? I think just as a normal person, how do we make sense of that?
Andrea Pitzer: So one thing that’s important to know is that because this was really key for them is that they had planned to sail all the way to China and back. And in terms of at least getting to China, they couldn’t have counted on having any stores. So they had a lot of food with them. So for them, rations got really lean and unpleasant. They had such bad scurvy that the ship’s biscuit this sort of hard crackery stuff that becomes the main fare of almost any sea voyage across several centuries. They couldn’t chew it. They would have to put it in hot water and basically turn it to mush to even be able to eat it, because scurvy loosens all that connective tissue. So their teeth were, like, falling out and it was painful to chew. So even if it wasn’t their favorite food and they ran out of beer, which was a catastrophe, of course, for many reasons, they didn’t run out of food. The food only got really to starvation levels after they had set out for home, when they were trying to get back home. And they had the small boats and they only had what they could carry with them in the small boats to try to come home. That was the point at which just pure starvation was a risk for them. So they did have food stores. They had surprising, they even had some seasonings. They had canned meat. They had a variety of things that they had to space out, though, so they were on pretty tight rations. They tried eating polar bear. They didn’t like the taste of the meat, which is, again, later expeditions were perfectly happy to have some polar bear meat, although there is one moment where they try polar bear liver, which it turns out is poisonous to the degree of being lethal sometimes. So that might be another reason why they later didn’t like polar bear meat so much. They didn’t want to take a chance on the rest of it either. But they did eat Foxes. They tracked Foxes and caught them. So they didn’t have a lot of food, but they did have some food and they could melt water. So it was time consuming and unpleasant to have to melt that much water, but they could melt the snow and ice for water. And so I think that was the first thing, was that just having enough to eat and water. And the second thing was building a shelter. They did build a cabin, and it was a good sized cabin. I don’t remember the dimensions off the top of my head, but something around the neighborhood of like 14 by 21ft, maybe a little bigger than that, because remember, there were 17 of them when they were first stranded. So you do need a certain amount of space to do that. But what’s interesting is this is far north of any trees growing. And so they actually had to Hunt along the shore until they could find lumbered, just literally trees that had washed up from Siberia. And they also dismantled some of the non. It’s called the superstructure. The stuff is built up on top of the deck from their ship, and they were able to make a cabin for themselves. So I think literally just going through Maslow’s hierarchy, they have food, they have water, and even if it’s insufficient food, not ideal shelter, they’re not having to compete with each other for any of those things. And so they begin to be able to work as a unit. But there are times when some of them are stealing biscuit and there are times and some of them are too sick to work. And at first and actually, in some of the activities for the whole time, the captain and Baron are exempt from those duties. And so you can imagine that the tensions were still quite high. Yeah, that’s fascinating and frightening, too, to think about it. And I should say too, I’m not a religious person, but that was an important thing in the historical record. We do see them praying. We do see them looking at things as signs and fear and wonder, and they believe that God is preserving them. And so that it’s clear that for at least part of the time and for some of them that that faith is an important thing as well.
Michael Canfield: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I have two more things. One involves a couple of readings and the Hardback book. I’ll just give you the page number but I think one of the things that this book does so well is kind of give a sense of what it would be like. Right. And the first one that I wanted you to read and comment on briefly is I’m on page 97 and really kind of describes what it would be like on one of his ships.
Andrea Pitzer: So William Barents’ ship on his third outing has no name in the historical record, but was of a typical Dutch style. Known as a yacht, it was constructed of wooden planks wrapped and sealed around ribs and braced by knees. A cargo area sat at the bottom of the hole, which the crew crammed with a wide assortment of goods, mostly second rate items, but a few impressive articles with which to initiate trade relations. And I want to say that when people hear yacht, it’s important to realize that this was a Dutch style of boat then. And actually, the boat that I traveled with to the ruins of his cabin was also known as a yacht. So in the sailing world, a yacht is not when we think of these luxury passenger ships that are today, but it is literally this sort of mid size. I was on a boat, they were on a ship, and that’s a factor of how many masts it has. But Interestingly, both of those vessels were within a few inches of being the same lengths, which was one of the things that I loved was being on and our engine died. That’s another thing I should say. On the way back from Nova Zumba, just as we pulled away from shore, almost like less than an hour later, the engine started smoking and we couldn’t use it. So we had to come back across the sea that is now named for William Barents, using just sales and with no idea how long this would take us. So it really helped me be back in that same kind of setting. But in terms of the yacht itself, it doesn’t mean what a yacht needs today. Yes. Continued on the next page just describing one about what life would be like under the deck. Yeah, this is a little different than our situation below deck, I’ll have to say. We had heaters and we had actually really good cooking. And we didn’t have Internet, but we had a phone, we had a satellite phone in case of emergency. But here is what Barents sent his men’s face. A ship at sea is a crowded space. The cooked stove, which sat on the same level where the men slept, was a low rectangular box that could be hoisted aloft for use on decks because of the smoke it generated in any confined space. But in the deep cold, sometimes the heat provided by the stove and the men’s quarters could offer enough comfort to offset the irritation from the smoke. So this is one thing we found again, and I found again and again like looking at the historical records of who was aboard the voyage and other voyages was just as they thought. They were really suffering in some horrible way. Some worst thing would come along, and then they would be, let’s say, in this case, the temperatures would dip low enough and suddenly they would be thrilled to have the smoke in their quarters because it would keep them from freezing to death if the fire were also in their quarters. But, of course, having the fire going below decks was also done dangerous in its own way. So there’s sort of an infinite number of dangers and this continual trading off as to which was the more severe one in the moment. There’s even one moment where they’re at sea and they’re about to crash into a shore and they’re trying to keep from crashing into the shore. And polar bears climb aboard the ship and are attacking them. And it’s just like they have to switch from not crashing into the shore to fighting off the polar bears. And I just thought and I think probably the pandemic feels this way to people, too, but it’s a much more vivid version of it when you read what was happening to them.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. And another description you have on page 117 in the hardback version, I think helps people think about something that I just think is in some ways unfathomable is how it was to move a ship around, sort of outside of just living on the ship. How did a ship move around with just sales? They didn’t have Motors in this sea of ice, and what would that have looked like? So maybe you can kind of read that and help us contextualize like, how did that work? What does that look like? Because it just seems like a mess to try to move from one place to another.
Andrea Pitzer: A lot of these times it is really difficult. So here’s a little bit what I wrote in the book for it to say. The next day, the ice field began to fracture with currents shearing the frozen landscape. It was August 10. At one point, with the ice moving around them, they realized that part of the iceberg to which they’d moored, the ship still sat grounded, but most of the ice was in motion. Fearing they’d be crushed in the chaos, they unmored the ship and set sail. Though the surface of the water was frozen, they skated over it, hearing the hole cracking through in places as they slid along. And this is one big difference between what balance faced and what I faced in the north, which is it is worth saying that when Baron set sail, there was a little ice age, so it was colder than the decades before and after. But at the same time, there was a lot more ice there then there is now. So we were up at the ruins of his cabin around August 23. I think it was and so height of summer, August is the warmest month. It is the month that you can navigate. And so when I was describing in the book what was happening on August 10, the water’s surface is frozen over. There are moored to icebergs. There are times that icebergs simply explode without warning. And it, of course, has to do with raising and lowering temperatures at various point and what kind of water it’s sitting in. But they experience all of these things. They experience icebergs coming by them that are taller than their mass. When there’s more than one ship sailing, they cannot literally mass to mass, see each other over these icebergs, which can be a half mile long. And so it’s really, in some ways a different planet than the one that you and I live on, even though, of course, it is the same planet. But moving the ship nimbly in that kind of setting is almost impossible. And on that first voyage, when they were trying to get north of Nova Zembla, they would encounter so much ice and the wind would be against them, too. They would have to tap into this wind doing these really steep zigzags, going miles and miles just to cover 1 mile north of distance and imagining doing that while being surrounded with ice that is on its own currents and slamming into you. It’s really a terrifying landscape in a way. It just wasn’t for me when I was there.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. And it seems like if you’re thinking of people trying to run a ship like that, even from their contemporaries that were in other parts of the world, you wouldn’t normally run into stuff in a ship or I think there would be risk of running a ground on a Reef or whatever, being crashed into a land, but you wouldn’t normally do that. But here it seemed like it was sort of an everyday thing at points during the voyage. Right. Where they’re running into stuff bears are crawling on, like just kind of mayhem. Is that your understanding from your research, is that true?
Andrea Pitzer: It’s constant, yeah. In the far North, I mean, it was just so dangerous, as you said, always like this being pushed by the wind onto a Lee shore or hitting a bank or a bar that wasn’t on your map. I mean, even today, those are huge issues for sailors. Even with all the radar we have everything that can still be an issue. But Barons and his men had that. And then this whole issue of dealing with the ice and it really took on so many different forms. Sometimes it would be slowly freezing them in. They would be trying to get through an area and literally behind them would be freezing, and ahead of them would be freezing and they would be in a smaller and smaller pool of navigable water. There are actually situations in which they are out there with hand drills trying to crack icebergs open to be able to sail through. They’re trying to cut and dig ways through later ships, once we get into the late 19th or early 20th century, actually carry Dynamite and try to blow up icebergs that are in their way. But you also have these currents that you can get smashed between icebergs. If they’re bigger than your ship or even if they’re not, they can still be a huge threat. But some of them are really quite enormous. And there’s one scene in which when they’re in their small boats, which, of course, is so much scarier even than in the big boat because you have much less control. They think they’re stuck. And then these two icebergs separate. So they go down this channel between them, and then the icebergs are closing. So they are literally rowing for their lives before it’s like a video game, right before they get smashed between these two icebergs. And they are so ill. And you were talking about what are some of the lessons we learned and all that? I did one interview where somebody asked me, this is just so inspirational. What inspirational lessons can you draw from this about how to find meaning? It’s sort of the equivalent of leadership blog type stuff. Right. And I was just like, on the one hand, no, these were just guys. They weren’t thinking about leadership manuals. I’m a little resistant sometimes to finding too much inspiration. It’s just they weren’t thinking in heroic terms most of the time that they were there. That’s not what we see reflected in the record. But what I did find very moving was that every day they would get up and they really had very little realistic hope of ever making it out of there. And they would just get up and do unbelievably grueling things, unexpected grueling things, because they didn’t foresee all these horrific things ice could do that the polar bears would actually climb on their roof and try to come in through their chimney, all these things they couldn’t foresee and that they just kept going. So I do think there’s something very moving about that part of it.
Michael Canfield: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And I think that’s a big piece of what you’ve been able to help us with is set up the context of this great story. And I really encourage people to get the book, to read it, to really understand it, because there’s a lot to learn from it. And again, not in necessarily just a leadership manual type way, but just to understand some of the ways you’ve described it. So thank you for that last thing. We’ve learned a lot about your life and the range of interests you’ve explored. I’m curious. What you tell us is next is sort of on the writing front. And then are there any things that now you have as sort of, I guess, what would be called bucket list things you want to do, places you want to go well.
Andrea Pitzer: That’s actually a really interesting question Because I’m having to think about it a lot. I am working right now on a memoir. I grew up in West Virginia and fell from lower middle class into really abject poverty and a lot of violence. But it’s also funny, isn’t quite the right word, but it’s ridiculous. Just so many ridiculous scenarios. We lost our house to bankruptcy. My mother and stepfather were heavily involved in Amway, and we’re going to Amway alleys all the time. It’s a very strange, I think, disturbing, hopefully interesting childhood. So I’m working on that right now, which was partly spurred by my mother’s fall into this psychotic dementia that she has sort of acquired over the last few years. And I realized nobody is going to remember any of this if I don’t write it down. And so sort of like wanting to kind of bear witness to that story. But also my plan in learning cold water diving in Russian and all this was to work with this crew that I’ve become very close friends with out of Russia And to be doing work all over the globe with them in the coming years. And of course, the situation with Ukraine is so horrific. And the repression in Russia, which was already pretty widespread, is vast. And there are perfectly reasonable sanctions right now in place against Russian companies and Russian banks. And so I don’t really know what’s going to happen with that. I’m sure that I will still be doing that work, and I don’t know exactly what it will look like at this point Simply because I think we’ll have to come out from the other side of it to see what that will mean. But I still believe that these polar stories are meaningful and important and do tell us a lot about today and that the changes that we’re seeing in climate are absolutely critical for people to understand. So part of what I’m looking to do is to invent new ways of telling stories that incorporate both this very dramatic history and the stakes of the planet today.
Michael Canfield: Well, I really appreciate you sharing with that with us, and we’ll look forward to seeing whatever it is that you do will be interesting and exciting, I think, and we’ll build on the things you’ve done so far.
Andrea Pitzer: So again, thank you so much for joining us today on the Dog Watch. Thank you for having me on. It’s been great.
Michael Canfield: Thanks again to Andrea for joining us today to discuss both the past and the future of the Arctic. Our music credit today is Whiskey on the Mississippi by Kevin McLaren, courtesy of Creative Commons until our next shift. This is Michael Canfield. Thank you for joining us on The Dog Watch.
