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A review by annikahipple
Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World by Andrea Pitzer
2.0
I enjoy books about polar exploration, so I was very interested to read this account of an early expedition that sailed further north than anyone had ever gone before, centuries before the so-called golden age of polar exploration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dutchman William Barents made three expeditions to the Arctic in search of a northern route to China. On his first two expeditions he reached Nova Zembla (Novaya Zemlya) but was forced to turn back due to heavy sea ice. His third expedition, in 1596, headed more directly north with two ships, captained by Jacob van Heemskerk and Jan Cornelis Rijp. After discovering Spitsbergen, there was disagreement about where to go next. Barents, van Heemskerk, and their crew of 15 others opted to continue on to Nova Zembla, parting ways with Rijp and his ship.
After rounding the northern tip of Nova Zembla, Barents's ship became mired in ice, forcing the 17 men to overwinter on the island's barren shore. The story of this harrowing ordeal, for which they were woefully unprepared, makes up the bulk of Andrea Pitzer's book. Marooned far from any chance of rescue, the crew faced the long dark of an Arctic winter, a constant struggle to find food, terrible sickness due to scurvy, and frequent threats from polar bears. It's an adventure worth reading about, yet despite all its inherent drama, I often found the story curiously flat. It's not necessarily the author's fault--she writes well and has clearly done extensive research, although her digressions into later polar exploration and other tangentially related topics sometimes felt a bit like padding to make the book longer (it's under 300 pages anyway). I think the main problem with the book is that there are no personalities. With the exception of Barents, van Heemskerk, Rijp, and crew member Gerrit de Veer, whose diary of the expedition is one of Pitzer's main sources, no one is mentioned by name. I am sure this is because their names have not been recorded in history, but this unfortunate fact means that much of the story simply reads as "They did this" and "Then this happened." As a result, Pitzer's story lacks the compelling characters and interpersonal drama that makes books about later polar explorers so fascinating.
There's also a lot of repetition, simply because the crew's lives while stranded on Nova Zembla were so monotonous. They starved, got lucky and managed to kill a fox for food, struggled to keep warm, killed a polar bear, trekked to their stranded ship for supplies, went looking for wood to burn or build with, killed another polar bear, etc. From a modern perspective, the number of polar bears they killed was horrifying. Some of them were a direct threat, but others were shot just because that was what the crew did when they saw an animal. At one point Pitzer quotes a modern researcher saying something like, "It's a miracle there's any wildlife left in the Arctic at all."
I'm torn between two or three stars for this one, but I'll round up. This was worth reading to learn about early Arctic exploration and an extraordinary saga of survival under the harshest of conditions, but it dragged on a bit despite Pitzer's best efforts. The anonymity and repetition aren't her fault, but there's only so much you can do with limited source material.
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UPDATE: Upon further contemplation, I'm changing my rating to two stars. Goodreads defines two stars as "it was ok" and that's really what it was. Just okay.
After rounding the northern tip of Nova Zembla, Barents's ship became mired in ice, forcing the 17 men to overwinter on the island's barren shore. The story of this harrowing ordeal, for which they were woefully unprepared, makes up the bulk of Andrea Pitzer's book. Marooned far from any chance of rescue, the crew faced the long dark of an Arctic winter, a constant struggle to find food, terrible sickness due to scurvy, and frequent threats from polar bears. It's an adventure worth reading about, yet despite all its inherent drama, I often found the story curiously flat. It's not necessarily the author's fault--she writes well and has clearly done extensive research, although her digressions into later polar exploration and other tangentially related topics sometimes felt a bit like padding to make the book longer (it's under 300 pages anyway). I think the main problem with the book is that there are no personalities. With the exception of Barents, van Heemskerk, Rijp, and crew member Gerrit de Veer, whose diary of the expedition is one of Pitzer's main sources, no one is mentioned by name. I am sure this is because their names have not been recorded in history, but this unfortunate fact means that much of the story simply reads as "They did this" and "Then this happened." As a result, Pitzer's story lacks the compelling characters and interpersonal drama that makes books about later polar explorers so fascinating.
There's also a lot of repetition, simply because the crew's lives while stranded on Nova Zembla were so monotonous. They starved, got lucky and managed to kill a fox for food, struggled to keep warm, killed a polar bear, trekked to their stranded ship for supplies, went looking for wood to burn or build with, killed another polar bear, etc. From a modern perspective, the number of polar bears they killed was horrifying. Some of them were a direct threat, but others were shot just because that was what the crew did when they saw an animal. At one point Pitzer quotes a modern researcher saying something like, "It's a miracle there's any wildlife left in the Arctic at all."
I'm torn between two or three stars for this one, but I'll round up. This was worth reading to learn about early Arctic exploration and an extraordinary saga of survival under the harshest of conditions, but it dragged on a bit despite Pitzer's best efforts. The anonymity and repetition aren't her fault, but there's only so much you can do with limited source material.
---------------
UPDATE: Upon further contemplation, I'm changing my rating to two stars. Goodreads defines two stars as "it was ok" and that's really what it was. Just okay.