‘Icebound’ Takes Us Back to the Arctic, in All Its Terror and Splendor
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ICEBOUND
Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
By Andrea Pitzer
Europeans once dreamed of an open sea at the top of the world. In 1606, Gerard Mercator, arguably the most famous cartographer of his time or any other, published a top-down map of the earth as he understood it. At the center of Mercator’s North Pole stood a magnetic mountain that pulled all compass needles northward; whirling around the mass of gray rock was a warm sea ringed by a thick circle of ice.
At the time, no one had a clue what the poles looked like. Mercator based his map on a theory proposed 1,800 years earlier by Pytheas, the first Greek to breach the Strait of Gibraltar and check out the Atlantic for himself. Pytheas sailed up the west coast of Europe, circumnavigated the British Isles, then continued north until he hit ice, possibly Iceland. Beyond that, he theorized, might be a free-flowing sea.
Pytheas’ travelogue was picked up by Pliny and others. Uncontested over centuries, his polar sea theory hardened into fact. Thoughts of that undiscovered ocean at the top of the world marinated in European imagination throughout the Middle Ages until the Portuguese found they could sail around Africa and into the Indian Ocean, prompting a trade route bonanza.
By the 16th century, European ships were poking into every bay, inlet and river. If there was a navigable ocean at the pole, it could provide a shortcut to Asia. In 1594, Dutch investors bet big on that theory, commissioning the cartographer William Barents to lead an expedition to the northernmost tip of Norway and then east over Russia in search of a northeast route. If they were right, Barents would make the Dutch phenomenally rich.
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