He and his crew break away from a companion ship to forge on alone, determined to be first to find the elusive passage. For weeks the 17 men fight off polar bears that rear up from nowhere, attacking until they are slaughtered or driven away. The ship tacks endlessly and desperately to escape floating “mountains of steel”: icebergs so impenetrable that the only way through is to drill holes and pray they will split apart. By mid-September the vessel is frozen fast, and the men resign themselves to overwintering “in great cold, poverty, misery and griefe”. Poorly clad and ravaged by scurvy, they are “phenomenally unprepared” for the ordeal, Ms Pitzer observes. Yet the remains of the shelter they managed to build stood for nearly 300 years.

Of the men themselves, 13 live through this long polar night—eight months of what the author neatly terms “the monotony of survival”. They dig out from continual blizzards, scavenging for fuel and Arctic foxes whose meat contains just enough vitamin C to sustain them. Still, the journey is filled with wonders: optical phenomena and mysteries unravelled, such as where European songbirds go each summer. Ms Pitzer’s descriptions of the region sing. “Bits of floating ice released tiny bubbles of air, hissing like oil in a skillet,” she writes. “The many languages of water surrounded them day and night.”

Barents’s heroism helped make the Arctic explorer a mythically resilient figure. The fantasy that drove him, meanwhile, has nearly come to pass. Arctic ice has been shrinking for several decades, with a sharp drop-off after 2006. Human ingenuity, epitomised by expeditions like his, has in 400 years made the Dutchman’s dream a terrifying reality.

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