Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World

(Scribner, $29)

The North Pole has a magnetic pull in more ways than one, said David Shribman in The Boston Globe. “Generations of explorers and adventurers have sought an arctic passage,” and their quest has often led to doom. This was the case for William Barents, a Dutch cartographer who attempted to find an arctic passage to the Far East centuries before Robert Peary and Frederick Cook staged their race to the North Pole. Journalist Andrea Pitzer resurrects Barents’ three late-16th-century expeditions, drawing on accounts left by his shipmates. The result is “a gripping adventure tale that deserves an honored place in the long bookshelf of volumes dealing with arctic shipwrecks, winter ordeals, and survival struggles.”

The book “faces limitations due to its very old source material,” said Michael

O’Donnell in The Wall Street Journal. Barents died on the third journey, and the survivors’ writings tell us nothing about his personality. As a result, Icebound “lacks the human element of the greatest adventure tales.” But Pitzer finds plenty of drama, first by situating the action in the context of the imperial ambitions of the Dutch Republic shortly after its liberation from Spain. Barents believed the ancient myth that an oasis of warmer, open water lay at Earth’s upper reaches, but twice got no farther than an icy island jutting out from central Russia. Pitzer writes vividly about the “unnerving isolation” of venturing into uncharted waters, and ahead await encounters with polar bears and sightings of carved idols on distant shores.

The third voyage yielded discovery of the Svalbard archipelago, but at a lethal cost, said Richard Schiffman in CSMonitor.com. Barents’ ship collided with an ice floe, and the crew was forced to dismantle it to build a makeshift hut. Some men succumbed to the cold or to scurvy, and Barents died during the crew’s “astonishing” journey home in two small skiffs. Pitzer labels him “the patron saint of devoted error,” but her book honors his fortitude, becoming “a tribute to the seemingly limitless human capacity to confront darkness and endure.”