Third time’s the charm

By Paula Sankelo

1594

You brought back home to Amsterdam

a polar bear skin

teeth hacked off a living walrus

a god robbed from a Nenets temple

two captive falcons

(the reindeer herder escaped)

and a promise: next summer will open the Passage

for Trade and Cooperation

“pious, faithful and sincere steady dealings”.

1595

Next summer, the Kara Sea gate clanged shut

Vaigatš denied you the right of way past her shores

ice in the Vaigatš Strait barred all dealings

pious, faithful, and so forth.

Was this decreed by

the homesick Nenets god in Amsterdam?

1596–97

This is by far my favourite attempt

to recount. You were no kinder to beasts this time

but you drew such a wondrous map!

I show them: meeting a bear here, you set out to

“cut her head in sunder with an axe, wherewith she died”

giving her name to Bear Island.

And here, further north, under

glorious parhelia dogging the sun

you found The New Land of Spitsbergen

“very great land with a great store of ice”

and barnacle geese! You discovered

they nest here in the usual manner

when everyone thought they spawned from rotten old

waterlogged planks, or hatched out of trees in Scotland!

(Some will chuckle politely at this

others have questions:

Can we pay with dollars?

Do you have wi-fi?

Is it true you locals all carry a gun?)

Leaving the map and ushering everyone into the half-light

I show them your dapper felt hat

and the brave tin mannikins from the

                        Astounding Mechanical Clock

your crew kept alive through the measureless night

in the living man’s horror that is winter on Novaya Zemlya

while you drew the map. Twelve men survived

to deliver it home to Amsterdam

revealing no shortcut to Oriental trade

but plenty of wildlife, oh the poor creatures:

soon was to follow much “casteth forth blood

where formerlie he spowted water”, et cetera.

Who likes to hear this? Instead

I tell them where to find the restrooms

and the polar bear fridge magnets made in China:

now they can ship through the North-East Passage

the great store of ice nearly lost.

It was a ridiculous hat to wear to Novaya Zemlya

I think, as I wend my way through barnacle goslings

to an after-work beer in “Barentz”

yet another Northernmost Pub in the World.

Quoted sources:

“Pious, faithful…”: Andrea Pitzer: Icebound – Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
(Simon & Schuster 2021). Pitzer in turn quoted Barentz’ contemporaries.

“Cut her head in sunder…” / “Very great land…”: Gerrit De Veer: The Three Voyages of William Barents To the Arctic Regions: 1594, 1595, and 1596 (original 1598, English translation by Charles T. Beke 1853).

“Casteth forth blood…”: Sir Martin Conway: No Man’s Land: A History of Spitsbergen from Its Discovery in 1596 to the Beginning of the Scientific Exploration of the Country (Cambridge University Press 1906). Conway in turn quoted a translation of a pamphlet called Drie Voyagien Gadaen na Groenlandt.

Paula Sankelo (MA, MSc, Mtech), an environmental researcher by profession, currently works as a writer and editor, and as a receptionist in Svalbard Museum. Her first poetry collection in Finnish, Katoava jää (Warelia 2024), was awarded the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for the best Finnish literary debut in 2024.