Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Politics & government

ICEBOUND

Andrea Pitzer

Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World

On an Arctic expedition in 1596 - "the first true polar voyage ever made" - Dutch navigator William Barents sailed from Amsterdam in search of a northeast trade route to China. Skirting the Scandinavian coastline that May on his third attempt to find navigable waters, he left the safety of the continent for the mysteries of the far North and the open sea he hoped to discover there.

Instead, by September, Barents and sixteen crewmembers found themselves trapped, icebound in the high Arctic. Forced off their ship and stranded for the winter, they struggled to survive an inhuman climate.

Catastrophes endured by the crew subjected them to horrific suffering, but also changed history. Expanding the edges of the mapped world, making scientific discoveries, and inspiring countless explorers who followed in their wake, William Barents and those who sailed with him influenced the search for commerce and shaped the path of colonialism engulfing the globe. The modern world is still buffeted by the historical tides unleashed in his era. Icebound will narrate the deadly challenges facing the sailors on Barents' three expeditions and their place in history.

An account of Barents' last voyage - the first overwintering in the high Arctic - became an international bestseller just two years later. His ordeals inspired and terrified explorers for hundreds of years. They were so well-known to audiences that they found use as a cultural touchstone by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night ("You are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard"). Yet the details of these exploits faded from public memory over time until they became footnotes in tales of later expeditions, and the literary references were forgotten. ICEBOUND will exhume the full story.

Andrea Pitzer is the founder of Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University (which she also edited during its first years). She was for several years spent a judge for the National Magazine Awards. She has written for Slate, USA Today, Vox, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Longreads, and Lapham's Quarterly, among other publications. Her writing has previously been reviewed or featured by NPR, PRI, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Smithsonian, Foreign Policy, the Boston Globe, the New Republic, as well as dozens of other print, radio, and television outlets. Andrea is sailing for the Barents Sea on a tall ship beginning Sept. 28, 2018. She'll be out in the Arctic until Oct. 19, incommunicado. She'll be living this story (in a way)!

Available products
Book Published 2021-01-07 by Scribner
Book Published 2021-01-07 by Scribner

Comments

Andrea Pitzer accomplishes for William Barents what the explorer could not do for himself: rescue his amazing life from the grip of the Arctic and centuries of hagiography. The Barents who appears in Pitzer's spyglass seems impressively close to the actual man: intensely bold, highly skilled, and catastrophically wrong.

Icebound, Andrea Pitzer's stunning story of 16th century Arctic exploration, disaster, and determination, shines with the glitter of sun reflecting off polar ice, auroral light shimmering in the night sky, and - mostly - the sheer, stubborn power of the undaunted human spirit.

Who knew that William Barents's 16th-century journeys so strongly influenced the great 19th-century arctic expeditions? Andrea Pitzer's visceral, thrilling account is full of such tantalizing surprises, a delight on every level.

Four centuries later, the final Barents expedition remains one of the most remarkable survival stories in the annals of Arctic exploration. In Andrea Pitzer's telling, the utter relentlessness of the challenge to stay alive - the crush of the pack ice closing on frail boats, the other-worldly cold and dark of the Arctic night, and the rooftop clawing of polar bears determined to extract the weakened men huddled below - is never anything less than compelling.

Gives readers a new understanding of the phrase uncharted territory. William Barents and his men were in constant danger of being shipwrecked, run aground, crushed by mammoth icebergs, or eaten by polar bears. Methodically researched and elegantly told, Icebound is the kind of story you experience even when you're not reading it - because you can't stop thinking about these remarkable explorers.

Icebound is a true pleasure. In chapters that are vivid, fast-paced, and meticulously researched, Pitzer takes us into the fierce world of polar exploration before the age of Shackleton. Her account breathes life into the forgotten quest of William Barents to find a Northeast Passage. Yet Icebound also makes a bigger argument: Barents came to symbolize suffering and endurance centuries before polar explorers planted flags at the poles.

Icebound is a fascinating, bizarre, and very human story of survival - and what it means to venture into the truly unknown. A riveting account of lives drawn into a world that seems at once dream and nightmare.

Buried in snow, besieged by ice, and hunted by ravenous polar bears, explorer William Barents and his Dutch shipmates, seeking a northern trade route to the Far East, found themselves trapped in an epic battle for survival in the unknown, ice-locked Arctic. Andrea Pitzer's worthy and superb account keeps us enthralled to the last chilling word.

In Icebound Andrea Pitzer has accomplished something unique - she presents the daily lives of the early Dutch Arctic explorers with such precision and clarity that the reader becomes as immersed in the rawness of their experiences as one could ever imagine. Through unflinching detail, she describes the struggle for survival faced by three separate expeditions seeking a northeast passage from Europe to China (one of those voyages culminating in being marooned for months in the frozen north). Without sentimentality, she describes the perseverance and selfless sacrifice of the men involved, which allows a glimpse into the true nature of human courage. This is a book you will not want to put down, except to catch your breath.

Long before Bering or Amundsen, long before Franklin or Shackleton, there was William Barents, in many ways the greatest polar explorer of them all. In this engrossing narrative of the Far North, enriched by her own adventurous sojourns in the Arctic, Andrea Pitzer brings Barents' three harrowing expeditions to vivid life - while giving us fascinating insights into one of history's most intrepid navigators.

An epic tale of exploration, daring, and tragedy told by a fine historian - and a wonderful writer.

Andrea Pitzer has taken on a tough subject: the 16th century Dutch attempt to reach the Far East from Holland though the long-sought Northeast Passage and over the top of Asia - a route that was and remains bleak, bitterly cold, and usually frozen year round. She tells a compelling story, full of danger, shipwrecks, and failure, but noble and heroic as well. Some in Barents' party didn't make it, but it was remarkable that so many managed to survive.

Page after page, Pitzer puts you inside one of the greatest adventures you'll ever encounter. Beyond thrilling. Beyond enthralling. I found this a tale so involving that I simply couldn't put it down.

UK: Simon & Schuster

Icebound is the bone-chilling tale of a legendary journey in which survival depended on leadership, teamwork, and superhuman endurance - as well as the ability to outpace and out-battle icebergs and polar bears. Andrea Pitzer's gripping account of 16th century explorers who sailed beyond the known world is a masterwork of narrative nonfiction.