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Arctic explorers
北極探險家
Northern exposure
北極風云
Icebound. By Andrea Pitzer.
《冰封》。作者：安德里亞·皮澤
When william barents, a Dutch navigator, sailed to the Arctic in 1594, he was pursuing the dream of a warm northern ocean first posited by the Greeks. The idea of a polar trade route to the Orient—above North America or the Russian Far East—enticed European explorers for centuries. Yet it proved a “lethal delusion”, and Barents’s missions a template for many harrowing trials.
威廉·巴倫支是一名荷蘭航海家，于1594年航行到北極，他當時正在追尋由希臘人首次提出的溫暖北部海洋的夢想。幾個世紀以來，在北美或俄羅斯遠東地區開辟一條通往東方的極地貿易路線的想法吸引了大量歐洲探險家。然而，事實證明這是一種“致命的妄想”，許多妄圖以巴倫支的航行任務為模板的探險家都歷經了痛苦的磨難。
Beyond the sea north of Scandinavia that bears his name, Barents and his tale are little known. Considered “the first true polar voyage”, his quest was eclipsed by the 19th-century exploits of Robert Peary and the ill-fated expedition led by John Franklin. Andrea Pitzer, an American journalist, recently sailed the same seas to Nova Zembla to recount this earlier, nail-biting feat of seafaring.
巴倫支和他的故事鮮為人知，就只有以他的名字命名的斯堪的納維亞北部海域還有些名氣。盡管他的探索被認為是“第一次真正的極地航行”，但與羅伯特·皮爾19世紀的偉績和約翰·富蘭克林領導的悲慘探險相比還是黯然失色。美國記者安德里亞·皮澤最近乘船穿越相同的海域前往新地島，以講述這一扣人心弦的早期航海壯舉。
Backed by Dutch merchants keen to make their fledgling state a maritime power, Barents made three journeys north in the 1590s. Ms Pitzer relies not just on a 19th-century translation of the journals of Gerrit de Veer, who accompanied the voyages, but on a previously untranslated account by a merchant representative. The polar ice was insurmountable on the first two expeditions; they were largely uneventful and barely stir a reader’s blood. But once Barents heads for the northern tip of Nova Zembla for the third time in May 1596, the story becomes dramatic, and dire.
當時的荷蘭商人們渴望新成立的荷蘭成為海上霸主，在他們的支持下，巴倫支在16世紀90年代曾三次北上。皮澤女士的書不僅依賴于曾陪伴巴倫支航行的《新地島日志》的19世紀譯本，還依賴于以前從未被翻譯過的一位商人代表的報告。在前兩次探險中，極地冰層無法逾越；基本全程平安無事的兩次探險經歷幾乎沒有激起讀者的熱情。但當故事發展到1596年5月，巴倫支第三次前往新地島的北端，情節就變得戲劇可怕了。
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