Sea Control - Sea Control 223 - Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World with Andrea Pitzer

Episode Date: January 17, 2021

Links1. Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World by Andrea Pitzer, Scribner, 2021.2. One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps by Andrea Pitzer, Little, Brown and Company, 2017.3. Longitude by Dava Sobel, Bloomsbury USA, 2010.4. “Polar bears and Arctic isolation: A Russian opposition activist describes military service as ‘political exile,’” by Robyn Dixon, The Washington Post, January 2, 2021.5. “Sailors found alive at sea after 13ft wave smashes into boat in -30C weather,” by Will Stuart and Milo Boyd, The Mirror, December 28, 2020.6. Barents expedition art by Sergey Nekrasov at the Rijksmuseum.7. Arctic Strategic Outlook, United States Coast Guard, 2019.8. “In the Arctic, Look to the Coast Guard,” by Walker Mills, USNI Proceedings, August 2020.

Hey folks, Anna here. Thanks for tuning back in to Sea Control. Today we are speaking with author Andrea Pitzer. Ahead of the release of her book Icebound, Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, Andrea took the bold step of sailing from Urmansk to the site of William Barnes's fateful third expedition, touching upon a corner of the Arctic world in which Russian and German forces battled during World War II. She looked into this region with her own eyes and stood a watch at the helm of a sailing vessel of similar size as Barnes's own. Her journey took her past the Russian Arctic National Park, Russian Harbor on Novia Zemlya Archipelago, Chieff Glacier, the Kara Sea, Kola Bay, Little and Big Oransky Islands, even into the Ice Harbor, which is still home to the

ruins of Barnes' cruise cabin, known as the Safe House. Icebound, Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, is a book about the famous Dutch polar explorer from the 16th century and about Andrea's own glimpse into the present state of the Arctic. It's already out in the UK and will be available in the US on January 12th. I've pre-ordered my own copy through Amazon, and I would encourage our listeners to do the same in fact icebound is in my section of the simsec holiday reading list available on our website at www.simsec.org as a reminder all views expressed are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might otherwise be associated and as always we want to advertise and strongly recommend our friends at the simsec podcast network and our

second podcast feed the bilge bumps you can find alex drach jamie and a pile of empty iron brew Bottles on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and wherever else you download your podcasts from. Andrea, welcome. Can you tell our guests a bit about yourself and how you came to be interested in William Barnes? It's this kind of circular crazy thing where everything comes back to itself in the end. I am a journalist and author. I'm 52 years old and really just in the last decade have gotten to do this super exciting work where I can kind of go places in the world and bring back information for people. So how I first heard about William Barron is with my first book. It was about Vladimir Nabokov, the guy who wrote Lolita of all things. And in another one of

his books, there was this secret kingdom of Zembla. And I started to research like, what the heck is the secret kingdom of Zembla? And then I found Nova Zembla, which is today Russian Novaya Zemlya, which is this archipelago. The bottom of it is not too far from the mainland, but the top of it is hundreds of miles, hundreds of miles from the Russian mainland. And the sort of forgotten history of this place became a really important part of my first book. And there was Gulag history and there was all kinds of other stuff that was tied up but the farthest back that I could find historical records were this account of William Behrens and these Dutchmen who were stranded at the northern end of Novaya Zemlya in 1596 the winter of 1596 and then into 1597

it was just such an amazing story to me because many of them survived the winter and most of them tried to make a run for home, but their Dutch ship was still frozen in, even in June. So they came home in their small boats. So something, you know, a little bigger than a Zodiac, but not by a lot. And to sail, you know, more than a thousand miles, afflicted with scurvy and in terrible straits. And I just was kind of astounded that I didn't already know this story. And the more I talked to other people, they didn't know it either. And so I had always thought while I was working on that first book that someday I would write a book about this story. And so going this extra mile to seek out a polar expedition agency to make the journey yourself, it's certainly

impressive. But what motivated you to make that expedition yourself? And what did you take away from it? I always try to think, what can I add to a project that I'm working on that nobody else can do? When I was working on my last book, which was a history of concentration camps from when the term first appeared in the 1890s all the way to the present, there were people who had spent their entire careers, like maybe 40 or 50 years, looking at one camp in the Nazi system. And there was no way I was going to know more than that person. With this project, there was no way that I was going to know more about how Dutch ships were built in that era than somebody who'd been studying it their whole lives, or what the Dutch imperial ambitions were when they were this very young

Republic in the 1590s, more than a historian who had spent 30 years. So I always think, how can I bring together the work of these people who have spent their whole careers doing it, tell it as a good story, but then also add something that maybe nobody else is doing? And so what I thought with this was, what if I go there? And it wasn't clear that I could go there, because this is a pretty restricted military area of Russian territory. So I did also do a a tall ship expedition in 2018, where my Dutch crew were the first to record a discovery of Svalbard, Spitsbergen, which is now kind of halfway between Northway and the North Pole. That was a little easier to get to. So I was determined that I would go up there and I sailed

on an expedition on a tall ship and learned to haul those sails. And it wasn't just like the ship they'd had in the late 1500s, but I did spend a ton of time as far up the mast as I could get. They didn't really have a crow's nest, but I was that far up and I would sit up there for an hour or two because that was the closest I could get to seeing the shore that they saw for the first time that we know of anybody in recorded history. So that was a little easier. Russia was a little tougher. They're pretty serious about security and everything there. I also went to the Netherlands and I handled the relics that had been found in their cabin like hundreds of years later, which are now in a museum, the Rijksmuseum. And I just thought, who has read all this history? Who has gone to these places? Who's been up looking at that shore during a week when they passed by the same area during the year that they lived in? Who has done that? And what I always hope is that that will give me some kind of insight that maybe nobody else has had to make the story vibrant, to bring it to readers. Maybe they already know some about exploration, but try to think about it in some new way. So that's what I want to bring to readers. And that's kind of how I do it. And I always, always come away really changed by actually going to these places. People who serve see a lot of the world in some unusual ways. And those people who really try to get out and experience the places that they're in kind of on their own terms, I find it super rewarding. And I find it changes me in a lot of ways. stepping backwards in time from today and transporting us back into the 1500s

can you help us put Barron's contributions into some historical context how did he get his start and why did he become a polar explorer of all things well it's interesting we don't actually know a ton about young William Barron's what we do know is that he was acknowledged as a really strong navigator. He became a sailor. When there were these really serious tensions, even before the Eighty Year War began, there were these really serious tensions with Spain because Netherlands were under Spanish control at the time. He sailed the Mediterranean. That's down in Spanish territory. He was the first person to do kind of a full mapping of the Mediterranean. So his cartography that was assembled into a book right before he left on his first Arctic

expedition or right as he was leaving on his first Arctic expedition. That's the first full mapping of the Mediterranean that we have. So he was already a fairly accomplished guy, but he was not in any way a famous guy, brought on to lead part of this split expedition that was going to go over to Novaya Zemlya, again, north of the Russian mainland. And part of the group would go south of it and see if they could get through a strait there. The part that he would lead was kind of a scouting foray to the north to find out, was it attached to a polar continent? Was there a whole landmass up there we didn't know about? Or was he going to be able to sail around this territory? So for that first expedition, he was kind of in this scouting role. It was his

navigation skills that they were relying on because it really was completely unknown what they were going to find. So to have somebody who could not only get there, but then also get home was going to be really critical. Yes, you always got to figure out how to get back. They couldn't do longitude effectively from a moving boat at that time. A lot of people don't realize this. A good navigator would be quite good at figuring out latitude at this point. So they kind of always knew how far north they were of Amsterdam, which is where he was sailing out from.

But how far east or west you were was always kind of a gamble. Even though they could determine latitude, so they could come up with some really fixed marks for their maps, other parts of them were quite off east to west. So getting home really could be a tricky thing. Absolutely. I think there's a wonderful book out there called Longitude, which has to do with development of timekeeping systems and precision timekeeping. Can you tell us a bit about Barents' first, second, and third expeditions? Sure. So for that first one, he was on this scouting party.

He was sort of in charge of that leg of the expedition, the people who went north over Nova Zembla, again in Russia today, Novaya Zemlya. They got really far north, but there was a lot of ice, kept zigging and zagging to avoid the ice and to stay clear of the shore. They were doing something like eight or ten times as many miles as they actually covered. You know, you have to reduce that to one eighth or one tenth for how far north they actually got because they hit so much ice. Finally, the crew kind of started making noises like they didn't really like this. Winter was getting a little closer. They weren't sure they could get home. and there was no open mutiny but there was some unrest and it was clear that the smart thing to do

was uh to turn so they turned and met up with the other and this is the part that always amazes me they went and they actually found the other part of the other expedition that had gone to the south you know in this open sea part of which was completely uncharted part of which had been a little charted toward the south they managed to find each other and they reunited and they came home and it looked like they had two routes it looked like they maybe they had a northern route because they'd been able to see over around sort of the north of Navasemblia. And then these other guys had found a southern route through this strait. So everybody back in the Netherlands is really excited

because they've declared independence from Spain. They're still fighting this war, but they've declared independence. And they're looking for how can they cash in on all this overseas trade and commerce. They don't want to do the southern route that the Spaniards and Portuguese have nailed down because that's going to be big trouble. But a northern route, that would be one that they could own and stake much more. And so having two possible routes from Amsterdam to China through a northeast passage starts to look really exciting. So the second expedition, a year later in 1595, they set out with a whole fleet of ships.

They're carrying all these goods. They're going to go to China. The first one was kind of a scouting expedition, but this one, they're going to China. And everything about it beginning to end was a disaster. I don't want to ruin it for readers if they're going to read the book. Everything that can go wrong on a sea voyage pretty much goes wrong. They don't completely lose a ship, but so they didn't, they didn't completely lose any ship.

So other than that, they made it back and the investors were so disappointed in them and that, I mean, it's quite expensive to fit out all these ships. I mean, the food for them and the cargo that they carried and everything. The ice had just been horrific. Some of the different cities that had helped fund this expedition decided no. So for the third expedition, a prize was set forth, and Amsterdam decided to take up the challenge that the first person to find this route would get this fantastic prize. So Amsterdam alone of the original group of cities that had sort of helped fund this said, we'll send two ships. Behrens was on one, and there was a second one, and the commander of the sort of mini fleet was on the other one.

and they quickly headed straight north because there have been discussions of this idea that if you could burst through this ring of ice, you would find this open polar sea and that that would be navigable. And so for this third voyage, they decided not all on their own, but with consulting with a geographer

named Petrus Plantius, who was very influential and some other people. This time on the third voyage in 1596, they were going to go due north. So when like right over the pole or as close to it as they can as a shortcut to China, which is not a bad idea, except there's ice. It doesn't work. This is when they find Spitsbergen, today the biggest island for Svalbard.

They try to get north of it, and they're unable to. They can get just past its northern tip, but they can't really get any farther north. Because they have this east-west confusion with longitude, they can't decide if they've found part of Greenland or if they've discovered a new place. They don't know quite east and west where they are. They know how far north they are, but they don't quite know where they are on a globe. And there's disputes over the route. the two ships end up splitting so baron's a navigator for the expedition with this captain they decide to split they're going to go back to nova zembla where he'd went two years before and he is thinking we'll get further around these islands we'll get to an open sea on the other

side and then we should be able to get to china because they've already sailed part of that coast they get back there pretty quickly they get farther around than he had before they get into what is today called the Kerasi. They get on the eastern side of Nova Zembla, and then they are consequently completely stuck in the ice at a place called Ice Harbor, and they end up having to spend the winter there. And it's a 10-month winter, basically. It's a long winter. You mentioned he wasn't the leader of the expedition. There was a separate captain. Was there an expedition leader, a captain, and a navigator? Well, some of these terms that are used in the U.S. Navy or even in other navies now

don't always have exactly the same meanings that they did before and there were different statuses so this is a little bit one of the mysteries that there's a an archivist at the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam who has looked at this and has actually kind of written a paper like what do we know about him in terms of what was his role and it seems that he was in a really strange role on the first expedition he had a little bit more role of captaining this boat that was headed to the north on this scouting thing but he was not in charge of the overall expedition he was in charge of running that boat, that ship, and a little companion boat that they had with them, deciding the fate of that. That was up to him. On the second one, it was this huge investment,

all these ships. He was important as a navigator, as the navigator, but the merchants had representatives on the ships. So the captains in charge of the men and the merchant representatives had a lot of say over what happened. And not surprisingly, he argued with them. He turns out to have had strong opinions about routes and not liking it when people didn't want to go the same way that he did. So he had a little bit more of a minor role in terms of title on board for that. But his ability as a navigator was taken quite seriously by everybody. And then on the third expedition, he is the navigator, is in charge of deciding where they go. But the captain is in charge of preserving the ship and the safety of the men aboard. They actually seem to have

worked together quite well. We don't have a record of disputes there, of disagreements between the two of them. The captain would kind of go on to his own heroic naval career in which he got a leg blown off in battle. And they have what they think is the armor for that with the missing leg up in the Rijksmuseum. There's been some question of how venerated was Behrens, how important was he? What we do know in the records is that he and the captain were exempt from gathering firewood, from the chores that the other men did, even some of the ones who were not necessarily career sailors they were the two that were exempt and there's a moment when i mean still ice and snow but in theory spring is there and summer is coming on and the men want to make plans to leave and the

captain wants to see if the ship is going to come unstuck because they have the too small boat but it'd be better if they could go in the ship it's much safer barrence is the person that the crew picks to talk to the captain there's obviously some kind of level of trust and faith in him that he becomes their intermediary to the captain to talk about that they want to leave and when will they leave and so it's this weird role because he's definitely not the captain at all on that third expedition yet clearly the men look to him for a certain kind of leadership but when it comes to the guy who's fighting off the polar bear with a halberd that's the captain barrence is already in his 40s at that at that time that was a fairly older age and um barrence wouldn't have

been doing a lot of the physical heroics of that kind of work. I very much hope that the book contains a greater description of this polar bear fight, because that sounds fascinating. Well, if polar bears are what you're looking for, this book has polar bears in the sea, on the land, stalking people, raging on the roof, trying to rip off the chimney. So if polar bears are your thing, this has a lot of polar bears. While they were hoped to in the ice, do you know if there was any search and rescue attempt made? Well, this is a huge difference between the more famous expeditions. People might have heard about the Franklin Expedition or some of the polar expeditions. There were lots of search and rescue attempts for those guys because people had a pretty good idea

where they were, or at least they thought they did, and where they were planning to go so they would know where to go and look around. But William Berentz and his men on that third expedition when they got stranded they were completely off any map that had ever been made so not only did people not know where they were they didn't know that that place existed so there wouldn't have been they could have just said well we know he went around nova zembla last time and he would have tried to keep going and they could have just set a boat to do that but they would have no idea what was waiting there or what would happen so there appears to have been no search and rescue attempt when they're making a run home they run into somebody that they know there's this kind of

amazing moment in which they uh it's not someone who's come to search and rescue them but they actually encounter somebody that that they actually knew before and i had just read that after christmas a russian fishing vessel sank in the barents sea area after experiencing heavy icing has all your research and experience given you any insight into what might have happened there i did learn on my third expedition to take the wheel we had a it was it's like a 60 foot what's called a yacht i assume i mean in russian like i know a lot of these words now in russian that i don't even know in english but i'm not an experienced sailor by any means i had learned to work the sails on the tall ship and was interested and so they actually taught me quite a bit and i

learned to work the winches and i learned to secure lines and i learned to take the wheel and that's you know i had already had experience dragging zodiacs to shore and and having some tricky escapes from shore and so I got just enough experience to get interested in having a lot more but I am not like a career sailor so I don't want to pretend to be a career sailor but what the guys on the boat told me on our boat the alter ego was that the Barents Sea is is a really choppy sea because you have the last dregs of the North Atlantic current coming in from your west and then you have a much colder Kara Sea on your east and the waters come together in the Barents Sea the one that came to be named after Barents. And I read one article where somebody described it as

the devil's dance floor. So I'm sort of not surprised that if you had icing and some bad conditions, that a boat could get in trouble pretty easily. I did see that article and where that boat was. And it was actually a couple hundred miles down the coastline from where we were. We were much farther north than that. However, we were there in August. That happened in December. And so, unfortunately, with climate change, we were there within days in August of when Barents and his men, more than 400 years ago, were frozen in. And there was no ice on the coastline at all at this point. And they were literally frozen in at the end of August. And we were there just a few days before that in August.

And it was pretty clear sailing. Now, I mean, I wouldn't want to have to swim a couple miles in that water, I don't think. So it was still cold. It's not like it's a beach resort or anything. But the super arctic conditions that they faced when they were there are not the same now. And so I don't know that rescue ship, but I'm not surprised that in December you would still face really significant ice pretty far south in the Barents Sea. But one other news story I did read just today on the front page of The Washington Post, which is pretty incredible, is the story of a guy named Ruslan Shverinov and is an ally of Alexei Navalny, who's the main opposition leader in Russia. And he claims he was basically sent to Novaya Zambia, again in Russian, Novaya Zambia, as a political exile, as punishment because of his political activity.

And what's fascinating to me, and again, this was quite far south of where we were, and this was considered harrowing political exile, that he had to go spend his year for military conscription services. And he was basically sent to this place with only polar bears and a little shack, and he had to escape polar bears to drag water from the local creek. So this kind of gives you an idea what Kivitishkans today are like on Nova Zembla still. But what's interesting is for my first book, the one about Nabokov, one of the things I researched were stories from 100 years ago of the Bolsheviks when they first took over right before there was a Soviet state. I was looking through stories in the New York Times of exiles being sent to Nova Zembla. And so it's this really like history is never really done with you.

And this is a really rich place in the world's imagination and in the Russian imagination because it is so remote. But I think one of the things we're going to find is with more and more climate change and more sea routes opening up, there's going to be a lot more traffic in and around these places. And they'll sort of lose some of that remoteness because they'll be so much more accessible. You chose a season that was very closely similar to Barnes's own third expedition. You tried to choose a vessel that was of similar size to Barnes's own. In what other ways did you find that your expedition was similar to Barnes's own third expedition? It was all three expeditions.

I tried to reflect a little bit of that because I actually had a first expedition that was not a marine expedition, but I did a dog sled expedition to the interior of Svalbard. I learned to mush a sled so that I could do this during polar night because my guys had been stuck there during polar night, not on Svalbard, but on Novaya Zemlya. And so I wanted to go see what would it be like to be away from everybody, to have a darkness all around you. So that was the first expedition. And then the second one, I learned to work the sails and get a more of a feeling of what it was like discovering a new land. And then with the third one, I got even more of a taste than I expected. I hadn't realized our boat would be

roughly the same length. Of course, the volume was quite different, but roughly the same length as the ship that Barrett's had had. So that was just a wonderful stroke of luck. But it repeated his expedition in just really wild, wild ways. When they were on Novaya Zemlya in early 1597, they spied a thing called the Nova Zembla or Novaya Zemlya effect, which is this polar mirage that has to do with inversion layer and temperatures. And it basically looks like the sun is coming up two weeks before polar night should end. It was one reason that accounts about this voyage were doubted because how could this happen? Nobody had ever heard of this. This was crazy they couldn't possibly have seen the sun rise early so they must just be making things up

but Friedhoff Nansen another really legendary explorer centuries later saw the same phenomenon and now we understand what it is and it has a name but when these guys saw it it didn't have a name now we didn't see this Nova Zembla effect but we saw a polar mirage in the section in the journal when they talk about getting to the Oransky Islands which were named actually by the Dutch the Orange Islands, but in Russian it's Oransky. There were hundreds of walruses in exactly the same place that they had been more than 400 years ago. And it makes perfect sense because if the rock walls are right and the water is right, and why would the walruses move? Why would they go to a different place? But it was still kind of amazing that 400 years later, we pull up and there they

are. They got out of the boat and started killing, trying to kill as many as they could, which was pretty common as far as a reaction at that time to new species and new things. They had heard that the tusks were valuable, so they were going to slaughter them to take the tusks. We didn't do that, so our voyage didn't replicate that, but we had a really wonderful accordion player on the boat, and he did a concert for the walruses, and the walruses actually all gathered by the side of the boat. It was really one of the most amazing things I saw. So we had the polar mirage, we had the massive walrus sighting, there was a leak in the seals on the engine, and the emulsion got messed up and an engine overheated. So we had to sail back from Nova Zembla without an engine. So

we had to go on sails only. I don't know if anybody else on the boat was excited about that than me, but I was quite excited because here we were traveling the same direction, not exactly the same route, but not a terribly different route, seeing what would it be like to cross the Barents Sea using only sails. I kept getting these little glimpses of them and also seeing the cabin. A few of the logs are still left and I had a map of the space an archaeological map and I could walk through it it really helped a lot to be able to stand on that spit of land and look out at the sea and think what would it be like to be hunted by polar bears here and to be stuck here for 10 months and nobody knows where you are and it was just close enough to being unfindable because we

landed on one side of a little inlet and then we kind of walked up over a hill to the harbor so just looking around there's no boat visible there's nothing you're just looking out at this open sea and thinking, what if nobody knew you were here? What would that be like? It was really pretty incredible. And I'm sure that's a feeling that a lot of your listeners have, that they go to places in the world where somebody does know where they are, but nobody's there right now. And it's a really direct way to kind of interact with the natural environment. It's pretty amazing. On your first trip to the Arctic, what was the reaction that you had to what you saw? And have you seen changes in the state of the Arctic between your first trip and today?

I've only been going to the Arctic for four years, and I will say from my first trip from that dog sledding to the polar interior during polar night, things were already pretty bad. We had rain in January in the high Arctic, which is really not ideal for Arctic conditions. A lot of the creatures that feed up there, the reindeer, they eat grasses that are really short, just maybe a centimeter or two tall. If it rains, then ice forms over that stuff. They can eat through snow, but they can't necessarily or aren't used to breaking through ice so there's all kinds of problems that when you have rain that freezes instead of snow that are created and that was we went on an ice cave thing but at the very beginning of our dog sled expedition there had

been a big cave-in because the ice roof that had been there probably hundreds of years maybe longer had collapsed and so my very first introduction to the arctic was wow it's already really really changing. Each time I went, I would see different things. So on the second expedition, the thing that was truly shocking was not so much a change in Arctic condition as it was how much trash there is up there, just washing up incredible amounts of plastic. And sometimes you would see reindeer horns covered in nets, and they had obviously dragged whole net as long as they could and then just collapsed. But they had been killed by getting their horns caught in the nets, probably drinking water or something like this, and then trying to get away from it. So just this trash and its

terrible toll on the second expedition. And then on the third expedition, just realizing we sailed past one island that was just found three or four years ago, because the glaciers finally retreated so much that this new island was discovered. And it was kind of great to be one of the first people to see this new island. But the circumstances of that are pretty distressing. And do you feel there's any misconceptions that sailors or visitors to the Arctic have the first time that they go there? There's this idea in the imagination, certainly in literature, the Arctic is this untouched, pristine place where you go to define yourself against nature, that it's this blank slate that you go into. You're free of everything else and you invent some new world or you discover

some new thing. I think a lot of the Arctic, there are people that have been living there for a long time already and they don't always get acknowledged or paid attention to. And several explorers could have learned a lot from this. Often those people have a lot better idea how to manage those conditions than the people who just show up out of the blue. So first of all, I think be aware of the people that are already there. Sometimes it's easy to imagine it's this empty place, but it's also not empty of life and vegetation. I mean, maybe the bushes only grow to be an inch tall. But if you actually look carefully at everything, it's this incredibly diverse biological landscape. So I think don't make assumptions. Learn to look closely at what you're seeing.

Realize people have probably been there before you and maybe know more than you. It's always really good to get tips because anybody who has traveled to any pretty remote places, things can go wrong anywhere. But in the Arctic, and I suspect the Antarctic, if things start cascading in the wrong direction, they have a potential to get much, much worse when you're that far out. Definitely wise words informed by someone who's been studying a navigator of the area. For such a geographically remote part of the world, the area you traveled, as you mentioned, has an immense amount of history and geopolitical relevance. Anything in addition that you have discovered about the region's history that you found surprising,

striking, or informative? It was interesting to me that right after William Barron sailed, partly because his voyages were so famous but also just partly because a lot of countries had already been feeling out whaling and whaling industry possibilities in these regions whaling really took off one of the things that i hadn't realized was just how quickly arctic whaling savaged whale populations some of them almost to extinction populations in the hundreds of thousands hundreds and hundreds of thousands like almost wiped out the effects of the change in the arctic right after Barents was there. So we're talking 400 years ago, some of this began. By the end of the 19th century, we had done a lot of damage. It's interesting to me because I think we're coming

back into a time where human activity, for different reasons, now climate change is already having and will continue to have big outsized effects on this region. Danger signs that I saw from what happened 400 years ago, we probably need to be thinking a little bit more about what are we doing? Because as this region does become more accessible, I think you're going to see a lot of national security issues rearing their head. You're going to see industrial friction between companies in different countries and different interests. And the easy thing to do would be like the whalers to say, well, I'm going to show up and get my whales and everybody else has to just worry about themselves. I think it's an easy response for countries to have.

And of course, governments have to think about their own national interests. That's a big responsibility that they do have. But I think we also need to be thinking collaboratively about preserving this place so that everybody can continue to have access. And when you have actors that aren't necessarily good faith actors that you have to deal with, it can be hard. So I'm not trying to say it's like a Pollyanna, we just all have to kumbaya and it'll all be fine. I think there's really hard questions, just as there were in Barrett's time, about how do you balance the strategic interests of your country and the long-term interests of that nation with what's really a larger planetary issue that is going to have huge national security and human

implications if some of those agreements aren't worked out and some of those collaborations don't happen. It isn't just that we all get to feel better if we save the earth. It is literally there will be fewer wars, we'll have better water access, there's tangible things that come out of it. But I think sometimes it's easy to default to the very narrow view when you kind of have to learn to work both sides of it to figure out what's the best thing to do in the long run. Today's Barents Sea fishery, a management believe, is shared between Norway and Russia. So that's just one case in point of exactly what you're saying, partnerships that have to happen in governance in that region. One of the things that is really interesting to me from working on this is the degree to which so many of the things that these guys face are still understandable, is still so human.

On the one hand, they're the representatives of this Dutch Republic, and they're sailing at the beginning of the serial period. The Spaniards, they were already all through big parts of the Americas at this point. There was a lot of this was already underway. But this was kind of the northern expansion of this idea of colonialism and imperialism. And it brought these really complicated things to the planet. And so on the one hand, it's this huge history. But on the other hand, it's just these dozen plus guys in a cabin for the winter, just trying to make it to the next day. And I think 2020 has been a tough year.

and as we move into 2021 to just say sometimes you're just going to be focused on the next day and that's okay even when there's really big stuff at stake and big things afoot thanks andrea and what's your next adventure what projects are on the horizon for you and are you planning to go back to the arctic anytime soon well it's funny you should say that because i was so entranced with my taste of being at the wheel and doing the sales that i am planning to head back to the Arctic in August on an expedition for my next book, which is not about Barrett's. I will be going to Franz Josef Land, which is even farther north in Navarra, Zambia. I am going to be the junior deckhand slash new sailor working with a crew. I'm going to try the sailing life in more

earnest, and I figure at the very least I'll come back with some good stories. Well, that's it for our episode. Andrea, you're an experienced traveler. You know that leaving shore gets harder as we grow roots but without them we don't have anything to come back to so i wanted to thank you for writing about running from our responsibilities into the arms of adventure how that can seem sometimes like a selfish thing to do made worse by the fact that we love it you've mentioned feeling uh guilt for going to sea when the world seems to need you more immediately elsewhere in your article for outside magazine and i want to express my appreciation for writing openly honestly about your experiences thank you for talking with us today on sea control

Thanks so much for having me, Anna. Where can our listeners get their copy of Icebound, Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World? And where can they follow you on social media? The best place to follow me on social media is on Twitter at Andrea Pitzer, A-N-D-R-E-A-P-I-T-Z-E-R. And they should be able this week in the UK and starting January 12th in the US to get Icebound, Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, anywhere they can get a book. So that could be bookshop.org, IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or your local bookstore. Sea Control is produced and edited by Keegan Indersoll, Ed Salo, and William McQuinston. A special thanks to our listeners who provided financial support through the Amazon Smile program in this new year.

Thank you. Oh, help me, Boban, pull in the alley. Hey, hey, pull in the alley. Help me, Boban, pull in the alley. Pull it out of the shimbo now. A porter of a porter gin, oh. Hey, hey, pull in the alley. A porter of wine, both white and red, oh.

Pull it out of the shimbo now. Oh, help me, Boban, pull in the alley. We'll be right back.