A Brill Calendar: May 16

Intrepid Navigators

Few meteorological predictions have so shocked public opinion world-wide recently as the forecast by scholars that the North Pole will become before too long navigable; if not free of ice.

Linked to this prediction is the looming dilemma between ecological disaster and unheard-of geological prospecting. The commotion is so great because of the scientific certainty – existing since the second half of the 19th century – that the immense ice-mass has been ‘in situ’ there for more than a miserly few hundred years.

However, when a small Dutch expedition departed from the Dutch island Texel for a northern voyage May 16 1596, with Jacob van Heemskerck acting as Senior Officer and Leader, it wasn’t clear that circumnavigation of Africa would be the only road from Holland and Zeeland to Asian riches for some three centuries to come; until the persistent Suez dream of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and of Goethe became realized by Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1869, fundamentally changing the global infrastructure for transportation.

This was the third effort to try what would be only later proven impossible. From 1594, Willem Barentszoon, born around 1550 on Terschelling (an island of the Dutch ‘Wadden’ archipelago between ‘Zuiderzee’ and ‘Noordzee’) had 'put his oar in' twice; both as scholarly reporter and investigator. Earlier he published (with cartographer Petrus Plancius) a descriptive atlas of the Mediterranean. On the first journey a ‘New Land’, Nova Zembla, was discovered; Barentsz’s third effort resulted in a famous hibernation in the gruesome & despotic Claws of Winter. A surprisingly large number of survivors, Willem included, lived to tell; although he died on his way home on open sea, June 20 1597, finding there an appropriate grave for an impassioned navigator.

Unfortunately, it is seldom that impracticability is ranked in the pecking order of scholarly greatness on the same level as demonstrating viability. A saying of García Lorca comes to mind: ‘time doesn’t make possible, it just allows’.