Barents, Willem

Barents, Willem (c.1550–97), Dutch navigator and explorer, born on the island of Terschelling. A Spanish decree forbidding the Netherlands to trade with Portugal turned the eyes of the Dutch towards the discovery of a North-East Arctic Passage to India and the Spice Islands (Moluccas), and in 1594 Barents, with two ships, sailed from Amsterdam to try and find it, though earlier English expeditions had failed to do so. He reached the coast of Novaya Zemlya, a Russian island in the Arctic Circle which divides what would become the Barents and the Kara Sea, and followed it northward until ice prevented him from going further. The following year he repeated the attempt with seven ships but failed to reach the Kara Sea, being held up by ice off Vaygach Island, situated between the mainland and Novaya Zemlya. During a third voyage undertaken with two ships in 1596, he discovered Spitsbergen and Bear Island, before the two ships separated. It was these discoveries that sparked the whaling industry in Arctic waters.

Barents made for the north point of Novaya Zemlya, which this time he succeeded in rounding into the Kara Sea before being beset by ice and compelled to winter there. The following spring, as the ship was still held fast, it was decided to abandon it. This was done in two open boats, but Barents, already suffering from the hardships of an Arctic winter, died seven days later, on 20 June. Part of his journal was found four years later, but it was not until 1871 that his headquarters on Novaya Zemlya were discovered and the contents removed to The Hague. His name was perpetuated when the Murmean Sea to the eastward of North Cape was renamed the Barents Sea in 1853.

See also exploration by sea.