Five Journeys

This is a book about the amazing journey of people discovering the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya, looking for traces of a small historical event against the backdrop of the ending of the Soviet Union. At the start of the age of exploration, the North Pole was believed to be hiding a continent, a land mass warmed by the midnight sun still inspiring today’s ‘Lost World’ fantasies. In the summer of 1596, two ships departed from Amsterdam to sail by its shores. The nine-month struggle for survival of the shipwrecked crew during the long polar night remains iconic in the history of the Arctic. Four hundred years later, Russians and Dutch together searched Novaya Zemlya for the grave and shipwreck of leader and explorer Willem Barents. This is a book about the Arctic and what it was like up there. This is a book about the ‘nineties.’ Over one decade we watched modern Russia take shape. This book has everything that makes the Arctic exciting, and the historical sensation on every page.