经济学人下载:北极风云(1)

Books & arts 

文艺板块

Book review 

书评

Arctic explorers 

北极探险家

Northern exposure 

北极风云

Icebound. By Andrea Pitzer.

《冰封》。作者：安德里亚·皮泽

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·巴伦支是一名荷兰航海家，于1594年航行到北极，他当时正在追寻由希腊人首次提出的温暖北部海洋的梦想。几个世纪以来，在北美或俄罗斯远东地区开辟一条通往东方的极地贸易路线的想法吸引了大量欧洲探险家。然而，事实证明这是一种“致命的妄想”，许多妄图以巴伦支的航行任务为模板的探险家都历经了痛苦的磨难。

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. 

巴伦支和他的故事鲜为人知，就只有以他的名字命名的斯堪的纳维亚北部海域还有些名气。尽管他的探索被认为是“第一次真正的极地航行”，但与罗伯特·皮尔19世纪的伟绩和约翰·富兰克林领导的悲惨探险相比还是黯然失色。美国记者安德里亚·皮泽最近乘船穿越相同的海域前往新地岛，以讲述这一扣人心弦的早期航海壮举。

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. 

当时的荷兰商人们渴望新成立的荷兰成为海上霸主，在他们的支持下，巴伦支在16世纪90年代曾三次北上。皮泽女士的书不仅依赖于曾陪伴巴伦支航行的《新地岛日志》的19世纪译本，还依赖于以前从未被翻译过的一位商人代表的报告。在前两次探险中，极地冰层无法逾越；基本全程平安无事的两次探险经历几乎没有激起读者的热情。但当故事发展到1596年5月，巴伦支第三次前往新地岛的北端，情节就变得戏剧可怕了。