Barents Facts Country Holland Occupation Navigator, Explorer Arctic Regions Explored Northeast Passage, # of Arctic expeditions 3 Most famous Arctic expedition Discovered Spitsbergen & Bear Island (1596) Other Significant Events Survived winter in crude shelter built on Novaya Zemlya Did you know? The Barents Sea (formerly called the Murmean Sea) is an extension of the Arctic Ocean lying north of Norway and Russia. It has an area of about 540,000 square miles. In northern sections of the Barents sea, the average winter air temperature is -13° F, but the Russian port of Murmansk remains ice-free in winter, partly because of the North Cape Current.

William Barents
(1550 - 1597)

The Dutch navigator William Barents, for whom the Barents Sea is named, is one of the more renowned of the early European explorers of the Arctic.

Around the end of the sixteenth century, several expeditions tried to establish a north-east passage to Asia, but fog, pack-ice and the confusing geography of the coast of Russia proved consistently frustrating. No one pursued a north-east passage with such tenacious skill as Barents. Seeking the illusive passage, he embarked on three notable expeditions (the last of which resulted in his death) along the frigid and unforgiving northern shores of Eurasia.

On his first two voyages, Barents reached the archipelago of Novaya Zemlya, rediscovering Spitsbergen and Bear Island and sailing east into the Kara Sea. On his third attempt in 1596, his ship became trapped by sea ice and he and his crew of 16 men were forced to winter ashore on Novaya Zemlya, building a crude cabin from the wrecked ship. Battling scurvy, hunger, the assaults of bears and the intense winter cold, they became the first West Europeans to winter in the high Arctic and survive. In June 1597 they set out on a 1,600-mile escape in two open boats, but Barents soon died. Many of his men survived, however. One survivor was Gerrit de Veer, who chronicled in great detail the voyages in "The Three Voyages of William Barents to the Arctic Regions" (1876).

It was not until 1648 that the Northeast Passage to the Orient was finally found. Russian sailor Semyon Ivanov Dezhnev sailed from the Kolyma River through what is now called the Bering Strait to the mouth of the Anadyr River on the Pacific Ocean.

Vitus Bering, a Dane in the employ of Russia, sailed from the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean between 1725 and 1730, and a series of expeditions (1734-43) inspired by Bering attempted to complete the passage by sea.

The Swedish baron Nils A. E. Nordenskjold made the first through-passage from west to east in the Vega in 1878-79, wintering off the Chukchi peninsula. Soviet Russians mapped and explored the passage, now called the Northern Sea Route, and modern ice-breaking ships have extended its use through much of the year.