A true and perfect description of the Novaya Zemlya Effect
Willem Barentz is a liar. I am certain of that. I believe that he missed some revolutions of the sun during the long polar night. Considering that he was often busy with polar bears, it is not surprising that he did not always find time for the proper observation of celestial bodies. His clocks must have frozen from time to time, whether from negligence or accident I do not know. How could he say that he saw the sun for the last time on the 4th of November when it is no more than 15 degrees below the equator? I suspect he is ten or eleven days off in his calculation.
When I asked him what he did on days when the weather was so inclement he could hardly have put his head out the door he told me that he could take a measure of the pole star by looking through the aperture of the chimney. Other questions he answered with equal foolishness or not at all. Instead he returned the next day with numbers and figures which I’m sure he looked up in some clever book of ephemerides or some almanac or other. I believe he filled his journal with all kinds of nonsense such as the idea that the farther north one goes the less ice there is in summer on account of the midnight sun. He is like the sacristan whose clock is off by an hour and when some wise people, like myself, question him, he says that the sun may lie but his instruments do not.
It’s simply not possible to lose sight of the sun on the 4thof November at a latitude inside the arctic circle. Furthermore, it is impossible to find her again on the 21st of March when she is no more than 9 degrees above the horizon.
I conclude that he did not keep his journal as he should have. Notwithstanding my esteem for him as a navigator, he is a liar of the first rank.
I end this letter with a wish for God’s grace on the 15 th of September, anno 1627.
Robbert Robbertsz.
Commentary
A sedentary old geographer distrusts his compatriot, the whaler Willem Barentz, who is a practical man, a mapmaker of cunning, who is looking for a sea route to Cathay or China. He wanted to make money, no more than that.
So familiar to me, that pedantry of the Dutch. They are, in a phrase of their own, mierenneukers, ant fuckers, busy with angles and numbers, tending to every insignificant hole. Microscopists of the first order, average geometers. They measure the summits of their mountains with great pride. They have the best weights in Europe. An Amsterdam pound is 494.09 grams. There is a tower in Gorinchem where false scales are hung alongside the heads of unscrupulous merchants.
It was one those mierenneukers who ruined me. No matter. I prefer to remember a different route to the north. Leaving rue Cartier, I took a train from the white coast to the interior. Just south of Schefferville the train was split and I was the only one in a carriage that travelled to a town that looked like a space station. It was minus forty when I arrived. My love was not there. Perhaps she had missed some revolutions of the sun.
I had almost given up when she arrived in a car with chains around the tyres. There was no traffic on the lunar highway and the oxygen rushed into our lungs on the space walk from the car to the apartment block.
Non-Euclidean love. No straight line. No route to Cathay. We certainly lost track of the days. Running through a graveyard we were chased by a swirl of green light. The snow came up to the chin of Jesus who cast a strange shadow on the snow. All of that is lost now. We missed some revolutions of the sun and I did not keep my journal as I should have done.
Laurence O’Dwyer | Kunstnerhuset
Contents | Mudlark No. 79 (2024)