Centuries before GPS trackers, heated parkas, and satellite ice charts, eight English whalemen were accidentally left behind on Spitsbergen and somehow lived through an Arctic winter with almost nothing.
Their survival in 1630 and 1631 is now recognized as the first recorded overwintering on the Svalbard islands, a feat historians still treat as a minor miracle rather than a neat camping story.
Today, Svalbard is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth. Scientists estimate that the region is heating six to seven times faster than the global average, with winters changing most rapidly. In other words, this same landscape that once nearly broke eight healthy sailors is now transforming at a pace that worries climate researchers.
Eight whalemen and an unintended “experiment” in Arctic living
The story begins with the English Muscovy Company, which sent whaling fleets north each summer to hunt bowhead whales and defend its monopoly in the region. In May 1630, the ship Salutation sailed for Spitsbergen under the command of whaling captain William Goodlad.
Once in Arctic waters, Goodlad detached eight men in a small open boat to hunt reindeer near the coast and top up the ship’s provisions for the voyage home.
They took little gear, assuming they would be gone only a few days. When the weather turned, the Salutation was forced offshore to avoid being smashed against the rocks. By the time the hunting party fought its way south, missing landmarks in fog and arguing about navigation, the entire fleet had already left for England.
They were alone, in late summer, at the top of the world.
One of the men, gunner’s mate Edward Pellham, later wrote a detailed pamphlet praising divine “power and providence” for their survival. Early printed editions even labeled their location as “Green-land,” reflecting a common 17th-century mix up between Spitsbergen and Greenland on European maps.
Brick by brick, they built a warmer world inside a frozen one
With no realistic chance of rescue before the next whaling season, the men turned an abandoned shore station into a lifeline. At Bell Sound, they found a large whaling “tent” structure used in summer to process whale blubber.
Inside that building, they constructed a much smaller brick house for extra insulation, cannibalizing the furnaces that once boiled whale oil and hauling every loose board and barrel stave they could find for fuel.
If you have ever complained about a drafty apartment when the heat clicks off, imagine tending fires day and night just to stop the mortar in your walls from freezing solid.
Contemporary archaeological and historical work on early whaling stations in Svalbard suggests that these structures were not designed for year-round use, which makes the men’s improvised double shelter even more striking to researchers.
Fasting, “whale fritters,” and a dangerous lesson from polar bears
Once the sea froze and the sun disappeared, the psychological side of the ordeal took over. Pellham described their minds as full of “a thousand sorts of imaginations,” a phrase that will sound familiar to anyone who has lain awake counting worries on a long winter night.
To stretch dwindling food, the men agreed to eat once a day and to fast several days a week, relying on lumps of leftover whale fat, which Pellham called the most loathsome food he had ever seen.
As light slowly returned, polar bears began to appear around the station. The animals were both a threat and a badly-needed source of meat.
Over the course of the winter and spring, almost 40 bears approached the camp and the stranded crew managed to kill several, which finally eased the worst of the hunger. Their first attempt at eating polar bear liver nearly killed them, which matches what modern toxicology now knows about the extreme vitamin A levels in that organ.
By late spring, against their own expectations, all eight men were still alive. When two ships from the English port of Hull sailed into Bell Sound in May 1631, looking to see whether rumors of stranded sailors were true, they found a group of smoke-blackened survivors in rags who had just proved that a full Arctic winter on Svalbard was survivable in the most basic conditions.
From whaling frontier to climate front line
A 1997 study in the journal Polar Record confirmed this as the first recorded overwintering on Svalbard and placed the event in a wider pattern of early European attempts to live year round in the Atlantic Arctic.
Historians now see Pellham’s account as a rare, almost experimental record of what happens when ordinary working sailors are dropped into an extreme environment without proper planning.
Four hundred years later, scientists rely on Svalbard again, this time as a natural laboratory for rapid climate change.
Recent research shows that winter temperatures over the archipelago are rising at nearly twice its already-elevated annual warming rate, while broader Arctic studies find the region heating about four times faster than the global average.
Glaciers around Svalbard are shrinking faster in exceptionally warm summers and sea ice is retreating from coasts once locked in by pack ice for much of the year.
At the end of the day, Pellham’s story is not only a tale of grit in the face of hunger and polar bears. It is also a reminder that Arctic risks have always been shaped by human choices, from 17th century whaling monopolies to today’s decisions about fossil fuels and shipping routes.
For readers who want to go straight to the original narrative, Pellham’s ordeal has been revisited in a recent feature that draws on his 17th century pamphlet and modern polar research.
The study on Svalbard’s rapid winter warming was published in Nature Communications.
