On the map, Novaya Zemlya looks like a bent arm separating two seas: the Barents Sea to the west and the Kara Sea to the east. Two main islands, nearly 900 kilometres from south to north, and glaciers calving directly into the ocean. Few travellers can say they have set foot here: only a handful of Russian polar expeditions, subject to permits, escorts and weather, venture along these coasts.

A port call that is not one

No welcoming port, no village open to passing ships: here, the term port call returns to its original meaning of a stop along the way. The expedition ship anchors in a sheltered bay, Zodiacs set off to scout, and every landing depends on the wind, the drifting ice and the bears. A day's program can change three times; seasoned high-latitude travellers know this and welcome it, because this uncertainty is the promise of a coastline that has remained just as the first navigators saw it. You land on beaches of grey pebbles, among driftwood and bleached carcasses, and the tundra stretches out immediately, low-lying and dotted with saxifrages and Arctic poppies during the short summer, with the surf and the distant cries of terns as the only sounds.

Barents' winter

Those first navigators have one name that towers above all others: Willem Barents. In 1596, searching for the Northeast Passage to China, the Dutch navigator saw his ship crushed by ice at the northeastern tip of the archipelago. His crew built a hut with timber from the wreck and survived an entire polar winter in it — the first documented Arctic overwintering in European history, recounted day by day by one of the sailors. The explorer died on the journey home, in 1597, leaving his name to the neighbouring sea. The remains of the hut, found almost intact three centuries later, yielded tools, books and even the clock, now on display in Amsterdam. Sailing these waters is literally following in his wake, old charts in hand, and onboard lecturers never miss a chance to read aloud from the pages of the crew's journal.

The wild side

Zodiacs skirt cliffs where murres and kittiwakes nest by the tens of thousands, in a din that drowns out the engines. On the northwestern islets, walruses pile up in compact colonies, mounds of tusks and wrinkled skin that rise all at once as the boats pass. The polar bear, master of the place, belongs here to a distinct population; each landing begins with a lookout by the armed guides, and it is not unusual for a cream-coloured silhouette spotted on the ridge to turn a planned walk into careful observation from the sea. The glaciers of the North Island, among the largest in the Russian Arctic, close off the fjords with their bluish walls, from which entire slabs of ice break away with a roar.

A darker history, an immense horizon

The archipelago also carries the memory of the 20th century: a closed military zone, it served as a nuclear testing ground during the Cold War, a closed chapter that explains why these shores remain so rarely visited. It is this paradox that strikes the traveller: a territory kept away from people and, in effect, returned to the birds, the walruses and the tundra. When the ship sets course to the south again, the long white spine slowly fades into the sea mist. You take away the feeling of having approached one of the last margins of the world, where maps long hesitated — and the urge to reopen the explorers' accounts, to measure what these waters demanded of those who opened them.