Experiencing the Arctic in the Little Ice Age: The Pioneering Account of Friderich Martens (1635–1699)

When natural philosopher Robert Boyle presented his groundbreaking study of cold in 1665, he criticized the sensationalism in travelogues from the Arctic. Instead of providing useful information for the advancement of science, Boyle argued, these documents mostly narrated ships in peril among masses of ice or life-threatening encounters with polar bears.¹ However, if Boyle, who died in 1691, had lived a few years longer, he might have revised his dismissal of travel writing from the polar regions.

In 1694, an account from Spitsbergen by the German physician and naturalist Friderich Martens was published in English translation. Martens’ systematic and carefully illustrated survey of the Arctic landscape, fauna, and flora contrasted sharply with the type of journal that Boyle had found so insufficient for natural philosophy.

Martens’ journey took place during one of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, and his account offers a unique glimpse of the Arctic before our current era and the dire state of the cryosphere due to global warming.² The narrative communicates an experience of an alien, frozen environment in the margins of the charted North. The following article focuses on Martens’ notions of the landscape and climate as well as on the empirical foundations of his report. First, however, a few words on the structure of Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland.

The 1694 English translation comprised 175 pages, divided into four sections, with the first section addressing the general outline of the journey. The second section examined the landscape of Spitsbergen; third, the flora; and fourth, the fauna of this Arctic region. The account included sixteen illustrations. Four foldout panoramas depicted the mountainous and icy landscape as well as the sea with its peculiar high waves. One plate illustrated various forms of snow crystals. There were four plates of plants, along with several plates of bird species, land animals, and marine creatures. Finally, one large foldout depicted three species of whales.

Figure 1: Whales and whale louse. Frederick Martens, Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland, in Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford (eds), An Account of Several Late Voyages & Discoveries to the South and North (London: Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford, 1694). Source: Biblioteca Nacional de España, GMM/2997.

These images were drawn by Martens himself. Inserted letters corresponded with descriptions in the text of various natural phenomena, thus creating a multimedia unity for communicating observations.³ Some of Martens’ illustrations were reprinted in other works, either as exact copies or with slight modifications—a further testament to Martens’ impact on early modern conceptualizations of the polar regions, and also an example of how the circulation of knowledge coincided with the circulation of images during this period.⁴

The sixteen illustrations in Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland were identical to those presented in the first German edition of 1675. The 1694 translation, however, also included a meteorological table showing wind, weather, and latitude throughout the journey, which took place in 1671, recorded day by day from April 15 to August 21. This table emphasized the scientific ambition behind the report and further distinguished it from the type of storytelling about Arctic voyages that Boyle had complained about a few decades earlier.

Martens was employed as a physician onboard a whaling ship that set sail on the River Elbe from Hamburg in April 1671. When the expedition approached Spitsbergen, Martens noted how the mountains “show very strange to those that never saw them before”: the dark rock, with features of various minerals, snow and ice, appeared “like Marble, with red, white, and yellow.”⁵

The most striking and wondrous element of this landscape, however, was the immense masses of ice. “There are seven large Ice-Mountains in a Line in these Countries”, Martens explained, referring to the glaciers on the west coast of Spitsbergen, “that lye between the high Rocks, which look of a glorious blew color, as also is the Ice, with a great many cracks and Holes in them; they are hollowed out, melted away, and cut in Groves by the rain and snow-water that runs down; they are increased greatly by the Snow, as the other Ice that swimmeth in the Sea is also: they are augmented likewise by the melted Snow from the Rocks, and from the Rain that falls on them.”⁶

Martens noted how the polar ice differed from the ice in Germany: it was much harder, and it appeared in a variety of colors, which depended on physical factors such as sunlight, clouds, fog, precipitation, and whether the ice was above or below water. The processes of freezing and melting also created an abundance of peculiar forms. In order to give the reader a sense of these shapes, Martens compared them with familiar objects: “just as Ice flowers on our Glass-windows,” he wrote, the polar ice “get all sorts of figures; for these are framed by the dashing of the Sea, like unto Mountains, Steeples, Tables, Chappels, and all sorts of Beasts.”⁷

In part two, chapter IV, “Of the Air”, Martens described various forms of precipitation and how fog could appear rapidly and with frigorific effects. In contrast, the sun could burn so hot as to melt the tar on the ship. In this section, Martens also presented detailed observations on snow crystals. They displayed different shapes: “Roses, Needles and small Corns,” as well as “Stars, with many points like Leaves of Ferne.”⁸ But just as with the polar ice, Martens went beyond classification, and also described the process of crystallization and how the appearance was conditioned by weather, wind and sunlight. His descriptions included the geometry of the single crystal as well as the clusters that falling snow may form under different weather conditions.

The Arctic nature that emerged from Martens’ account was a dynamic landscape, a living environment characterized by great variety in visual appearance and, not least, by metamorphosis—from the ever changing large scale forms of “ice that swimmeth” to the microcosmic world of snow flakes, glittering like “Atoms in Sun-shine.”⁹ Equally important was Martens’ systemic thinking: his notions of how the observed natural phenomena were interdependent, and ultimately connected to the climate. His reflections on these aspects hint at an ecological perspective, taking into account intangible factors such as wind, vaporization, and even the potential remote effect of the moon.

Martens conducted his observations without the aid of scientific instruments. Though, his report was thoroughly empirical, almost completely devoid of references to works in natural history. Martens trusted his own senses, and he did not limit himself to the epistemology of the eye. He tasted ice and snow to determine salinity. He noted smells and sounds. Examples of the latter include how the clashing of icebergs “makes such a great noise, that one can hardly hear his own voice,” or how hard wind blows foam of snow over the sea waves, generating a roar “as if a watermill were agoing.”¹⁰

At the same time, Martens’ narrative contained strands of poetic phrasing and metaphors, and even humor. It would be anachronistic, however, to view the scientific and the literary traits as conflicting methodological strategies.¹¹ Apart from his medical training, Martens was not academically schooled in the natural sciences; as a naturalist, he was self-taught.¹² In the foreword to the German edition—omitted in the 1694 English translation—he explained that the decision to edit his notes and have them published in this form was spurred by his friends Michael Kirsten (1620–1678) and Martin Fogel (1634–1675), both prominent figures in the scientific community of Hamburg.¹³ Their encouragement was a response to an open request from the British Royal Society, asking for firsthand information about the Arctic.

Immediately after the English translation was published in 1694, the editor of Philosophical Transactions—the official journal of the Royal Society—acknowledged the “admirable Diligence” of Martens “in making such considerable Observations in the barren and horrid Climate of Greenland.”¹⁴ Martens’ pioneering account was foundational to the early modern scientific understanding of the Arctic. Its influence diminished during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as polar research became increasingly dependent on advanced technologies and large-scale international collaboration, exemplified by the First International Polar Year of 1882.¹⁵

Martens’ narrative—subjective and sensuous, yet systematic and diligent—offers a valuable perspective on this modern scientific paradigm. Scholarship on the history of polar exploration has focused primarily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, consequently, Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland has not received much attention. Yet, when read alongside other early modern travel accounts from the polar regions, Martens’ work can contribute to a deeper understanding of both the development of scientific knowledge about the Arctic and of historical responses to extreme climates and environments.

1. Robert Boyle, New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, or An Experimental History of Cold (London: John Crook, 1665), preface unpaginated.[↩]
2. Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 120–121, 212.[↩]
3. This model followed the newly established standard for scientific representations. See Wolfgang Lefèvre et al (eds), The Power of Images in Early Modern Science (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2003).[↩]
4. See for example Homann Heirs, Historia Animantium Marinorum, ca 1760, which included both a reproduction of Martens’ illustration of whales and variations of his landscape images (accessed 2026-06-08).[↩]
5. Frederick [sic] Martens, Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland, in Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford (eds), An Account of Several Late Voyages & Discoveries to the South and North (London: Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford, 1694), 19, 20. The whaling expedition of which Martens was a member did not actually travel to Greenland, in today’s sense of the word. During the early modern period, Spitsbergen was often named East or New Greenland.[↩]
6. Martens, Voyage, 20.[↩]
7. Martens, Voyage, 37–38.[↩]
8. Martens, Voyage, 52.[↩]
9. Martens, Voyage, 49.[↩]
10. Martens, Voyage, 41, 27.[↩]
11. See Judy A. Hayden, “Intersections and Cross-Fertilization,” in Judy A. Hayden (ed.), Travel Narratives, the New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569–1750 (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 1–21.[↩]
12. Historical records contain limited biographical information about Martens and the circumstances leading up to his published work. See Ludwig Brinner, Die deutsche Grönlandsfahrt (Berlin: Karl Curtius, 1913), 1–3 and passim, and the editor’s introduction to the 2002 German reprint: Friderich Martens, Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise Beschreibung, gethan im Jahr 1671, ed. Dr. Volker Matthies (Berlin: Dr Köster, 2002), 1–14.[↩]
13. Friderich Martens, Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise Beschreibung, gethan im Jahr 1671 (Hamburg: Gottfried Schultzen, 1675), preface unpaginated.[↩]
14. “An Account of Books,” Philosophical Transactions 17 (June 1694), 166–168, 168.[↩]
15. Another shaping factor was, of course, the nationalist and imperialist ambitions of the period. See Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund, Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2021).[↩]