To Polar Bears, We Are Just Vertical Seals

The Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz, also called “the Columbus of the ice”, set out in the late sixteenth century on a commercial mission: to find a shorter route to China, Japan, and Indonesia. Instead, his expedition became a harrowing survival story. Shipwrecked in the Arctic, the crew salvaged what they could from their vessel to build some kind of shelter. For three months they endured a polar winter, fighting off bears night and day. Twelve men eventually returned to Amsterdam, two years after their departure. “They were like ghosts”, everyone had assumed them dead. Their logbook, published soon after, became an instant European bestseller and was translated into Italian within a year and quickly spreading into other languages.

It is this sense of astonishment that drives Frank Westerman’s latest book, Zeven Dieren Bijten Terug (translated in Italian as Bestiario Artico or Artic Bestiary). As he explains in conversation with Antonio De Sortis, Westerman does not write fiction. Reality, he insists, is often more fantastic. What compels him is the moment of wonder, the point when he is baffled, even flabbergasted. That is when he begins to scratch at a story, to keep digging.

True to form, Westerman pursues his research in the field as much as in the archive. He reread the four-hundred-year-old logbook, but he also travelled to Spitsbergen, camping there with his daughter only a year after a fatal polar bear attack. The risk is real; the history, tangible.

Westerman’s book moves between the sixteenth-century encounters and our own relationship with animals and nature. In the Arctic, the Barentsz crew had never seen polar bears before; nor had the polar bears ever seen humans. These first contacts reveal as much about human behaviour as they do about the animals. The way we describe and portray animals, Westerman argues, reflects our desire to engineer nature. To bend it toward our own designs. Yet our attempts to restore nature's balance after having disrupted it are, in his words, “pathetic”: We sow greener grass to help geese in the Netherlands, never mind that they migrate six thousand kilometres a year.

Westerman wants to unpack our own anthropogenic lens. Again, he emphasises that he does not cross the line into fiction. The wonder lies in reality itself, more revealing than anything invented. Bestiario Artico reminds us that animals are not passive objects, but active subjects that bite back.