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Gerrit de Veer
Born: around 1570, exact date or place not known - Died: Not known
Interesting Trivia:
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named the Novaya Zemlya effect (the rectangular phase of the sun which occurs in the Arctic)
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he was a carpenter by trade
His Story:
Gerrit de Veer served as a carpenter on the second and third voyage (1596) of Jacob van Heemskerk en Willem Barentsz.
On the second journey, after Barentsz successfully rounded Nova Zembla, the ship got stuck in the ice. De Veer was one of the few survivors. He kept daily records on the positions of the sun, planets and stars. That way, the surviving party could keep track of the date and knew when would be an appropriate time to try to get back to Holland. They overwintered in a cabin, built from driftwood (called 'Het Behouden Huijs') and in the spring built a sloop which took 15 sailors back to civilization.
Unfortunately, Barentsz died on that journey but the men were picked up by a Dutch merchant vessel. De Veer kept a diary of the voyage. He described something (on 24th January 1597) which he had never seen before and made history when he became the first person to observe and record, what he had called, the Novaya Zemlya effect. It was after a long pole night and he only saw the sun for a short period. He did not actually see the sun that day, but what he saw were lights reflected from the sun that through the round shape of the earth became visible.
According to his calculations, the sun should have gone up two weeks later. When he returned to Holland, nobody believed him and he was ridiculed for being sloppy with his calculations. The general believe was that he must have used the Gregorian calendar which calculated 10 days behind.
Charles T. Beke’s research in the 1850’s, however, showed that De Veer’s observations were reliable. Beke stated "We have therefore no alternative but to receive the facts recorded by de Veer as substantially true, and to believe that owing to the peculiar condition of the atmosphere, there existed an extraordinary refraction, not merely on the 25th of January, but continuously during fourteen days afterwards, at first amounting to nearly four degrees, but gradually decreasing to about one degree and a half." ... "The problem is a curious, and, with our still insufficient knowledge of the laws of atmospheric refraction in high latitudes, a difficult one. Nevertheless we may confidently rely on the result being such as to establish the entire veracity of our Dutch historian."
Meanwhile, modern research has come up with a logical explanation as to why the sun appears rectangle, but this does not make De Veer’s discovery less amazing.
Te Papa Whale exhibition in Washington, DC