Next day, being Twelfth Eve, on which foreigners, according to the old practice, hold the festivities now customary in England on the following day, the men asked Van Heemskerck that they might enjoy themselves, "and so that night we made merry and drank to the three kings. And therewith we had two pounds of meal, which we had taken to make paste for the cartridges wherewith, of which we now made pancakes with oil, and to every man a white biscuit, which we sopped in wine. And so supposing that we were in our own country and amongst our friends it comforted us as well as if we had made a great banquet in our own house. And we also distributed tickets, and our gunner was king of Nova Zembla, which is at least eight hundred miles long and lieth between two seas."
In time the sun reappeared—as also the bears—and the rigours of the winter relaxing, the men, on the 9th of May, applied to Barents asking him to speak to Van Heemskerck with a view to preparing for departure. This, after two other appeals, he did on the 15th of May, Van Heemskerck's answer being that, if the ship were not free by the end of the month, he would get ready to go away in the boats. The two boats, or, to be exact, the boat and the herring skute, were then repaired and made suitable for a long sea voyage, and on the 13th of June were in proper condition with all their stores ready. Then Van Heemskerck, "seeing that it was open water and a good west wind, came back to the house again, and there he spake unto Willem Barents (that had been long sick) and showed him that he thought it good (seeing it was a fit time) to go from thence, and they then resolved jointly with the ship's company to take the boat and the skute down to the water side, and in the name of God to begin our voyage to sail from Nova Zembla. Then Willem Barents wrote a letter, which he put into a powder flask and hanged it up in the chimney, showing how we came out of Holland to sail to the kingdom of China, and what had happened to us." Then Barents was taken down to the shore on a sledge and put into one boat, the other sick man, Andriesz, being placed in the other, and "with a west-north-west wind and an indifferent open water" they set sail on a voyage of over fifteen hundred miles among the ice, over the ice, and through the sea.