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Summary: Rare Account of Russian Arctic Exploration
Review: This is an exceptionally interesting tale which was originally published in 1917 and that relates the tragedy of a doomed Russian Arctic expedition. After being icebound on the Saint Anna for two years far to the north of Siberia, Albanov, the navigator, opted to abandon the trapped ship to make a perilous push for the Franz Josef archipelago, attempting to travel a couple of hundred miles over the ice pack by way of crudely fashioned sledges and kayaks. Ten of the 23 crewmen chose to accompany him. Those who stayed behind, including the captain and the nurse (a rare Western female figure in Arctic journeys--Inuit women sometimes show up in these expeditions but other than this nurse, I haven't read about any European or American women joining up for any travels, except in a footnote in this volume which noted the wife of another Russian explorer tagged along with him and died horribly in the 1750s in Yakutsk)...were never seen again. (Although Russian scholars speculate that it's possible that the ship eventually drifted free again into the Atlantic and might have sailed for Norway, because Nansen's Fram had proven this could be done. Unfortunately, since the remaining crew would have had no way of knowing that WWI had broken out in the meantime, and the North and Barents Seas were swarming with German U-boats, they would've been sunk on sight.)Most of Albanov's diary was lost in the 90-day struggle towards salvation, so he starts his book right at the point at which he and his group left the ship, saying little about the preceding two years. Later, after rescue, he consulted the remaining diary pages and padded them out to form the bulk of this slim narrative. One of the things that I found most interesting was that Albanov's whole plan hinged on the accuracy of Nansen's map of the Franz Josef Archipelago, which had been included in a book about that earlier expedition. In that volume in the ship's library, Nansen had told how he and a comrade had wintered at Cape Flora on Northbrook Island in a camp that had been established by still an earlier explorer, the Englishman Jackson. So Albanov, without a means to establish longitude and only able to calculate latitude periodically, was relying on a tentative map of a poorly explored region in order to find a camp that had likely not been visited for several years in the hope that supplies could be found there. At one point, he basically had to guess whether to turn east or west, knowing that if he chose wrong, he would end up hiking away from the archipelago and out into the void. The other really interesting thing about Albanov's story is the frank way he talks about his companions, calling them lazy and indolent imbeciles without curiousity, foresight, or motivation, and going so far as to note at one point that "they seemed to be engaged in a competition to determine who was the most useless". At every step, he has to verbally flog them forward, because they're constantly kvetching and moaning about hunger and fatigue, and the moment he stops haranguing them, they basically grind to a halt and lay about, staring at the sky. They were able to shoot seals and polar bears from time to time, although it seems that at one point, they narrowly avoided an ignominious death from essentially digestive disorders. (Polar bears are rife with trichinosis, and people can also die from Vitamin A overdose by eating their livers, and it is speculated that one or the other of these problems led to the death of the stranded Andree balloon expedition, the bodies of whose members were not found until 30 years later.) This all-meat diet (after they had run out of biscuit), however, led to severe malnutrition and was probably the cause of death for two members and may also explain why most of the others became listless and wanted to do nothing but stop and sleep. Also, it's quite interesting to consider the degree to which national characters or cultures are reflected in these expeditions. The English, of course, cornered the market on noble and heroic outright failures, in which everyone suffered tragically and died stoically for the Empire, keeping order and decorum to the end, most notably in Scott's attempt to reach the South Pole. The Americans devolved into murder (the Jeanette expedition, at least as speculated in Weird and Tragic Shores), mutiny and cannibalism (the Greely expedition), and lying and fraud (Frederick Cook). The Scandanavians (with the exception of Andree's quixotic attempt) were pragmatic and low-key (Nansen's farthest-north record was achieved specifically by letting the Fram get frozen into the pack ice so that it would slowly be carried by the currents across the Arctic Sea until he could make a run at the pole by foot). The Russians stereotypically appeared to be fatalistic and indifferent. Of course, the fact that the expedition was extraordinarily badly planned and that half of the crew consisted of whatever idlers and riffraff where found at the very last moment at the wharves at Murmansk could explain why virtually no one seemed to display admirable moral qualities. This is a very fascinating account about an Arctic journey that few in the English-speaking world had known about until 2000 when the first edition of this book was released. (German and French translations had been published in the 1920s.) Even in Russia it seems that Albanov's ordeal had attracted little interest. The man who was behind organizing this English translation discovered virtually by accident that Russian scholars also had the original diary of the only other survivor but could scarcely be bothered to consult it because the diarist was a mere sailor. The details from this document shed a whole new light on key sections of Albanov's story and are told in an epilogue that had not been prepared in time for the hardback edition. I highly recommend this book to anyone who dabbles in the exploration genre. It's truly fascinating stuff and told in a way that is fresh and intriguing. It's a story that should be better known.
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