In the Land of White Death Read online

  Valerian Ivanovich Albanov

  VALERIAN ALBANOV

  IN THE LAND

  OF WHITE

  DEATH

  An Epic Story of Survival in the

  Siberian Arctic

  PREFACE BY JON KRAKAUER

  INTRODUCTION BY DAVID ROBERTS

  ALISON ANDERSON, TRANSLATOR

  WITH ADDITIONAL MATERIAL FROM WILLIAM BARR’S

  TRANSLATION FROM THE RUSSIAN

  T H E M O D E R N L I B R A R Y

  N E W Y O R K

  CONTENTS

  Preface by Jon Krakauer

  Introduction by David Roberts

  Maps

  WHY I LEFT THE SAINT ANNA

  PREPARATIONS FOR THE SLEDGE EXPEDITION

  LAST DAY ON BOARD THE SAINT ANNA

  OVER THE POLAR ICE PACK

  DEATH OF SAILOR BAYEV,

  FURTHER DISCOURAGEMENT,

  EXHAUSTION

  DRIFTING SOUTHWARD

  LAND HO!

  ALEXANDRA LAND

  THE FATEFUL JOURNEY TO CAPE FLORA

  CAPE FLORA, JACKSON AND ZIEGLER’S CAMP

  PREPARING TO WINTER OVER AT CAPE FLORA

  SHIP AHOY!

  LEAVING FRANZ JOSEF LAND

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Map from Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen

  PREFACE

  Jon Krakauer

  When Robert Falcon Scott perished on an Antarctic glacier in 1912, just eleven miles from salvation, he was venerated as one of the foremost fallen heroes in the history of the British Empire. There is scarcely a schoolboy in all of Britannia who can’t recite the story of Scott’s ill-starred quest by heart.

  Three years after Scott so famously came to grief, an expedition to Antarctica under the leadership of Ernest Shackleton seemed headed for a similarly grim end. Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, was crushed by ice and sank, leaving twenty-eight men stranded on the frozen Weddell Sea. Shackleton, however, managed to deliver his entire team to safety, by means of an audacious eight-hundred-mile voyage across the gale-ravaged South Atlantic Ocean in a puny open lifeboat. This near-miraculous journey was recently made familiar to millions of readers by such deservedly popular books as Endurance, by Alfred Lansing, and The Endurance, by Caroline Alexander. Shackleton’s name became synonymous with courage, tenacity, and brilliant leadership under pressure.

  All of which begs the question: If Scott and Shackleton have attained such posthumous stature and renown, why is Valerian Ivanovich Albanov all but unknown to the world?

  Albanov was a Russian navigator. In 1912, six months after the death of Scott, he set sail from Alexandrovsk (present-day Murmansk) as second in command on the good ship Saint Anna, bound for Vladivostok, 7,000 miles away, across treacherous Arctic waters. Some two years before Shackleton’s Endurance was beset by pack ice off Antarctica, Albanov’s Saint Anna was likewise trapped at the opposite end of the globe, in the frozen Kara Sea. Eighteen months later, with supplies running perilously low and his vessel more firmly locked in the ice than ever, Albanov abandoned ship and led thirteen men southward in a desperate fight for survival.

  The trials Albanov endured as he struggled his way back to civilization were every bit as harrowing as those faced by Shackleton. And Albanov’s story is perhaps even more riveting to read, because it is told in Albanov’s own voice, as entries in a daily journal. (In contrast, the recent bestselling accounts of Shackleton’s ordeal—though wonderful—were written many decades after the fact, by authors who weren’t present during the events they describe.) Albanov, moreover, turned out to be both a gifted writer and an uncommonly honest diarist. He wrote a spare, astounding, utterly compelling book that—thanks to bad luck and the vagaries of history—vanished into the recesses of twentieth-century letters.

  But it remains in the shadows no longer. Here, published in English for the first time, is In the Land of White Death. More than eighty years after Albanov wrote this tour de force, there is reason to hope that he might finally receive the recognition he deserves.

  ——

  JON KRAKAUER is the bestselling author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

  The Saint Anna upon its departure from St. Petersburg

  INTRODUCTION

  David Roberts

  How is it possible that the story of the 1912–14 voyage of the Saint Anna, one of the most tragic and heroic episodes in Arctic annals, remains virtually unknown outside of Russia? Even more regrettable, how can it be that the narrative of that expedition, written by one of its two survivors, Valerian Ivanovich Albanov, lurks in a limbo of historical obscurity? For Albanov’s account is one of the rare masterpieces of polar literature, deserving of comparison with the classic texts of Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Falcon Scott, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and Sir Ernest Shackleton. Yet with this edition, Albanov appears in English for the first time.

  Although I have been a devotee of Arctic and Antarctic exploration for three decades, until 1997 I had never heard a word about the ill-starred journey of the Saint Anna, commanded by Georgiy Brusilov, nor of Albanov’s daring flight from the doomed ship across the ice in quest of salvation. In Jeannette Mirsky’s definitive history of northern exploration, To the Arctic!, Brusilov’s expedition merits a mere sentence and a half, and that only to record the fruitless search for the lost party by a more famous explorer.

  Three years ago, a French publisher, Michel Guérin, recommended to me an obscure book, published in French in 1928, called Au pays de la mort blanche. He in turn had been tipped off by Christian de Marliave, a seasoned explorer and connoisseur of polar literature. At Harvard’s Widener Library, I found a copy of this French edition of Albanov, whose account in Russian was originally published in 1917. During the sixty-eight years the book had stood in the Widener stacks, it had never been checked out!

  I read Albanov with a sense of awe laced with a growing excitement, for it is a stunning revelation to discover a great work in a field of writing in which one thinks one knows all the canonic books. It is thus a pleasure to introduce this neglected narrative to a new audience, and to muse on what circumstances allowed Albanov to write so vividly about the Arctic nightmare he barely survived.

  There are reasons why the Saint Anna story has slipped through the cracks. A moderately experienced navigator in northern waters, Brusilov was uninterested in exploration for its own sake. The rationale for his expedition was to find new hunting grounds for walrus, seal, polar bear, and whale. The enterprise seems to have been jinxed from the start. A trusted friend whom Brusilov wished to make second in command, and who was bringing with him much-needed expedition funds, a doctor, and a small library of Arctic books, failed to reach the port of Alexandrovsk in time to embark. Brusilov was delayed and impoverished by an absurd Russian law that levied a crushing tax on any ship purchased in another country (in the Saint Anna’s case, Great Britain). As he filled his ship with twenty-three crewmates, he managed to recruit only five genuine sailors. The rest of the team members were at best professional hunters, at worst opportunists hoping to strike it rich in the fur trade.

  Brusilov was demoralized by his setbacks. In his last letter, mailed to his mother from Alexandrovsk, he wrote, “Here we have had nothing but disagreements. . . . The ambiance was dismal: one man who fell ill, others who refused to embark. . . .”

  Nevertheless, Brusilov launched his voyage in a state of blasé overconfidence that in retrospect seems unfathomable. In proposing to emerge at Vladivostok, the captain intended to make only the second successful traverse of the Northeast Passage. Like its cousin, the more famous Northwest Passage ranging the Arctic Ocean north of Canada and
Alaska, the Northeast Passage had been hypothesized since the Renaissance as a shortcut from Europe to China. The long ocean voyage to the north of Scandinavia and Siberia was first attempted by a British expedition in 1553. The perilous traverse was not completed, however, until 1879, by the great Swedish explorer Baron Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld. During the thirty-three years that yawned between Nordenskiöld and Brusilov, the feat had not been repeated.

  For his riffraff crew of twenty-three, Brusilov loaded on board enough provisions to feed thirty men for eighteen months, but he inexplicably failed to include adequate supplies of the antiscorbutics of the day, such as citrus fruits. Within four months, the crew of the Saint Anna had succumbed to a veritable plague of scurvy. Nor did Brusilov embark with nearly enough fuel to run the ship’s engines and heat its cabins for two years. With all his delays, he set out on August 28, 1912, a date so late in the summer that it guaranteed the ship would be trapped in the ice.

  At the last minute, Brusilov took on board a young woman named Yerminiya Zhdanko, even though the presence of females on Arctic expeditions was virtually unprecedented. With some training as a nurse, Zhdanko, Brusilov thought, might serve in place of the absent doctor. The fatal casualness with which the whole team approached the journey emerges poignantly in a letter the woman wrote her father shortly before embarking:

  The brother of Ksénia [i.e., Brusilov] has bought a boat, a schooner, it seems. He’s organizing an expedition to Arkhangel’sk and is inviting passengers (it was even announced in the papers) in the event that there are enough cabins. This will take two or three weeks and I’ll come home from Arkhangel’sk by train. The goal of the expedition, it seems, is to hunt walruses, bears, etc. . . . and then they’ll try to traverse to Vladivostok, but you can be sure, none of that concerns me.

  Seduced by the delight of the first leg of the journey, Zhdanko stayed aboard and sailed on to her icebound death sentence.

  Above all, Brusilov underestimated the treachery of the Kara Sea, the frigid ocean north of the delta of the river Ob. As Jeannette Mirsky writes, “Since sailors first looked on the Kara Sea, it was never mentioned without an adjective denoting dread or terror; it is the ‘ice-cellar.’ ” Yet Brusilov cavalierly coasted into this trap on September 4. By October 15, the Saint Anna was locked in sea ice.

  At this point, the party was still close to land, for the Yamal Peninsula protruded just east of the ship. On a shore excursion, crewmen had found the fresh tracks of sleds pulled by the reindeer of the Samoyeds, nomadic natives of Siberia. Had the team abandoned the ship and fled south into the interior, every last member’s life would likely have been spared. But Brusilov had not set out along the Northeast Passage to quit at the first setback. It was almost routine for a ship in Arctic waters to be frozen in for the winter, only to be disgorged into open sea in the next summer’s thaw; Nordenskiöld himself had endured just such an immobilization.

  So the Saint Anna drifted in lazy zigzags north. The team wintered over in the ice, but when the summer of 1913 came and went without freeing the ship, the disheartened crew faced the inevitability of a second winter in their Arctic prison. After a year and a half, the ship had drifted north some 2,400 miles from where it had frozen in. It had been sixteen months since the crew had last sighted land. At a latitude of 82°58´, in fact, the Saint Anna lay north of any terra firma in the Eastern Hemisphere.

  By January 1914, there was mutiny in the air. Although there was plenty of food still on board, the coal and wood had been exhausted. The only source of heat and light was a putrid mixture of bear and seal fat with machine oil that burned with a smoky sputter. Virtually every crewmember had been incapacitated for long stretches with scurvy. To more than half the team, the prospect of waiting for a second summer’s deliverance seemed tantamount to resigning themselves to the “white death” of Albanov’s title.

  Second in command as chief navigation officer, Valerian Albanov was, at thirty-two, three years older than his captain, with more experience in Arctic waters. By early 1914, Brusilov and his navigator had been at serious odds for months. As Albanov writes, every time the two men made contact, “the air was electric.” Albanov had become convinced that the only chance for survival was to leave the ship and head, however desperately, by ski and sledge and kayak for Franz Josef Land, which the team knew lay somewhere to the south.

  The only map of these little-known precincts the team possessed was a page from Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North, nearly twenty years out of date, with most of the Franz Josef islands indicated by hypothetical dotted lines. Had Brusilov done his homework, or had the Arctic library his comrade intended to bring aboard the ship actually arrived, the captain would have known that in 1900, after reaching a new farthest north, the great Italian explorer the Duke of the Abruzzi had left an ample depot of supplies on Prince Rudolf Island, the most northerly (and for the team, the nearest) land in all of the Franz Josef archipelago. That knowledge alone might have saved the team’s lives.

  On January 9, 1914, Albanov requested permission from the commander he had come to hate to build a kayak. It was his intention to flee the ship on his own, but within the month, many of his teammates were inspired to follow his example. Brusilov consented, mindful of how much longer the dwindling food supply would last with half his crewmembers gone.

  It would have been one thing had a foresighted captain stowed kayaks and sledges aboard for just such an emergency. Instead, Albanov and his cronies had to improvise kayaks and sledges out of the materials at hand. It is a testimonial to these sailors’ remarkable craftsmanship that a pair of kayaks and a pair of sledges ultimately held up till very near the end of the ordeal.

  On April 10, 1914, Albanov and thirteen companions set off across the sea ice, leaving the Saint Anna behind. Three of the party soon thought better of their flight and returned to the ship. With him, Albanov carried a copy of Brusilov’s log, which recorded in brief, unimaginative entries the appalling year and a half of helpless drift.

  The reader may well wonder why Brusilov and so many of his teammates were content to linger on board the ice-locked ship. One piece of Arctic history the captain did know was the strange fate of the Jeannette, an American ship that had been trapped by ice in 1879 north of eastern Siberia. A year and a half later, the polar pack dealt its death blow to the Jeannette, crushing and sinking her. Forced to head for land six hundred miles away, thirteen of the party’s thirty-three men, including the expedition leader, perished either on the ice or in improvised refuges on forlorn shores.

  Three years after this disaster, recognizable pieces of the Jeannette washed up on the shores of Greenland. Thus explorers learned of the unexpected large-scale currents that governed the drift of polar ice. In 1893, in what was arguably the boldest Arctic expedition ever launched, the visionary Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen took advantage of this discovery to prosecute a wildly ambitious attempt on the North Pole.

  Nansen had a ship designed with a shallow, rounded keel, so that instead of being gripped and crushed by the ice, it would be thrust upward by the pressure of the floes. Then he sailed off north of Siberia with the deliberate aim of getting the Fram frozen into the pack. The design worked: The ship’s keel slid safely above the frozen sea. After the Fram had drifted erratically northwest for a year and a half, Nansen and a single companion set off with dogs to ski to the Pole. They had no hope of regaining the ship.

  After twenty-six days, the two men reached a new farthest north of 86°13.6´, but fickle southerly currents defeated them. Undaunted, Nansen and his partner made their way south to Franz Josef Land, wintered over a third time, and made their way to an outpost at Cape Flora, where an English explorer had built huts. They were picked up by a passing ship in August 1896. Meanwhile, the Fram, just as planned, had drifted with the ice all the way across the Arctic and was released unharmed into the Atlantic.

  On board the Saint Anna, Nansen’s magisterial account of that expedition, Farthest North, had become a kind of bible. Al
banov had read certain passages so many times he had virtually memorized them. And Brusilov loitered on deck toward his second icebound summer in the serene faith that the drifting pack would liberate the Saint Anna just as it had the Fram.

  ——

  Most of the finest polar narratives are leisurely, richly detailed, grandly symphonic works (Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, the definitive account of Scott’s tragic 1910–13 Antarctic expedition, runs to 643 pages in the Penguin edition). In the Land of White Death, however, is as lean and taut as a good thriller. One of the felicities of Albanov’s book is his decision to begin his account with his departure from the Saint Anna on April 10, 1914. The whole of the dolorous but uneventful drift of the ship frozen into the ice the author wisely ignores.

  Thus the book narrows its focus to the ninety-day ordeal during which, commanded by Albanov, ten men struggled through unimaginable hardships and dangers to traverse 235 miles of frozen sea, open leads, glaciers, and island shores to gain the same Cape Flora that had proved Nansen’s deliverance. Among other accomplishments, Albanov’s escape was a brilliant feat of navigation, for with only a faulty chronometer, he had no way of divining an accurate longitude. During one agonizing moment midway in the journey, the pilot had to guess whether the whole of Franz Josef Land lay east or west of him. He guessed east, and he was right.

  Albanov was a born leader. Without him, the other men would have died early on. Growing sick of the tedious alternation of kayaking open leads with the sledges as baggage and man-hauling the sledges with kayaks stowed, five of the men urged abandoning both kayaks and sledges and skiing hell-bent for land. Albanov not only recognized that course as suicidal folly, but managed to convince his followers of the fact.