In the Land of White Death: An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic (2 page)

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. Albanov 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.

There is no denying Albanov’s compassion: The sleepless vigils as he awaits absent colleagues, the retracing of his hard-won path to hunt for stragglers, give proof of his humanity. Yet at the same time, he must have been an autocratic and headstrong leader. In an age when interpersonal conflicts were politely veiled in public accounts, Albanov makes no secret of his disdain for Brusilov. Even more strikingly (and this is another strength of the book), Albanov rails in print against the apathy and incompetence of his teammates, despite the fact that as he writes in 1917, they are all but one dead. Thus “My companions are no better than children”; they are “foolish”; “I am sure they are capable of anything.” When one crewman carelessly loses an invaluable Remington rifle, Albanov is so outraged that he strikes out at any teammate who crosses his path.

The hazards of that ninety-day journey, from being chased by walruses to falling through thin ice into the numbing sea, make up a gauntlet of continuous peril. The ups and downs of hope and despair measure out the psychological
agon
of the voyage. And the sheer mystery of the fate of missing comrades haunts the reader just as it haunts Albanov.

Yet many a dramatic Arctic ordeal has produced only a plodding expedition book. What is the secret of Albanov’s all-but-unconscious genius as narrator?

The style is plain and direct, though rich in concrete detail. Yet in the breast of the plainspoken chronicler there also abides the soul of a poet. One of the finest passages in the book is the lyrical outburst Albanov delivers upon reaching land for the first time in almost two years. The cacophonous birdsong sounds “the hymn of life and the hymn of existence”; tiny yellow flowers were “greeting us again with their pure and charming splendor”; even the sight of innumerable small stones gleaming in the sun imparts an unspeakable joy. Yet there hangs over this idyll the unguessed tribulation of the future—for the land would prove far more fatal to Albanov’s men than the sea.

With all the hindsight available to him as he took up his pen in 1917, Albanov cunningly resisted the temptation to foreshadow or moralize. He had kept a diary throughout his excruciating escape. In his book, he recasts the narrative as that diary, though without doubt the entries have been enhanced and polished (exhausted men do not write lyrical odes to refulgent nature). The effect of this strategy is to recapture in all its tense uncertainty the drama of never knowing whether a given day’s actions lead one closer to safety or to death. At the most optimistic moments, the cruel Arctic knocks Albanov’s party flat; yet in the depths of their discouragement, it unveils a corridor of hope.

Moreover, Albanov seems blessed with an inborn knack for metaphor. In the midst of his closest call, the iceberg on which he and his last partner, Alexander Konrad, have taken refuge cracks open and dumps the two men, trapped in a double sleeping bag, into the sea. Albanov likens their plight to that of “kittens thrown together in a sack to be drowned.” The most ordinary turns in the party’s grim trek push Albanov to an apostrophic eloquence, as when he hears a teammate exhort the moribund Shpakovsky, “Do you want to join Nilsen?”—the teammate who had died the day before. There follows an inspired
pensée
in which Albanov analyzes the small increments by which exhaustion leads to death. The passage serves as well as Albanov’s implicit prayer for deliverance.

By the time his book was published, Albanov had only two years to live. Having survived, through improvisatory pluck and heroic perseverance, one of the most deadly of all Arctic ordeals, Albanov would perish in 1919—in only his thirty-eighth year. By some accounts he died of typhoid fever; others report that he was killed absurdly when a boxcar loaded with munitions blew up in a Russian train station. His fellow survivor, Alexander Konrad, lived until 1940.

Of the nine men who died trying to reach Cape Flora; of the thirteen, including Brusilov and Yerminiya Zhdanko, who stayed aboard the
Saint Anna;
of the doomed ship itself—not a trace was ever found.