In the Land of White Death: An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic

V
ALERIAN
A
LBANOV

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

——

J
ON
K
RAKAUER
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

 

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.