The Brusilov Expedition — the ship drifted off the map, and only two men walked out

The Brusilov expedition was a Russian attempt, begun in 1912, to sail the Northeast Passage — the Northern Sea Route across the top of Russia from the Atlantic to the Pacific — aboard the schooner Svyataya Anna (St. Anna) under Lieutenant Georgy Brusilov. It failed catastrophically. The ship sailed too late in the season, was beset by ice in the Kara Sea off the Yamal Peninsula in October 1912, and was never freed. Locked in the pack, she drifted helplessly northward for nearly two years, carried far beyond her intended route to about 83° North, near Franz Josef Land. Of the roughly twenty-four people aboard, only two survived: the navigator Valerian Albanov and the sailor Alexander Konrad, who walked out across the ice in 1914. Brusilov, the ship, and everyone who stayed with her vanished and were never seen again. Around twenty-two people died.

The expedition was undone before it began by poor planning and a late start, and then by the long, grinding entrapment that followed. Through 1913 the Kara Sea did not release the ship; by 1914 she had drifted into latitudes far from any shipping, and scurvy had taken hold among captain and crew. Judging the ship doomed to drift indefinitely, the navigator Valerian Albanov asked to be relieved of his duties and to leave on foot. Brusilov agreed, and in April 1914 Albanov set out across the moving pack toward Franz Josef Land with thirteen other men, hauling improvised sledges and kayaks.

The march was a ninety-day ordeal across some of the most treacherous terrain on earth — shifting floes, open leads, pressure ridges, and a sea ice that drifted them backward even as they walked forward. The party fractured and died by stages; some turned back, others were lost. Only Albanov and Konrad reached land, at Cape Flora on Northbrook Island, where by chance they were rescued by the Svyatoy Foka, the ship of the separate, also-stricken Sedov expedition, in 1914. Albanov carried out the ship’s logbook and his own diary, the only substantial records of the expedition to survive, later published as In the Land of White Death. The Svyataya Anna and all who remained aboard, including Brusilov and the 22-year-old nurse Yerminia Zhdanko, were never found. A century later, in 2010, searchers on Franz Josef Land recovered remains and artifacts thought to belong to the lost escape party, the first physical trace of the expedition’s fate.