14 DAY TRIAL // A team of explorers announced yesterday, September 13, that they have just discovered the log of a ship that set sail about a century ago, in search for the elusive Northeast Passage.
This was a hypothesized route that was supposed to connect Europe with Asia directly, through or around the North Pole. Satellite data show that the route remains elusive even now.
But the captain and crew of the explorations ship Saint Anna had no idea of this when they set sail.
The sailors headed out and made it quite some distance from their port before their ship became embedded in ice floating in the Vilkitsky Strai, which leads to the Kara Sea.
It was presumed for a long time that the ship and her crew had been lost for good, but that recently turned out not to be the case.
Explorers were able to discover a journal dated May 1913, which seems to details life aboard the trapped Saint Anna, as told by adventurer Georgy Brusilov, the captain of the expedition.
“There is no doubt that the skeletons and notebook pages we found at the end of July on Franz Josef Land are the remains of Georgy Brusilov's expedition – which were thought forever lost,” explains Oleg Prodan.
He was the leader of the research expedition that retraced the ship's route, Discovery News reports.
All the remains were found embedded in ices on Franz Josef land, the northernmost land mass belonging to Europe.
The expedition was survived by only two people, one of which was navigator Valerian Albanov. He wrote a book of memoirs, in which be accounted for how he and the sailors spent two grueling years trapped on the ship.
Of the 24-member crew, only 11 decided to try their luck navigating the ices in the area, in a bid to find firm land. But only two made it back to civilization.
Soviet author Veniamin Kaverin made this story popular in the renowned novel “Two Captains.” The failure of Saint Anna made the subject of books and movies, and is a popular cultural reference.
Among the objects found on Franz Josef land, the Russian explorers mention a knife, a spoon with its owner's initials on it, snowshoes, a watch, and even a pair of sunglasses.
These had been fashioned out of the bottoms of two rum bottles. “It was so overwhelming to find those sunglasses, which we had all been able to imagine so well after Albanov's description,” said in a conference Vladimir Melnikov, a member of the team that made the recent voyage.