Enterprise and Adventure/Russian Polar Expeditions
RUSSIAN POLAR EXPEDITIONS.
While English enterprise in the Polar Regions has chiefly been confined to the northern coast of America, the Russians have been diligent explorers of these regions lying nearer to the wild and inhospitable coasts of Siberia. These explorations are comparatively but little known, although the Russian narratives of them are extremely interesting. Up to a recent period the great islands of Nova Zembla, in the Frozen Ocean, were comparatively unexplored, and were visited only by occasional fishermen and hunters in search of seals, bears, otters, reindeer, and foxes. Believed to be in circuit about two thousand miles, none had ever made the voyage around them. Those who had visited them had found them intensely cold and uninhabited, the surface very desolate, having no timber or firewood, and no vegetable excepting a few Arctic plants.
In the year 1553, the unfortunate Sir Hugh Willoughby, being closed in by the ice and forced to winter on the coast of Lapland, was frozen to death, with all his crew. Richard Chancellor, who accompanied this expedition, succeeded in reaching Archangel, and began to trade with the Russians. On a second voyage he took with him a sailor named Burrough, who saw at least a part of the southern and western shores of Nova Zembla; but, from the discovery of that island till the year 1B33, not one of the many navigators who visited the northern seas were able to approach its eastern coasts, with the exception of Rossmyssloff, who, about a hundred years since, advanced a little way beyond the straits which divide the islands; and of Loshkin, the walrus-fisher, to whom tradition attributes the discovery of the entire eastern coast, but the date of whose discovery was entirely unknown. Early in the present century five expeditions, dispatched by the Russian Government to survey the eastern coasts and Nova Zembla, all failed in their mission. The attempt, so often frustrated, was afterwards abandoned, and would probably have never again been attempted had not the lucky activity of private enterprise stepped in at a lucky conjuncture to renew it.
A merchant of Archangel, named Brandt, formed, in 1832, the plan of restoring the ancient trade along the northern coast, from the White Sea to the Gulf of Oby, and of surveying the eastern stores of Nova Zembla, in the hope of being able to establish there an extensive walrus-fishery. Three ships were fitted out to undertake distinct portions of the exploration—the first commanded by Lieutenant Krotoff; the second by the pilot Pachtussoff. The third vessel, which was to visit the western coasts of the islands, returned in due time richly laden. Krotoff and Pachtussoff were separated in a fog soon after starting, and of the former nothing was ever heard more, Pachtussoff was more fortunate. He left Archangel on the 1st of August, and, sailing eastward along the southern shores of Nova Zembla, he fell in, on the last day of the same month, with compact fields of ice, which obliged him to construct winter residences after the Russian fashion, and prepare for the rigours of the approaching season. Fearful snowstorms were endured during the winter, and battles were fought with polar bears. On the 24th of April, as they were preparing to resume their researches, so dreadful a storm of snow came on that the men were unable any longer to hold themselves erect, and lay down to allow themselves to be buried by the snow. Although they had buried some provisions not far from the place where this took place, it was impossible while the storm lasted to fetch them, and for three days they lay buried in the snow without tasting food. This snowstorm was a remarkable one for meteorologists, not so much on account of its violence as for the vast extent of country simultaneously visited by it, since it was proved that it was felt throughout the entire length of the Oural mountain chain, a distance of sixteen hundred miles. One of the most interesting episodes of this expedition was the finding of tokens of the long lost and almost mythical Loshkin. On the 4th of July the explorers embarked in a small boat, and came to the mouth of a little river, where they found the remains of a fallen cross, on which was clearly deciphered a date, and the commencement of an inscription headed Ssawa Fofanoff. As Loshkin was surnamed Ssawa, they knew that the cross had been erected by him, and the date, which was according to the Greek calendar, fixed the period of his exploration, which had hitherto been a mystery, as the year 1742 of the Christian era.
Pachtussoff having returned with the boat, and the ship being at length freed from the ice, the whole party embarked on the 11th of July, after having occupied a winter hut for two hundred and ninety-seven days. Another touching episode happened at this period. On a desolate island they came upon some human bones, which, although gnawed by wild beasts, were easily recognized as the remains of the skeletons of a woman and two children. These were supposed to be the family of a Samoyed who were known to have passed over ten years before, and who had never since been heard of. As no traces of the bones of the man were found, it was conjectured that he had perished while hunting, and that in consequence his wife and children had died of hunger. Having passed through the straits dividing the two great islands, Pachtussoff was assailed at their western mouth by a furious tempest, which obliged him again to drift for the shores of Siberia, where his ship went ashore on the 31st of September.
In the following year, the Russian Government determined to follow up these discoveries, fitted out two vessels, and appointed the indomitable Pachtussoff chief of the expedition. During this expedition they came upon a spot where they found one of the huts constructed seventy years before by Rossmyssloff, still in tolerably good condition. Locked fast again during a terribly severe winter, the men suffered great hardships; but Pachtussoff was unwearied in fitting out minor expeditions for surveying by sledges and boats, which the explorers built themselves. Let free at length in the month of July, the vessel held her course through broken ice, when, on a sudden, two great ice fields closed upon her, and she immediately went to pieces. The men had barely time to save themselves, with a few of their instruments, a bag of flour, some butter, and the small boats, which they fortunately succeeded in dragging up on the ice. They now with great labour made their way, dragging after them the boats, by which they crossed from one ice field to another, till they reached an island where they found some driftwood; but their scanty stock of provisions, and the unfitness of their small boats for the open sea, did not make Pachtussoff give way to despair. He resolutely began surveying the adjoining coasts, and in this manner diverted the minds of his companions from the miseries which seemed to await them. Happily after thirteen days of privation and misery, a solitary walrus-fisher, by rare chance, approached the coast, and rescued them from their perilous situation. Pachtussoff's spirit was in nowise daunted by these disasters. He commenced and finished a new expedition; but, setting sail in September for Archangel, this brave and adventurous seaman was seized with a sickness on his arrival, and soon afterwards died in that city. Subsequent expeditions have completed the survey of this interesting region.