History of Russian navigation: Traces of Arctic expeditions found on Franz-Joseph Land

Russian scientists, who set off for the Franz Joseph Land archipelago in order to look for the Arctic expedition of Georgy Brusilov, which had gone missing almost 100 years ago, discovered artifacts of expeditions of 19th – 20th cc.

On the Federal Security Service aviation plane explorers overflew the area and noticed a stone pyramid with remains of a bamboo flagstaff. The pyramid is supposed to belong to the Jackson expedition of 1895. “Unfortunately, we did not succeed in finding a note, which was expected to have been left in the pyramid”, – said one of the participants of the expedition.

Later researchers managed to make a discovery of remains of a 1930’s Norwegian expedition. “This expedition is not described in any of contemporary Russian sources, and this house has never been localized before. In the end of the route the group on the helicopter headed for the Bell Island in order to take photographs of notes made by Nansen, Samoilovich and other polar explorers. Notes were made on the walls of the house of the 1881-1882 Benjamin Leigh Smith expedition. The house is in a good condition”, – he stated.

Meanwhile on the top of rocks, on the eastern extremity of the Cape Neil were discovered stone pyramids which are likely to have been put by the Jackson expedition in 1895. In one of the stone pyramids explorers discovered bullets of a 12-gauge shotgun, produced in Great Britain, a fact which proves that they belonged to the Jackson expedition”, – the researcher explained.

In summer 2010 researchers intend to unlock the mystery of disappeared Brusilov Arctic expedition of 1912.

The tragic history of this famous expedition underlies a book by Veniamin Kaverin entitled “The Two Captains”. The expedition, which set off in 1912 on the schooner “St. Anna”, soon divided. Some of the St. Anna crew together with Brusilov’s lieutenant Valerian Albanov abandoned the ship and decided to walk on the shore. The only two survivors – navigator Valerian Albanov and a sailor Alexander Kondrat managed to survive and reach Cape Flora in Franz Joseph Land. The fate of the Brusilov expedition is still unknown.