Description

In 1912, 6 months after Robert Falcon Scott and four of his men found grief in Antarctica, a thirty-two-year-old Russian navigator named Valerian Albanov embarked on an expedition that will prove much more disastrous. Looking for new Arctic hunting grounds, Albanov's ship, the Saint Anna, was frozen fast in the pack ice of the treacherous Kara Sea-a misfortune grievously compounded by an incompetent commander, the lack of crucial nautical charts, insufficient fuel, and inadequate procedures that left the team poor and debilitated by scurvy.For almost annually and a half, the twenty-five men and one-woman aboard the Saint Anna suffered terrible hardships and risk whilst the icebound ship drifted helplessly north. Confident the Saint Anna would not free himself from the snow, Albanov and thirteen crewmen left the ship in January 1914, carrying makeshift sledges and kayaks in it over the icy ocean, intending to achieve the remote coast of Franz-Josef Land. With merely a surprisingly incorrect map to steer him, Albanov led his men on a 235-mile journey of constant danger, enduring blizzards, disintegrating ice floes, attacks by polar bears and walrus, mutiny, illness, snowblindness, and hunger.