Russian Expedition : Traces Found of Ill-Fated Arctic Expedition

(August 14) A Russian expedition returned from  Arctic waters  this week with  new information on one of the country's most enduring mysteries : the fate of Georgii Brusilov's expedition aboard the ship St. Anna, which sailed from the northern port of Archangelsk  in August 1912 in a bid to become the first Russian ship to negotiate the Northern Sea Passage to the Pacific  Ocean. It never made it.

halfway through , in the Kara Sea, the shipwas frozen fast in pack ice that began to draw it implacaby northward. The crew endured two winters at the mercy of the shifting ice. In early 1914, with the vessel apparently drifing even closer  to the North Pole, the navigator , Valerian Albanov, had  enough.With part of the crew , he embanked on a grueling march over the ice, of which he was one of only two survivors. The remaining crew disappeared.

The basic tale, recounted in Albanov's celebrated memoirs, was the source for Veniamin Kaverin's novel "Two Captains," Known to every Russian child and  twice adapted for the screen. "I will find the expedition !" says the novel's hero. "I don't believe that it has vanished without a trace!"

Russian explorer Evgenii Fershter  felt  the same way, and he started planning a search for the remains of the St. Anna and her crew in 2005. Another Arctic expert, Oleg Prodan, joined the effort  and became  the leader of this summer's expedition.

"The St. Anna is probably lost forever," Fershter says. He  suspects that the pack ice carried the ship to unfrozen waters where, crushed by the floes, it sank. As a result, Proden says, "what happen  to the Brusilov and his crew will probably remain a mystery. But it may  possible to discover what happened to the people who left with the navigator, Albanov, to find land. Albanov's memoirs leave much untold, including the dangerous tensions  Fershter and others believe flared on the doomed ship in the endless night of the Arctic winter of 1913-1914.

The expedition found the bones of a Saint Anna crew member,  in the desolate landscape of the Franz Josef Land. Nearby, they found the crew'sbelonging :a bucket, rifle cartridges, glasses made by the ship's engineer from bottles  of rum, a knife, snowshoes, a pocket watch and a spoon with the initials of one of the crew meen. "We all grew up with the story of the two captains ," Prodan says. "Grown men were  overwhelmed, filled with wonder to find and touch what they read about as children."

Near the body lay something still more intriguing : a well-preserved diary page from May 1913, when the whole crew was still aboard  the St. Anna.

A knife from the lost expedition was found this summer on an island in the Arctic  arehipelago of franz Josef Land(bottom photo).

Prodan and fershter agree that their "discoveries  raise as many questions as they answer. it is unlikely , for example , that the man whose body they found froze to death  a mere six miles from Cape Neale, yet the terrain there posed no dangers and the remains show no sigs of a predator's teeth. it was too  close to their starting point to be a camp, and yet many of the group's crucial possessions were left there.

The team raised a memorial cross for the dead crewmen before returning to the mainland. In the coming weeks, the recovered docments will be read. They may provide answers to these and to haunting questions about the drama played out among the crew  in their last days  on the ship.

Next summer, the team hopes to return to seek the remaining crewmen and further evidence of their fate. The St. Anna's mystery may yet be brought to light, almost a century later.

My spin:  I read the novel  "Two Captains"  enjoyed it very much.  Thanks PIC....like you say  there is  a lot more to learn , just look beneath the surface.

Kicking back  keeping it real and having fun......ya betcha.