Located some 500 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle in the icy Chukchi Sea is the forlorn, enigmatic landmass of Wrangel Island. So remote and isolated is this frozen land that it was not properly mapped until the early 20th century, and then inadvertently, when wildly over-optimistic explorers washed up, shipwrecked, on its shores.
Trapped in the fringes of the permanent Arctic ice pack, born out of legend and maintained by tales of hardship, endurance and tragedy, Wrangel’s outwardly austere appearance hides not only a tragic and mysterious history, but also a strangely self-contained island ecosystem.
Two summers ago, I set out aboard the giant Russian icebreaker, Kapitan Khlebnikov, to see what all the fuss was about.
Along for the ride as a guest lecturer was author Jennifer Niven, whose two critically-acclaimed books, Ice Master and Ada Blackjack zero in on Wrangel Island as an epicenter of hopelessly misplaced optimism and tragedy. Her laboriously researched and superbly written books trace in detail the vain efforts of Canadian, British and American explorers and “scientific colonists” to extract some profit – monetary, political or intellectual – from this remote land.
As I stand on the deck, beneath me the mighty Kapitan slices through irregular slabs of sea ice with relative ease. Even with a fearsome “ice knife” in the bow and 25,000 horsepower available to drive it home, we are occasionally forestalled by a particularly stubborn sheet. One, perhaps a meter thick and about the size of a city block, brings us to a noisy, shuddering halt. The Kapitan, unfazed, backs up and body-slams the floating mass, creating a fissure that gradually opens to admit our 15,000 tons of diesel-electric anger.
These ice floes are also the domain of the many mother polar bears occasionally seen leading their first season offspring across the pack in search of seals. The denser the ice, the more the bears like it. Bears cannot catch seals in the thinning floes, because the seals can easily escape into the water. I take my turn on bear watch, camera primed for the elusive shot.
In 1821, Baron Ferdinand Petrovich von Wrangel had been with his dogs on the ice for many months in search of fabled lands hundreds of miles north of Siberia’s Chukchi coastline. Von Wrangel saw giant, snow-capped mountains rising magnificently into the crisp polar air, perhaps thousands of feet high, while shimmering lakes bordered by lush forests carpeted the land. Despite this idyllic vista, all before him was frozen solid, an impenetrable carpet of sea ice. The intrepid Baron was fooled by an intricate mirage – a fata morgana. He spent another three years looking for an island he knew was there (he had seen migratory birds flying north), but never found it.
The island did not “appear” again until 1849, when British Naval Captain Henry Kellett thought he saw a large land mass west of Herald Island, which he had just mapped. It persisted on Admiralty maps as – for want of a better name – Kellett Land, until 1867, when American whaler Thomas Long dubbed it for the Russian explorer he felt was more deserving. Since that day, Wrangel Island has been a point of contention between Russia, Britain, Canada and the U.S. Despite a series of flag-raisings over a period of 50 years, it is only recently that the international community acquiesced to Russian sovereignty.
In 1911, the famous icebreakers, Taymyr and Vaygach, as part of the Russian Arctic Ocean Hydrographic Expedition (1910-15), briefly landed a party on Wrangel Island and claimed it for Russia. In 1914, survivors from the Vilhjalmur Stefansson-led Canadian Arctic Expedition’s doomed Northern Party camped on Wrangel Island for nine harrowing months. Their ever-controversial leader abandoned them in September 1913, leaving them for dead aboard their ship, the CGS Karluk, stuck fast in the ice pack.
From this disaster, a hero emerged; Captain Bob Bartlett, who trekked 700 miles with an Inuit across Siberia to secure a rescue party. He returned to find murder and mayhem, but managed to save 16 of the original 22 who sailed with the Karluk.
Not content with that fiasco, Stefansson landed an “occupation” party of five on Wrangel Island in 1921 (he did not accompany them), apparently to assist Canada and Britain in the so-called “northward course of empire.” This Stefansson experiment – recounted by Jennifer Niven in her on-board lectures – also ended in tragedy. When the resupply ship failed to arrive, three of the men set off walking to Siberia for help, while a brave young Inuit woman, Ada Blackjack, was left behind to nurse a scurvy-stricken American – Lorne Knight – who was too weak to accompany his three comrades.
The trio disappeared into a snowstorm and were never seen again. Knight, quickly failing, died some weeks later. Alone and scared, Ada had to learn to hunt ducks with an unfamiliar rifle, trap foxes and overcome her debilitating phobia of polar bears. Ada was rescued on August 20, 1923 by the boat Donaldson, again amid much controversy. She was returned to Alaska where she immediately came under the unwelcome glare of an intensely curious media. Continually dogged by poverty and misfortune, she died in 1983.
In spite of this abject failure, another group of Inuit were installed on Wrangel in 1923, but these hapless souls were eventually evicted in August 1924 by Russian Marines. They were taken into servile custody before eventually being returned to Alaska. To dissuade future “invasions,” Russia installed their own ten Inuit families on the island and they and their descendants remained there until the end of the 20th century.
In the 1930s, a despotic Russian bureaucrat, Konstantin Semenchuk, reigned over the island, starving and punishing residents with his psychopathic rule. He was eventually removed, tried and executed in 1936.
During the Second World War and quite likely for some time thereafter, the island became a horrific gulag for German SS POWs and the most dangerous political dissidents. Apparently, none who were brought to the gulag on Wrangel Island ever returned (it is rumored that the Swedish hero of Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg was among the many thousands who died there). The gulags – located near Rodgers Harbor in the southeast – are mentioned in the 1982 book, The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union, by Avraham Shifrin. In it, he suggests that radiation experiments were conducted on live subjects there as recently as the 1960s. Interestingly, no mention was ever made of these camps in our otherwise comprehensive lectures.
Today Wrangel Island – about the size of Delaware – is only occupied in the summer, by a small team of Russian scientists and their supporting community, who maintain a meteorological and research base at Ushakovskoye on the southern coast. The seasonal settlement nonetheless confirms Russia’s on-going territorial claim – one that was not properly resolved until 1974.
Much of Wrangel Island’s attraction to explorers stemmed from its abundance of wildlife. Polar bears, walrus, arctic foxes, snow geese, migratory birds and seals populate it in relatively large numbers. Ironically, Wrangel also escaped glaciation in the last Ice Age, leaving several unique species of vascular plants. It was also probably the last place on Earth to support a woolly mammoth population, perhaps as late as 1700 bc. Although many of the bones and tusks have been removed, it is still possible to see skeletal remains of these extinct giants scattered across the island’s landscape, with global warming releasing still more archaeological bounty from beneath the permafrost. In 2004, the UNESCO World Heritage committee included Wrangel Island on their list of global ecological hotspots, describing it as a “self-contained island ecosystem” with “the highest level of biodiversity in the high Arctic.”
It is five days from the port of Anadyr in Chukotka Province before we get our first glimpse of Wrangel Island, dull and foreboding through thick, wet arctic mist. This, apparently, is one of the “jewels” described by the imaginative Stefansson as a paradise teaming with game and resources. We are told that Wrangel Island boasts the world’s largest population of denning polar bears, a few reintroduced reindeer as well as musk oxen, arctic fox, walrus and seals. Birds are abundant too, especially the over-protected Lesser Snow Geese (Anser caerulescens), which, our Russian hosts assure us, flock in large numbers in the west of the island. Regrettably, due to conservation considerations, we are not permitted to visit them.
Baron Wrangel might well have been a bit disappointed with his namesake, had he actually made it thorough the tortuous miles of pack ice. Stefansson too may have moderated his enthusiasm if he had actually seen the land for himself. But there is no mistaking the impact of the journey – one of the most difficult and unpredictable of our age. There is a palpable sense of satisfaction among the passengers and crew, especially Jennifer, who appears to be almost channeling Ada Blackjack.
We observe the featureless landscape from both outboard zodiacs and the Kapitan’s mighty MI-2 jet helicopters. Our first landing is to see a herd of musk oxen, gathered on the windy tundra and enjoying a family picnic among the bright pastel sprays of arctic wildflowers. Wrangel’s 400 vascular plants – more than any other arctic archipelago, and 23 endemic species had the plant people quite excited. Their well-insulated posteriors point skyward as they arrange their cameras for precision macro photos.
My mind instead turns to the forlorn souls trapped here a century before, forced to eke out a living by hunting anything and everything. They ate polar bear, foxes and even grass to survive. Jennifer, normally ebullient and vivacious, is also strangely silent as she pensively kicks pebbles on the beach in her leopard skin gumboots.
We all try to imagine being alone on this treeless land for months on end, foraging, hunting and just surviving. Two days are all we have to synthesize this isolation, and then it is off again, pressing west through the Northeast Passage.
Icebreakers as tourist vessels have only been coming this way since 1991, when the icebreaker Sovetsky Soyuz – on its return voyage from the North Pole – brought the first tourists to visit Wrangel Island. The secret was out. Today this arctic wonderland is a regular stop for cruises that traverse the Bering Sea. Naturalists, ecologists, archaeologists, “twitchers” (fanatical bird watchers) and tourists searching for something unusual now comprise a minor throng sailing north each year out of Anadyr aboard the helicopter-equipped icebreaker, Kapitan Khlebnikov (see box). Surrounded as it is by ice almost all year, every year, Wrangel Island is destined to remain a difficult-to-visit location.
With the smooth, flat landscape of Wrangel Island slowly disappearing amid a lingering polar sunset, we leave behind this renowned nature reserve, repository of legend and lore, natural wonderland and kingdom of sadness and despair. Clearly, despite earlier valiant efforts, Wrangel Island will never again be inhabited, left instead to the occasional scientific observers and the capricious devices of nature. A good thing too. RL
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