the baby-sitters club

In 1912, the Saint Anna, led by Lieutenant Brusilov, sets out for the Northeast Passage (it's like the Northwest Passage but less interesting), which has been navigated once before; he's mostly interested in hunting walrus and polar bear, etc. They get iced in and drift north for over a year. Albanov, the navigator, is "dismissed from duty" in late 1913 (but is stuck on the ship with everyone else). Early in 1914 he asks to venture south on his own, to avoid being stuck in another winter. About half the crew volunteers to come with him. Most of his party makes it to the Franz Josef Archipelago to the south, but as they're moving east across the archipelago, people get sick or the party just gets split; only Albanov and Alexander Konrad survive. They get picked up by another Russian polar vessel that's also been out of touch for two years, and when they get back, they have to be informed WWI has started. Albanov kept a diary of his trek, and wrote this up in 1917 using that as a basis; he died two years later, from either typhoid or an exploding munitions boxcar (the Russian Revolution was a fun time).

They had to make their own sledges and kayaks before setting off, because Brusilov didn't have any of that kind of stuff, and Albanov spends a lot of time yelling at the guys not to just leave them behind and go on skis, we actually need these to navigate, fools. I can sort of visualize loading kayaks on sledges to cross ice, but lashing sledges to the kayaks to cross the water gaps is impressive! (Later he talks more about "we lashed them on crosswise," but it was hard for me to visualize at first. They start with five sledges and also five kayaks that take turns riding on each other, it's not five sledge-cum-kayak-vehicles.)

Albanov was definitely a member of the Fridtjof Nansen fan club; they have basically no books on the Saint Anna, but they do have a map of Nansen's travels from "Farthest North." He and Johansen had approached the Franz Josef Archipelago from the east (rather than from the west like Albanov), Albanov is trying to find the supplies where they'd made camp, in the middle.

There's one woman on the Saint Anna, Yerminiya Zhdanko. She was originally hired as a nurse, and apparently took very good care of Brusilov during his illness, but also is the crew's "hostess" at meals. Is this just men defaulting to "oh of course the woman will be doing the ~feminine~ jobs"?

Denisov, a harpooner who stays with the Saint Anna, gets about as much biographical background as anyone. He "was half Ukrainian and half Norwegian." But because this is a Russian narrator writing in 1917, Denisov's father's home is in "the Ukraine," oof.

There's probably a spectrum to draw rating all the expedition leader+second-in-command dynamics. But Brusilov is new levels of awful. His POV on the crew asking to leave:
AKA our supplies are so limited, he needs some of the crew to leave so the remaining supplies will go farther, and then too many people stayed back with him.

And here's Albanov shortly before their departure:
Albanov's general tone throughout (and I guess this is feasible to put into print if all but one of your comrades are dead) is "why am I surrounded by idiots, you are all so lazy, don't sleep, get up and start sledging." But when they leave someone behind who's dying and unable to be carried, he sends a sledge to go back for him. He says that he's become more religious; he carries an icon of Saint Nicholas, and has a dream of him that he interprets as miraculous.

As they're marching across the ice, two guys steal a bunch of supplies on the guise of a "scouting expedition" and disappear. Albanov is furious, but reasons that they can't waste time trying to track them down. A week later, they reach land, it's great, there is fresh food and flowers and everything is wonderful. Turns out the thieves are also there.
(But also, Albanov never mentions the names of the two miscreants. Was one of them the one who survived?)

You know how some people really bond together and become friends while facing ordeals together? Yeah nope:
I mean, personally, I've definitely...been there. It's just odd to find that expressed as a precept. Maybe it's a Russian thing.

Worsley when they're almost to Elephant Island :handshake meme: Albanov when they're almost to Northbrook Island
not like this, we're so freaking close
Illness triggers the third man factor:
But shortly after this, the narrative starts switching between a last-name and a first-name basis for Alexander. :)

The footnotes are detailed and useful, so is the index. (Every time he uses the phrase "white death," take a shot.)

A little downtime between bingo years, and kind of figured "the only way out is through" when it comes to being weird about polar exploration fandom, so...wandered around a used bookstore and picked up some random titles that looked interesting, there may be more where this came from.

Expedition: the 1865-67 Russian-American Telegraph Company. People had tried to lay a telegraphic cable under the Atlantic Ocean, it didn't last, so another company was like "what if we go up the North American west coast, across the Bering Strait*, then across all of Russia and connect up with the existing telegraph system in Moscow?" So this was part of the exploration/research/preliminary scouting for that. It kind of ends abruptly with "okay never mind, they got the Atlantic Ocean route working after all, let's stop," but hey, that's just capitalism.

This is more of a humorous travelogue with lots of droll tongue-in-cheek, culture shock, wedding-crashers type stuff. Seasickness:
(When my grandpa was writing up his recollections of his military experience, decades after the fact, he had some creative euphemisms for seasickness too, maybe this is just a travel literature staple.)

Many of the place names and Russian loanwords didn't have their spelling standardized by this point. Stuff like "yourt" and "toondra" are always in scare quotes, ditto his spelling for balalaika and sastrugi (which is admittedly not a super common word unless you're in polar nonsense fandom...) *And the body of water between Asia and North America is "Behring's Straits" at this point. Early on he complains about Russian transliteration, why is there a "W" in "Wrangell" [Island] or "Wladimir," why would you want to spell this province name "Kamtchatka," nobody pronounces the first "T." So that aged well! (Most of my knowledge of Kamchatka comes from playing, or at least setting up, games of Risk with my brother, who had a line about 'Kamchatka will never forgive you!!')

The word I wish they'd had a translation or gloss for is "verst," which I wasn't familiar with. A verst is 1.07 kilometers, or about 2/3 of a mile.

Nitpick: there are maps in the endpapers, which is great, but it's very zoomed out, a lot of it is the proposed route of the telegraph across the rest of Russia, and the map goes as far south as India and the Arabian Peninsula. Would have been better zoomed in on the area that's actually the focus, but maybe a lot of the smaller settlements didn't have their coordinates mapped...

Obviously Kennan is not a professional anthropologist so take the cultural observations with a grain of salt. I thought the contrast between "the nomads' culture can seem kind of ruthless and harsh to us, but that's a byproduct of the circumstances under which they live, they're as honest and hospitable as anyone else" versus "their cousins who live in settlements are just the worst, most lazy, and terrible" was an interesting parallel to the worldbuilding in cultures like the Outskirters from the Steerswoman series. The details of "these people live in their summer habitations for three months, damming up the river and catching lots of salmon, then go back to their winter village for most of the year," and "the central government of Russia is trying to tax people's fishing harvests so that they have insurance for years when there isn't a good catch" also seem like neat worldbuilding concepts. Maybe for future origfic.
There's also a description of "Anadyr sickness" that's especially common in women, and that's really intriguing in light of what our culture would describe as "mass psychogenic illness." Low temperatures are survivable, but wind is a drag; nobody associates Siberia with mosquitoes, but mosquitoes suck. Many of the cultural allusions went over my head, but hey, he would probably say the same thing about our literature. There are a lot of John Franklin jokes. The Eastern Orthodox liturgy is very moving and they sing Christmas carols too.

A ball at the house of a priest on Sunday night struck me as implying a good deal of inconsistency, and I hesitated about sanctioning so plain a violation of the fourth commandment. Dodd, however, proved to me in the most conclusive manner that, owing to difference in time, it was Saturday in America and not Sunday at all; that our friends at that very moment were engaged in business or pleasure, and that our happening to be on the other side of the world was no reason why we should not do what our antipodal friends were doing at exactly the same time. I was conscious that this reasoning was sophistical, but Dodd mixed me up so with his "longitude," "Greenwich time," "Bowditch's Navigators," "Russian Sundays" and "American Sundays," that I was hopelessly bewildered, and couldn't ahve told for my life whether it was to-day in America or yesterday, or when a Siberian Sunday did begin. I finally concluded that as the Russians kept Saturday night, and began another week at sunset on the Sabbath, a dance would perhaps be sufficiently innocent for that evening. According to Siberian ideas of propriety it was just the thing.