Svyataya Anna

The Svyataya Anna or St. Anna, named after Saint Anne, was a Russian ship built in England. It was the ship commanded by Georgy Brusilov during his ill-fated 1912 Arctic expedition to explore the Northern Sea Route.

The expedition was ill-planned and ill-executed by Captain Brusilov. He set out from Alexandrovsk on August 28, 1912, so late in the summer that it was almost sure that his ship would be trapped by the ice.

Thus the "Saint Anna" became locked in the polar ice of the Kara Sea off the Yamal Peninsula in October 1912. Supplies were abundant, so officers and crew prepared themselves for wintering, hoping to be freed in the following year's thaw.

However, during 1913 the sea remained completely frozen. By early 1914 the "Svyataya Anna" had drifted far north in lazy zigzags with the Arctic ice. In the summer that year she ended up at 83° of latitude, NW of Franz Josef Land, and had no chance to be freed in 1914 either. To make matters worse, captain and crew had succumbed to scurvy. Navigator and second-in-command Valerian Albanov, believing that their position was hopeless, requested permission from Captain Brusilov to be relieved from his duties as second-in-command in order to leave the ship and attempt to return to civilization on foot. Albanov's aim was to reach Eva Island in Hvidtenland, the northeastermost island of Franz Josef Land. He used Fridtjof Nansen's inaccurate map, full of dotted lines where the archipelago was still unexplored. After a gruesome ordeal, Albanov and Alexander Konrad, one of the crewmen of the "Svyataya Anna", finally made it back to Russia. They were the only two survivors.

The "Svyataya Anna" was never seen again and not a trace was ever found. Perhaps it sank crushed by the polar ice. However, there is the possibility that being carried by the polar ice drift it broke free on the other side of the Arctic, like the "Fram" had done previously and that, its captain and crew unknowing that the First World War had begun, she was subsequently sunk by a German submarine.

In 1914-15 Otto Sverdrup led a search-and-rescue expedition aboard ship "Eklips" in the Kara Sea on behalf of the Russian Imperial Navy. His aim was to search for two missing arctic expeditions, that of Captain Brusilov on the "Svyataya Anna" and that of Vladimir Rusanov on the "Gerkules". However, regarding the "St. Anna", Sverdrup was not successful.

Valerian Albanov made repeated requests to Arctic explorer and Admiral Alexander Kolchak to launch a search expedition for the "Svyataya Anna". In December 1919 Albanov traveled to Omsk to confer with Kolchak, but the political turmoil in Russia at the time didn't make such a relief mission possible.

A geological feature in the Arctic Ocean basin, the St. Anna Trough, or Svyataya Anna Trough located east of Franz Josef Land, with a depth of 620 m, has been named in memory of this ill-fated ship.

References

* Valerian Albanov. "In the Land of White Death"
* History of the Northern Sea Route: [http://www.springerlink.com/index/m7q5743v750705l0.pdf]
*William Barr, "Otto Sverdrup to the rescue of the Russian Imperial Navy".