The First Landing on Wrangel Island With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants

DeLong , commanding USS Jeannette , led an expedition in attempting to reach the North Pole , expecting to go by the "east side of Kellett land", which he thought extended far into the Arctic. His ship became locked in the polar ice pack and drifted westward, passing within sight of Wrangel before being crushed and sunk in the vicinity of the New Siberian Islands. Hooper, was seeking the Jeannette and two missing whalers in addition to conducting general exploration.

It included naturalist John Muir , who published the first description of Wrangel Island. They stayed about two weeks and conducted an extensive survey and search. In , members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition , organized by Vilhjalmur Stefansson , were marooned on Wrangel Island for nine months after their ship, Karluk , was crushed in the ice pack. Stefansson considered those with advanced knowledge in the fields of geography and science for this expedition.

At the time, Stefansson claimed that his purpose was to head off a possible Japanese claim. In , the Soviet Union removed the American and 13 Inuit one was born on the island of this settlement aboard the Krasny Oktyabr. Wells subsequently died of pneumonia in Vladivostok during a diplomatic American-Soviet row about an American boundary marker on the Siberian coast, and so did an Inuit child. The others were deported from Vladivostok to the Chinese border post Suifenhe , but the Chinese government did not want to accept them as the American consul in Harbin told them the Inuit were not American citizens.

Later, the American government came up with a statement that the Inuit were 'wards' of the United States, but that there were no funds for returning them. They subsequently moved through Dalian , Kobe and Seattle where another Inuit child drowned during the wait for the return trip to Alaska back to Nome. During the Soviet trip, the American reindeer owner Carl J. Lomen from Nome had taken over the possessions of Stefansson and had acquired explicit support "go and hold it" from US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes to claim the island for the United States, [35] a goal about which the Russian expedition got to hear during their trip.

Due to unfavorable ice conditions, the Herman could not get any further than Herald Island, where the American flag was raised. In , the government of the Soviet Union reaffirmed the Tsarist claim to sovereignty over Wrangel Island. In , a team of Soviet explorers, equipped with three years of supplies, landed on Wrangel Island. Clear waters that facilitated the landing were followed by years of continuous heavy ice surrounding the island.

Attempts to reach the island by sea failed, and it was feared that the team would not survive their fourth winter. In , the icebreaker Fyodor Litke was chosen for a rescue operation.

Wrangel Island - New World Encyclopedia

It sailed from Sevastopol , commanded by captain Konstantin Dublitsky. On July 4, it reached Vladivostok where all Black Sea sailors were replaced by local crew members. Ten days later Litke sailed north; it passed the Bering Strait , and tried to pass Long Strait and approach the island from south. On August 8 a scout plane reported impassable ice in the strait, and Litke turned north, heading to Herald Island.

The First Landing on Wrangel Island, with Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants

It failed to escape mounting ice; August 12 the captain shut down the engines to save coal and had to wait two weeks until the ice pressure eased. Making a few hundred meters a day, Litke reached the settlement August On September 5, Litke turned back, taking all the 'islanders' to safety. This operation earned Litke the order of the Red Banner of Labour January 20, , as well as commemorative badges for the crew. According to a article in Time Magazine , Wrangel Island became the scene of a bizarre criminal story in the s when it fell under the increasingly arbitrary rule of its appointed governor Konstantin Semenchuk.

Semenchuk controlled the local populace and his own staff through open extortion and murder. He forbade the local Eskimos recruited from Provideniya Bay in [38] to hunt walrus , which put them in danger of starvation, while collecting food for himself. He was then implicated in the mysterious deaths of some of his opponents, including the local doctor. The subsequent Moscow trial in June sentenced Semenchuk to death for "banditry" and violation of Soviet law.

In , a small herd of domestic reindeer was introduced with the intention of establishing commercial herding to generate income for island residents. A prisoner who later emigrated to Israel , Efim Moshinsky, claimed to have seen Raoul Wallenberg there in Moreover, a military radar installation was built on the southeast coast at Cape Hawaii. Rock crystal mining had been carried out for a number of years in the center of the island near Khrustalnyi Creek.

At the time, a small settlement, Perkatkun , had been established nearby to house the miners, but later on it was completely destroyed. By the s, the reindeer-herding farm on Wrangel had been abolished and the settlement of Zvezdnyi was virtually abandoned. Hunting had already been stopped, except for a small quota of marine mammals for the needs of the local population.

In , the military radar installation at Cape Hawaii on the southeast coast was closed, and only the settlement of Ushakovskoe remained occupied. According to some American activists, eight Arctic islands currently controlled by Russia, including Wrangel Island, are claimed by the United States. However, according to the United States Department of State [43] no such claim exists.

It specified that even though the treaty had not been ratified, the U. In , the Russian Navy announced plans to establish a base on the island. In Verne's description, a live volcano is located on the island: City of Heavenly Fire , the last book in the series, Wrangel Island was the seat of all the world's wards, the spells that protected the globe from demons and demon invasion.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the Alaskan island, see Wrangell Island. March ; last updated March Accessed 30 July Retrieved February 28, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Retrieved 28 February Retrieved 4 March Paul Island mammoths most accurately dated 'prehistoric' extinction ever Penn State University". Retrieved 2 April The voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe: Proceedings of the International Congress of Americanists: Edited by Major Edward Sabine. James Madden and Company, London. John Muir 's description of the exploration of Wrangel Island.

The First Landing on Wrangel Island, with Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants

Yupik relocation in Chukotka, —". Archived from the original on August 18, Time magazine , vol. The Mystery Lives On. Raoul Wallenberg Is Alive! Department of State, Washington, D. Fact sheet on Wrangel Island. Retrieved 20 August New Russian military bases going up on Arctic island near Alaska". A Dream in Polar Fog. Anonymous, , Wrangel Island. Eglin, Libby, , Run For Wrangel. Tourist's account and photography. Eime, Roderick, nd, Wrangel Island: Isolation, Desolation and Tragedy. Comments about history and tourism of Wrangel Island.

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Quaternary Research Center, University of Washington. Numerous comments, picture, papers, links, concerning various aspects of Wrangel Island Detailed map of Wrangel Island click link in list McClanahan, A. John Muir's description of the exploration of Wrangel Island. Finally, I submit to your lordships that when the service will admit it is desirable that a ship of war should visit Pitcairn annually, and I propose to cause this to be done during the remainder of my command. Her Majesty does not, I believe, possess in any part of the world more loyal and affectionate subjects than this little knot of settlers.

No one acquainted with these islanders could fail to respect them. A religious, industrious, happy, and contented people, they will lose rather than gain by contact with other communities.

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This is also, implicitly, an inter-imperial issue. He arrived on the island as one of the crew of the British ship Khandish when she was wrecked on Oeno, an atoll about miles away. The crew spent six weeks on Pitcairn awaiting pickup, and Butler afterwards returned to marry an island woman who had recently been widowed: The arrival of the American might have been unsettling, at least in part, because America was the current rival expansionist naval power in the Pacific.

They would also have been aware of what happened the last time an American citizen set up on Pitcairn. Joshua Hill , an adventurer and fantasist with US citizenship, had landed on Pitcairn in and spent the next seven years establishing an almost dictatorial power over the island, appointing himself President of a Pitcairn Commonwealth and giving long denunciatory sermons with a gun under his chair. Several prominent islanders fled before Hill was deposed by a visiting RN Captain and sent to London, where he continued to petition the CO and other government branches for compensation for his services.

On arrival at the CO, despatches would be provided with a printed cover-sheet, which performed several functions. First, it functioned as a form for the office to classify the despatch, assigning it a number, noting which despatches it related to, and summarising its origin and subject matter. The string of minutes, usually a paragraph or two long, that accumulate on the minute sheer represent the input of the secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant undersecretaries and chief clerks who, sometimes in an orderly line of precedence and sometimes in something rather more like a back-and-forth colloquy, decided how to respond.

The impression, often, is one of workaday intimacy. The Pitcairn despatch is quickly combined with other relevant papers, accumulating a certain amount of ad hoc appendices, and a relatively long exchange extends the usual single-sheet minute paper to several leaves. The first response is from a staff member who signs himself WO not immediately identifiable from the CO staff list for — if any well-informed readers can help us out here, do get in touch:.

See memorandum by Mr Bussell February and annexed respecting Pitcairn Island — it would I presume be held to belong to the British crown if any Foreign Govt attempted to take possession of it. I was wondering yesterday when I passed how the magistrate managed to enforce the rules for the maintenance of order especially as an outsider in the shape of an American has managed to locate himself on the Island — You will best know whether the authorization sought can be given. Norfolk Island where the majority of the descendants of the Mutineers of the Bounty are located is under the personal government of the Governor of NSW to whom the Magistrate who is annually elected looks for guidance and support.

John Bramston was an assistant undersecretary who specialised in dealing with despatches from Canada, South Africa, Australian and Pacific colonies. By the time this one reaches him it has already accumulated a book Pitcairn: The Island, the People, and the Pastor , by the Rev. Thomas Boyles Murray — an publication of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, of which Boyles Murray was then secretary , and an earlier memorandum from February Bramston replies by recirculating the despatch with the further addition of a set of minutes from a Cape Colony Despatch No.

The next interlocutor is R. Herbert, the Permanent Undersecretary whose notes appear on almost every set of minutes from the period. Permanent Undersecretary was a position of enormous responsibility: I think I should let this alone until we have clear proof of the necessity for our interference with a little community that has hitherto managed its own affairs. In such a place they do not want our complicated system of law — their own few simple rules can easily be enforced by themselves.

It is, no doubt, an anomalous state of things: We might reply to the Admiralty that we are glad to hear that they propose to make arrangements for an annual visit of a Ship of War to the Island: And there the matter lies.

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As so often in colonial administration, the question that reaches London turns out to be a question that London resolves simply to bear in mind. The matter demands no immediate response; there is no particular inclination to adopt an active policy, or no resources to hand with which to enforce it; things are best left to colonial governors on the spot, trusting to their judgment and closer understanding; any or all of these reasons might be in play. So, for the time being, the issue of Pitcairn — whether it is to be visited yearly, what its legal and constitutional arrangements are to be, and indeed whether it is to be formally pronounced British territory except purely negatively, in the face of an immediate counter-claim — was left in abeyance.

Horsey may have been well aware that his report was likely to be circulated and picked up on in the popular press. Whipping up anti-imperial fervour against Britain, he inveigles his way to being crowned Emperor of the Pitcairn Commonwealth, embarking on a Napoleonic career of petty tyranny and comic self-aggrandizement that inevitably sinks under the weight of its own contradictions. As a political parable, its commitments are queerly unpolitical. The story of Wrangel Island is very different from that of Pitcairn.

Essentially, nothing much happens: But if nothing else, the bureaucratic encounter with Wrangel provides a counterpoint to that with Pitcairn. In both cases, the same cast of CO staff faced issues of territoriality, sovereignty, remoteness and geostrategy, and come up with very different answers; in both cases, the encounter takes place in a larger cultural context in which remoteness itself, and how it is construed, is central to how those issues are thought about.

Neither the name nor the territorial claim would stick. Nonetheless, the US government notified the British, and towards the end of November the Admiralty informed the Colonial Office of what had transpired. To briefing gives a strong impression of the piecemeal way that the topography and geopolitical dispensations of the Arctic came into focus.

At the same time, beyond this Island to the West and North and extensive high land was seen. In August — the season being very favourable, some American whaling ships gained the neighbourhood of these lands — one of the Captains Long, of the ship Nile , traced continuous land from He considered it impossible to tell how far the land from the last position Cape Hawaii extended northwards, as ranges of mountains extended as far as the eye could see; but that he had learnt from another Whaling Captain Blevin, of the ship Nautilus that he Blevin saw land NW of Herald island, as far North as Latitude The Charts thus show two names for what apparently is one continuous land, or group of large islands, Wrangell Land and Kellett Land.

It also gives a nice sense of how the business of Arctic exploration and mapping proceeded. Unlike the Antarctic, whose unique isolation and inaccessibility were met at the end of the century with a combination of technology, political will and ideological fervour which sparked the relatively short heroic age of exploration, geographical knowledge of the Arctic had a long pedigree which encompassed the geographical knowledges of indigenous peoples, the penetration of resource extraction industries — most notably whaling, sealing and fur trading — and a rather longer history of European exploration dating back to Davis, Frobisher and the Muscovy Company.

The Corvin, in fact, was on a search — for the US ship Jeannette, apparently lost the year before, and for two missing whalers. A published narrative by one of the doctors on board recounts the sighting of Wrangel from Herald Island, and the first documented landing. It is an evocative document of how late nineteenth Europeans and North Americans viewed the Arctic — as a territory of chaos, scarcity and ruin, a rich field for scientific enquiry but in human terms a terra nullius.

After Herald Island, the party makes landfall on Wrangel, and though much of the narrative is taken up with observations and cataloguing of wildlife species:.

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The final comment is from Hicks Beach, and reads, with impatience and an uncharacteristic levity:. We have obviously nothing to do with Wrangel Island. In this case, there was no appetite for geostrategic competition: While Pitcairn, the argument goes, can only preserve its technologically and politically undeveloped society from unknown threats internal and external through the imposition of hard technology warships and the juridical techniques of statehood, neither are yet of any use in the Arctic. The new data is to be disseminated to the relevant Colonial governments, where it will lie in wait until it becomes useful; otherwise, the island and its territorial status can be more or less forgotten.