in the land of white death by valerian albanov

Albanov's diary begins as he makes the decision to leave the ship and seek the safety of distant Franz Josef Land.

Over the next year and a half they drifted. They set out from Murmansk in August with insufficient fuel and inadequate charts and soon found themselves imprisoned in an ice floe that took them north in the Kara Sea. The crew of twenty-three included only five sailors, an incompetent captain, Georgi Brusilov, and Yerminiya Zhdanko, a nurse and the only woman on board.

In 1912 Albanov signed on as chief navigation officer of the British-built Russian ship Santa Anna, for a 7,000-mile expedition to search for new hunting grounds for the fur trade. The document has been translated into German and French, which finally made its appearance in English as In the Land of White Death: An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic more than eighty years after its original publication in Russian in 1917. SIDELIGHTS: Valerian Ivanovich Albanov was a Russian explorer who documented his eighteen-month-long ordeal and survival in the Arctic in a diary. In the Land of White Death: An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic (originally published in Russian in 1917), translation from the French by Alison Anderson, preface by Jon Krakauer, introduction by David Roberts, with additional material from William Barr's translation from the Russian, Modern Library ( New York, NY), 2000. PERSONAL: Born 1881, in Voronezh, Russia died 1919.

In the land of white death by valerian albanov