MAROONED ON WRANGEL

Evening Star, Issue 20129, 20 March 1929, Page 10

MAROONED ON WRANGEL

NO COMMUNICATION SINCE 1926 Five Russians and fifty-five Eskimos, cut off from the, world since 1926, arc still on Wrangel Island. .Doughty icebreakers like those that cut through the Spitsbergen ice to rescue Nobile’s party could not penetrate the pack that lies between 'Wrangel Island and the open sea, close to the Siberian coast. The steamer Staxropol, that sought to take the little colony a three years’ supply of food, lias returned with the supplies intact, and an aeroplane that attempted a similar mission also turned back. It is possible that one more tragedy will be added to Wrangel’s long record of death. Wrangel Island is not an attractive spot. The snow melts tor two months in the summer; then poppies, pinks, and saxifrages bloom, but in sparse tufts only an inch or two in diameter, with from one to two feet of bare brown soil between them. The black rocks are lichen-covered, and it might ho possible to raise reindeer on the island. .Apart from that rather remote possibility its only conceivable use to man seems to he as one of those .Arctic aviation stations, of which daring souls who study globes and know that the shortest route from Tokio to London passes close to the North Pole dream. Yet, despite its barrenness, it has a long international history.

The Russian whose name it hears heard of it and searched for it in .1824, but never saw it; an Englishman saw it in 1881, but did not land; the first tracks on its beach were of the “ Corwin ” party, with which John Muir visited Wrangel in 1881, searching for the lost crew of the Jeanette. James Gordon Bennett had sent the Jeannette out ns a newspaper venture; it was then believed that the island stretched northward almost to the, Pole, and the Jeannette' party had hoped to make a dog sledge clash in that direction. But the little ship was caught by the ice floes and drifted helpless between Wrangel and the Pole until she sank off the New Siberia Islands. Her log, checked up after the men who kept it had died, proved that Wrangel was, after all, only a small island.

The “ Corwin ' party raised the American flag, but lor decades thereafter no American set foot on the barren soil. Russians landed there in 1911 and claimed it in the name of the Czar: Stefansson sent an expedition there which raised the British flag in 1914. but neither the British nor the American home Governments ever defended the claims which their nationals had asserted, and upon the theory which assigns to Canada all the lands between her mainland and the Bole, Wraugel undoubtedly belongs to Russia. Three men of Stefansson’s 1914 expedition were buried on the island; a second Stefansson expedition attempted to colonise the island in 1921, _but three of its four members were drowned attempting to reach the mainland over the ice, and the fourth died of scurvy in his tent, leaving only an Eskimo woman to tell the tale to the relief expedition which went out in 1923. In 1924 Harold Noicc, acting for the Alaskan promoters to whom Stefansson had sold his claim, left one American and thirteen Eskimos on the island, but when Soviet Russia sent an expedition to claim the desolate island a year later the American was glad enough to leave. The Soviet flag was hoisted on August 20. 1924, and presumably it still flies. But the sullen ice defies the rescue parties and threatens to make another cemeterv of the latest attempt to colonise the Arctic,