After Krakauer read Albanov’s slim book at one sitting, he couldn’t sleep, and he wound up e-mailing his publishers at 3 a.m., urging them to publish it. The result, in stores and in English at last, is a hardcover Modern Library edition of “In the Land of White Death” with a 70,000-copy first printing, a preface by Krakauer and an introduction by Roberts. And yes, it is one helluva read.
In the late summer of 1912 the Russian ship Saint Anna left Aleksandrovsk, bound for Vladivostok by way of the Northeast Passage through arctic seas. Two years later, after spending not one but two winters ice locked and drifting ever farther north, chief navigator Albanov requested permission to build a sled and a kayak that he could use to find help. Half the crew asked to go with him. And that is where Albanov’s narrative begins, with a journey across the ice to the Franz Josef archipelago that lies north of Russia. That trip took three months and cost nine lives. Albanov was one of two survivors (the ship and the crew that remained aboard were never found). Along his journey he faced thievery, mutiny, polar bears, walruses, brutal cold and near starvation. At one point the iceberg on which he and a partner were sleeping cracked in two, dumping them into icy waters “like two unwanted kittens thrown together in a sack to be drowned.”
Both Krakauer and Roberts have logged time near the poles, and over dinner recently in Boulder, Colo., they avidly vouched for Albanov’s veracity. “I’ve had snow blindness and I’ve been cold and I’ve handled ill-designed sleds,” says Krakauer. “You picture yourself in this position, and you come away with tremendous respect for these men and especially their leader. He was so tough.”
It’s Albanov’s writing–simple, direct yet poetic–that most distinguishes him in the eyes of Roberts, editor of the splendid new anthology of exploration literature “Points Unknown.” (First published in Russia during the revolution, the book made it into German and French, but it never caused much stir, and until now was never translated into English.) Albanov possessed an uncanny eye for detail (“When well roasted, seal fins are similar to calves’ trotters”) and an amazing ability to face facts, no matter how wretched (“No sooner had we left the Saint Anna than our sledges were already falling apart… Our clothes are nothing but oily rags swarming with vermin. Our supplies consist of two pounds of salt”). Terse eloquence characterizes almost every page: preparing to leave the Saint Anna, Albanov writes that he will carry mail from the crew to their loved ones, “people who live in the present–unlike those of us on the ship, who live only in the past and the future, awaiting our deliverance from the polar ice.”
Albanov died in 1919, a man so obscure that no one is even sure how he died, typhoid maybe, or he may have died in a munitions-train explosion. “He deserves this attention now because he never saw any noteworthy success while he was alive,” Roberts says. But what fascinates both men–and what makes “In the Land of White Death” such memorable reading–is the contradictory elements in Albanov’s personality. On one hand, he was a natural leader. But he was also autocratic, short tempered and standoffish. “He was not a guy you would like much,” Krakauer admits. “But what’s really fascinating is that after he survived this trek, he went back to the Arctic several times!”
Roberts laughs at this. “Come on. How many times have we said, ‘If we ever get off this mountain, we’ll never do it again’?” Krakauer nods. Both men have seen people die while mountain climbing. Yet both men still climb. “I was climbing yesterday,” Krakauer says. “Climbing for me is still the most satisfying thing I do, even more than writing.”
“But that,” Roberts quips, “is just because you haven’t taken up golf yet.”
