Nansen, trekking home from a failed polar dash, bumped into Jackson on Franz Josef Land
In the spring of 1896 Fridtjof Nansen, having abandoned his ski attempt on the North Pole, reached the ice-bound islands of Franz Josef Land. At Cape Flora he stumbled, purely by chance, on the British explorer Frederick George Jackson, who carried him home to Norway. The archipelago has never had a permanent population.
The Russian archipelago holds 192 islands covering 16,134 square kilometres, about 85 percent under ice, and its heavily cut coastline runs 4,425 kilometres. No land in the Eastern Hemisphere lies farther north than Cape Fligely on Rudolf Island, and the highest ground reaches 620 metres on Wiener Neustadt Island. Norwegian sealers probably saw the islands in 1865 but, as was common, kept quiet to protect their hunting grounds.
Official discovery went to the Austro-Hungarian expedition of 1872 to 1874 under Julius von Payer and Karl Weyprecht, whose schooner Tegetthoff drifted from Novaya Zemlya to unknown land they named for Emperor Franz Joseph I. Later visitors had rough luck. Benjamin Leigh Smith's ship Eira sank on 21 August 1881, forcing his party to winter in a hut. The Ziegler expeditions of the early 1900s fared worse: one was branded an utter failure, and the next lost its ship America to the ice and waited until 1905 for rescue.
Russia took a growing interest. Georgy Sedov's poorly supplied expedition arrived in 1913 and recorded the first snow measurements, but he died on a march toward the pole. Searching for him in August 1914, the Polish-born aviator Jan Nagórski made the world's first Arctic flight. On 15 April 1926 the Soviet Union annexed the islands, then considered no one's land, under a sector principle that was never internationally recognised; Norway and Italy protested, and a Norwegian attempt to set up a weather station failed in 1929.
Soviet presence expanded after the 1932 International Polar Year, with a drifting ice station launched from Rudolf Island in 1936 and a winter population of 300 by 1937. During the Second World War a German weather station called Schatzgräber operated unnoticed on Alexandra Land until trichinosis from polar bear meat forced its evacuation in 1944. Closed to foreigners in the Cold War, the islands became a nature sanctuary in 1994 and joined the Russian Arctic National Park in 2012.
Source: Franz Josef Land
