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Arctic: Saga of Survival against Odds

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  • Arctic: Saga of Survival against Odds

    Divers find the remains of an Arctic mission ship which avoided tragedy

    By Adrian Blomfield
    (Filed: 02/10/2006)

    It was arguably the greatest adventure epic of the Soviet era, a tale of derring-do in the Arctic Ocean that delighted Stalin and gripped the world.

    The saga of the steamship Chelyuskin has been brought to life for a new generation of Russians after a team of divers found its wreckage beneath the Arctic's freezing waters.

    A drawing of the Chelyuskin
    A drawing of the Chelyuskin trapped in ice

    Russian television has heaped plaudits on the expedition that finally broke a three-decade jinx to discover the vessel 72 years after it triggered one of the 20th century's most compelling tales of survival against the odds.

    The Chelyuskin set sail in the summer of 1933 to prove that the ice-bound 4,500-mile Northern Maritime Route from Murmansk to Vladivostok was navigable.

    What happened to the Chelyuskin over the following year enthralled generations of Russian schoolchildren in the same way Scott's expedition inspired the British.

    Four months after setting sail and within sight of open water in the Bering Strait, the ship became trapped in pack ice in November 1933.

    From being so close to success, the Chelyuskin and its 105 souls — including two babies born on board — was pushed back several hundred miles by the expanding ice.

    On February 13, 1934, the vessel's hull stove in under the pressure and sank 70 miles from shore. There the Chelyuskin would lie until four divers and an underwater robot, feeling their way through water so murky that visibility was less than two feet, found it last week.

    A glow of nostalgia has descended on Russia since the ship was discovered. Commentators suggested that memories of the Chelyuskin's relief were helping ease the pain still felt over the failure to save 118 submariners aboard the Kursk in 2000.

    For though the Chelyuskin sank, its crew was rescued in a two-month drama played out in temperatures of -40C.

    Capt Otto Schmidt, a veteran polar explorer, led his entire crew off the ship — save for one steward who slipped off the icy deck and drowned.

    They set up camp on an ice floe where they would remain for nine weeks, burning flotsam on primitive stoves to keep warm and reading transcripts from the Communist Party congress. In Moscow an unprecedented rescue operation was launched as Stalin ordered his airmen to push the frontiers of flight. But time was running out. With the onset of spring, the ice was starting to melt.

    In the nick of time, the aviators arrived. Navigating massive distances and treacherous conditions they flew 24 sorties between April 7 and 13, 1934.

    They rescued all 104 survivors, ferrying out some in enclosed stretchers strapped to the wings of the aircraft.

    News of the rescue caused celebrations around the world, where wireless reports of the unfolding saga had been followed with bated breath. The following year the Marx Brothers paid comic tribute to the Russian aviators in A Night at the Opera.

    "The Chelyuskin relief operation was a unique event in the USSR," said Iosif Rabinovich, the scientific secretary of the expedition that found the vessel last week. "It was one of the few events when the Soviet people felt themselves to be one nation."

    For decades, the quest to find the vessel had consumed Russian adventurers.

    The latest was organised by the governor of Russia's Koryak region, Oleg Kozhemyako, who had dived into the Arctic waters in the past in search of the vessel.

    This time the governor only provided the ship that found the Chelyuskin thanks to lateral-view echo locators.

    A more old-fashioned diving expedition succeeded in bringing up the evidence: a piece of railing and a clamp.

    "Visibility was only 30cm," Mr Rabinovich said. "Divers had to feel their way along the ship, crawling along its surface."
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...02/wship02.xml
    Quite something!


    "Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

    I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

    HAKUNA MATATA
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