Franz Josef Land

• 1. Introduction

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  Franz Josef Land is a Russian archipelago of 192 islands sitting deep inside the Arctic Ocean, so far north that Cape Fligely on Rudolf Island marks the northernmost point of the entire Eastern Hemisphere. Nobody lives there permanently. The only people on the islands today are military personnel. And yet this remote scatter of ice-covered rock has been the subject of imperial claims, polar obsessions, secret discoveries, and Cold War strategy for well over a century.

  The questions this story raises are not small ones. Who actually found these islands first? Why did an emperor lend his name to land he would never see? What drew explorers to die here, season after season, chasing a pole they could not reach? And when the Soviet Union declared the archipelago its own territory in 1926, what did that mean for the Norwegians who were already using it?

• 2. A Secret Discovery

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  In 1865, a Norwegian sealing vessel named Spidsbergen sailed northeast from Svalbard. Its captain, Nils Fredrik Rønnbeck, and harpooner Johan Petter Aidijärvi were hunting for new sealing grounds. They found land. In all likelihood it was Franz Josef Land. But they never told anyone.

  The silence was deliberate. At the time, keeping a newly found sealing site secret was standard practice. Revealing a productive location would only draw competitors. Russian scientist N. G. Schilling proposed in 1865, that same year, that the ice conditions in the Barents Sea pointed to the existence of another landmass in the area. He too went nowhere, unable to secure funding for an expedition.

  The discovery that the world would actually hear about came from an entirely different direction. The Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1872-1874, aboard the schooner Tegetthoff, set out under Julius von Payer and Karl Weyprecht with the dual aims of finding the Northeast Passage and reaching the North Pole. Departing in July 1872, the vessel drifted from Novaya Zemlya toward a new landmass. Payer and Weyprecht named the archipelago in honor of Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, who had been born in 1830. The next expedition to glimpse the islands was a Dutch voyage aboard the schooner Willem Barents, but the ice kept them from ever setting foot on land.

• 3. The Race Toward the Pole

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  Benjamin Leigh Smith arrived at Franz Josef Land in 1880 aboard the barque Eira, landing on Bell Island in August. He set up a base at Eira Harbour and explored toward McClintock Island. When he returned the following year, the Eira sank on the 21st of August after being stopped by ice at Cape Flora. Smith and his crew built a cottage and survived the winter, waiting to be rescued the following summer by two British vessels, Kara and Hope.

  Fridtjof Nansen's Fram expedition of 1893-1896 changed the archipelago's role in polar ambition. Nansen had designed the venture to harness the Arctic Ocean's natural east-west drift, departing in 1893 from the New Siberian Islands and drifting for a year and a half before growing impatient. He and Hjalmar Johansen then set out on skis toward the North Pole. They failed to reach it but found their way to Franz Josef Land, the nearest land they knew of. Their arrival proved something important: no large landmass lay north of the archipelago.

  Also at work on the islands at that time was the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition, which had arrived in 1894 and established a base on Bell Island. In the spring of 1896, at Cape Flora, Nansen stumbled by pure chance upon Frederick George Jackson, who was able to take him back to Norway. Together Nansen and Jackson had explored the northern, eastern, and western portions of the islands.

  Once the basic geography was understood, expeditions pivoted to using Franz Josef Land as a launching pad for the pole. American journalist Walter Wellman, backed by the National Geographic Society, tried in 1898. Two Norwegians, Paul Bjørvig and Bernt Bentsen, wintered at Cape Heller on Wilczek Land in 1898-99, but insufficient fuel killed Bentsen. Wellman returned the next year but quickly abandoned the polar push after losing most of his equipment. Italian nobleman Luigi Amedeo organized an attempt in 1899 aboard the Stella Polare, wintered on the islands, and set out toward the pole in February and again in March 1900, but did not get far.

  Evelyn Baldwin's Ziegler Polar Expedition of 1901, financed by William Ziegler, based itself on Alger Island but pressed nowhere toward the pole and was widely judged a failure. Ziegler then appointed Anthony Fiala, who had served as second-in-command on that first expedition, to lead a new attempt. It arrived in 1903, but their ship America was crushed in December and disappeared in January. The team made two runs at the pole, abandoned both, survived another full year on the ice, and were finally evacuated in 1905 by the Terra Nova.

• 4. Russia Stakes a Claim

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  The first Russian expedition reached the islands in 1901, when the icebreaker Yermak made the journey. A more consequential Russian presence came from hydrologist Georgy Sedov, whose expedition embarked in 1912 but could not reach the archipelago until the following year because of ice. The expedition measured snow for the first time on the islands and determined that magnetic field changes occur in cycles of fifteen years. Scurvy struck during the second winter, killing a machinist. Sedov himself, lacking prior experience or adequate provisions, insisted on marching toward the pole. He died on the 6th of March.

  With Sedov's group missing, a ship called Hertha was dispatched to search for them. Its captain, I. I. Islyamov, planted a Russian iron flag at Cape Flora and declared Russian sovereignty over the archipelago. His motivation was the ongoing First World War and Russian fear that the Central Powers might establish a foothold there.

  That same August of 1914, the world's first Arctic flight took place when Jan Nagórski, a Polish aviator and one of the first pilots of the Russian Navy, overflew Franz Josef Land in search of Sedov's group. Another vessel, Andromeda, went out for the same reason. It did not find the missing men, but it did settle a long-standing geographic question: Peterman Land and King Oscar Land, suspected lands thought to lie north of the archipelago, did not exist.

• 5. Soviet Territory

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  Soviet expeditions returned to Franz Josef Land almost every year from 1923 onward. On the 15th of April 1926, the Soviet Union formally declared the archipelago its own, invoking the sector principle that Canada had previously used, claiming all land between the Soviet mainland and the North Pole as Soviet territory. That principle has never gained international recognition. Both Italy and Norway filed protests.

  Norway's objections were partly about whaling and sealing rights, a period when Norwegian hunters were also being pushed out of the White Sea, Novaya Zemlya, and Greenland. The Soviet government, however, made no move to expel Norwegian hunting vessels in the years immediately following. Nor did they intervene when, in 1928, foreign ships entered the waters searching for the missing Italian airship Italia.

  Norway pursued both a diplomatic course and a practical one, sending an expedition financed by Lars Christensen to establish a weather station. Both routes failed in 1929. The Soviet icebreaker Sedov, under Otto Schmidt, reached Tikhaya Bay and began building a permanent base there instead. In 1930 the Soviet government considered renaming the archipelago Fridtjof Nansen Land, but the name never took hold. The Norwegian Bratvaag Expedition visited that year but was told by Soviet authorities to stay out of Soviet territorial waters going forward.

  Also in 1930, a Norwegian-Swedish balloon expedition under Hans Wilhelmsson Ahlmann aboard Quest arrived, as did the German airship Graf Zeppelin. These were effectively the last Western expeditions until 1990.

  Soviet activity expanded sharply after the International Polar Year in 1932. The archipelago was circumnavigated, a topographical map was completed, and geological and glaciological expeditions ran in 1934-35. Up to sixty people wintered between 1934 and 1936, a period that also saw the first birth recorded on the islands. The first drifting ice station was set up from Rudolf Island in 1936, an airstrip was built on a glacier there, and by 1937 the winter population had climbed to 300.

• 6. War and the Secret Station

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  During the Second World War, activity at Franz Josef Land contracted sharply. Only a small group of men remained at Rudolf Island, and they went without resupply for the duration of the war. They never learned about something operating just a few islands away.

  Nazi Germany had quietly emplaced a weather station on Alexandra Land, designated Schatzgräber, as part of the broader North Atlantic weather war. The station was abandoned in 1944 after the crew contracted trichinosis from eating polar bear meat. The physical remains of the base were not discovered until 2016.

  With the Cold War came renewed Soviet military interest in the archipelago. The islands were described internally as an unsinkable aircraft carrier. The site of the former German weather station on Alexandra Land was chosen as the location for a Soviet aerodrome and military base, which would become known as Nagurskoye. When intercontinental ballistic missiles changed Soviet military doctrine in 1956, the strategic justification for an Arctic airbase dissolved. Scientific focus returned instead, with an airstrip built on Heiss Island in 1956 and the geophysical Ernst Krenkel Observatory established the following year. Activity at Tikhaya Bay was shut down in 1959.

• 7. Opening Up and Militarizing Again

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  Franz Josef Land remained closed to foreign researchers through the Cold War, though Soviet scientists carried out extensive work in geophysics, ionospheric studies, marine biology, botany, ornithology, and glaciology. The Soviet Union lifted the restrictions in 1990.

  Almost immediately, the Institute of Geography in Moscow, Stockholm University, and Umeå University organized expeditions to Alexandra Land in August 1990 and again in August 1991. They studied climate and glacial history by radiocarbon dating raised beaches and antlers from extinct caribou, doing so from a small research base southwest of Nagurskoye that had been built in 1989. Those same dating results revealed that caribou had lived on Alexandra Land approximately 4000 to 2000 years ago, and likely died out as the climate cooled.

  Also in 1990, the Academy of Sciences, the Norwegian Polar Institute, and the Polish Academy of Sciences launched a collaboration that produced the first of several archaeological expeditions. The military base on Graham Bell Island was abandoned in the early 1990s. The Krenkel Observatory's staff fell from 70 to 12. In April 1994 the archipelago and its surrounding waters became a nature reserve, and in 2011 Franz Josef Land was incorporated into the Russian Arctic National Park.

  The military arc reversed again in 2012, when the Russian Air Force decided to reopen Graham Bell Airfield. A new base called the Arctic Trefoil, named for its three-lobed design, rose at Nagurskoye. It can hold 150 soldiers for 18 months and covers 14,000 square meters, according to Radio Free Europe. The upgraded airbase is considered a threat to the American military installation at Thule, Greenland. In August 2019, Russia abruptly revoked permission for a Norwegian cruise ship to visit the islands, a sign of how quickly access can close. That same August, a geographic expedition by the Russian Northern Fleet discovered a new island in the archipelago, one that had previously been mapped as a peninsula of Hall Island.