Wrangel Island polar bears

Although Wrangel Island has been uninhabited throughout most of its history, humans have made it here, with mixed success. In Krasin Bay there’s a 3,400 year old Paleo-Eskimo camp, but from the 19th century onwards, controversy over discovery and ownership of the island became the main story.

In the early 1820s, Lieutenant Ferdinand Petrovich tried and failed to find the island on three separate expeditions, making sledge journeys over the sea ice. In 1867, a whaler captain, Thomas Long, was the first European who undisputedly sighted and landed on the island, and in 1911, two Russian icebreakers conducting surveys in the region claimed the island for Russia.

Next comes the famed and fraught voyage of the Karluk. A Canadian Arctic expedition with 25 crew, it set sail in August 1913, became trapped in ice, drifted and was crushed and sunk in January 1914. The crew struggled to survive, first on the ice and later on Wrangel Island, and 11 men died before rescue. You can visit Dragi Harbour where the survivors scrambled ashore and lived until they were rescued.

The island’s undisputed heroine is Ada Blackjack, an Inupiat woman from Nome, Alaska, who lived for two years on Wrangel Island. Her story is one of the most extreme wilderness survival tales ever recorded. In 1921, she had joined a private expedition organised by a Canadian explorer, with four other male crew members. One of them, American Fred Maurer, had already spent eight months on the island in 1914 after the sinking of the Karluk.

A supply ship failed to reach the island because of ice during the summer of 1922 and subsequently all the men died, leaving Ada alone. She was eventually rescued in August 1923, having survived by shooting seals.