stefansson-wrangel-09-30-006-001

Appendix C IV V

Summary of the History and Political Situation of Wrangell Island

WRANGEL ISLAND-

(Copied from "The Geographical Journal"
The Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain for December, 1923)

about
2000 words

Note to the printer:
Please do not
change the spellings of this article,
as they are a true copy from
the magazine

The history of the discovery of Wrangel* Island is bound up with ideas of a
large continent lying off the north-eastern coasts of Siberia. Rumours of
islands in this region were current on the mainland from the seventeenth cent-
ury. During the first half of the next century, a considerable part of this
coast and the group of islands, now known as the Bear Islands, were visited by
Russian travellers. It was then thought that America reached as far as to the
north of the river Kolma. To ascertain the truth of this, Andreyev, a Cossack,
undertook a journey in 1763 from the mouth of the Krestvaya northwards, visit-
ing the Bear Islands. From the last of these he claimed to have seen to the
east an extensive country which he took to be an island of considerable size.
Six years later, however, a party of Russin surveyors, Leontev, Lisev, and
Pushkarev, failed to confirm his reported discovery.

In the opinion of the Russian traveller, Baron Wrangel, Andreyev had prob-
ably seen part of the Asiatic mainland. Wrangel himself, while on a journey
along the Siberian coast from Nijne-Kolimsk to Kolyuchin Bay in 1824, was told
by natives that between Cape Shelagski and Cape North, from some cliffs near
the mouth of the river, it was possible on a clear summer’s day to see snow-
covered mountains at a great distance to the north. But in spite of persever-
ing efforts to reach this land (April 1824) Wrangel was compelled to turn back
unsuccessful. In his narrative of an Expedition to the Polar Sea (English
edit., 1840, p. 348) he writes: "With a painful feeling of the impossibility
of overcoming the obstacles which nature opposed to us, our last hope vanished
of discovering the land which we yet believed to exist. ... We had done what
duty and honour demanded; further attempts would have been absolutely hope-
less, and I decided to return."

The first to sight land in this region was Captain Kellett, R.N., of H.M.S.
Herald, in command of an expedition in search of Franklin. On 6 August 1849
he landed upon a small island, subsequently called Herald Island, of which he
took possession in the name of Queen Victoria. From this island he saw west
and north what he took to be several islands with an extensive land beyond.
These were not visited by him: to the most easterly island was given the name
Plover Island, and the mainland was afterwards called Kellett Land on the maps.
These new discoveries were taken to be part of that polar continent of whose
existence off Cape Akan Wrangel had heard, and exaggerated ideas as to its size
again became current. In 1855 Commander Rodgers, U.S.N., of the Vincennes,
landed on Herald Island, but failed to sight Kellett Land. However, in 1867
the American Captain Thomas Long sailed along the southern shores of the "land"
seen by Kellett, to which Long gave the name Wrangel Land. That same year, as
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* This reprint