On June 21, 1900, an expedition left Kronstadt to the north, costing its leader his life.
Edward Toll.
The story of Baron Toll began long before his birth. At the beginning of the 19th century, more precisely, in 1810, the traveler and St. John's wort Yakov Sannikov sent a report to the Imperial Russian Geographical Society about the next discovery of a new land. On one of the clear sunny days, hunting for Arctic fox at the northern tip of Kotelny Island, he clearly saw the land on the horizon. By that time, Yakov was already a well-known traveler, he had three open islands on his account, so they did not doubt Sannikov's words. Moreover, the discovery was confirmed by the evidence of his companion.
New Siberian Islands. Somewhere to the north of Kotelny Island we saw Sannikov Land.
Legends and dreamers
In general, Sannikov had long assumed that uncharted land lies north of the Kotelny. There have been legends about her since ancient times. The northern Yakuts had legends about the Onkilon people, who once withdrew from their camps and, along with deer and dogs, went to the North, supposedly to warm fertile lands. The hunters who returned from the hunt told about this. Yes, and migratory birds, instead of flying south, stretched in schools to the north, then returning from there with offspring.
Whatever it was, but the state was in no hurry to organize an expedition in search of new land. Baron Toll did it for him. With his own money, he got to the Boiler House with the same enthusiasts. He, like Sannikov, managed to see the mysterious land: four mountains, turning into a low.
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Due to the difficulties in weather conditions, which are not uncommon in those parts, the expedition was unable to reach the land they saw. Toll returned with nothing. But from the day when the still unattainable mountains appeared on the horizon, the search for the mysterious country of the Onkilons became for the baron his entire subsequent life.
"Dawn" in the Nerpal lagoon, December 14, 1901, scanned from Kuznetsov's book "In Search of Sannikov's Land".
Directive from above
The message of Eduard Vasilyevich in the Russian Academy of Sciences about the land he discovered gave impetus to the ambitions of the Russian Naval Department. The report was interested at the very top: the emperor himself gave the order to organize the first official polar expedition. For a long time they could not find the money required to equip the expedition: then the budget of Russia was bursting at the seams.
It is not known how much more the government poured from empty to empty, perhaps the expedition would never have taken place. But Nicholas II on the last day of 1899, by his decree, sent 200 thousand rubles to organize the campaign, withdrawing them from the pocket of the Academy of Sciences.
This was all the king could do for the pioneers. They did not have the main thing: a vessel that can withstand a sea voyage in the harshest conditions of the Far North.
Again, Toll invested his own savings in the venture. He bought from the Norwegians the seal-hunting sailing-steam schooner "Harald the Fair-haired", which was renamed "Zarya". The purchase and re-equipment of the ship into a schooner-barque cost 60,000 rubles - an amount that was too heavy for a baron at that time. Therefore, it was necessary to attract benefactors. The interest in the lands new to Russia was so great that they raised an amount approximately equal to that which was allocated by the Academy. A well thought out and fully equipped expedition set off from Kronstadt on June 21, 1900.
Eduard Toll expedition crew. The third from the left in the top row is the future Admiral Kolchak.
One who cannot be called
The expedition was attended by two dozen people. But in Soviet times, they preferred not to mention one of them. This man was engaged in measuring depths: he was a specialist in hydrogeological and magnetic surveys. His name was Alexander Kolchak. Subsequently, he will become an admiral confronting the whole country. And that year, in the Greek port of Piraeus, Toll practically lured the green lieutenant on an expedition from the battleship Petropavlovsk, which was sailing from the Baltic to the Far East. Kolchak shared with the baron all the hardships of an extreme trip to the Arctic. Together they survived the winter in Taimyr, twice reached the Kotelny. Only a little over a year later (in September) they managed to reach the place where the land Toll had seen should be.
Baron Toll on a polar expedition, one of the last photographs.
Although the shallow depths indicated that the land was somewhere nearby, the travelers could not see it. Dense fogs appeared, and the search was once again postponed. The team had to spend the winter at Kotelny again.
Mysterious disappearance
In the following spring, Toll made another attempt to get to the mysterious land. But by the time of his return, the schooner did not come to the meeting place: ice blocks damaged the Zarya. Lieutenant Kolchak turned to the Academy of Sciences with a request to entrust him with the rescue mission. And from the beginning of May to the beginning of December 1903, an active search took place in the area where the baron disappeared.
But all efforts to find Toll's team were in vain: only a geological collection and a note written by his hand were found. From the note, we learned that the team sailed to the south of Bennett Island in October 1902. Whether he got to Sannikov's land or died without achieving his dream is unknown.
Toll's site was found by Soviet researchers in the 1930s. And in the seventies, according to the instructions of Baron Toll, which he left in his diary, they found a cache with perfectly preserved food. The stew turned out to be completely edible, which the researchers checked on the spot.
The world's oldest edible can of canned meat produced in 1900, stored in the Research Institute of the Federal Reserve.
The technique only added mysticism
In the images of that region of the Arctic, strange spots are constantly present, which do not allow to see in detail the entire space around Kotelny Island. But the people living there, fishermen, hunters, researchers, firmly say that they all went and did not find any warm island there.
There is, however, a gigantic shallow water approximately in the places where Toll and Sannikov observed the land. And the silty bottom sediments indicate that quite recently there was still land there.
Most plausible version
So where could the huge island disappear, which Baron Toll saw after Sannikov? And he saw so clearly that he did not doubt his reality for a second and did not regret his search for life itself. The researchers put forward the version that Sannikov's land was most likely composed of fossil ice hidden under a layer of applied soil. The ice was eventually destroyed by the sea or the sun, and the island simply melted. This version is confirmed by the well-known facts of the disappearance of the islands of the Arctic Ocean, already recorded in our time.
Fossil ice veins emerge on the surface. The ice will melt, the soil will collapse, and it will be covered by the sea.
By the way: In the 50s of the XX century, a rather large object had to be erased from the maps. In 1770, merchant Ivan Lyakhov discovered an island in the Laptev Sea, named Semenovsky. Its dimensions in 1823 were 15 km long and 5 km wide. In 1912, its length was already only 4630 meters, and its width decreased to 926 meters. In 1936, an approaching hydrographic vessel recorded a length of 2315 meters and a width of 463 meters, and in 1952 the island completely melted. Perhaps the Sannikov Land suffered the same fate.
And the birds flying to nest to the north were caught, ringed and found out that they fly not to the north, but through the north. They breed chicks in Canada and the USA, and then return back. It's just that the path is shorter.
RUSICH ANNA
