Georgy Brusilov

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Captain Brusilov and the ill-fated St. Anna.
Captain Brusilov and the ill-fated St. Anna.

Georgy Lvovich Brusilov (Russian: Георгий Львович Брусилов) or Hryhoriy Brusylov(1884 in Mykolayiv - 1914?) was a Ukrainian naval officer of the Imperial Russian Navy and an Arctic explorer. His father, Levko Brusylov, had been a naval officer as well.

In 1910-1911, Georgy Brusilov participated in a hydrographic expedition on icebreakers Taymyr and Vaygach, visiting the Chukchi Sea and East Siberian Sea.

In 1912, Brusilov led an expedition on brig St.Anna, which aimed to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific by the Northern Sea Route. One of the members of the expedition was a 22-year-old nurse, Yerminia Zhdanko, daughter of a general who had been a hero in the Russo-Japanese War. She was the second Russian woman to go to the Arctic.

By mid-September, Captain Brusilov's expedition had reached the Kara Sea through the Yugorsky Shar Strait, but soon became icebound near the western shores of the Yamal Peninsula and was drifting helplessly towards the north. Brusilov wintered in the hope of seeing his ship freed in the following year's thaw.

However, the summer of 1913 came and the St. Anna remained locked in sea ice. It had now drifted far north with the pack ice, leaving the Kara Sea and entering the Arctic Ocean. Captain Brusilov became ill and was bedridden for months. Many members of the St. Anna's crew succumbed to scurvy.

In the spring of 1914, some members of the St.Anna's crew, led by Captain Brusilov's lieutenant, Valerian Albanov, abandoned the ship and decided to walk south over the drifting ice. The only two survivors - navigator Valerian Albanov and sailor Alexander Konrad - managed to reach Cape Flora in Franz Joseph Land. There they were rescued by the expedition of Georgy Sedov on the St.Foka ship.

The almost impossible task of searching for Brusilov (as well as for similarly disappeared geologist Vladimir Rusanov from another expedition), was entrusted to Otto Sverdrup with the ship Eklips in 1914-15. His efforts, however, were unsuccessful and the fate of the Brusilov expedition is still unknown.

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