The Island At The Top Of The World

To understand what happened on Wrangel Island between 1921 and 1923, you have to understand what Wrangel Island actually is.

It sits in the Arctic Ocean above the Arctic Circle, at approximately 71 degrees north latitude.

It is roughly 80 miles long and 30 miles wide — a landscape of coastal lowlands, inland mountains, and river valleys that are tundra in summer and ice-covered wasteland in winter.

Temperatures drop to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit in the coldest months.

The island sits surrounded by the East Siberian and Chukchi Seas, which are frozen solid for eight to ten months of the year.

It is also, remarkably, an island with an ancient human history.

Archaeological evidence indicates that Indigenous peoples — related to the ancestors of modern Iñupiat and Yupik communities — lived on and visited Wrangel Island as far back as 4,000 years ago, during the period when the woolly mammoth’s last known population was dying out on the island.

These ancient Arctic peoples understood the island’s ecosystems: the walrus colonies that hauled out on its beaches, the polar bears that denned on its slopes (Wrangel has the highest concentration of polar bear dens on Earth), the seabirds that nested on its cliffs, and the sea ice patterns that governed all of it.

The island was, in other words, a place that had been known and navigated by Indigenous peoples long before European explorers arrived in the nineteenth century — a fact that would prove deeply relevant to what happened in 1921.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson was a Canadian-born Arctic explorer who had built a considerable reputation and a considerable mythology around the idea that the Arctic was not hostile but friendly — what he called “The Friendly Arctic” in the title of a book he published in 1921.

He believed, and argued publicly, that the northern lands could be colonized and exploited, that Indigenous survival knowledge proved it was possible, and that European settlers could learn to live as the Indigenous peoples did.

The problem was that Stefansson had this idea without fully extending its implications.

He understood that Indigenous knowledge was essential to Arctic survival.