CHAPTER THREE
WITHOUT A TITLE
I had an appointment that day with a member of the Pravda editorial
staff whom I wished to tell about my discoveries. He had put me off
twice, being too busy to see me, then at last he telephoned and I went to
see him at the Pravda office.
He was a tall, attentive old chap in spectacles, who had a slight squint,
so that he seemed to be looking away all the time, thinking of something
else. 'A specialist of a sort in aviation,' he introduced himself. He
seemed sincerely interested in my story-at any rate, he began to take it
down on his writing pad as soon as I started speaking. He made me
sketch a drawing of my method of anchoring a grounded aeroplane
during a blizzard and said I ought to write an article about it for the
Civil Aviation magazine. He phoned the magazine there and then and
arranged when and to whom I was to hand in my article. He seemed to
be well aware of the significance of the St. Maria expedition and said
that now, when everybody was taking such a great interest in the Arctic,
the subject was a timely and useful one.
'But there has already been an article about it,' he said. 'If I am not
mistaken, in Soviet Arctic.'
'In Soviet Arctic! '
'Yes, last year.'
That was news indeed! An article about Captain Tatarinov's
expedition in Soviet Arctic last year?
'I didn't see it,' I said. 'In any case, the writer cannot know what I
know. I've deciphered the diaries of the navigating officer, the only
survivor of the expedition to reach the mainland.'
That was when I realised that the man before me was your true-born
journalist. His eyes suddenly gleamed and he began taking me down
quickly, even breaking his pencil in the process. Evidently it was
something in the nature of a scoop. He said as much.
'Why, it's a sensation!'
Then he locked his office, and took me to see the 'boss', as he
declared in the corridor.
I repeated my story briefly to the 'boss' and we agreed:
(a) that I would bring the diaries to the office the next day,
(b) that Pravda would send a reporter to my lecture, and
(c) that I would write an article about my discoveries and then 'we
shall see about where to publish it'.
I should have raised the question, while there, of organising a search for
the expedition, but decided that this was a special question which had
nothing to do with the press. That was a pity, because the journalists
would have been able to put me on to somebody at the Northern Sea
Route Administration or even telephoned to that person for me. As it
was, I spent two hours in the waiting-room for the honour of seeing one
of the secretaries of the Head Office. I was shown into a private office,
where I spent another half-hour. The secretary was busy. Every minute
some sailor, airman, radio-operator, engineer, carpenter, agronomist or
190
artist went in to see him, and all the time he had to pretend he knew all
there was to know about aviation, agronomy, painting and radio
engineering. At last he turned to me.
'It's only of historical interest,' he said when I had rushed through my
story. 'We have other problems to deal with, more up-to-date.'
I said I knew perfectly well that it wasn't the job of the Administration
to organise searches for lost expeditions. But since a high-latitudes
expedition was going out that year to Severnaya Zemlya, it was quite
possible to give it the minor parallel task of exploring the area of
Captain Tatarinov's ill-fated expedition.
'Tatarinov, Tatarinov...' the secretary said trying to recall something.
'Didn't he write something about it?'
I said he could not have written about it, as the expedition had set out
from St. Petersburg about twenty years ago and the last news of it was
received in 1914.
'Yes, but who was the Tatarinov who wrote about it?'
'Tatarinov was the Captain,' I explained patiently. 'He set sail in the
autumn of 1912 aboard the schooner St. Maria with the aim of
navigating the Northern Sea Route, that is, that very Route in whose
administrative offices we now happen to be sitting. The expedition was a
failure, but incidentally Captain Tatarinov made important geographical
discoveries. There is full reason to believe that Severnaya Zemlya, for
instance, was discovered by him, not by Vilkitsky.'
'To be sure, there was an article about that expedition and I read it,'
the secretary said.
'Whose article?'
'Tatarinov's, if I'm not mistaken. Tatarinov's expedition, Tatarinov's
article. So what are you proposing?'
I repeated my suggestion.
'Very well, write a memo about it,' the secretary said, sounding as if
he felt sorry for my having to write a memo which would remain lying in
his desk drawer.
I left.
It could not be just a coincidence. In a book-shop in Gorky Street I
thumbed through all the issues of Soviet Arctic for the last year. The
title of the article was 'A Forgotten Expedition'-the title of my own
paper!—and was signed 'N. Tatarinov'. It had been written by Nikolai
Antonich!
It was a long article written in a reminiscent vein but with a faint
touch of scholarship. It began by describing the schooner St. Maria as
she lay at her moorings near Nikolayevsky Bridge in St. Petersburg in
the summer of 1912: 'The white paint on her walls and ceilings was still
fresh, the polished mahogany of her furniture gleamed like a mirror and
carpets covered the floors of her cabins. The storerooms and hold were
packed with all kinds of supplies. They had everything conceivable-nuts,
sweets, chocolate, different kinds of tinned fruit, pineapples, crates of
jam jars, biscuits, and many other items, including such necessities as
