Alexander Kuchin

Background

Alexander Kuchin came from a humble background and became a seaman on a Norwegian ship at age seventeen. He mastered the Norwegian language within a year. In 1907 he worked at a Norwegian Biological Station in Bergen, studying under oceanography expert Professor Bjorn Helland-Hansen. His enthusiasm for Norwegian led him to write a "Small Russian-Norwegian dictionary" for his compatriots.

From 1910 to 1911, Kuchin was the only foreigner on Amundsen's South Pole expedition aboard the Fram, making oceanographic and navigational observations in the Southern Atlantic. After returning to Norway in December 1911, he became engaged to 18-year-old Aslaug Paulson, daughter of prominent journalist Andreas Paulson. In 1912 Kuchin returned to Russia and joined Vladimir Rusanov's expedition as captain of the ship Gerkules, bound for Svalbard to investigate coal potential.

The expedition sailed from Aleksandrovsk-na-Murmane on 26 June with thirteen men and one woman, Rusanov's French fiancée, along with a geologist and a zoologist.

Disappearance

After a successful summer of fieldwork, three expedition members—the geologist, the zoologist, and the ship's bosun—returned to Russia via Grønfjorden in Norway. The remaining ten, including Captain Alexander Kuchin, set off with Rusanov without consulting St. Petersburg authorities on an attempt to reach the Pacific Ocean via the Northern Sea Route. The ship Gerkules was considered too small for such an undertaking. The last communication was a telegram left at Matochkin Shar on Novaya Zemlya, reaching St. Petersburg on 27 September 1912, in which Rusanov stated his intention to round the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya and head east across the Kara Sea.

Nothing further was heard from the Gerkules, presumed lost without trace after September 1912 in the Kara Sea off northern Siberia. In 1914–15, Otto Sverdrup commanded the ship Eklips in an unsuccessful search for Rusanov's expedition and the similarly missing Captain Brusilov. In 1937, the Arctic Institute of the USSR sent the ship Toros to the Nordenskiöld Archipelago, where relics of the 1912–13 Gerkules expedition were found on one of the Mona Islands and on Popov-Chukchin Island. Two small islets off Salisbury Island in Franz Josef Land bear Kuchin's name.