SVYATAYA ANNA

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aukepalmhof
Posts: 7771
Joined: Thu Apr 02, 2009 1:28 am

SVYATAYA ANNA

Post by aukepalmhof » Mon May 05, 2014 9:08 pm

Built at the Pembroke Dockyard for the Royal Navy.
05 March 1860 ordered.
19 September 1860 keel laid down.
Suspended 1862/63.
20 July 1867 launched as the HMS NEWPORT.
Tonnage 868 ton, dim. 200 x 30.4 x 14.6ft.
Powered by a 2-cyl. Horizontal single expansion steam engine, 350 hhp, one shaft , speed 9.25 knots.
Armament: 1 – 68 pdr. 4 – 32 pdr. Later replaced by 1 – 7 inch, 1 – 40 pdr., 4 = 20 pdr guns.
Crew 100.
April 1868 Commissioned as survey vessel.
The Philomel-class gunvessel HMS NEWPORT was launched in England in 1867. Having become the first ship to pass through the Suez Canal, she was sold in 1881 and renamed PANDORA II She was purchased again in about 1890 and renamed BLENCATHRA taking part in expeditions to the north coast of Russia. She was bought in 1912 by Georgy Brusilov for use in his ill-fated 1912 Arctic expedition to explore the Northern Sea Route, and was named SVYATAYA ANNA Anna (Russian: Святая Анна), after Saint Anne. The ship became firmly trapped in ice; only two members of the expedition, Valerian Albanov and Alexander Konrad, survived. The ship has never been found.
Design
The Philomel-class gunvessels were an enlargement of the earlier Algerine-class gunboat of 1856. The first six of the class were ordered by the Admiralty from the naval dockyards between April 1857 and April 1859. Another twelve were ordered on 14 June 1859 to be constructed by contract in private yards, receiving their names on 24 September the same year; these were then fitted out at naval dockyards. The last eight of the class, of which NEWPORT was the first, were ordered on 5 March 1860 for construction in naval dockyards, although six of them were later cancelled.
Construction
NEWPORT was laid down at Pembroke Dockyard in Wales on 17 September 1860. She and ALBAN were suspended in 1862, and six of the uncompleted vessels, including ALBAN were cancelled in 1863. She was finally launched on 20 July 1867. She was fitted with a Laird Brothers two-cylinder horizontal single-expansion steam engine driving a single screw and developing 325 indicated horsepower (242 kW).
She was armed with a 68-pounder 95 cwt muzzle-loading smooth-bore gun, two 24-pounder howitzers and two 20-pounder breech-loading guns. All ships of the class later had the 68-pounder replaced by a 7-inch/110-pounder breech-loading gun. The class were fitted with a barque-rigged sail plan.
Survey ship
She was commissioned in April 1868 under Commander George Strong Nares (Also on HMS CHALLENGER 1873), and employed in survey work in the Mediterranean. In 1869 during the opening ceremony and first passage of ships through the Suez Canal, although the French Imperial yacht L'AIGLE was officially the first vessel to pass through the canal, HMS NEWPORT , commanded by Nares, actually passed through it first. On the night before the canal was due to open, Nares navigated his vessel, in total darkness and without lights, through the mass of waiting ships until it was in front of L'AIGLE. When dawn broke the French were horrified to find that the Royal Navy was now first in line and that it would be impossible to pass them. Captain Nares received both an official reprimand and an unofficial vote of thanks from the Admiralty for his actions in promoting British interests and for demonstrating such superb seamanship.
Pandora II
She was sold to Sir Allen Young in May 1881. He has previously owned another ex-Philomel-class gunvessel,HMS PANDORA, and he named his new ship PANDORA II after her.
Blencathra
The ship was sold in about 1890 to the wealthy F W Leyborne-Popham, who intended to use her as a yacht, and had an interest in Arctic waters. Leybourne-Popham appointed Joseph Wiggins as captain of BLENCATHRA for an 1893 voyage to the Kara Sea and into the Yenisei River, thus taking the ship to the furthest reaches of Siberia. To combine business with pleasure, he formed a syndicate to exploit the commercial opportunities offered by the carriage of cargo to the far north. As plans were being finalised, Wiggins received an urgent request from the Russians to carry rails for the Trans-Siberian Railway up the Yenisey to Krasnoyarsk. A 2,500-ton steamer, ORESTES, was chartered and four Russian river vessels were provided for the final stages of transport in the Yenisey. With the river vessels embarked in ORESTES, and BLENCATHRA in company, the group left Vardø on 22 August 1893, reaching the mouth of the Yenisey on 3 September. BLENCATHRA and ORESTES returned to England via Arkhangel, while Wiggins stayed with the Russian river vessels, reaching Yeniseysk on 23 October.
Among the party was Miss Helen Peel, granddaughter of Sir Robert Peel, who wrote a book about her experiences entitled Polar Gleams.
Leybourne-Popham sold his yacht to Major Andrew Coats, and in company with William Speirs Bruce, Coats made a long hunting voyage to the Arctic waters around Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen. Bruce joined BLENCATHRA at Tromsø, Norway in May 1898, and the cruise explored the Barents Sea, the dual islands of Novaya Zemlya, and the island of Kolguyev, before a retreat to Vardø to re-provision for the voyage to Spitsbergen. In a letter Bruce reported, "This is a pure yachting cruise and life is luxurious". Nevertheless, the scientific purpose of the voyage was not forgotten; measurement of temperature & salinity and meteorological observations went on day and night.
1912 Arctic expedition
Main article: Brusilov Expedition
A geological feature in the Arctic Ocean basin, the Anna or Svyataya Anna Trough, located east of Franz Josef Land, with a depth of 620 m, has been named in memory of this ill-fated ship.
The Brusilov Expedition (Russian: Экспедиция Брусилова, Ekspeditsiya Brusilova) was a Russian maritime expedition to the Arctic led by Captain Georgy Brusilov, which set out in 1912 to explore and map a route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific via a northeast passage known as the Northern Sea Route. The expedition was ill-planned and ill-executed by Brusilov, and disappeared without a trace. Earlier searches were unsuccessful, and its fate was not known until 2010.

The expedition set out from Alexandrovsk on August 28, 1912 in the gunvessel SVYATAYA ANNA, so late in the summer that in October the ship became locked in the polar ice of the Kara Sea off the Yamal Peninsula. Supplies were abundant, and officers and crew prepared themselves for wintering over, hoping to be freed in the following year's thaw.

However, during 1913 the sea remained completely frozen. By early 1914 the SVYATAYA ANNA had drifted far north in lazy zigzags with the Arctic ice. In the summer that year she reached 83° of latitude, NW of Franz Josef Land, and had no chance to be freed in 1914 either. To make matters worse, captain and crew had succumbed to scurvy. Navigator and second-in-command Valerian Albanov, believing that their position was hopeless, requested permission from Captain Brusilov to be relieved from his duties as second-in-command in order to leave the ship and attempt to return to civilization on foot. Albanov hoped to reach Eva Island in Hvidtenland, the northeastermost island of Franz Josef Land. He used Fridtjof Nansen's inaccurate map, full of dotted lines where the archipelago was still unexplored. After a gruesome ordeal, Albanov and Alexander Konrad, one of the crewmen of the SVYATAYA ANNA, finally made it back to Russia. They were the only two survivors. One of the members of the expedition was the second Russian woman to go to the Arctic, Yerminia Zhdanko, a 22-year-old nurse and daughter of a general who was a hero in the Russo-Japanese War.

The SVYATAYA ANNA was never seen again. She may have sunk, crushed by the polar ice. It was thought she may have been carried by the polar ice drift until she broke free on the other side of the Arctic (like the FRAM), but this seems unlikely now that items have been found on Franz Josef Land.

In 1914-15 Otto Sverdrup led a search-and-rescue expedition aboard ship EKLIPS in the Kara Sea on behalf of the Russian Imperial Navy. He aimed to find two missing arctic expeditions, those of Captain Brusilov on the SVYATAYA ANNA and Vladimir Rusanov on the GERKULES, but found no trace of either expedition.

Valerian Albanov made repeated requests to Arctic explorer and Admiral Alexander Kolchak to launch a search expedition for the SVYATAYA ANNA. In December 1919 Albanov traveled to Omsk to confer with Kolchak, but the political turmoil in Russia at the time made a relief mission impossible, and the fate of the expedition was unknown until 2010.

Explorers announced in 2010 that they had found the bones of a crew member of Brusilov's expedition. Later in 2010, a crew member's logbook and various other artifacts were found, also on Franz Josef Land.
Russia 2011 prestamped postcard Two of these cards show the nurse Yerminia Zhdanko which lost her life also in this voyage. (with thanks to Mr. Sitnikov for the images)

Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svyataya_Anna
Attachments
S_S_Yacht_Blencathra (1).jpg
2013 St Anna.JPG
1981 æó´Ôá´ Ç¡¡á Broussilov.jpg
1992 »Ó«õÑßß«Ó î«½þá¡«ó. îÒÓ¼á¡ß¬.jpg
Albanov.jpg
Hermine_Chdanko.jpg
Last edited by aukepalmhof on Thu Dec 02, 2021 10:20 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Anatol
Posts: 1037
Joined: Sun Apr 12, 2009 2:13 pm

Re: SVYATAYA ANNA

Post by Anatol » Thu Apr 06, 2017 12:32 pm

Georgy Brusilov- polar explorer ((1853—1926).
Djibouti 2016;650fdj;SG?
Attachments
img1733.jpg

aukepalmhof
Posts: 7771
Joined: Thu Apr 02, 2009 1:28 am

Re: SVYATAYA ANNA

Post by aukepalmhof » Thu Dec 02, 2021 10:21 pm

The Djibouti issue of 2016 is an ILLEGAL STAMP.

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