I remember at one time the followers of Lyndon LaRouche were claiming that Russia’s Wrangel Island was properly American territory. Is there any historical or legal basis for thinking so?
The United States does have a claim to the island that it has never relenquished, so far as I know. IIRC, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan made mention of our outstanding claim in a speech, without threatening to enforce the claim. The U.S. claim seems to derive from the fact that the first known landing on the island was by an expedition under an American Navy officer, Capt. Calvin Hooper, in 1881. Years later, Vilhjalmur Stefansson tried to claim the island for Canada. The Russians have continuously occupied the previously uninhabited island since the 1920s.
Stefansson was leader of a Canadian expedition on the ship “Karluk” around 19-oh-something. The ship got trapped in the ice and Stefansson abandoned the ship and took off by dog sled. The men left behind had to leave the ship as the ice destroyed it and make their way on foot to Wrangel Island. They survived there for a couple of years eating seals and fish. Many died. One of the men hiked across the ice into Siberia, linked up with some aboriginals and, more than one year after he left Wrangel, came back with a British sailing ship to rescue the remaining survivors.
I listened to a tape of interview with an old man named McKinley, living in Scotland, who was a teenager when he was one of the castaways on Wrangel. When the rescuers arrived the survivors were dressed in rags and rough seal skins, and they were filthy black from burning seal oil in their huts for light and heat. I was moved almost to tears listening to McKinley describe the arrival of the rescue ship. After more than two years on that utterly barren island the castaways were so shy and stressed that they ran and hid in their huts when the rescuers arrived. The old man said “we rrran and hid”.
There is a book about this available, by McKinley, called “Karluk”.
If Steffanson later went to Wrangel and tried to claim it for Canada it was a publicity stunt to cover his sorry sleazy ass. Steffanson also claimed to have discovered in the Canadian Arctic a tribe of blonde Eskimos (now called Inuit) descended from Vikings.
There is a little island south of Juneau, Alaska, called Wrangell Island. I think this might be the source of some confusion - maybe the little Wrangell is being mistaken for the one that is north of Siberia. Not noticing the different spellings, it would be pretty weird to think of a Russian claim on an island buried among other southern Alaska islands.
But there may also be some Americans who really want to possess Wrangel Island … are they seal fanciers? I suppose it might make a base for electronic surveillance of Russia, but claiming the island and then putting a bunch of spy antennae on it would be the height of provocation…