However, there used to be a few barns and other buildings present in the middle of the eighteenth century when Dmitry Laptev stayed in the village when scouting the coastline from the mouth of the Lena River to Cape Bolshoy Baranov.

The local population only just had time to arm themselves as German troops attempted to disembark from a submarine, the shallow waters surrounding the port preventing enemy vessels approaching too closely.

As a result of the shallow waters mentioned above, the usefulness of the settlement as a port was limited and shipping was gradually transferred to Chersky in the lower reaches of the Kolyma to accommodate larger vessels.

[2][1] In an account by David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky in their 1947 book Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, it was suggested that in the winter of 1933–34 the SS Dzhurma, ferrying 12,000 prisoners to Ambarchik, got trapped in the Arctic ice and was unable to move on until the spring.

In his book Stalin's Slave Ships, Bollinger examined the evidence and found that the Dzhurma did not enter service in the Dalstroi until 1935 and was not big enough to hold 12,000 prisoners.