In 1899, Baron Eduard Toll, an Arctic explorer preparing to embark on a new polar voyage, bought a Norwegian three-masted barque called Harald Harfager (the nickname of a King of Norway) for the cost of 60,000 rubles.

Renamed Zarya, the ship was sent to the shipyard of Colin Archer in Larvik to be heavily modified in order to deal with the ice.

Zarya made her first wintering trapped in the ice of a bay that Toll named after Colin Archer shipyard (Bukhta Kolin Archera) near Taymyr Island.

In August 1901 the ship headed across the Laptev Sea towards the New Siberian Islands, searching for the legendary Sannikov Land (Zemlya Sannikova), but was soon blocked by floating pack ice.

Badly beaten by the ice, and beyond any hope of repair, Zarya was finally moored east of the delta of the river Lena, in the Bay of Tiksi on the lee side of Brusneva Island, never to leave the place again.