stefansson-wrangel-09-17-022-001

(All notations and underscoring with pen and ink are
copies of similar notes made on the typewritten copy
sent Dr. Bowman by Mrs. J. T. Crawford)
------------------

Saturday Night, Toronto, Canada, September 15, 1923, p. 1.

The Unfriendly Arctic

When the erratic Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson invented
his catchy phrase "The Friendly Arctic," he coined a good title to sell a
book with, but at the same time he promulgated a grotesque fallacy, that
has wrought tragic mischief. Allan Crawford, of Toronto, and the other
young lads who accompanied him on his last Wrangel adventure no doubt left
civilization under the delusion that the Arctic was friendly. They paid
the penalty of this mistake with their brave young lives. No one can read
the tale unfolded by Harold Noice who headed the relief expedition so long
delayed that it failed of its object by many months, without experiencing
the deepest pain and anger at (the tragic folly of the whole Stefansson
enterprise) The whole literature of sea adventure contains no narrative
more harrowing than Noice’s story. The episode of the Eskimo woman, Ada
Blackjack, who for two months lived alone in this desolate waste, with the
dead man Knight in a tent near by, awaiting death by starvation appals the
imagination. Equally appalling are the circumstances of Knight's death,
and those surrounding the end of Crawford and his companions wandering on
the ice between Wrange1 and the coast of Siberia, details of which will
never be known.

Noice, without openly censuring anybody makes it clear
that the lives of all these victims would probably have been saved had there
been any clear plan or adequate preparations in connection with Stefansson's
Wrangel expedition. The lads he wook with him were for the most part
novices who went in a spirit of adventure and knew little or nothing of what
they had to face. Elementary precautions against the prospect of starvation
appear to have been overlooked. The neglect to provide a proper craft that
could be used to hunt walrus in northern waters was a contributory cause of
the ultimate tragedy. Again the lack of means and precautions to protect
food against marauding animals made the maintenance problem still more
serious. It is quite possible that a body of experienced Arctic voyagers,
provided with sufficient ammunition might have been able to maintain life
for an indefinite period on Wrangel, but Crawford and his companions were
novices led away by a false lure and with little real knowledge of the
problems with which they had to deal. Thus they perished while the author
of the wild enterprise was far away talking nonsense about the supposed
strategical importance of Wrangel. That adventurous lads of so fine a type
as Crawford and his companions should needlessly perish is something
difficult to forgive.

The utter folly of Stefansson's project is apparent from
the reply sent by the British Foreign Office to the Moscow Government's pro-
test against the supposed seizure of Wrangel. The protest was of course made
at a time when it was not known that the members of the expedition were dead;
and when Stefansson was in London talking of the importance of Wrangel as
an aerial base from which to carry on war against Siberia. Lord Curzon
made it clear that Great Britain had no intention of disputing Russian
sovereignty and the Stefansson expedition of course explodes the theory
of the feasibility of Wrangel as a base for aerial warfare; but if it would
be used for that purpose, what advantage could Britain reap from bombing
Kamschatka? What gain would it be to the Empire to annex the desolate