stefansson-wrangel-09-25-004-004

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I wanted to give him one of the cheif positions of responsibility in the
expedition but, since it had been organised before I knew he would join
it, I found no berth for him at once and, without official rating, he was
sharing my cabin on board the Karluk as my friend and travelling companion
when an accident (see Chapter VI, "The Friendly Arctic") separated five
other men and myself from the Karluk, which drifted off held fast in the
shifting ice while we watched from the shore helpless. The ship was now under
my official next in command, Captain Robert A.Bartlett, and Hadley re-
mained without official status as the sole occupant of my cabin during
four months and a thousand miles of drifting between August, 1913, and the
end of that year. He did not, therefore, belong to the official machinery
of the expedition when the Karluk broke and sauk. was crushed on January 10th, 1914, some
sixty miles northeast of Wrangell Island.

I did not hear of that wreck until a year and a half
later and I did not learn the full story until still another year had
passed and Hadley had jointed us again after the adventured of the shipwreck,
the march over shifting floes to Wrangell Island, the seven months on the
Island, and the voyage to Victoria, B.C., after the party had been picked
up in Wrangell Island by Swenson, Jochimson and McConnell of the King and Winge.

Hadley had a pungent and inimitable way of speaking,
only a faint flavour of which remians in what he wrote. I had every
form of interest in the story as he told it, sometimes in casual fragments
and sometimes in long chapters when we were together between 1915 and 1918. the winters of 1915-16
and again in 1916-17 and 1917-18. I knew the ship that sank with many of
my hopes and with many a book and memento treasured from childhood. I knew
the gods that died pathetically the first few days, and the men who died
soon thereafter partly because those dogs had not survived to help them.