stefansson-wrangel-09-25-004-021

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of clothes throughout, and a good fill of good grub. Then we and started for
Nome where we arrived September 13, 1914.
(signed) John Hadley.

We have been telling the story from Hadley's manuscript,
but nearly every impression I have of Wrangell Island and the adventures and
trials of Hadley and his companions is from the stories he told me during the
long winter evenings, sometimes with exessive elaboration but more often in
brief, disjoint sentences that would have been incomprehensible to a
listener not thoroughly familiar with the whole background of polar environ-
ment, sailor ethics, and human nature as it manifests itself in remote isola-
tion under circumstances different from the ordinary routine of sailor life.

Without a trace of callousness but with a recognition
of the inevitable, Hadley believed that a second winter on Wrangell Island
would have meant the death of all those not active and self supporting. This
was not so much because the productive hunters would have refused to share
what they got with the others, but rather because he believed both food and
activity to be necessary for health. It seemed to me that the lives of the
whole party were saved by the King and Winge but Hadley always maintained
stoutly that himself, the Eskimos and probably two or three of the white men
would have lived through the winter and through any number of successive
winters. He believed also that these same people could have corssed to the
mainland of Siberia, a hundred miles away, after the middle of the winter,
and he said they would have done so except for the possibility that some