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Elisabeth Marbury (The American Play Company of New York). I knew that through
her personal friendship for me and her interest in our work she
would devote the time and experience of her literary agency to making
contracts advantageous in the amount of money received and in the
safeguarding of other interests, such as the suppression of any de-
tails that might be painful and yet not significant or necessary for
an understanding of the whole truth.

After unexplained delays there arrived in England a
cable sent by Mr. Noice to the North American Newspaper Alliance.
Through the courtesy of the British purchasers, the Daily News and
the Manchester Guardian, I was allowed to read these cables before
they went to press. There came later a short cable from Mr. Noice
to me. I was horrified to see in these cables things which I
knew to be incorrect and others I was morally certain must be wrong.*
*For the sake
of clearness we
are repeating
in this chapter
certain things
that have are been
also discussed
elsewhere.
The cables said, for instance, that the men had been inexperienced,
but the truth was that there were only two or three men living in
the whole world who had more experience in the Arctic than Knight
and Maurer. An example of what I felt rather than knew must be wrong was the intim-
ation that starvation had been the cause of the death of Crawford,
Galle and Maurer, and that they had died in a desperate effort to
reach Siberia to bring back assistance to Wrangell Island. Anyone
familiar in general with polar conditions needed no special famili-
arity with the Wrangell situation to know that this was absurd.
We shall not go into that here for the subject is fully and more
? properly dealt with elsewhere later in this book. I suggest to the News
and Guardian that, since these statements would eventually be proved
incorrect, it would be better to soften them in the original public-
ation. They felt it their duty, however, to publish the despatch
as received. It is also probable that they were inclined to believe
that they were it was correct, for the allegations to which I objected were it was in accord with their ideas of what