stefansson-wrangel-09-29-025

Insert p.175

Picture of cat
and walrus head.

While we are on the subject of important tilings that are
not mentioned in diaries, we might as well discuss the expedition
cat, named Victoria,or Vic for short. She must have occupied an
important place in the thoughts and affections of the Wrangell
Island community and still she never appears once in the two volumes
of the diary. Knight did tell a good deal about her in one of his
letters to his parents,and in the photographic collection she
appears more often than any member of the expedition.

The name Victoria seems to have come from the circum-
stance that the kitten was presented to the expedition by the crew
of the steamer Victoria on the voyage from Seattle to Nome. Every
photograph shows her apparently fat and flourishing.

There is a^curious parallel in the experience of the cats
that belonged to the two Wrangell Island expeditions. When the
Karluk was being outfitted in Victoria in 1913 someone made us the
present of a kitten. She was well taken care of and grew to
maturity on the voyage north and during the Karluk`s adventurous
drift until the shipwreck near Wrangell Island in January, 1914.
When the ship had to be abandoned because the water was rushing
into the engine room, the cat was not forgotten. Someone slipped
her under his coat and when the temporary cabin had been built on
the floe beside the gap in the ice through which the Karluk had
sunk she was given a snug corner. I think it was Fred Maurer who
later carried her ashore. Certainly I have heard from the men who
were on the island that summer that he did more than his part in
looking after the cat. Through all the vicissitudes of that
difficult time she remained safe, and when the King and Winge
came to pick up the marooned party Maurer took the cat with him
to Nome and Victoria and eventually to his home in Ohio where at
last reports she was still safe and contented although now growing