stefansson-wrangel-09-21-009-002

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(not written) by me at a time when I was in a serious nervous
condition. They were based on a hasty reading of the documents.
When I went to Nome the summer of 1923 I was but recently out
of the hospital where I had undergone a serious operation. The
nervous strain of organizing and outfitting the relief expedition,
the oppositions put in my way in Alaska, the Soviet threats, plus
the task of manoeuvring the Donaldson through the ice to Wrangel,
and, most of all, the terrible shock of the tragedy I found on
the island, all these were undoubtedly responsible for certain
incorrect impressions which unfortunately passed on into print.
The false impression of Wrangel ( or any part of the North that
I know) given in my newspaper stories is offset by my own book
"With Stefansson in the Arctic" (Dodd Mead, New York, and George
G Harrap, London) in which I originally thought of calling "A
Polar Picnic."

Though I actually wrote none of the newspaper
stories, I am responsible for them. I find that I used the words
"youth and inexperience” several times although Maurer and
Knight were twenty-eight and twenty-nine years old when they
started on the Wrangel Island expedition, and were experienced
men in the North. It was only the other two, Crawford and Galle,
who were having their first look at the arctic.

As published, my newspaper stories gave the
impression that the fatal journey away from Wrangel Island was
made under pressure of food scarcity, that the neospa purpose of
the journey was to bring back succor, that the men and dogs were
weak from hunger, and that the undertaking was of such a nature
that there was small chance of a safe journey to Siberia. This