stefansson-wrangel-09-25-005-006

6

Lorne Knight was a Seattle high school boy who had served
capably for three years on my last expedition. He was fitted for pioneer
work both by physique and temperament and had been popular with his companions.
I liked him especially. In 1917 he accompanied me on the longest sledge trip
I ever made, and in 1918, when I was ill with fever, he accompanied my
second-in-command, Storker Storkerson, on one of the most remarkable of polar
adventures. Storkerson and his four companions traveled in mid-winter by
sledge north from Alaska about two hundred miles into the unexplored ocean,
selected a substantial ice floe and camped upon it for more than six months
while it drifted four hundred and fifty miles, living by hunting the while
and trying especially to determine the direction of ice movement in that
part of the ocean. During the seventh month Storkerson, the leader, became
ill. It was October, the worst part of the year for travel over moving sea
ice, and they were then three hundred miles away from land. But they made
the journey ashore without trouble. With the exception of Storkerson and
myself, there was no man living in 1921 who had traveled as many miles on
moving sea ice or who had spent as many days upon it as had Knight. Of the
great explorers of the past, Peary was the only one who had excelled
Knight's record.

Frederick Maurer I saw first in 1912 when he was on a
whaling ship wintering in the Arctic north of Canada; in 1913 he became a
member of the crew of our Karluk. He was with that ship when it sank some
eighty miles northeast of Wrangell Island and was one of the men who spent
more than six months on Wrangell Island in 1914 after the shipwrecked men
landed there. It was he (as we have told in a previous article) who raised
the flag at the time British rights to the island were reaffirmed on July
first, 1914. Maurer was eager to get back to any part of the Arctic but