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16.

The entries from January 22 to January 27 are routine, the making of clothing, tending of fox traps, etc.

On January 28: "They’re off. At 9:10 A.A., a nice clear day, warmer than usual and all in their favor. They were going due south when last seen, and were soon out of sight."

January 29: "Blowing a howling gale from the east. This camp is very comfortable and a little wood goes a long way. Yesterday and today, I have been busy fixing the place up, making it convenient for two people. Now we are well fixed until the snow starts to melt in the spring. All of the boxes outside will then have to he cleaned out (the snow removed from them), the roof and walls of the house dug away, and numerous other things will keep us busy. If only a hear would wander into camp, we would he fixed in greet shape, for with only two of us and no dogs a bear would go a long way. In a couple of months, the females will be coming out of thoir holes with their cubs and then we should have plenty of meat. My left leg just above the knee is considerably swollen and is giving me some pain. Whether it is from scurvy or not, I am not sure, and although it does not lay me up, it makes moving rather painful. Fresh meat will fix me up, I am sure."

This, the day after the party left, is on the whole a cheerful entry, and also on which gives an answer to many of the questions that have been asked since the tragic outcome was published. Few of the theories that have pleased the journal-

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17

ists can be held except by ignoring this and several other entries of the same sort. On the basis of them the reader can form his own conclusions without editorial help.

But in that cheerful entry the first sentence is ominous to us, though the context shows it did not have that moaning to Knight as he wrote it. For the next several days he evidently thought of Crawford, Galle and Maurer as traveling steadily toward Siberia; and after that he supposed them to he passing in ease and affluence from settlement to settlement along the Siberian coast toward the telegraphs at Nome. He speculates on what I will think and do when I receive Crawford’s report about Wrangell Island. So easy in their minds wore both he and the Eskimo woman, Ada, that even after Knight’s death she never doubted the safety of the others. When the supply ship landod six months after the party left iso find her watching alone by Knight's body, her first and constantly reported question was not if they were safe but where were they? As I write, I have just been talking with her in Seattle, She is still firm in the belief that they are alive. "Why should they die?", she asks. "They were well clothed, they had rifles, they had food, and the natives on the Siberian coast are kind to travelers". But she thinks badly of the Russians and insists: "How do you know they are not prisoners among the Russians? If they are dead, how do you know the Russians did not kill them?”

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stefansson-wrangel-09-25-007-018

18.

But we feel sure that the kindness of the Russians on the north coast of Siberia is equal to the kindness of the natives. If, through some confused notion of the international issues at stake, they had xxxxxxxxxx taken the party prisoners, they would have mode no secret of it and would have treated them humanly. We also have direct testimony from others than Russians. Captain Aarnaut Castel, a member of my 1913-18 arctic expedition for five years, a comrade on it and friend of Knight and Maurer, was wintering on the coast south of Wrangell. With him was anothe r comrade of Knight’s on Storkerson’s great sea-ice journey of our 1913-18 Expodition, August Masik, himself a Russian. Both say there is no chance of any one landing on the coast without everybody knowing about it.

Knight’s entry, "Blowing a howling gale", may therefore be the key to the tragedy which he never suspected but which we know must have occurred in one of two ways. The gale may have broken up the ice in such chaotic fashion that death resulted immediately, either by the party being thrown into open water or crushed between the massive trumbling floes; or else death came, without warning or even premonition, through the form of accident that has been responsible for more polar tragedies than any other - breaking through thin ice and drowning. Even in midwinter the ice on the Northern Sea is in constant slow motion, the floes drifting before the wind and current, spinning around sluggishly and leaving patches of open wate r between. The danger comes when these patches freeze over and especially if the newly

Last edit about 1 month ago by Samara Cary
stefansson-wrangel-09-25-007-019
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19.

formed and treacherous ice is covered by a white and uniform blanketing of snow that has settled upon it fluffily in a calm. On some afternoon, the party must have traveled too far into the evening twilight and may have failed to recognize danger because of the combined disguise of snow and darkness. If the ice broke when the sledge was far from any solid floe, their deathnwas catastrophically sudden. If they were near some heavy ice the sledge and outfit may have been lost while some or all of the men were temporaily saved. The former is the xxxxxx likelier alternative and less painful to contemplate. But in any case, we have reason to believe that Crawford, Galle xxxxxx and Maurer faced the situation as bravely on the sea ice as Knight did on the land.

There can be no braver document than Lorne Knight's, diary after he realized that death was coming. It softens the tragedy a little to know that for the first two or three months he considered himself no less safe than he thought his comrades were to be. When he realized his danger he took it stoically. What he wrote is cheerful and Ada Blackjack says that his manner was cheerful to the end. There is not a whimper in the whole diary nor a suggestion that he himself or any one else was to blame. There are no heroics, no vain regrets. He was confined to the house by the gradually increasing illness and wrote longer entries because there was more leisure. In a book sometime we shall be able to quote them in full. It is a thrilling story only

Last edit 4 months ago by Samara Cary
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- 20 -

if one reads the heroism between the lines. His was that type of courage which never feels the need of decking itself with becoming modesty. It was not the attitude of the martyr before a sacrifice or of the hero giving his life for a cause. It was rather the light-hearted seriousness of the Tommy going into battle.

Knight died on June 22nd, a little before the most powerful ship could have xxx left Nome for Wrangell Island, even the most favorable season.

When It came to the test, the courage of Ada Blackjack seems to have been the same type of Knight's own. She had been brought up in a city. and, Although of Eskimo blood, she knew little more about the life of a hunter than might be the case with a Frenchwoman. But she had always worked with her hands and was full of resource and initiative. When Knight could not tend the traps she taught herself to do that, learning through failure how to succeed another time. First she caught foxes and later she shot birds.

Unfortunately but inevitably, she had the superstitions of her people. She was afraid of the evil-spirits which she supposed were causing Knight's illness and which might do her harm. This made her trial severe and her credit greater for having stuck it out. But a more handicapping superstit on was her Eskimo fear of polar bears which has come down since the days before fire arms when a bear had to be killed at close quarters sometimes with bow and arrow but more frequently with spear. Under those conditions

Last edit over 1 year ago by Vibha Vasanth
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