stefansson-wrangel-09-26-001-001

PREFACE

This book has been written under difficulties that are
not ordinary. Crawford, Galle, Knight, Maurer and I were friends
and disciples of a common faith; two of them had been with me on a
former expedition through illness, hunger and shipwreck. Now they
were dead and I had to write their story. in that writing I found
myself continually handicapped by too strong a sympathy for the
aims of the work I was describing and too personal an affection
for the heroes of the stern romance I was trying to tell. Fear-
ing I might say too much, I have, I fear, said too little,
especially about the nobility and unselfishness of their motives.
They were patriots in the Canadian and the Imperial sense through
what they did; but in their minds was a larger patriotism, for
they believed in the coming unification of the English-speaking
peoples and throught that whatever they might do either for the
Empire or for the United States they would be doing for both.
Wholly apart from that, they were gallant adventurers in the
Elizabethan sense of the word, pioneers of whom our race should
be the more proud the fewer they become through the softening
effect of our coddling civilization.

I was, then, handicapped in the writing of this book by
the fear that my sympathies might lead me into what would seem
over-zealous advocacy or intemperate praise. These were, in a
sense, pleasant handicaps, for I am proud to be so closely asso-
ciated with men who were noble and with work that must be admired
by whoever understands it. But there have been other handicaps
that could not have been more painful or in every way more
deplorable. I wanted the story of Wrangell Island to consist of
documents edited only for clarity. But after the initial and in
a sense unavoidable misfortune that the diaries of the three men
who were drowned were lost with them, we suffered the unbelievable
experience that some of the remaining records were deliberately
destroyed (as related in this book) after they had been brought
back to civilization. Other documents were withheld for about
five months from the relatives and from those who had a right to
them. Meanwhile painful, sensational and in some respects untruth-
ful stories were being published through the newspapers of every
country by the very man who had destroyed or was withholding the
documents upon which his writings were in part based. We could
not even deny effectively at the time what we were morally certain
were incorrect statements about what had happened at Wrangell
Island, for these statements were alleged to be based on the
records, and we could not for the time being get a chance even to see
the records.

The mutilition and withholding of the Wrangell Island
documents is gone into reluctantly but fully in the body of this
book. We must mention it here to excuse in advance certain
defects of composition which the reader cannot fail to notice.