stefansson-wrangel-09-26-001-029

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The Karluk's thousand miles of ice-fettered drifting between August September, 1913, and the end of
that year. He did not, therefore, belong to the official machin-
ery of the expedition when the Karluk broke and sank.

I did not hear of that wreck until a year and a
half later, and I did not learn the full story until still another
year had passed and Hadley had joined us again after the advent-
ures of shipwreck, the long march over shifting floes to Wrangell Island,
the seven months on the Island, and the voyage to Victoria, B.C.,
after the party had been picked up in Wrangell Island by Swenson,
Jochimsen and McConnell of the King and Winge.

Hadley had a pungent and inimitable way of speaking,
only a faint flavor of which remains in what he wrote. I had
every form of interest in the story as he told it, sometimes in
casual fragments and sometimes in long chapters, when we were to-
gether between 1915 and 1918. I knew the ship that sank with
many of my hopes and with many a book and memento treasured from
childhood. I knew the dogs that died pathetically in the first few
days, and the men who died soon thereafter partly because those
dogs had not survived to help them. I knew the other dogs that
helped the seventeen people to reach Wrangell Island and that took
the Captain and his one companion from there to Siberia. I knew
the men who died later on Wrangell Island and the men who lived
through. Some that died and some that lived were dear friends,
and the responsibility for it all was mine in greater or less
degree.

During the expedition there had always been at least
three theories aboard the Karluk as to almost anything that we did
or failed to do. James Murray and Forbes Mackay, veterans of the
Antarctic, had views from Shackleton's expeditions which prevailed
with them and confused those whom they tried to convert. Bartlett
had his