stefansson-wrangel-09-26-001-057

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41

minutes, taking films of us. When that was finished we went on
board and started for Nome where we arrived .

(Signed) John Hadley.

We have been following Hadley's manuscript, but
nearly every impression I have of Wrangell Island and the adventures
and trials of Hadley and his companions comes not from his written
account, though the manuscript is about five times as long as the
part here printed, but from the stories he told me during the long-
winter evenings, sometimes with excessive elaboration but more often
in brief, disjointed sentences that would have been incomprehensible
to a listener not thoroughly familiar with the whole background of
polar environment, sailor ethics, and human nature as it manifests
itself in remote isolation under circumstances different from the
ordinary routine of sailor life.

Without a trace of callousness but with a recognition
of the inevitable, Hadley believed that a second winter on Wrangell
Island
would have meant the death of all those not active and self
supporting. This was not so much because the productive hunters
would have refused to share what they got with the others, but rather
because he believed both food and exercise to be necessary for health.
It seemed to me that the lives of the whole party were saved by the
King and Winge, but Hadley always maintained stoutly that himself,
the Eskimos and probably two or three of the white men would have
lived through the winter and through any number of successive winters.
He believed also that these same people could have crossed to the
mainland of Siberia, a hundred miles away, after the middle of the
winter, and he said they would have done so except for the possibility

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