stefansson-wrangel-09-27-034

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the uncertainty of getting game in time. I have always sympathized with these
critics, for both my memory and diary tell that I was a bit frightened. at the
time
I have had the feeling that in the subsequent rapid and exhilarating
recovery when they got plenty of underdone meat to eat both sick men must have
lost the memory of their previous gloom and worry.

It took only three days until the acute symptoms of scurvy had
disappeared. There had been the blackest gloom in their minds and pain in their
every joint, but both, vanished disappeared after three days of underdone and raw meat.
Their traveling strength came back more slowly and it was several nearly weeks until we
were on the road again. It was Only after we got back to “civilization" that did I
realized that this experience had planted in the minds of my companions a faith
in the safety of northern travel even greater less qualified than my own.

A year after the events experiences just related, that part of our
expedition of which Knight was a member was wintering on the north coast of Alaska.
I had gone [adaue] three hundred-miles by sledge journey to the Mackenzie River trading posts
and to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police establishments at Macpherson and Hersehel
Island to buy dogs, and on the journey I had contracted typhoid fever. It had been my
plan to take a small party about two hundred miles northward from the north coast of Alaska in March (1918), camp
on a substantial floe and drift with it for a year, living by hunting. According
to our views the floe should have drifted in twelve or thirteen months to a place
somewhere north of Wrangell Island or perhaps north of the new Siberian Islands. It had been the tentative plan that our party
would abandon this floe either at the end of one year or two, years and travel south,
landing either on Wrange11 Island or on the coast of Siberia. We had relied so
often on the game supply of the open ocean that it did not seem to us particularly
dangerous to undertake this previously untried adventure. I have never in my
whole experience been so eager to do anything. But the typhoid made it impossible,
for I was flat on my back for more than four months. In this emergency the journey
was undertaken by my second-in-command, Storker T. Storkerson. Knight was one of

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