stefansson-wrangel-09-31-032v

30 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

three ships of my expedition sailed past Cape Smythe
in 1913, he was there and wanted to join, both because
we had always been good friends and because he was
beginning to consider the north tip of Alaska a little
tame. I wanted to give him one of the chief positions
of responsibility in the expedition but, since it had been
organized before I knew he would join it, I found no
berth for him at once, and without official rating, he
was sharing my cabin on board the Karluk as my friend
and traveling companion when an accident separated five
others and myself from the Karluk, which drifted off,
held fast in the shifting ice, while we watched from shore
helpless. The ship was now under my official next in
command, Captain Robert A. Bartlett, and Hadley re-
mained without formal status as the sole occupant of my
cabin during the Karluk’s thousand miles of ice-fettered
drifting between September, 1913, and the end of that
year. He did not, therefore, belong to the official
machinery 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 adventures of shipwreck, the march over shift-
ing floes to Wrangel Island, the seven months on the
Island, and the voyage to Victoria, B. C., after the party
had been picked up in Wrangel Island by Swenson, Joch-
imsen 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 together between 1915 and 1918.