stefansson-wrangel-09-31-033v

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32 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

with them are dead. Some time Hadley’s manuscript will
doubtless be published as he wrote it. It will then be far
more enlightening than the fragments of it which we
can now publish. Even so, I feel that Hadley should be
allowed to tell at least part of the story in his own words,
editorial discretion imposing silences and softening
phrases here and there.

As we have said, Captain Hadley’s handwritten docu-
ment as preserved in the Government archives at Ottawa
is the fullest and most explicit story of the vicissitudes
of the Karluk on her long drift. If a critical history ever
comes to be written, the Hadley story can be checked
and supplemented by the copy of Captain Bartlett’s log
which is also in the same archives and has been published
in the Report of the Department of the Naval Service
for the Fiscal Year ended March 31, 1915. While this
log is too fragmentary to form a connected story, it is
of great value when used together with Hadley’s narra-
tive or else together with Captain Bartlett’s own popular
account as published in “The Last Voyage of the Karluk.”
My own version of how the Karluk was first beset by
the ice and how my small hunting party and I were
separated from it by accident has also been published
in “The Friendly Arctic,” Chapters V and VI, and some
account of her drift in the appendix to that book.

We can, therefore, choose between many sources. Most
logical perhaps would be to use Hadley as the basis of
it all, but we have decided to tell the first part of the
story in the words of Frederick Maurer. If we used any
of the other versions we should have to condense for the
purpose of this book; but Maurer has been so brief that
we can afford to print his statement without change,
except minor editing as where names are misspelled

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