stefansson-wrangel-09-31-072r

THE OUTFITTING AND VOYAGE TO WRANGEL 107

health on Wrangel Island, less thanonly a hundred miles
away from the hospitable American and Russian traders
and the wealthy and equally hospitable natives of north-
ern Siberia, it seemed to him that a shipload of goods
would be almost a superfluity and that with a sledge
and a team of dogs, he could land on Wrangel an outfit
that would keep him safer and more comfortable than
he had been used to being on his former expedition.
Indeed, it had been his plan and Storkerson’s on their
trip in 1918 to land on Wrangel if they had drifted that
far west. Their outfit then would have been two sledges
empty except for cooking gear, ammunition, old clothes
and a few scientific instruments. With such an outfit
they had planned to land on Wrangel in May, spend the
summer there and proceed to Siberia the following Janu-
ary. To men of the experience of Storkerson and Knight,
this would seem easier and safer than several journeys
in which they had already taken part.

With Maurer’s experience of Wrangel Island and the
theories he and Knight held in common, it was logical
for Crawford to do what we had agreed he should do and
to buy an outfit both in Seattle and Nome based on the
idea that there were a few necessities in the way of
hunting equipment and beyond that everything was in
a sense a luxury. Whether they bought chewing gum, a
phonograph or a bag of sugar, they were, in their own
minds, deciding only for one luxury as against another.
Each luxury they took depended on their taste, on their
slender finances, and on the transportation problem,
for they were going to engage a schooner rated only as
carrying ten tons ¹

The outfit taken by the Wrangel party seemed ade-

_{They originally planned to charter the schooner Orion, but they eventually
took the much larger Silver Wave.}