stefansson-wrangel-09-31-073v

110 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

been discovered, and it must be in the vicinity of some
trading post where the party could buy the supplies which
they were not taking with them. Few gold miners have
been on the north coast of Alaska, but there is current the
general knowledge that the arctic coast has a string of
fur trading posts. Obviously these were being relied upon
by Crawford’s party. Possibly some of these remote
fur traders might even be in secret league with us.
Accordingly, it became pretty definitely known that their
destination was “somewhere east of Point Barrow.”
The owner of the schooner Silver Wave was Captain
Jack Hammer. When Crawford went to him with a pro-
posal to charter his boat for a voyage to an unnamed
destination the skipper quite properly refused to negoti-
ate unless he were let into the secret. Had our party
understood better the gold miner’s psychology, they might
perhaps have said that they were going “somewhere east of
Point Barrow.” But, beyond reticence, they knew no
guile, and so they told the truth. Hammer was to know
privately that they were going to Wrangel Island, but he
must not tell anyone. But that is exactly the formula
which, according to miner logic, is to be interpreted as
meaning the opposite of what it says, and when the story
spread from Captain Hammer it seems to have been
agreed that one destination might now be eliminated.
Wherever our party were going, they were not going to
Wrangel Island. Still, the wording of the agreement was
that the ship was chartered for that voyage. I do not
think the boys guessed Captain Hammer’s skepticism
about Wrangel or the theories he held about their plans
until on the actual voyage, when he began to show more
and more surprise that he was not asked to change his
course, his instructions remaining that Wrangel was the