stefansson-wrangel-09-31-088v

138 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

If you get your ship fast in the ice of the European arctic
you drift south into open water and freedom. If you get
fast in the ice to the north of Alaska or eastern Siberia
you drift with it to the northwest, being inevitably frozen
in and carried across the polar ocean north and west unless the ship is
broken and sunk. This has been proved by scores of
whaling ships and by De Long’s Jeannette, Nansen’s
Fram, my own Karluk, and more recently by Amundsen’s
Maud.*

Had the Teddy Bear been frozen in, it would have
meant not only the loss of the ship, but also that she
would have been powerless to help the men on Wrangel
Island. No one could be better aware of this than Cap-
tain Bernard, and so he was wise in running no risk of
being caught. He retreated again and again barely in
time and followed along westward until he came to where
further progress was impossible because the ice touched
the Siberian coast. He climbed high headlands in one or
more places and saw the ice lying heavily packed twenty
or thirty miles out to sea. There arose later rumors that
Bernard could have reached the island had he tried
harder. These must have originated among people who
did not understand the conditions, and they were even-
tually completely removed by the testimony of the
Wrangel Island party itself, who watched from the hills
of the island the same ice that Captain Bernard saw from
the hills of the continent.¹

On September 23, 1922, Captain Bernard returned to
Nome and the Lomen Brothers reported to me by wire-
less his failure to reach the island. This did not cause
me any great worry, for I knew that, barring accident or
sickness, the men were safe. The chances of accident

² The text of Captain Bernard’s report is printed in the Appendix to this

*Later Maud information seems to brief [despalclur] from the
seem to indicate she was not
carried accross the basin, but made to
circle in an eddy.