stefansson-wrangel-09-31-103v

166 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

development of the arctic lands might then come no less even
more quickly than we had expected, though the bene-
ficiaries of it would be others than we had hoped.

From the first presentation of the news it seemed to the
public as if not only the men were lost, but also the
cause for which they had died. They had gone north to
carry out an enterprise and to work out a theory. The
enterprise had been carried out, but the value of it would
disappear if the theory upon which it was based were
proved to be wrong. The original newspaper despatch
seemed to show that, instead of the Arctic being well sup-
plied with game, as it had to be according to our theories,
it was in reality the barren wilderness of ancient belief.
But in order to accept the conclusions which the news-
papers began to extract editorially from Mr. Noice’s
despatches, I had to discard not only my own experience
of eleven years in the Arctic, but also Maurer’s experi-
ence of six months on Wrangel Island itself in 1914 and
the reports sent back by Crawford’s party with the cap-
tain of the Silver Wave in 1921 telling me that game con-
ditions seemed evenbetter than they we had expected.
I could not accept such a conclusion,
and so I believed only part of the cables,
But most of the public naturally took
them at face value.

A fair reading of tThe cables gave as the only solution
of the tragedy, starvation due to lack of game. But I
knew this could not be true, and I-believed the cable sent
to London had been edited in New York and amplified
from Mr. Noice’s original Nome dispatch. I proved
wrong in that surmise. The real source of error involved
conditions more serious and painful than I at first had
any ground for suspecting. That will appear in the next
chapter.

The story as published in newspapers on both sides of
the Atlantic had been so composed that it produced upon
the average reader unfamiliar with the conditions on