stefansson-wrangel-09-31-108v

174 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

was at the time in a temporarily abnormal nervous con-
dition. We accepted a statement to this effect signed
by Mr. Noice. Since it merely withdraws or explains
certain of Mr. Noice’s statements which never were a part
of the true Wrangel Island story, it is best to read it only
as an epilogue to the narrative based on Lorne Knight’s
diary, which ends in Chapter XIII. We therefore print
it as Chapter XIV.

When we found that Mr. Noice was willing to sign a
general statement which by its implications would lessen
or cancel the value of his opinions on disputed points,
we concluded it was not necessary to try to make the
document we asked him to sign so comprehensive as to
include all the misstatements that had been published
over his signature. Most of them are obvious when
pointed out (as we do point out some of them in the
appendix) and would be ascribed by the reader to the
temporary mental aberration which he acknowledges (see
Chapter XIV) and by which he now explains the errors
he does retract.

Since Mr. Noice has now given us a signed statement
declaring that when he published the newspaper story
of Wrangel Island he had not as yet read over carefully
the documents on which he then said it was based, and
has explained this and other things by saying that he
was then on the verge of a nervous breakdown¹ we would
like to remove to the appendix the whole of the discus-
sion of the wrongness of his story—as we have removed
most of it. But the reader will want to know here at
least how Mr. Noice got into such control of the expedi-

¹ What we speak of here and elsewhere in this book as being contained in
Mr. Noice’s signed “explanation and apology” is always to be understood only
as our interpretation of it. If the reader is in any doubt he should compare
our interpretation in each case with Mr. Noice’s statement itself which is
printed in Chapter XIV, post.