stefansson-wrangel-09-32-013r

THE FIRST WINTER AND SECOND SUMMER 231

near Wrangel Island and that the boys might be sitting
on the highest hilltops watching day after day for a
ship that never came. I thought that under such con-
ditions they might feel heartbroken through a neglect
which they could not understand. Up to the time when
the ship sailed from Alaska I was, therefore, hoping that
a blockade of ice would, in their minds, shift the blame
from us who were careless or had failed. That seems to
have been actually the case. During the summer proper
there is no mention in Knight’s diary of the expectation
of a ship or of worry because it did not come. Far
beyond their horizon and unknown to them the Teddy
Bear had been trying for three weeks to reach the island
when Knight wrote (September 18): “All hands have
about given up hopes for a ship this year and we intend
to move west a short way soon. The wood for two miles
or more on each side of us is exhausted and it is easier to
move camp to the wood than to haul wood all next winter
a long distance to camp.” ⁵

September 20th they began making active preparations
for the second winter. “Crawford and I went to the
west to the first harbor mouth two and a half miles
distant to pick a camp site. Wood is plentiful, and a
great deal of it can be hauled with the dory before the
freeze-up.”

⁵ If the reader is following this as a student rather than because of the
story, he would do well to examine at this point Captain Bernard’s report
of the voyage of the Teddy Bear which is printed in the appendix, post.