stefansson-wrangel-09-32-080r

THE WRANGEL ISLAND DOCUMENTS 359

York or elsewhere. The collection as a whole was not salable.
Limited selections from it were sold, but the prices were inadequate.

By the spring of 1923 Mr. Noice had completed the manuscript
of a book which was eventually sold to a British publisher who
resold it to an American publisher.¹

Mr. Noice’s situation in New York had now become difficult.
My own expenditures in supporting the Wrangel Island expedition
were heavy, and there did not seem to be any remunerative work
to which he could immediately turn. It struck me that if I were
to place him in charge of the supply ship going to Wrangel Island
this would give him a certain amount of prominence which might
enable him later to lecture profitably. Before sailing for England
in May I broached this subject and found, as I expected, that Mr.
Noice was eager for the opportunity.² I told him I could not
make any definite arrangements then because I had not the money
to send him from New York to Nome. I was hoping to secure
funds in England, however, and would communicate with him by
cable either direct or through the Toronto office of our company.

As the summer dragged on without any financial success for me
in England, my business associate, Mr. A. J. T. Taylor, of Toronto,
cabled me offering personally to pay the expenses of Mr. Noice
from New York to Nome in order that he might be on hand there
to take charge of a ship in case I could later get money in England
and cable it direct to Nome. I accepted this offer by cable, al-
though we could have saved the passage money by employing in
Nome (through Lomen Brothers who had done such things for
us previously) any one of the many sailors available up there
who were in our opinion as capable as Mr. Noice of taking a boat
to Wrangel. But, as said, we wanted Mr. Noice to have the advan-
tage of the expected publicity to help him get a lecture job later,
and both Mr. Taylor and I felt willing at that stage to invest a
little more money in his future.

We come now to a section of this chapter which I print with

¹As we go to press there has come to hand an advance copy of this book.
It covers some of the ground we do in the present chapter and elsewhere. It
shows how facts and theories appeared to Mr. Noice himself before he suffered
the mental changes we are about to describe—for the book passed out of his
control before the changes took place. The title is “With Stefansson in the
Arctic” (New York and London, 1924).

²We repeat here, for clearness, certain things stated in Chapter IX.