stefansson-wrangel-09-32-086r

THE WRANGEL ISLAND DOCUMENTS 371

We would have liked to omit both the publication and discussion
of this newspaper accusation against one whom Mr. Noice now says
he believes innocent of the main charge—that of not trying in
good faith to prevent the death of Lorne Knight. We are regret-
fully unable to do that for two reasons: (1) A person who has been
unjustly accused deserves an exoneration as public if possible as
the original charge; (2) Mr. Noice still asserts there were ten pages
missing from Knight’s diary when he received it from Ada Black-
jack. Since Ada Blackjack was the only person on the island
before Mr. Noice arrived, this means practically that he still
charges her with having removed the page.¹¹ When we agreed
with Mr. Noice and his attorney that in exchange for the offered
retraction and apology we would omit from this book certain harsh
evidence, allowing Mr. Noice’s own explanation of nervous break-
down to take the place of more severe conclusions the reader
might have come to for himself, we explicitly said we would not
refrain from stating in the book anything we deemed necessary in
order to re-establish the credit of the Wrangel party undermined
by Mr. Noice’s publications, and we made it clear we reserved the
right to demolish by evidence any point which Mr. Noice still
sticks to, if we supposed ourselves to possess that evidence. He
admits having torn out the twenty-six pages which he later re-
stored and he admits having erased other passages (without keep-
ing a memorandum of them), but he denies having torn out or ever
having seen the ten pages now missing. We must therefore pre-
sent the evidence on this point, especially as anyone who supposes
Ada Blackjack to have destroyed written records will also be
likely to imagine she did so because they contained—as Mr. Noice
implied originally in the newspapers—evidence of her serious guilt.

It is the worldwide publication of the above-quoted newspaper
statement which reluctantly decided us to go fully into every detail
of the history of the Wrangel Island documents in this book. Any-
one who compares with the diary and records, as we now have
them, either the original story published by Mr. Noice through the

¹¹ It is, of course, thinkable that Lorne Knight himself removed these pages,
but Ada Blackjack denied that when interviewed in Los Angeles by newspaper
men and others after the publication of Mr. Noice’s charges against her, say-
ing that no pages had been torn from the diary by anyone up to the time Mr.
Noice got full possession of it. This puts the published statements of Harold
Noice and Ada Blackjack in direct contradiction.