stefansson-wrangel-09-32-090r

THE WRANGEL ISLAND DOCUMENTS 379

ing critic who has himself shown the dead no charity. There can
be but one decision though it may hurt not to be able to find an
easier way.

But most painful to relatives and friends and most fundamentally
misleading is the general impression which Mr. Noice's press nar-
rative gave that mismanagement and misfortunate gradually led
to starvation until a last desperate effort had to be made to get
succor from Siberia. In his original cable Mr. Noice said that
both men and dogs were so weakened with hunger when they started
that they “did not have one chance in a thousand" of reaching
Siberia.¹³ He further makes the implication clear that the journey
to Siberia had been a sudden resolve when food gave out. All this
is without support from the documents on which Mr. Noice alleged
that he based his narrative, and is in fact contradicted by the
diary, which plainly tells that the journey had been planned months
before, and that it was planned for purposes entirely other than
those alleged by Mr. Noice. Neither is there any evidence that the
men or dogs were weak from hunger. These things Mr. Noice him-
self now clearly realizes and is willing to admit, as will be seen by
his signed retraction.

These instances, few out of many, will suffice to show the man-
ner in which the Harold Noice press story differs from the diary
on which it is alleged to be based, and therefore from the facts as
we know them and as he either did know or could have known them.
They also show in part why the press story was so very painful
to the relatives and intimate friends of the dead.

Here must end our long account of the suppression for five
months of some of the Wrangel Island documents,¹⁴ the still-con-
tinued suppression by some one of ten pages (if they have not been
destroyed) and the irreparable mutilation of sentences and para-
graphs here and there. The reader will feel, as we do, that the
most nearly adequate reasons for what Mr. Noice has done are
those which he has himself stated—that when he did these things,
so certain eventually to injure himself no less than others, he was
on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

¹³ I was allowed to remove this from the cable by the Daily News and Man-
chester Guardian, but it was generally published outside of Great Britain.

¹⁴ This refers to a section that has now been partly destroyed and partly
removed to another part of this appendix.