stefansson-wrangel-09-34-002

BY WAY OF PREFACE

The purpose of this manuscript is twofold: To tell
a story which, for all its simplicity, is a drama seldom
surpassed in tension, tragedy and ultimate triumph, and to
bring out of obscurity an extraordinary woman who has been
interred in a forgotten appendix of a book long out of print.
All of it is truth, and much of it is told in her own words.
In more ways than one she is unique, a woman of this century
who spanned within her own personality twenty centuries of
human evolvement, and if she was a heroine it is because she
lived an heroic experience without conscious heroics. The
record she left is a remarkable document of an indomitable
human spirit.

In September, 1921, four young men and one young woman
were put ashore on an uninhabited Arctic island with supplies
and equipment sufficient to insure reasonable comfort and
safety until a ship came for them the following autumn. But
it was two years, not one, before a ship got through the ice
to reach the island again, and when it did only one member of
the group was found still alive.

Her name was Ada Blackjack. She was an Eskimo who had
accompanied the four men as a seamstress. Her companions had
been Allan Crawford, a Canadian, and Lorne Knight, Frederick
Maurer and Milton Galle, Americans. The expedition had been
organized by the Artic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, for
the purpose of establishing a positive claim to the island
for Britain. Stefansson himself had remained behind to seek
financial backing for the project.