stefansson-wrangel-09-14-115-002

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learned of the presence in the city of Castel and Masick, two men who
has been with Lorne on his first northern expedition, two men who and
had also traveled with Noice and knew them both only as men will know each
other after having eaten out of the same frying pan.

I hunted them up and had a good visit with them. They
had spent the last winter and two summers on the north coast of Siberia and
during the darkest hours of our boys they were about as close to them as
could be on Siberian Coast and it makes them sick to know of the fact that
they were in distress and these boys could have rendered them aid had they
known of it, because they being all experienced ice travelers, they could
have made the Island but they were ignorant of the situation.

I acquired a better and a different conception of the
vastness of the north which is, in reality, a land or a country of great
distances. Its vastnesses we cannot comprehend by reading of it and, much
as I have come in contact with it, I did not realize as I do not the exact
situation as it really is there.

To begin with, I am able to say that this expedition was
as much the child of the boys who took part in it as it was of Mr. Stefansson
and there was not a soul among them who was not eager and determined to go
and I learn more than I knew before, that Lorne and Mr. Maurer had a great
deal to do in the matter of the plans and the selection of the outfit was
left very largely to the judgment of the boys and their selection of the
outfit was in all respects the result of good judgment had they found condi-
tions normal.

There had been plenty of reindeer on the island at one
time but Castel and Masic tell me that in the spring of 1923 reindeer have
migrated to the north coast of Siberia for the first time in seven years.
They tell me that the ice conditions were worse in and about the north coast
from what they have been, in 1922 and that, while there seemed to have been
a clear sea to the east of the island as far as their vision extended, there
was a belt of ice out beyond this which Captain Bernard could not have pene-
trated and, had he done so at the time (October) that the sea was clear to
the east of the island, he would surely have been stuck there for the winter
and perhaps had his ship crushed as was the Karluk. There can very easily
be a misconception of this situation, as I have had, for it is not easy to
understand the distance from East Cap Point Hope to the Island and, what can
be seen at one end of this journey is not an indication of the conditions at
the other end or between. Masic and Castel assure me that, barring some
possible error in his judgment, which is natural to all, Captain Bernard did
all that could humanly have been done to get to the island in 1922.

I also learn that Noice's criticism of the fact that they
went in without having taken a number of Eskimos is fabrication because they
had arranged to take two men and their wives and when the Silver Wave was
ready to sail only Ada Blackjack appeared and, as it was already late in
September, they decided to proceed with only she as seamstress and they did so.

I also learn from Mr. Carl Lomen that they had access to
their store for the purpose of supplies and they took with them all that they
deemed necessary to take and the fact that they had no umiaks (skin boats)
to hunt walrus with was due to the fact that the Eskimos they were to have