stefansson-wrangel-09-13-038-002

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I mentioned to them the imperative necessity of at least one good skin boat
to take with them from Alaska. Independently, Maurer had frequently said
to me that the chief lack of equipment felt by himself and collcagues during
their six months stay on Wrangell in 1914 was that of a skin boat and that
he would never go there again without one. I never got any detailed report
of their equipment apart from the invoices from shopkeepers. Since the
skin boat would have been purchased from an Eskimo. I expected no
invoice and had no doubt of their having taken one or two boats, up to
the moment of the arrival of news from Noice to the contrary. Noice's
newspaper despatch shows both abundance of walrus when he got there this
year and abundance of them in 1922. With skin boats, securing walrus is
so simple that it is work rather than hunting. I think Noice is right in
assigning this as the central trouble. As said above these departures
from our ordinary methods with which the men were familiar are difficult
to understand. We have no key as yet.

(5.) INEXPERIENCE. Although Knight and Maurer had been in the Arctic be-
fore, Noice is partially justified in calling them inexperienced, which a[...]
ars from the following. Maurer had been in the Arctic two years, but a
year and a half of that was spent on shipbeard; the other half
year, however, was spent in Wrangell Island itself. Knight had
been with my expedition three years and had taken part in some of the
longest sledge journeys. Our method on these was to eat up during the first f
few weeks all food brought with us and to live thereafter exclusively
by hunting - sometimes several months and in one case more than a year.
But Knight had not actually done much of the hunting itself - he had rather
been present when it was done. Walrus and polar bears are the chief game
on Wrangell Island. They are so easy to secure normally that I considered
Knight’s theoretical knowledge ample.

Noice apparently includes under "inexperience" the fact that on one