stefansson-wrangel-09-26-001-002

- 2 -

He will inevitably detect repetitions but will, I hope, blame
me less for them when he learns that the main body of the book had
to be written on the basis of a diary from various parts of which
a total of thirty-six pages were at that time missing. The book
had been promised for early publication before we suspected we
would have any difficulty in getting at all the documents that had
been saved. But it turned out that we suffered some legal delays
in getting the main part of the diary back from an innocent pur-
chaser and that when we received it we found that thirty-six pages
had been torn out. It took us five months to get back twenty-six
of the thirty-six pages which had been removed. There are thus
still missing ten diary pages in addition to numerous paragraphs
that have been erased from the main part of the diary.

Thus we were compelled to write the first draft of "The
Adventure of Wrangell Island" on the basis of a very incomplete
record, bridging the gaps in the documents as best we could by con-
jecture. Then, when some of the missing pages were at length
returned to us, we had to interpolate their information. At this
stage I was so crowded with work incidental to a trip to Australia
for which I had contracted before the Wrangell Island tragedy
became known, that the interpolating of the new material was done
badly in many places. Few, if any, contradictions will be found,
for my conjectures had been right. There will be repetitions,
however, because I could not remove the conjectures without
destroying the fabric of the book, and I was unwilling to omit the
direct quotations from the diary.

The delay in recovering the pages torn from the diary
explains also why this book will appear at least six months later
than the date originally announced by the British publishers. The
American publishers were fortunately protected from making a
premature announcement.

Neither in this preface nor anywhere in any way can I
make adequate thanks or show sufficient admiration for the manner
in which the crushing loss of son, husband or brother has been
borne by the relatives. But I can at least thank especially the
families of the two veterans, Lorne Knight and Frecerick Maurer,
for their tireless efforts ot lesson the grief of the parents of
the younger men, Allan Crawford and Milton Galle, by sharing with
them the better understading of arctic life and conditions which
they had secured from their explorer sons when they had been at
home in the intervals between their expeditions. For Knight had
been north with me three years between 1915 and 1918 and Maurer had
been in the Arctic twice, the second time with me when he was ship-
wrecked on Wrangell Island itself in 1914.

With a heart too full for words in any case, I have
attempted in this book no eulogy of the dead. Their actions and
worthy motives are their best monument. What their thoughts and
deeds were is shown by the fragments of records we have received
from Crawford, Galle and Maurer and especially by the one
preserved diary, that of Lorne Knight, upon which this book is