stefansson-wrangel-09-32-033r

THE SECOND WINTER AND THE TRAGIC END 269

from what Ada Blackjack says, we know he held that
view without a question to the end.

In these entries the description of the weather for the
three days next after the party set, out is ominous.
“Blowing a howling gale” means little to the experienced
northern traveler on land or on firm ice. But the weather
had been fine the day they started' and the travelers had
disappeared vanished rapidly from sight over the horizon going straight south.
They were therefore now on no firm landfast ice but on
the treacherous moving floes of the open sea.

An experienced arctic traveler man on Wrangel Island was
bound to feel about the traveling party somewhat as we
feel when a party of our friends takes the air to fly from
London to Switzerland. We know by statistics that the
danger of such flights is many hundred times greater than
that of steamer and railway travel, and still we say truly
that the risk is nevertheless so slight that one is not
justified in worrying or in refraining from the journey if
there is any good motive for hastening beyond the speed
of steamers and railways. We might discuss the various
dangers of such a flight due to breakage of machinery,
fogs or to human errors. Similarly, discussing the prospects of the trip towards Nome from Wrangel Island, we
should would probably have put the case about as follows:

There should have been seven dogs instead of five, but
the five could pull the sledge along on level going. In
rough ice the three men could help it along so rapidly
that from all we know of such travel we would have ex-
pected for them a speed of twelve to fourteen miles a day
when weather did not prevent traveling. The ice be-
tween Wrangel and the mainland breaks frequently, so
we would have expected numerous detours to get around
patches of open water or young ice, lengthening the total