Category: History Publisher: self
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 73
Copyright: May 1 2002
The true story of a 1920's expedition to Wrangel Island off Siberia that went terribly wrong.
ICEBOUND
Introduction
It’s funny how things happen. What started out as moving day at my father-in-law’s house in Toronto’s east-end in 1996, turned out to be the journalistic find of the century. At least, as far as I was concerned anyway.
Dad, an 85+ widower no longer able to easily manage the steep staircase up to his bedroom and the only bathroom in the house, had finally decided it was time to sell his beloved home of over forty years and move in with his oldest daughter and her family. It had not been an easy decision, but being severely limited in his vision and mobility now, he was quickly running out of other options.
Among the many things to be done during the move was cleaning out the basement including his workshop and all the family memorabilia stored in it. Amongst the old and newer tools and accessories stored there were boxes and containers of every size and shape. One, a metal ammunition box from WWI, turned out to contain all the vital paperwork pertaining to his mother-in-law’s life except her children’s records – a gold mine for a family genealogist like me.
In the bottom of another was a small brown-paper-covered scrapbook that had been made from an early school workbook with the handwritten words “Story of Wrangle Island” on its cover. On the first page was written a revised spelling of the island and name of the notebook. “Story of Wrangel Island Tragedy” it said, and followed with the name, address and phone number of the person who had compiled it – A(dele) Sale - my father-in-law’s mother. What followed were pages and pages of yellowed newspaper clippings faithfully collected from editions of the Toronto Star where the story had appeared in installments with accompanying photographs. Asked if he remembered it, Dad said yes he remembered his mother showing it to him years ago, but he had promptly forgotten about it.
Taking the scrapbook home, I was quickly lost in the incredible story of survival in the high Arctic that it had to tell. I promised myself that one day I would try to tell it to the rest of the world.
Six years later, and a lot of trial and error along the way, I finally have. I‘ve also finally found the answer to the question that has haunted me since I first read the story. What happened to Ada Blackjack, the heroine of the tragedy?
I fantasized too that it would make a great movie with someone like Sigourney Weaver playing the indomitable Ada Blackjack. You never know, it could happen yet.
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Excerpt
“Only once or twice in a generation do newspaper readers have an opportunity to peruse a true narrative as dramatic, as full of daring adventure and heroism, as that which follows. The news of Harold Noice’s expedition which left Nome, Alaska, last August to rescue four white men and an Eskimo woman, marooned on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean since the summer of 1921, and his recent return with Ada Blackjack, the Eskimo woman, the sole survivor, has already been flashed around the globe. Behind the news features of this tragic episode of the far north lies a story which, for vivid dramatic interest, has seldom been equaled even in the realm of fiction.
Piece by piece, from bundles of unsent letters, diaries, the mute testimony of the little camp on Wrangel, and the pitiful tale of Ada Blackjack herself, Mr. Noice has been able to present the story of the doomed party, with his own conjectures as to the fate of Crawford, Maurer and Galle, who left the island and started across the ice for Siberia last winter.”
(Lead-in for Harold Noice’s newspaper account of the Wrangel Island Tragedy)
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