The Disastrous Wrangel Island Expedition

"In 1921, Inupait seamstress Ada Blackjack joined a a group of four white men who wanted to establish a trading post on Wrangel Island in the freezing Arctic Ocean. The explorers were stranded on the island when their return ship was forced to turn back due to ice. Facing harsh conditions and dwindling food supplies, the men died one by one, but Ada remained. Find out how she alone managed to survive the disastrous expedition"--

Otangel Island expedition, 1921-23.

Stefansson's contributions to arctic exploration are immense. He discovered some of the world's last major land masses in the Arctic and his hydrographic soundings outlined, for the first time, the continental shelf from Alaska to Prince Patrick Island and revealed the submarine mountains and valleys beneath the Beaufort Sea. While in the Arctic he lived with the Inuit, learning their habits and language, and kept a detailed record of early Inuit society. However, some of Stefansson's deeds, and the motives behind them, garnered less acclaim. In one instance Stefansson was accused of abandoning ship just before the ship was crushed in the ice, a heinous act for the leader of an expedition. On another occasion, following a disastrous expedition to Wrangel Island during which great numbers of the party died, Stefansson was accused of deliberately misleading members of the expedition and lying about the perils that faced them. The affair caused Canada to become embroiled with the United States and the Soviet Union, and many argued that Stefansson was more concerned with personal fame and financial gain than people's lives. Was Stefansson a prophet or a profiteer, a victim or a villain? Stefansson and the Canadian Arctic reveals the truth about this fascinating personality.

From the author of The Ice Master comes the remarkable true story of a young Inuit woman who survived six months alone on a desolate, uninhabited Arctic island In September 1921, four young men and Ada Blackjack, a diminutive 25-year-old Eskimo woman, ventured deep into the Arctic in a secret attempt to colonize desolate Wrangel Island for Great Britain. Two years later, Ada Blackjack emerged as the sole survivor of this ambitious polar expedition. This young, unskilled woman--who had headed to the Arctic in search of money and a husband--conquered the seemingly unconquerable north and survived all alone after her male companions had perished. Following her triumphant return to civilization, the international press proclaimed her the female Robinson Crusoe. But whatever stories the press turned out came from the imaginations of reporters: Ada Blackjack refused to speak to anyone about her horrific two years in the Arctic. Only on one occasion--after charges were published falsely accusing her of causing the death of one her companions--did she speak up for herself. Jennifer Niven has created an absorbing, compelling history of this remarkable woman, taking full advantage of the wealth of first-hand resources about Ada that exist, including her never-before-seen diaries, the unpublished diaries from other primary characters, and interviews with Ada's surviving son. Ada Blackjack is more than a rugged tale of a woman battling the elements to survive in the frozen north--it is the story of a hero.

Lieutenant George Washington De Long was an American explorer whose disastrous Arctic expedition gave evidence of a continuous ocean current across the Polar Regions. In July of 1879 he set sail from San Francisco taking the Jeannette through the Bering Strait and heading for Wrangel Island, off the northeast coast of Siberia. On September 5th, the ship became trapped in the pack ice near Herald Island (now Gerald Island), east of Wrangel. With crewman George Melville’s engineering skill, the boat was kept afloat for almost two years until it was finally crushed on June 12, 1881. The crew, including De Long, escaped with most of their provisions and three small boats. Their destination, the Siberian coast, lay some 600 miles away. They endured extreme hardships for the next two months as they crossed the ice. After reaching open water, one of the boats and the men aboard were lost. The remaining two boats became separated. De Long's boat reached the eastern side of the Lena River delta, Melville’s, reached the western side. Melville's party was rescued, but De Long and his men died of exposure and starvation. Melville later led an expedition that found the remains of De Long and his party the following Spring. De Long's journal, in which he made regular entries until shortly before his death, was found a year later and published as The Voyage of the Jeannette (1883). Three years after the Jeannette was sunk, wreckage from it was found on an ice floe on the southwest coast of Greenland, a discovery that gave new support to the theory of trans-Arctic drift.

National Outdoor Book Awards Winner The true, harrowing story of the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition and the two men who came to define it. In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed Canada for the Arctic Ocean. At the helm was Captain Bob Bartlett, considered the world’s greatest living ice navigator. The expedition’s visionary leader was a flamboyant impresario named Vilhjalmur Stefansson hungry for fame.Just six weeks after the Karluk departed, giant ice floes closed in around her. As the ship became icebound, Stefansson disembarked with five companions and struck out on what he claimed was a 10-day caribou hunting trip. Most on board would never see him again.Twenty-two men and an Inuit woman with two small daughters now stood on a mile-square ice floe, their ship and their original leader gone. Under Bartlett’s leadership they built make-shift shelters, surviving the freezing darkness of Polar night. Captain Bartlett now made a difficult and courageous decision. He would take one of the young Inuit hunters and attempt a 1000-mile journey to save the shipwrecked survivors. It was their only hope. Set against the backdrop of the Titanic disaster and World War I, filled with heroism, tragedy, and scientific discovery, Buddy Levy's Empire of Ice and Stone tells the story of two men and two distinctively different brands of leadership—one selfless, one self-serving—and how they would forever be bound by one of the most audacious and disastrous expeditions in polar history, considered the last great voyage of the Heroic Age of Discovery.