stefansson-wrangel-09-28

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so weakened with hunger when they started that they "did not have one chance in a thousand" of reaching Siberia. * The He further makes the implication is

* I was allowed to remove this from the cable by the Daily News and Manchester Guardian, but it was generally published outside of Great Britain.

clear that the journey to Siberia had been a sudden resolve when food gave out. All this is without support from the documents Knight's diary (on which Mr. Noice alleged that he based his narrative) and it is in fact definitely contradicted by Knights the diary, which So Mr. Noice must have invented it. The fact was, as the diary plainly tells, that the journey had been planned months|before, and that it was planned for purposes entirely other than those alleged by Mr. Noice. Neither is there any evidence that the men or dogs were weak from hunger.

These instances, few out of many, will suffice to show the manner in which the Harold Noice press story differed from the diary on which it is alleged to be based, and therefore from the facts as we know them and as he either did know or could have known them. They also show in part why the press story was so very painful to the relatives and intimate friends of the dead.

[156-J]

Here must end our long story of the suppression for five months of some of the Wrangell Island documents, the still-continued suppression of ten pages (if they have not been destroyed) and the irreparable mutilations of sentences and paragraphs here and there. The five-month suppression has caused a five-month delay in the publication of this book. That may have been a motive, and we have suggested others. Still the reader will feel, as we do, that adequate reasons for what Mr. Noice has done are not yet in evidence. We cannot guess what they may be and must wait till he states them himself, publicly.

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the view that there are not in existence any diaries except those of Lorne Knight and Ada Blackjack.

We go on, then, with our story, basing it on all the information and documents we now have - the correspondence of members of the expedition with me and with their friends and families, a few scattered papers written by Milton Galle found on Wrangell Island, the fragment of diary kept by Ada Blackjack, verbal information given by Ada Blackjack to me when I talked with her in Seattle in January, 1924, letters from friends of Ada Blackjack's in Seattle and Alaska to whom she had givn information which they conveyed to me, a statement made by Ada Blackjack to E.R. Jordan, now resident in Seattle but formerly of Nome and the man who engaged her to accompany the Wrangell Island expedition. But chiefly the story is based upon the two-volume diary of Lorne Knight.