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It goes without saying that I should not have put Mr. Noice in charge of the Wrangell supply ship of 1923 had I known his mental attitude on these and several other subjects. Ignorant of it so I gave by cable the necessary orders to pay his New York bills and have him start. Sailings from Seattle to Nome are few and the one he had to catch was scheduled in a week. He, therefore, left New York on only a few hours' notice for Toronto.

Mr. Taylor had been trying to raise money in Canada but had not been very successful. It now occurred to him that part of the expense of the trip to Wrangell Island could perhaps be paid by making an arrangement with a syndicate of newspapers to furnish them an exclusive story covering the voyage of the supply ship under command of Mr. Noice from Nome to Wrangell Island and back to Nome. The story of what had happened in Wrangell Island could not be offered for sale without contingent clauses, for we could not say in advance whether for personal or policy reasons we might desire to withhold it temporarily.* It was also understood that the men in Wrangell had personal rights as well as those rights which belonged to our company and that a story depending on their records or told by them could not be sold by us until there had been a conference.

Mr. Taylor now discussed with Mr. Noice his formulating and sending out upon every opportunity stories about his progress from Nome towards Wrangell, and also on his return to Nome a cable story summarizing the voyage but not including any account of what had happened on the island to the party who were there. The conclusion arrived at was that the plan was both feasible and desirable. To make everything secure legally, Mr. Taylor obtained from Mr. Noice authority to bind him to a newspaper agreement not only as our employee but also in so far as his personal rights to the story were concerned, if there were such personal rights in law.

* For the full text of the contract with the North American Newspaper Alliance, see Appendix, post.

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Mr. Taylor was vice-president of our company, and could not conclude this arrangement without reference to me. He, therefore, sent me the following cable: "At Noice’s suggestion am arranging to syndicate story his trip through Canadian press and their friends using money towards expenses expedition cable approval."

On receipt of this cable I did not decide at once, for as stated in the preceeding chapter, the conditions were not wholly agreeable. We were engaged in an altruistic enterprise and I did not want the public to have any reason to think that money was being made. Of course, we were really losing heavily and gaining nothing, but the public would not know that and they might infer from the sale of a cable to a syndicate that someone was getting rich. A more important consideration, as stated in the preceeding chapter, was is that if you sell an exclusive story dispatch to one newspaper in a given city, the other papers are likely to ignore the news if they can. That did not suit us, for we wanted the public to know the facts as widely as possible. Especial - ly in smaller cities it is also true that if one paper gets a story exclusively the other papers may be so annoyed that they retaliate by misrepresentation or by trying to find opinions or evidence in contradiction, thus starting bickerings and complicating the issue. I had begun to feel, however, that our only one hope of getting money was through personal loans from friends. Under these circumstances, I did not feel I had the right to refuse Mr. Taylor’s suggestion for syndicating the story of Mr. Noice’s trip. I accordingly replied by cable as follows:

"Willing syndicate if Brown* thinks ad-visable and not likely prejudice favorable publicity.'’

Dealing through Mr. John R. Bone, of the Toronto Star, with Mr. Loring Pickering, of the North American Newspaper Alliance of New York our company now made an arrangement with that organization to sell them for three thousand dollars the cables sent back by Mr. Noice.

*Roy Brown, Managing Editor of the Vancouver Province and a personal friend of Mr. Taylor's and mine.

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telling about the operations of the supply ship. The contract contained also an option clause to the effect that our company would offer to the North American Newspaper Alliance any newspaper narrative that we might have for sale concerning the two years of Wrangell occupation. This paragraph also covered the possibility that the men on the island might feel that they had personal stories that did not belong to the company. In that case the company were to use their best influence to get the members of the expedition to sell their stories to the North American Newspaper Alliance. There was nothing said about the price of the narrative of the Wrangell Island expedition. The option meant therefore, that the North American Newspaper Alliance would not get the stories unless they were willing to pay for them an amount equal to the largest amount obtainable from others wanting to purchase. The following is the text of the contract: (Insert here in small type full contract). These particulars about dealing with the newspapers may seem tedious side issues for the moment but they later became of almost bragie importantce later.

On his journey from Toronto to Nome Mr. hoice was informed by a telegram from Mr. Taylor that the company had made an arrangement with the North American Newspaper Alliance, and certain instructions were given him as to the length of stories he was to send out and their frequency. Some despatches were sent back by Mr. Noice and these were in accordance with the arrangements.

When the Donaldson returned to Nome from Wrangell Island the tragic story she brought percolated through the community and somehow got on to the cables, so that the first news received by the world was a brief statement unauthorized by Mr. Noice or by anyone connected with our company, and also partly at variance both with the cable later sent to the Alliance by Mr. Noice and with the facts as

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we now know them.

I was in England September 1, 1923, when the tragic news arrived. One of my first thoughts was that, while the truth must not be suppressed, it was important that we prevent as far as possible the ordinary distortions which the press is accustomed to give to any events that happen in remote regions under conditions not familiar to the average reader. I knew even before the details came out that freezing or starvation were not likely to have played an important part, but I knew equally that the press always wants to assign any polar tragedy to the routine reasons of hunger and frost. Their doing so now would go a long way towards making fruitless the work for which our young men had died. I was thinking also of the feelings of the relatives, for it takes a little of the sting out of any tragedy to feel know the sacrifice was not in vain. and The diaries and papers expedition records have eventually since clearly established one death was from illness and three were from accident. I conceived I anticipated that conclusions and thought it would lessen the suffering sorrow of the realatives if they also knew it these facts from the beginning, instead of being tortured by visions of slow starvation. I saw, also too that the Wrangell Island narrative would now possess a commercial value much increased by the tragic outcome, and from this I felt our company had no right to profit in any way. from this. These were the motives in my mind when I sent the following cable to my secretary:

"Will Elizsabeth Marbury undertake sell Wrangell magazine story any length desired written by Noice and me fyom diaries proceeds divided between relatives of dead, Macmillan’s having first option book. Consult Noice's contract with newspapers. I can sell story England and Australia. Notify Noice I will get him. good leet re job. Tell Affiliated* get in touch Noice by cable, you keep Noice, Taylor, me posted.”

In this cable a part very important to me and to all concerned was the portion that the sale should be handled by Miss

*The Affiliated Ryceum and Chautauqua Association who have ten offices in the large cities of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and are leading lecture managers.

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Elizsabeth Marbury (The American Play Company of New York). I knew that through her personal friendship for me and her interest in our work she would devote the time and experience of her literary agency to making contracts advantageous in the amount of money received and in the safeguarding of other interests, such as the suppression of any details that might he painful and yet not significant or necessary for an understanding of the whole truth.

After unexplained delays there arrived in England a cable sent by Mr. Noice to the North American Newspaper Alliance. Through the courtesy of the British purchasers, the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian, I was allowed to read these cables before they went to press. There came later a short cable from Mr. Noice to me. I was horrified to see in these cables things which I knew to be incorrect and others I was morally certain must be wrong. *For the sake of clearness we are reporting in this chapter that have are been also discussed elsewhere. The cables said, for instance, that the men had been inexperienced, but the truth was that there were only two or three men living in the whole world who had more experience in the Arctic than Knight and Maurer. An example of what I felt rather than knew must be wrong was the intimation that starvation had been the cause of the death of Crawford, Galle and Maurer, and that they had died in a desperate effort to reach Siberia to bring back assistance to Wrangell Island. Anyone familiar in general with polar conditions needed no special familiarity with the Wrangell situation to know that this was absurd. We shall not go into that here for the subject is fully and more properly dealt with elsewhere later in this book. I suggest to the News and Guardian that, since these statements would eventually be proved incorrect, it would be better to soften them in the original publication. They felt it their duty, however, to publish the despatch as received. It is also probable that they were inclined to believe that they were it was correct, for the allegations to which subjected were in accord with their ideas of what