![]() They were never seen again.įor six months, Blackjack was alone with Knight. On January 28, 1923, Crawford, Maurer, and Galle made the decision to leave Blackjack to care for the deathly ill Knight and set out on foot across the ice to Siberia in search of help. ![]() Public Domainīy the beginning of 1923, the situation had turned dire: the party was starving, and Knight was extremely ill with undiagnosed scurvy. The camp at Wrangel Island in late autumn, from the book The Adventure of Wrangel Island. As the weather turned, the expedition faced the reality that their inadequate stores would have to last another year. Unbeknownst to the party, Teddy Bear, the ship chartered to pick them up, had been forced to turn back due to impenetrable ice. And so even after the rest of the hired Inuits backed out, on September 9, 1921, Blackjack boarded the Silver Wave with Crawford, Knight, Maurer, Galle, and the ship’s cat, Victoria.įor the first year on Wrangel Island, the land lived up to Stefansson’s promises, but as summer came to an end, the once-plentiful game disappeared and the pack ice closed in with no sign of a ship. But the odd jobs of sewing and housekeeping she was picking up in Nome were never going to be enough to bring Bennett home, and the Wrangel Island expedition promised a salary of $50 a month-an amount that was, to Blackjack, an unheard-of sum. Public Domainīlackjack had many misgivings about shipping out with an expedition of four men, especially as she had initially been promised she would be just one of many Indigenous Alaskans in the party. A map of Wrangel Island, which lies to the north of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean. Though Stefansson picked the team and funded the mission, he never had any intention of joining the party himself and sent his woefully inexperienced team north with only six months of supplies and hollow assurances that “the friendly Arctic” would provide ample game to augment their stores until a ship picked them up the following year. Using the pull of his celebrity as a seasoned explorer, Stefansson assembled a team of four starstruck young men-Allan Crawford, 20, Lorne Knight, 28, Fred Maurer, 28, and Milton Galle, 19-to claim Wrangel Island for the British Empire-even though Britain had never shown the slightest interest in wanting it. The expedition, organized by the charismatic Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, was at best an ill-conceived venture at worst, it was a willfully negligent act of astonishing hubris. It was during this time that Blackjack heard word of an expedition heading for Wrangel Island: they were seeking an Alaska Native seamstress who spoke English. Ada Blackjack and her son, November 1923. Destitute, she placed Bennett in a local orphanage, vowing that she would find a way to make enough money to bring him back home. The boy suffered from tuberculosis and general poor health, and Blackjack lacked the resources to properly care for him. The abandoned Blackjack walked 40 miles back to Nome with her five-year-old son, Bennett when he was too tired to walk, she carried him. She was instead brought up by Methodist missionaries who taught her enough English to study the bible, and who instructed her in housekeeping, sewing, and cooking white-people food.Īt the age of 16, she married Jack Blackjack, a local dog musher, and together they had three children-two of whom died-before Jack deserted Ada on the Seward Peninsula in 1921. While Blackjack was Inupiat, she was not raised with any knowledge of hunting or wilderness survival. ![]() History has largely forgotten her, though Jennifer Niven’s 2004 biography Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic painted a comprehensive picture of her life. The shy tailor with the crippling fear of polar bears had taught herself to shoot and trap to stave off the constant threat of starvation, and when she strode out to meet her rescuers in a resplendent reindeer parka she had stitched herself, her gaunt face held a triumphant smile.īlackjack-née Ada Deletuk-was born in 1898 in Spruce Creek, Alaska, a remote settlement north of the Arctic circle near the gold rush town of Nome. But by the time a rescue ship crested the horizon nearly two years later, Blackjack, who would come to be known as “The Female Robinson Crusoe,” was the only member of the party still alive-that is, apart from Vic.
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