She Went for the Wages. She Came Home the Only Survivor.

By June 1923, Lorne Knight was dead. Three other members of the expedition had gone across the sea ice towards Siberia months earlier. None had returned. On Wrangel Island, north of Siberia, Ada Blackjack was left with the expedition’s cat and no certainty that anyone was coming. She had a son waiting in Alaska. She had accepted a sewing job. Somehow, she still had to get home.

When a story like this turns up between advertisements and somebody’s holiday photographs, it sounds almost too extraordinary to believe. But Ada left a diary. Behind the headline about the sole survivor are pages of work, illness, fear, prayer and longing. They make it much harder to turn her into a tidy little lesson about being brave.

In 1921, Ada was a 23-year-old Iñupiaq woman trying to earn enough to care for Bennett, her surviving child. Her husband had abandoned the family. Bennett had tuberculosis, and she could not afford the care he needed. She placed him in a children’s home in Nome while she worked. Then came an offer of fifty dollars a month to join an expedition as a seamstress. The money offered a way back to life with her boy. ¹

Fifty dollars a month. It is worth sitting with that detail before we start admiring the adventure. How much choice does an opportunity represent when the alternative is remaining separated from your sick child?

The expedition was conceived by explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson as an attempt to establish a territorial claim to Wrangel Island for Canada or Britain. Four men went: Allan Crawford, Milton Galle, Fred Maurer and Lorne Knight. Ada joined them in September 1921. Stefansson stayed behind. The ambitions were his; the people who would have to live through the consequences were on the island. ²

Ada was the only woman and the only Alaska Native in the party, although she had expected other Iñupiat to accompany them. Her sewing was an essential skill in a place where clothing helped keep people alive. Hunting, however, was something she would have to learn. Her identity did not automatically equip her for every task the Arctic would demand. ³

In 1922, sea ice prevented a relief ship from reaching them. Food became dangerously scarce. In January 1923, Crawford, Galle and Maurer left across the ice to seek help in Siberia. They were never heard from again. Knight, suffering from scurvy, remained with Ada. He died on 23 June. ²

By then, Ada was carrying the work of the camp as well as caring for a desperately ill man. Her own account describes something still more painful: Knight’s cruelty towards her. On 21 April, she recorded his accusations, including remarks about the children she had lost. She also recorded the labour he seemed unable to acknowledge. ⁴

Imagine reading a survival story and discovering that the person doing the hunting, fetching the wood and tending the patient also has to defend herself against the patient’s contempt. Ada’s diary prevents us from polishing that relationship into a comforting picture of comrades enduring hardship together.

She wrote about what should happen to Bennett if she died. In her April entries, she asked that her belongings reach him and that her sister Rita care for him. Even while making arrangements for her own possible death, she was trying to protect her child. ⁴

Her days were filled with practical demands. Traps needed checking. Wood needed gathering and cutting. Clothes needed mending. Her diary records repeated unsuccessful trips for food, physical pain and moments when she was too unwell to go out. On 21 May, she recorded practising with a shotgun against an empty tea tin. Four days later, she described trying Knight’s rifle. Here was learning with consequences far beyond a missed target. ⁴

After Knight died, Ada protected his body with boxes and moved into the storage tent. She strengthened her shelter, improvised a stove from kerosene cans and kept watch for polar bears. She hunted birds, trapped foxes and collected eggs. The National Park Service also records her construction of skin boats. Survival required a succession of jobs, each of which had to be done with the strength and materials available. ⁵

There is something almost offensively inadequate about the word “resilience” here. We use it so easily once the danger is over. On the island, there was still the next meal to find and the next day to get through.

Her faith runs through her diary. She read her Bible, prayed and repeatedly gave thanks to Jesus. Alongside the accounts of work and fear are thoughts of home and Bennett. Those entries belong to the story because she put them there herself. We do not need to supply a grand speech about what kept her going. ⁴

On 20 August 1923, according to Dartmouth’s collection history, Harold Noice and the crew of the Donaldson arrived. Ada and Vic survived. Of the five people who had gone to the island, she was the only one to come back. She had spent nearly two years there, the final two months without another living person. ²

Rescue brought publicity, but publicity did not settle what she was owed. Anchorage Museum records that she received less than her promised wages and did not profit from the books and stories about her ordeal. Dartmouth records that Stefansson bought the rights to her diary for one hundred dollars in January 1924. He later used her account and Knight’s in The Adventure of Wrangel Island. Ada continued to experience financial hardship. ^{1, 3}

It is an uncomfortable ending to an extraordinary survival. We like the ship to arrive, the survivor to embrace her child and the credits to roll. Life rarely respects our preferred stopping point.

Ada did reach Seattle with Bennett for his medical treatment. His health remained poor. She went on caring for her family, largely away from public attention, and died in Alaska in 1983, aged 85. ¹

The territorial claim gives this story its historical setting. The failed relief and the sea ice explain how five people became stranded. But when I think of Ada Blackjack, I come back to the mother accepting fifty dollars a month because she needed to care for her son.

She went to the island with skills worth paying for. She learned more at a terrible cost. And when the ship finally came, she was still there to meet it.

Bennett’s mother was coming home.