Finally, she managed to catch a seal. She ran into the tent to get a rope to drag her precious catch home. She returned, set to work and suddenly saw a yellow lump. Her worst fears were realised: she saw a polar bear and her cub. Ever since she grew up with Inuit legends, she had been haunted by the fear of being eaten by a bear. She ran as fast as her legs would carry her. Just 400 metres and she would be safe. She climbed a high wall to protect her unexpected new home. From a distance, she watched the two animals eat her food. She did not wonder how she had ended up on the uninhabited ice island of Vrangel, north of Siberia. The answer to the question of why she had joined an Arctic expedition two years earlier and why she was now living alone with a corpse and a cat in a hostile wilderness gave 25-year-old Ada Blackjack the strength to survive.
True, she was Inuit, even if the whites called her Eskimo, but she knew nothing about building igloos, hunting animals, setting traps and surviving in the wild. She was eight years old when her father poisoned himself with old meat and she and her younger sister took him by dog team from their isolated home village of Spruce Creek, Alaska, to a doctor in the remote town of Nome. She did not remember later when she discovered she was no longer breathing, only that she turned the sled around and returned home.
But it was no longer her home. Her mother sent her to Nome, a city full of violence and filth. The gold rush had not yet subsided and fortune-seekers were swarming the coast like ants. But for Ada, Nome was the most sophisticated place she had ever seen. She loved the boarding school and the school run by Methodist missionaries. They taught her how to read and write, sew furs, cook western food and clean, as well as how to bathe, brush her hair and brush her teeth, all for free. She also learned about the Bible and God, and how to wear clothes that made her look beautiful.
She knew nothing about traditional Inuit life, but she quickly realised how difficult it is to survive alone in the city. Even though she learned how to handle money at school, she could never earn enough from her occasional sewing and cleaning. Standing less than a metre and a half tall, desperately shy and thin-skinned, with eyes that one friend described as permanently mysterious, like a closed window, she soon married. She was 16 when she became Jack Blackjack’s wife.
Five years later, she was a woman used to everything: her husband brutally beat and starved her, only one of the three children she bore survived, and finally she was left alone, “poor as a church mouse, almost naked because I had no clothes and no money”. As soon as her husband left her, she was a single woman again, because among the Inuit, marriage was by oral consent and without official endorsements.
She had no choice but to walk from the Seward Peninsula to Nome, some 65 kilometres away, where she had lived before, with her five-year-old son Bennett, who was suffering from tuberculosis. When the child fainted, she carried him.
At the finish line, she had to accept that she simply couldn’t take care of him anymore. Her only option was an orphanage. There was food, there was a doctor. She visited her son as often as she could and saved everything she could to live together again. She struggled for two years, but in 1921 she still did not earn enough to realise her dream. Then a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to earn money came along.
It’s like Hawaii in the Arctic
While Ada struggled to survive, the four young men lived in America and Canada in a leisurely but restless life. They were so different, but they had one thing in common: they all had a thirst for adventure and they all had their hopes in the same man, Vilhjalmur Stefansson. They didn’t mind that he was born in Manitoba as William Stephenson, but then changed his name because he thought it fit better with his self-image as an Arctic explorer. And they were not dissuaded by the fact that he had a reputation for being an extremely unreliable man.
Twenty-eight-year-old Fred Maurer knew him well. In 1913, he went on an expedition with him, but their ship, the Karluk, was soon trapped in his grip by ice. Stefansson walked peacefully ashore in Alaska with part of the expedition, leaving the others on board, even though he was responsible for them as expedition leader. The ship and its ice drifted north-west with the changing weather until it sank five months later, leaving the explorers and scientists alone in the middle of the polar ice.
They walked 160 kilometres to the uninhabited Vrangel Island and struggled for six months to survive. Eleven of the 25 members of the expedition died. Fred Maurer was rescued and returned home: “It was as if I had stepped into another world. The daily newspapers, the traffic noise… everything seemed new. The majestic silence of the North was far behind.” Suddenly everything seemed interesting, from the posters to the shops.
He was giving himself over to the warmth of his home ground, but he was lost inside himself. It was as if there was a void inside him that no one could understand. Even with his lectures on the expedition, he could not fill it. Security meant less and less to him, his resentment against Stefansson, who had let him down at Karluk, faded, and he wanted to go back again, even if only in his mind. He had read everything he could find about the Arctic.
When Stefansson crossed his path again at the travelling lectures, Maurer first wanted to know: is there any chance of going north again? Stefansson remained silent, explaining dramatically to the people who had always been eager to hear him: ‘The ground up there is covered with permafrost; it is always winter and extremely cold. The land, whether land or sea, is an uninhabited wasteland of eternal silence. The stars look down with a cruel gleam, and the depressing effect of the winter darkness on the human spirit is heavy beyond description. This … is a snapshot of the Arctic. And this … must be forgotten before any Arctic exploration can be read in its true light.”
Fred Maurer knew what it was like there, but he also listened, wide-eyed, time and again, to a 41-year-old man expressing a confidence that people could not resist. When he explained how the North was welcoming and friendly to anyone with a bit of common sense, everyone believed him. “With a healthy body and a positive spirit, a family at the North Pole today can live as comfortably as in Hawaii. In my opinion, anyone with good eyesight and a gun can live indefinitely anywhere in the North Pole,” he assured the audience.
Let’s go north!
He knew how to sell himself. After all, he was the explorer who led the longest polar expedition in history, discovering new islands. The temperamental Lorne Knight knew this well. He was 27 when they met again in 1920 and 22 when they met in 1915.
At that time, Captain Lane invited him to join an Arctic expedition. One day, the Polar Bear anchored just a few kilometres off the coast of Canada’s Cape Kellett. They looked out on the shore and saw a living creature. They thought it was an Eskimo, but since it was obviously trying to get their attention, Knight had to go ashore. Instead of Eskim, he saw a neglected white man, Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
After leaving the Karluk, his research team and Fred Maurer in 1913, he continued to explore on his own. He hired new people, bought new ships and crossed the Alaskan mainland. He disappeared for a while somewhere in the Canadian Arctic, but now he was standing here, even though everyone said he was dead. Lorne Knight never forgot how this thin but steely man said to him, “If you know how, it’s as easy to live here as at home.” He ate what he caught on the way.
Knight’s dream was sealed. He wanted to explore, but with Stefansson he set off on a four-year adventure. The plan was to sail 320 kilometres north of Alaska’s northern coast, spend a year on the ice and subsist on hunting. Then, Stefansson hoped, they would be taken north to Vrangel Island or the Siberian coast, from where they would head even further north.
It was then that Knight learnt how to set needles, drive a dog sled, trap and shoot animals, measure the depth of the sea and much more, and for the first time he also encountered scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency easily cured with fresh fruit. He suffered from inflamed and stiff joints and hypersensitive gums, and was in desperate pain. He never forgot the wonderful taste of fresh raw meat, which finally brought him relief, because that too can help.
When the party broke up on 26 August 1919, exactly four years after they had set out, Lorne Knight was convinced that the North had made a man of him. Would he repeat the exercise, Stefansson wondered. Right away, Knight didn’t hesitate, he just wanted to be warm again for a while to recover. In 1921, everything in him was already buzzing with new expectation.
At 19, Milton Harvey Robert Galle was too young to remember, but he had so many more hopes and aspirations. He had never been anywhere. He spoke Spanish, German and English fluently only because he had learned them at home. Stefansson easily charmed him, but during his lectures he played recordings of his travels.
This is how he met the serious and reserved Maurer and the temperamental and loud Knight. He immediately won them over with his sweetness and charm, and they became a trio, working with Stefansson and wondering whether the rumours about him going to Vrangel Island were true or not.
Stefansson neither confirmed nor denied them, but they just couldn’t ignore them. Eight years ago, Fred Maurer buried friends on the island. At the time he had prayed for salvation and had not even thought of returning, but now it seemed to him that it would bring him peace of mind. He had a good life, with a mother, a girlfriend and a decent job, but he was not happy.
Knight’s life was also settled, but he would have swapped his job as head of the police for the North in a heartbeat if he could. For young Gallo, the expedition would be the fulfilment of his greatest dreams. All three were on edge, but Stefansson remained silent.
He did not tell them that he had started planning the expedition in the autumn of 1920, but he could not convince the Canadian Prime Minister and some members of Parliament to finance it. Why are they not interested in Wrangel Island? He simply did not want to understand that, by planting a Canadian flag on it, the island would not become Canadian, because it has been Russian for a good many years.
Stefansson had never set foot on his floor, but he saw potential in him. Its location 320 metres north of Siberia and 650 kilometres north-west of Alaska made it ideal for an airfield, walrus hunting, reindeer herding and as an endless source of animal fur. He was certainly not an idealist, nor was he a visionary, although he considered himself one, but he was certainly a businessman who always took care of himself first.
It was accordingly misleading. He was worried about rumours that Japan would try to take Vrangel Island for itself, putting the crew in danger. He kept it from them, but he could not keep it from the Canadian Members of Parliament. They did not want to finance a dangerous, politically motivated expedition, and especially not a man who had a reputation for being extremely self-absorbed and, above all, unreliable. People died on his expeditions. But not this time, they decided, at least not under the Canadian flag.
But Stefansson was in a hurry. Summer was approaching. Could he carry out his plan? He imagined that the expedition would spend three years on Vrangel Island. They would carry food for six months, and they would find their own meat. After a year, new supplies would be brought to them by boat. Anyone who wanted to would leave, but otherwise new people would come with them and they would set up a kind of community there. So they would occupy the island and it would become Canadian, or British, because Canada was under British rule.
Unfair games
On June 6, 1921, Knight and Maurer received the much-anticipated telegrams, “Will you go over Nome to an Arctic island for $400 a month and a small share of the project?” Stefansson was interested in something else: would they be willing to become Canadian citizens to do it? The only way he could claim the island for Canada or Britain was if a Canadian led the expedition, and they were both Americans.
They would have done anything for an adventure, but it turned out that with the citizenship they had acquired, they were not “British enough” to claim the island. For his plan to succeed, at least in his mind, Stefansson needed a “real” Canadian. He had sent a note to the University of Toronto some time before, saying that he was looking for members for a possible new expedition and wanted someone who had just finished his studies, because “young men adapt more quickly to northern conditions”.
They recommended the conciliatory, immensely patient and very witty Allan Rudyard Crawford. He was only in his third year at the age of 20, but he was an excellent student, and it was only a little embarrassing that he had never left his native Toronto. But for the ambitious Crawford, this was no obstacle. The expedition was his chance to achieve an achievement that would stand alongside the academic triumphs of his father, a distinguished university mathematics professor, author of technical books and essayist.
The lack of experience was not a problem even for the irresponsible Stefansson: the boy had Canadian citizenship and that was enough. The team was finally selected. Galle was overflowing with happiness and pride. Out of 10,000 cadets, Stefansson had chosen him! The truth was that his idol hadn’t spoken to anyone else, he had just lied a little to the boy so that he would be more grateful for the opportunity and would agree to anything.
Only now that they were talking for real, he revealed to the boys that they would be going north alone and that their leader would be the most inexperienced of them. He did not tell them about the financial problems, although there was still no official answer from the government. When the final one did not arrive, he kept it quiet from the boys. He left them believing that the MEPs were still thinking, and that he was setting up his own company just in case, so that he could finance the removal privately if necessary.
But in June 1921, he struggled to raise the $2500, or $26,000 today, to buy equipment and supplies for the Quartet. He even borrowed the money from Maurer, although Maurer had to ask his brother for it, and then he told the boys that there would be nothing to pay them. Instead, they would get shares in his company, which was supposedly going to be doing great. They did not sign the contracts.
The naive and adventurous agreed to anything, although Stefansson was also rather stingy with his advice. He helped them so much that he told them to buy some ham and butter because they would be eating seals and bear fat. They don’t need much in the way of guns and ammunition, and four tents will be quite enough, because they can build a shack out of driftwood.
They should not carry large quantities of meat with them, as they will have to catch their own. After all, they were also going there to confirm his words that the Arctic is a very friendly environment for anyone to live in. They necessarily had to buy hunting equipment, such as traps, and an umiak, the traditional Eskimo boat for hunting at sea.
In Nome, Alaska, they must hire Eskimo families to help them hunt, cook and sew clothes, Stefansson told them before they left Seattle for the stormy seas. By the time they arrived in Nome, Galle had nearly fainted from seasickness.
On land, he recovered quickly and they got to work. We are looking for Inuit to come north with us to sew clothes and help hunt for food, they quickly spread the word. The monthly wage is $50. Twenty-three-year-old Ada Blackjack quickly did the math: with this money, she could take her son out of the orphanage and take care of him for a while.
She has registered. She was not the only one, but on 9 September 1921, when they were due to push off, she stood alone on the quay. All the other Inuit changed their minds. In their experience, the expedition was too dangerous. Ada stayed. She was desperate enough to lease not only a dangerous landscape for 50 euros a month, but also the company of four unknown men with whom she would live in the wilderness for a year.
Ada Blackjack Fighting for survival
They kicked the can down the road and have only made mistakes ever since. They stopped at the eastern cape of Siberia and tried to persuade some locals to go with them, but they went on, even though they could not find any. Ada may have been Inuit, but she knew as much about surviving in the icy wilderness as Victoria. On the boat that took them out of Seattle, the boys were given a kitten, and since cats are supposed to bring good luck to explorers, they took Vic, as they affectionately called her, with them.
On 16 September 1921, they finally arrived at Vrangel Island. They were greeted by mild weather, warm sunshine and a pleasant breeze. Even a few flowers were growing. Around them they saw many animal tracks and wooden debris for firewood. We will easily spend a year here, the five agreed.
They started collecting wood, building a hut, making a table and chairs. They set up measuring devices because they also wanted to monitor the weather. Ada made hoods and sewed them on jackets. She knitted gloves and cooked for everyone, although at first it was hard to catch anything. The walrus ended up on their table because they found it sleeping and could easily shoot it.
But the Arctic soon showed its true face. The temperature dropped to minus 27.5 degrees Celsius. The ice on the water began to close in on the surface. By mid-November, daylight was almost gone. Ahead of them were about two months of polar night. And then the boys realised that Ada was going to be difficult.
She expected them to look after her. She was capricious and sometimes childishly stubborn. She had panic attacks. One day she saw Knight sharpening a knife. Convinced that he was trying to kill her, she ran out onto the ice. She ran and ran and the boys chased her for hours before they caught her. They dragged her back and tied her up. If she had escaped in the middle of the night, she would have frozen to death. The attacks lasted until mid-December, when they suddenly disappeared. She did not remember what she had done.
In January 1922, temperatures dropped further. Outside it was minus 40 degrees Celsius, or Fahrenheit, because at that temperature the scales are aligned. There were no animals to hunt because they had moved. Food was going fast and they were increasingly forced to conserve it.
In June 1922, a relief ship was due to arrive. They decided that Ada would return with it, even though they were used to her. She herself liked the young and smiling Gallo and Crawford best, and she had nothing against the serious Maurer, except that she didn’t like the rugged Knight. She was even afraid of him when he was always complaining about her and reproaching her.
The second of June 1922 was one of the worst days they had ever experienced. The sun shone for a long time, but it was snowing so hard they could hardly see anything, the wind almost blew them away and there was only a sample of food. They were really waiting hard for the ship, firmly convinced that it would come.
But Stefansson had no intention of sending it. He was comfortable in Canada, and he didn’t bother to raise the money he would have needed if he had wanted to hire her and buy supplies. The boys’ families were putting pressure on him. Finally, he relented. On 20 August 1922, the Teddy Bear sailed from Nome. With a bit of luck, it would have returned to the city in just 14 days, with all the passengers who would have wanted to be on board.
But luck was not on the side of the brave. The area was hit by the worst cold and snow in 25 years. The ship’s propeller was damaged. The journey north became too dangerous. If the ship had stayed in place, ice would have trapped it in the middle of the ocean.
On 25 September 1922, the captain gave up and turned back. Stefansson calmly told the boys’ families, “You have no more to worry about than if you were in a European city … In a year’s time they will be as safe and well as you and I are likely to be in Texas or New York.”
Without hope
The reality was much darker. Knight again felt pain in his joints. He knew the symptoms of scurvy, but kept silent. In mid-August, they started eating the last of their supplies. There were hardly any animals left to hunt. They had moved elsewhere with the winter, but they stayed in the same place. By the end of September, the sea froze again. The hope that the ship would still arrive in 1922 was extinguished.
In November, they were left without firewood. The camp was moved a few kilometres away, where there was plenty of firewood. Soon they were eating only walrus skin and dried bread. It did not go on like that. On the seventh of January 1923, young Crawford and sickly Knight decided to cross Siberia and arrive in Nome on foot. There they would find help and send for the others.
They calculated that the journey should take no more than 60 or 70 days. They returned in less than 14. They were exhausted, frostbitten and full of blisters. Crawford’s fingers and toes were black, Knight felt worse than before. What should they do? If they all stayed, they would all die. If some of them go for help, they could all still die.
Finally it was decided that Crawford, Maurer and Galle would go to get help, while Ada and the sick Knight would look after each other. Even though the temperatures were low and the storms strong, they separated on 23 November 1923. Ada and Knight were left alone.
A week later, Ada stepped out of the tent and saw Knight lying in the snow. She didn’t like him, but the fear of losing him and being alone squeezed her heart. Who would look after her? Fortunately, he was still breathing. She struggled to wake him. I am well, he told her when he saw her frightened face.
She helped him into the tent and into his sleeping bag. Only then did he reveal to her how sick he really was. I have scurvy, he explained, judging by my symptoms. Crawford had noticed it, Maurer had dreamt it, but now it was so bad that he could no longer hide it. “I’d say we’ll never see Noma again,” he concluded darkly.
Now she had to take care of them herself. She went out and chopped firewood. She took his map and found the traps Maurer had set. No fox was caught in them. Disappointed, she returned home to Knight. He was losing strength fast. Slowly, he felt dizzy just by making one sudden movement. He was immediately breathless. He had only picked up a piece of wood and had to sit down to relieve himself. He dreamt of fresh meat. If only a bear would come into the camp … If only he could go around alone …
He didn’t dare. If he had lost consciousness while checking the fox traps, he would have been finished. He was terrified of his own helplessness. He didn’t see how Ada would be able to look after herself and him.
So far, she has refused to shoot. She was scared to death of guns. She had no idea that she would come across a polar bear while checking the traps. Or that she would be caught in the night before she could return home. Daylight was still scarce. On top of that, the walking was tiring and she hadn’t caught any foxes.
Yet she did everything and learned everything. Even setting traps. One day, she saw a fox track by one of them, but because she had buried the trap too deep, the fox couldn’t get to it. She realised that she just had to cover the trap with snow.
She learned to hunt animals, even if she had to shoot them, but she also learned that food is hard to keep safe. The day after she cleaned her second seal, she heard a noise outside her tent. A good four metres away, she saw a polar bear and a cub.
“I was scared to death, but I took my gun and decided to take the risk. I knew that if I hit them just in the leg or somewhere where I could hurt them just a little, they would rush at me, so I shot over their heads. They turned and ran a little way, turned again and looked at me as if they were going to come back, so I fired five more rounds towards them. Then they ran away for good,” she said, describing one of her encounters with polar bears, who now liked to come and visit.
She had learned everything she needed to know to survive with Knight, but she was exhausted and desperately lonely. She missed the boys. Since they left, everything was different. She didn’t know how to help Knight. Now he was just lying there in severe pain. He was no longer eating. His mood was fluctuating more and more, and he was delirious more and more often. She had done everything she could for him, but it was not enough.
Abandoned on an ice island
On the twenty-first of June 1923, she stood by his side and wept. He was unconscious again. “Don’t leave me here alone,” she begged him in her mind. He opened his eyes. They both knew that he was fading away, but not what the real cause of his fading was. She couldn’t save him, but at least she was trying. And he was aware of that. As he looked at her, all frightened and sad, he thanked her for all she had done for him. He told her to be strong and to do everything she could to survive and hold on until the ship arrived.
When he lost consciousness again, she sat down at the typewriter. Before he left, Galle scolded her that she was not allowed to use it. She had never touched it, but now she wanted to type a message, just in case she too was about to “go away”.
She addressed the message to Gallo, apologising first for touching the typewriter, but saying that she had to because the message was really urgent. Mr Knight, she wrote, hardly knowing what she was saying. ‘I think he’s going to die, he looks bad. I hope to see you when you read the letter. Well, if nothing happens to me, I’ll see you.”
She added that she had to go seal hunting, but that “Mr Knight won’t eat any meat, of course, because he always says he has a sore throat”. Then she went to bed. The next morning, as she had done every morning, she checked how Knight was feeling. He was not breathing. He died one night on 22 June 1923.
In her diary, which she started in March, she wrote: “Today I moved into another tent and washed my dishes and gathered some firewood.” That was the day she found Knight’s body, but she could not bring herself to take it out of their tent. She had neither the heart nor the physical strength, and most of all she could not bear to be left all alone in the camp. She left him in the sleeping bag in which he died, so that everything would remain almost as it was. She put a fence around him, made of boxes, so that the wild animals could not get to him, and moved into the equipment tent with Vic the cat.
It was much smaller, but at least it didn’t smell like a decaying corpse. She had furnished it as she had furnished her previous tent. She hung the rifle and pistol above the bed so that she could easily reach them if she was surprised by bears in the middle of the night. She had stowed Knight’s belongings in a neat way so that they would not be ruined by damp and could later be handed over to his parents. She missed him. She could not understand why he had died so young.
She was left alone. Her only companion on this harsh island was her kitten Vic. She took care of her in a very motherly way, shouting at her and making sure nothing bad happened to her when she disappeared out of sight. She wondered if maybe she was losing her mind.
Every day was a new challenge. One morning, she opened the door to see bear footprints. When she followed them, she saw that he had walked all around her tent. Behind him she had oil. Three days later, another bear came and ate it all.
A heroine and a murderess
“It was one evening, on 19 August. I was preparing lunch or dinner. I heard a strange sound, like a ship’s signal, but I thought it was a duck or something. It was foggy and I couldn’t see, so I didn’t think about it again until the next day.” After dinner she read because she could not fall asleep without reading.
“The next morning, around 6am, I heard that sound again.” It seemed closer to her then. She grabbed her magnifying glasses and stepped on the wall that surrounded her tent for safety. “And sure enough, there was a ship and a captain and people walking on the beach.” She gave up breakfast so she could keep an eye out for them to turn in her direction. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Captain Harold Noice also did not know where to look for the expedition members. On Stefansson’s orders, he set sail from Nome on 2 August 1923, but when he reached the island on 19 August, the camp was not where it should have been. Sixteen kilometres downstream he found an abandoned camp. He signalled loudly to alert the boys, but no one appeared from nowhere.
The fog was low. He could not continue his search. The next morning, through the fog, he saw a living creature on the shore. He sailed to the shore in a boat with some Inuit families. Stefansson was clear: if Crawford, Knight, Maurer and Galle wanted to return, he had to stay on the island and take their place.
He had no idea that he would take part in the “British occupation of the island”, and somehow he expected that the Quartet would want to return home after two years. The safest thing to do was to hire some Inuit with dog sledges and take them with them, so that they could take their place. Noice found them easily.
And now they were all standing together in front of this petite Inuit woman. Where are Crawford, Galle and Maurer, Ada asked Noyce. I was going to pick them up here, he replied. “There’s no one else. I’m alone,” she explained. Will he take her back to Nome? Of course. She had taken note.
They took her on a boat and returned to the camp. They buried Knight and took Victoria. Ada survived, only she didn’t know that a new storm was brewing. There was no sign of Crawford, Gallo and Maurer. Parents and loved ones demanded answers.
Stefansson has done everything to shift the responsibility from himself to others. Noice fought for the rights to sell the story because Ada had told it to him first. Since she survived and the bold boys did not, they had to dishonour her. They accused her of everything from being a prostitute to killing Knight. A New York newspaper calmly accused her of murder. She only spoke during the police investigation, she did not say a word to the press.
She was finally able to take her son out of the orphanage. She took him to Seattle for treatment. She met the Crawford, Maurer and Gallo families. She told them what had really happened, but the fate of their boys after they left the camp remained unknown.
She returned to Nome. She started working again as a seamstress and cleaner, and again she was penniless. She spent it all on her son’s treatment for tuberculosis. She married for the second time, but was no luckier than the first time. Her husband left her and the baby as soon as he realised he had no money. Before she was vilified, she was worshipped as Robinson Crusoe in the female form, which made her famous.
She just wanted peace. With two children, she simply disappeared. In 1935, a journalist spotted her on the remote shores of Aleutian Island. She refused to speak to him. She gave her only interview in 1973, after her son died at the age of 48, but otherwise she told her story only for the police record. She lived to 85 in poverty and died a few years before her name was officially cleared.
For a long time, Stefansson could not accept that Vrangel Island was not his. He even tried to sell it, first to the Canadian and US governments, then to private investors. He wanted to use the money to pay off Ada and the relatives of the deceased. He did not want to hear anything more about it afterwards. In his statements, he was less and less connected with the expedition and, in the end, no longer connected at all. But he could not erase the boys’ diaries and Ada’s confessions forever.
