Located 140 kilometers north of Chukotka, Wrangel Island nominally became part of the Russian Empire in 1911, when the Russian Tricolor was raised by members of the Polar Expedition of vaigach icebreakers off its deserted, uninhabited coast. In the winter of 1914, members of a Canadian Arctic expedition organized by Icelandic-Canadian anthropologist Viljalmur Stefansson ran into trouble on the island.
When the Civil War was raging in the former Russian Empire, Wielyamur Stefansson read in the newspaper that Japan planned to annex all of Eastern Siberia. Stephenson was an ardent opponent of those who saw the Arctic as a useless, icy desert and actively promoted the idea of a "friendly Arctic" to the masses. Although Wrangel Island belongs to Russia, according to Stephenson, the fact that it is uninhabited means that both the United Kingdom and its Dominion Canada can claim ownership of the island.
Prepare for the expedition
So, in order to get a piece of the collapsing empire, Stephenson decided to establish a colony on Wrangel Island. To do so, he hired 4 young people, 3 Americans and 1 Canadian who would become puppets of the new settlement so that Canada would have the right to make territorial claims against no man's land. The pioneers left the Port of Seattle, Canada, on August 18, 1921, and arrived in the village of Nome, Alaska, where they planned to charter a boat for Wrangel Island.
Among other things, Stephenson's team was supposed to hire several locals from the Far North in Alaska to teach them how to survive in the Arctic and serve them fish and game first. After some effort, we managed to rent a boat to Wrangel, but the local aborigines got into trouble. All Inuit (Eskimo) families that initially agreed subsequently rejected the lucrative offer, and as a result, only one young Inuit woman arrived at Nome Docks before the boat left. Her name was Ida Blackjack.
Ironically, the indigenous woman did not have any claimed skills to survive in the Arctic, and the difficult living circumstances forced her to be hired. Ada Blackjack, nee Deletuk, was born in 1898 in the Indian settlement of Spruce Creek, Alaska. Her mother sent her to Nome when she was very young, where she was taken to a Methodist church, where she was taught to read, write and cook "white food." She became an excellent tailor, and her skills in making fur garments proved invaluable for future adventures.
Stephenson promised her that her monthly salary on expeditions was $50, far more than she could earn while staying in Alaska. What she really needs is money. She recently divorced her husband, Jack Blackjack, whom she married when she was 16. In the years after the marriage, her husband repeatedly beat Ada and starved her. She bore him three children, two of whom died in infancy, and a third named Bennett, who suffered from chronic tuberculosis because his mother was unable to support him and lived in an orphanage.
Ada Blackjack and a member of the Wrangel Island Expedition
Knife and bear
For obvious reasons, Ida was very worried before leaving. First, she was afraid of polar bears, and second, she was worried about the prospect of traveling with 4 white people who didn't think she was a useful member of the expedition and it was indecent to travel with one person. lady. But the money for the expedition was given to Stephenson, who had already hired Ida and given her a deposit, so everyone had to push aside their fears and prejudices, and also promised that Ida would go to Chukotka before landing on Wrangel Island. , where they will employ missing men and women.
Just before setting sail, Ida visited the local shaman of Nome. Unexpectedly, visiting a pagan cleric did not bring her spiritual relief. The shaman predicted death and danger ahead and ordered fire and knives to be raised.
When everything was ready, on September 9, 1921, the conquerors of Wrangel Island set out. They were 20-year-old Canadian Alan Crawford, American Lorne Knight and 28-year-old Fred Maurer, and 19-year-old Milton Galle, our heroine Ida Black and the expedition's mascot, Vic the kitten, by the crew that brought them to Nome's ship.
A week later, they arrived at Wrangel for a brief visit to Chukotka, and no one wanted to join the expedition in anticipation of the coming winter. Ida immediately felt lonely and deceived. When the men of the expedition raised a wooden flagpole, raised the British flag on it and declared the island a British possession, the Inuit women stood at the water's edge, their eyes not leaving the departing boat, crying.
Forgotten, abandoned
At first, the weather was conducive to adventure, and soon the Trailblazer team entered the rhythm of daily life. After a few weeks, however, things changed. Tormented by fear, loneliness, and longing for home and her son, Ida becomes withdrawn and indifferent. Every time she saw men drawing their swords, she shuddered at the memory of the shaman's prophecy. She knew that the men were against her staying on the island and treating her as a burden, and she often heard someone whisper that Knight was going to kill her.
One day, she went to the tundra with a bottle of emollient cream, intending to kill herself by drinking medicine. On another occasion, she followed the arctic fox, far from the camp, because she believed that there were ghosts posing as arctic foxes and would be treated kindly if they could be found. She had less and less work cooking and sewing clothes, and at first the men tried to persuade her to start working again, then persuasion turned into vicious ridicule, and then they began to refuse her food and leave her out in the cold. Even tied her to a flagpole. At some point, they threatened to whip her.
As the winter of 1921/1922 approached, Ida seemed to wake up and her mood improved, she devoted herself to her work, and the men accepted her, because only together could it be possible to spend the long polar winter. They were looking forward to the summer and the arrival of the supply ship from Stefanson. However, spring came, and the brief summer in the north passed, and there were still no boats. These people cursed Stephenson, but he had nothing to do with it. He did equip a ship with supplies, but despite the summer months, the ice was so severe that it didn't give the ship a chance to get close to the island.
Scenery from Langle Island
By the time of the second wintering, the group was not only emotionally exhausted, but also physically. Despite Stefansson's assurances of a large number of prey, most of their potential prey — Arctic foxes, seals and bears — has moved to remote areas of the island. People began to become weak, especially Knight, who had caught a cold during a separate reconnaissance sortie and was lying in bed, in addition to the initial symptoms of scurvy.
Finally, in January 1923, when the temperature dropped to minus 50 degrees, around the island, an endless stretch of ice floes and hills formed, and Crawford, Maurer and Harley crossed the sea ice to Siberia, intending to contact people and organize a rescue expedition. No one else saw them.
alive
There were now only two people left on the island: Ida, a young Inuit woman with no skills to survive in the wild, and Nate, a bedridden patient whose strength was slowly waning. The lady reluctantly took on the full burden of providing food for their small group. She learned how to trap, shoot and combat migratory birds for arctic foxes. She even overcame her fear of polar bears and drove the arrogant polar bears out of the parking lot.
Ida gave Knight most of the fresh meat to treat scurvy. Knight, on the other hand, hides his fear of death in an endless scolding of a "worthless" savage who is too lazy and stupid to provide enough food for both of them. In this context, Ida herself discovered the first symptoms of early scurvy.
Knight died on June 23, 1923. Ida didn't have the strength to pull a man's body out of the filthy hut, so she erected wooden boxes and wooden box barricades in front of and around Knight to protect the dead's body from local encroachment. beast. Except for The company of Vic the Cat, she had to move into a storage room, where she lived alone. She hoped that those who had been to the mainland would come back to pick her up, but she wasn't sure.
Shortly after Knight's death, she killed her first seal, but she still made more mistakes than hits, and when her ammunition ran out, she focused on collecting eggs. She even possessed the skills and techniques of building a kind of kayak out of skin and wooden fragments. One day, the tide washed her first kayak into the sea, and she built a second. To entertain herself, she learned to "take selfies" against the background of the camp and the sea with an expedition camera, taking a lot of photo negatives and collecting an entire photo album.
Ida blackjack
Heroine of Wrangel Island
On August 20, 1923, Ada woke up from the noise from the outside of the sea. She grabbed her field glasses from the closet made of empty crates and rushed out of the tent. There was a thick fog outside, but a gust of wind blew through the thick veil, and she saw the mast of an unknown ship. Just as a strange boat approached the shore, she rushed to the shore and fell into the water with a thud.
She had expected Crawford, Maurer and Harley to be on board, but the man who first disembarked and identified himself as Stephenson's assistant Harold Noyce said he himself wanted to see the named gentlemen on shore. As soon as they opened their mouths, the two realized the seriousness of the situation. Ada Blackjack, an Eskimo seamstress and cook, was a burdensome and unwelcome element of the expedition, humiliated and cursed by four healthy men, who lived longer than all of them, and were the only survivors.
Her return and the death of the rest of the expedition drew a public outcry, but Ida tried to avoid that excitement. With the money she earned, she took Bennett to Seattle to treat him for tuberculosis, gave birth to another son, billy, and eventually returned to Alaska. She died there on May 29, 1983, at the age of 85, and was buried in Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery. On her grave, there is a commemorative plaque erected by Billy that reads: "Heroine of Wrangel Island.".