How This Woman Survived 2 Years Alone on a Frozen Arctic Island

On September 21, 1921, five people boarded a ship called the Silver Wave and sailed north toward one of the most remote islands on Earth, all because one man believed the Arctic was not dangerous. But one by one over the next two years, the four men with her died. The only person still alive was a 23-year-old woman from a small coastal town on the western edge of Alaska. Her name was Ada Blackjack, and while the men around her perished one by one, she managed to stay alive for two years on a frozen island surrounded by polar bears with no rescue in sight and no way to call for help. And through all of it, she managed to document all this in a diary as well. This is the story of the woman who survived two years alone on a frozen Arctic island and what she wrote while fighting to stay alive, The Expedition. The man behind it was Will Yalmour Stephanson, a charismatic Canadian explorer who had built a career and a reputation on the idea that the Arctic was not hostile but friendly, not dangerous but manageable, a place where anyone willing to adapt could live off the land indefinitely. He had written books about it, given lecture tours about it, and in 1921, having been refused support by the Canadian government, he quietly organized a private expedition to plan a territorial claim on Rangel Island, a remote expanse of tundra and ice sitting 140 kilometers off the northeast coast of Siberia. He recruited four young men and sent them north with six months of supplies and the confident assurance that the island would provide everything else they needed. Alan Crawford was 20 and nominally led the group. Lorne Knight was 28 and the most experienced Arctic hand among them. Fred Maurer, also 28, had survived a previous shipwreck in these waters. Milton Gall was 19 and had nothing to recommend him except enthusiasm. Stephanson did not go with them. He stayed behind to fundraise and give lectures while his team sailed north. He also recommended they take an Iupiat seamstress to sew the fur clothing that would keep them alive in temperatures that reached minus 48 degrees Celsius. Only one agreed to go. Ada Blackjack, who needed the $50 a month the expedition was offering, signed a one-year contract and boarded the Silver Wave on September 21, 1921, with four men she had never met in a ship's tabby cat named Victoria, Vic for short. She had been told other Iupiat families would be joining the expedition. When the day came, they did not appear. She was the only Alaska native and the only woman. She watched the supply ship leave from the beach, walking far enough down the shore that the men would not see her cry. Then she went to work. The first year went better than it had any right to. Game was less abundant than Stephanson had promised but manageable, and the group settled into a routine that held until the summer of 1922, when the ship that was supposed to arrive with new supplies and a replacement crew was forced to turn back by impassable sea ice. The reality of what that meant settled over the camp slowly and then all at once. They were going to have to survive another winter with whatever they had left, when it starts falling apart. By the start of 1923, the expedition was starving. Temperatures on the island had dropped to minus 48 degrees Celsius, and the game the men had been counting on had thinned dramatically. The foxes that had been reliable the previous season had moved elsewhere, their tracks still visible everywhere in the snow, but the animals themselves almost impossible to catch. The men grew weaker with every passing week, and then something happened that made an already desperate situation completely untenable. Lorne Knight, the most capable man on the expedition, collapsed. He had been hit by scurvy, a disease caused by severe vitamin C deficiency that sets in when a person goes too long without fresh food. In the Arctic, where fresh food is almost impossible to find in winter, it moves through a body without mercy. His gums began bleeding, his teeth loosened, and purple bruises spread up his legs. Within weeks, the most experienced man on the island was completely bedridden and entirely dependent on everyone around him. The remaining three men, Crawford, Moorer, and Gall, who were still well enough to move, made the only decision that seemed available to them. On January 28, 1923, they harnessed the sled dogs and set out across the Chukchi Sea toward the Siberian coast, 90 miles away, in search of help. They left Ada behind to care for Knight. What happened next is one of the most chilling facts of this entire story. Crawford, Moorer, and Gall walked out onto the ice and were never seen or heard from again. No bodies were ever recovered. No equipment was ever found. Three men simply walked into the and the Arctic kept them. Ada was now alone on Rangel Island with a dying man and a cat named Vic, and the nearest human settlement was 90 miles of frozen ocean away. Knight and Ada had never had an easy relationship. From the beginning of the expedition, he had treated her as little more than a servant, and as his condition worsened, his frustration turned into something uglier. Bedridden and humiliated by his own helplessness, he directed his rage at the one person caring for him, criticizing her constantly, blaming her for his deteriorating condition, and using the painful details of her past against her. Ada bore all of it without responding, but she wrote in her diary what she could not say to his face. Still through all of it, she kept him alive, heating sand to warm his frozen feet, rotating oatmeal sacks beneath him to prevent bed sores, keeping the fire burning and hunting for what little food the island offered, all while her own body was beginning to show the early signs of scurvy as well. She was nursing a man who despised her while the same disease was quietly beginning to work on her. On June 23, 1923, Lorne Knight died. Ada built a barricade of wooden boxes around his body to protect it from animals, moved herself and Vic into the storage tent, and faced Rangel Island alone. The two years. Three months before Knight died, Ada had started keeping a diary. The first entry was dated March 14, 1923, and it reads exactly like the woman who wrote it. Practical. Precise. No drama. March 14, 1923. The first fox I caught was in Feb. 21st, and then 2nd March 3rd and 4th. 5th, that makes 4 white foxes, and then in March 13th, I caught 3 white foxes, that makes 7 foxes altogether. 14th, I got headache all day, I'm taking aspirin it seems didn't work. 7 foxes. A headache. That is what survival sounded like in Ada Blackjack's voice. Trapping and shooting were skills Ada had never needed before the island, and both had to be learned from scratch, alone, through trial and error, in temperatures that punished mistakes immediately. She practiced with a rifle against an empty tea tent until her aim was good enough to trust. The polar bears were the thing she feared most, and Rangel Island, which has one of the highest densities of polar bears anywhere in the world, gave her good reason to keep fearing them. But waiting could not be the only strategy, so she built an observation platform on top the storage tent from driftwood and scraps she found around the camp, high enough to scan the surrounding terrain before stepping outside each morning. It gave her enough warning to get back inside before anything reached her. Every day she walked 6 miles along the shoreline collecting driftwood, the only source of firewood on an island with no trees. She hunted birds and tracked seals across the ice. She even figured out the expedition's photography equipment and took self-portraits standing outside the camp. In one photograph she looks directly into the camera with an expression that is not quite a smile, but something more considered than that. In her spare time she sowed a pair of moccasins for Bennett. The son left in a gnome orphanage, because the tuberculosis treatment cost money she had not had. The son she had come to this frozen island to earn enough money to bring home. She kept the moccasins carefully, and when she wrote about what should happen if she did not survive, the entry read like a mother making practical arrangements rather than a woman losing hope. This very important note in case I happen to die or somebody find out that I was dead, I want Mrs. Rita McCafferty take care of my son Bennett. My sister Rita is just as good his own mother I know she loved Bennett just as much as I do. Rescue On August 20, 1923, Ada Blackjack woke to an unfamiliar sound coming from outside her tent. She stepped outside into thick fog, raised her field glasses toward the water, and waited for the fog to shift. When it did, the outline of a ship appeared through it. She ran. The vessel was the Donaldson, sent from Nome by a man named Harold Noyce, an associate of Stephanson after two years of failed attempts to reach the island. As it approached, the crew could see a figure running toward the beach. When they came ashore, they found the camp in far better condition than anyone had expected. Ada had kept it well. She had kept everything well. Ada had run down to the beach thinking she was about to see the faces of Crawford, Moorer, and Gall. She was certain the three men had made it and come back for her. But as Harold Noyce stepped forward and began to speak, the look on his face told her everything before the words did. She was the only one left. The crew spent time on the island before departing, and what they found impressed them deeply. The camp was organized, the supplies well managed, and Ada herself was in strong enough condition that the crew later said she could likely have survived at least another year if the ship had not come. She had spent nearly two full years on Rangel Island. When she finally walked down to board the rescue vessel, she was dressed in a reindeer parka she had sewn herself from skin she had collected on the island. Back in Nome, Ada was finally reunited with Bennett. The expedition salary she had earned, or the portion of it that Stephanson actually paid her, went immediately toward her son's tuberculosis treatment. For a while, she let herself rest and simply be with him. She had earned that. Then the press arrived, and for a brief while the world could not get enough of her story, newspapers called her the female Robinson Crusoe, a reference to the famous fictional castaway who survived alone on a deserted island. The attention felt deserved, but it did not last and it did not serve her. Stephanson wrote a book about the expedition from the comfort of his lecture tour and profited from it. The families of the dead men accused Ada of neglecting night, and one accuser was later found to have torn pages from her diary trying to manufacture evidence against her. He apologized. Ada saw none of the money and only a fraction of her promised salary. She had not survived two years on a frozen Arctic island to become someone else's story. She had done it to come home to her son. She remarried, had another son, and eventually returned to the Arctic where she lived until she was 85. She died in 1983 in Palmer, Alaska. Her gravestone reads Heroin Rangel Island Expedition. She was hired to sew. The four men she was there to keep warm are all dead. Ada Blackjack came home in a parka she had sewn herself. Carrying moccasins she had made for a son, she never stopped believing she would see again. Subscribe and hit the notification bell so you never miss a story like this one.