- Ada Blackjack
Ada Blackjack, (1898-1983) was an
Inuit woman who lived for two years as acastaway on uninhabitedWrangel Island in northern Siberia.Biography
Ada Blackjack Johnson was born in
Solomon, Alaska on May 10, 1898. Early on in life Blackjack relocated to Nome, Alaska. In 1921 she joined an expedition across theChukchi Sea to Russia’sWrangel Island led by Canadian Allan Crawford but financed, planned and encouraged byVilhjalmur Stefansson . Prior to joining the expedition, Blackjack had given birth to three children but only one survived past infancy. By the time she joined the expedition she had temporarily placed her son in an orphanage after her husband had left her destitute.On 16 September 1921 a team of five people was left on Wrangel Island north of Siberia, with the intention of claiming the island for Canada or Britain: Ada who had been hired as a cook and seamstress, three American men named Lorne Knight, Milton Galle, and Fred Maurer (Maurer had spent eight months in 1914 on the island after surviving the shipwreck of the
Karluk ), and a Canadian man named Allan Crawford.The conditions soon turned bad for the four men and Ada. They were unable to kill enough game on the island to survive after rations ran out, so on 28 January 1923 three men made an attempt to cross 700 miles across the frozen Chukchi Sea to Siberia for help and food, leaving Ada and the ailing Lorne Knight behind. Knight was afflicted with
scurvy and was cared for by Ada until he died in April 1923. The other three men were never seen again. And so, Ada was utterly alone except for the company of the expedition's cat, Vic. Ada learned how to survive in the icy world until she was rescued on 19 August 1923 by a former colleague of Stefansson's, Noice. In some newspapers she was called a real "female Robinson Crusoe". Ada used the money she saved to take her small son Bennett to Seattle to cure his tuberculosis and had another son Billy. Eventually Ada returned to the Arctic where she lived until the age of 85. She was quiet and hated the media circus that developed around her and the attempts by her rescuer Noice and Stefansson to exploit her story. Except for the salary that she made on the trip and a few hundred dollars for furs that she trapped while on Wrangel, Ada did not benefit from the subsequent publication of several very popular books and articles concerning this disastrous voyage.Ada Blackjack was buried in
Anchorage , Alaska.External links and references
* [http://www.jenniferniven.com/?act=books The Ice Master] and [http://www.jenniferniven.com/?act=books Ada Blackjack] Jennifer Niven's non-fiction works on Wrangel Island and Ada Blackjack
* The heroine of Wrangel Island by historian Alexandra J. McClanahan, site [http://www.litsite.org/index.cfm?section=History%20and%20Culture&page=Life%20in%20Alaska&ContentId=850&viewpost=2]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
