HEROINE OF ICY WATERS

Evening Star, Issue 19760, 10 January 1928, Page 5

HEROINE OF ICY WATERS

TRAGEDY DOGS ARCTIC SURVIVOR tragedy is dogging tho footsteps o£ Ada Blackjack, the young Eskimo woman, known as the heroine of the ill-fated expedition to Wranged Island (writes the Vancouver correspondent of the^ISunday 1 Sunday Chronicle,’ November 1M). Neglected, and a victim of tuberculosis, she has gone to a bleak Alaskan island, presumably to end her days. When four determined men set out to claim Wrange! Island for tha B’itisly she went with them so that she might keep them supplied with warm clothes. Her present illness can be traced to the terrible hardships she endured on Wrangcl Island, from which she was rescued in a starving condition. Two years almost to a day from tha time the original party landed. Harold Noice, a young Scotsman, at the head of the Wrangel Island Rescue Expedition, stepped from a boat on the shore. He was greeted only by, Ada Blackjack, who, half running ahd half leaping, half 'crying and half laughing, rushed down to embrace him, Noice learnt from her that eight months before three men of the party had set out to. make a'dash over the ice to Siberia and had never returned. In a tent he saw the dead body the fourth man clad in his deerstia sleeping bag. Ada Blackjack had nursed him as tenderly as though ho had been hjek husband. Then she kept her lone vigil beside the body for six months. Ada Blackjack left a record of her terrible experiences in a diary. One entry read: “God is the only one wlfb i will brought me homo again. There£|s J no one pity me in this world but Gok||| I