ada blackjack

Photo by: okta'lonli

This past long -- and hot -- weekend I settled in my lawn chair on my 15th floor balcony and finished reading about an Inuit woman who was the sole human survivor of an Arctic expedition to Wrangel Island in the 1920's -- Ada Blackjack.

I say 'sole human', because the expedition's cat Vic, also lived.

Because of her heritage, this might not seem such an unusual event, but Blackjack went on the four-man expedition as a seamstress and was raised in the city of Nome with no experience in living off the land.

The author, Jennifer Niven, has painstakingly crafted a fine recreation of events, based on diaries, correspondence and documentation of the time.

Blackjack's story of survival on a piece of frozen tundra is remarkable. She was left alone with one of the men who was sick with scurvy as the other three men set off across the ice in search of aid after a promised relief ship never made it through the ice-packed waters.

She spent almost five months fending for herself and a dying man (and a slow, agonizing death from scurvy is about as hard as it gets.) She spent another two months alone, except for the cat, before a rescue ship appeared out of the icy fog.

A quiet, unremarkable woman in many ways, her story is fraught with underlying racism and sexism. She, and the four young men who lost their lives on the trip, were caught up in the ill-planning and self-promoting of a famed Arctic explorer. Her life after Wrangel Island was hard too, and mostly undocumented and sketchy, but the author found resources in Blackjack's surviving son. Blackjack emerges as a woman who kept going against all of the odds.

After her rescue she was vilified and taken advantage of by men -- and women -- seeking to make their name and fortune. The follow-up to her rescue is just as frightening and sobering as the time spent on the island -- in a different way. The dangers afterward lie in human manipulations.

Yet Blackjack, even if only out of rightful fear, survived their clutches as she had earlier survived being a hungry polar bear's next meal -- and always returned to her sons.

A story well told and worth telling.