On August 19, 1923, a relief vessel called the Donaldson pushed through the fog off the northeast coast of Siberia and found its way to the shores of Wrangel Island. Harold Noice, the expedition leader who came ashore, was expecting to find the group of five who had been left there nearly two years before. What he found was one woman, Ada Blackjack, twenty-three years old, Iñupiaq, originally hired to sew fur clothing. Of the four men who had sailed out alongside her, three had walked onto the sea ice heading for Siberia in January and had never been seen again. The fourth had died of scurvy on June 23, 1923, while Ada nursed him. She had survived the remaining two months alone — with the expedition cat, Vic — until the Donaldson’s arrival.
The press called her the Female Robinson Crusoe. She said she was simply a mother who needed to get home to her son.
Both things were true, but neither one was sufficient. The full story of Ada Blackjack’s time on Wrangel Island, from her hiring in Nome in the summer of 1921 to her rescue in August 1923, is a story about what desperation agrees to, about what a person learns when survival becomes the only curriculum, and about what happens when a woman without institutional standing survives something that men with institutional standing did not.
## Ada Delutuk: Before the Expedition
Ada Delutuk was born in 1898 in Spruce Creek, Alaska, a small settlement near Solomon, about eight miles from Nome. She was Iñupiaq. Her father died of food poisoning when she was approximately eight years old, and her mother sent Ada and her sister Rita to a Methodist mission school in Nome, where they learned English, sewing, housekeeping, and the other skills the missionaries considered worth imparting.