Knight’s response to her care was, by the accounts that have survived, not uniformly grateful. He was ill and frightened and dying, and illness and fear and proximity to death do not always produce their best expressions in people. He criticized her work. He questioned her effort. He accused her of failing to do what he needed. He was, by at least some accounts, verbally abusive toward the person who was keeping him alive.
Ada kept working.
Her diary — kept in sporadic entries, on paper and later typed on the expedition’s typewriter — records the texture of this period in her own words. The diary is not a polished document; she wrote in English that was phonetically spelled and syntactically direct, the English of someone who had learned the language at a mission school in Nome and was using it under conditions of extreme stress. What the entries record is a woman who was doing more work than she had capacity for, who was frightened of the polar bears that moved through the island, who was thinking constantly of her son, and who was attempting to maintain some daily structure in conditions of increasing desperation.
## The Diary: Ada’s Own Record
The diary Ada Blackjack kept on Wrangel Island is now held at Dartmouth College’s Rauner Special Collections Library, along with other papers from the expedition. It is a primary document of what she experienced, in her own words, subject to the limitations of any document produced under extreme stress by a writer working in her second language.