Several things are notable about what the diary records and what it doesn’t record.
It records her fear of polar bears — the large predators that were a constant presence on the island and against which she had to take active measures. She built a gun rack above her bed specifically so she could reach a weapon quickly in the night. She built an elevated platform to watch for bears and to see across the terrain.
It records her loneliness and her grief. After the three men left and after Knight’s death, she was alone in a way that the diary registers without sentiment — she was simply alone, and the aloneness was a fact of her existence for months.
It records her focus on her son. An entry dated April 2, 1923, reads: “If anything happen to me and my death is known, there is black stirp [sic] for Bennett school book bag.” In the middle of an Arctic island, with no clear prospect of rescue, she was thinking about what she had left for Bennett and wanting any eventual rescuers to know about it. She was planning, even in extremity, for a future in which he would need things she had set aside.
In July 1923, she began typing dated notes on the expedition’s typewriter — messages addressed to any rescuers, documenting that she was alive and asking specifically not to be left without. An entry from July 23 reads: “I thank God for living.” The notes were not diary entries in the usual sense; they were communications, addressed to the future, to people who might come. They were her version of the signal fire, the written equivalent of flagging the horizon.