She had outlasted them all.
## The Voyage Home and the Account She Wrote
On the voyage back to Nome and eventually to Seattle, Ada wrote an account of her experience on Wrangel Island. She was the only person who had witnessed what had happened there from September 1921 to August 1923, and the account she produced was the primary record of events — not the only record, since the diaries and papers of the expedition’s members were also available, but the only first-person account of the full two-year experience.
Noice also acquired the materials she had produced on the island: her diary, her photographs, the papers and diaries of the other expedition members. He took them without, according to subsequent accounts, her explicit consent. The materials included Knight’s diary and the typed messages she had been leaving for rescuers. Noice would later manipulate and exploit these documents in ways that had significant consequences for Ada’s public reputation.
She was twenty-three years old, coming back from two years on one of the most remote and inhospitable islands on earth, having survived the deaths of four men and months of sole-human existence. She arrived into a media environment that was interested in her story and was not necessarily interested in representing it accurately.
## The Press, the Public, and the Female Robinson Crusoe
The press seized on Ada Blackjack’s story with the enthusiasm that early 1920s American journalism brought to genuine adventure narratives. The “Female Robinson Crusoe” characterization circulated widely. Stories emphasized her isolation, her survival, the dramatic arc of rescue. Photographs of her ran in newspapers.