Wrangel Island sits in the Arctic Ocean, north of the Chukchi Sea and north of the far northeastern coast of Siberia. It is roughly 120 miles long and 50 miles wide, a windswept, treeless place where polar bears, walruses, seabirds, and arctic foxes lived in numbers that varied with the season. Russia had longstanding claims to the island, but those claims, in 1921, had not been formally and definitively established in the post-World War I legal landscape of territorial claims.
Stefansson saw an opportunity. He believed Wrangel Island could be claimed for Canada or the United Kingdom, and that establishing a presence on it — a group of English-speaking people raising a flag and declaring occupancy — could be the basis for a territorial claim. He brought the idea to the Canadian government, which declined to be involved. He brought it to the British government, which also declined. He proceeded anyway.
The expedition he organized was lightly supplied: roughly six months of provisions for what he was framing as a one-year occupation that could sustain itself through hunting. Stefansson had promoted his “friendly Arctic” concept in lectures and books, and the expedition’s design reflected his theory — the participants would learn to live off the land as the expedition required. What the design did not adequately account for was the possibility that game might be scarce, that weather might prevent resupply, or that the people he was sending might not have the specific skills required.
He himself did not go. He was occupied with fundraising for another expedition and with the public promotion of his work. The four young men he sent — and Ada Blackjack — were his proxies.