When they reached Wrangel Island on September 15, 1921, the landing was organized. Equipment was brought ashore. The flag was planted. Crawford, as the nominal leader, managed the formal aspects of the claim — the record-keeping, the declaration, the establishment of the camp as a colonial presence on the island.
The camp they set up was a collection of tents and equipment positioned to provide the basic shelter and storage they would need. It was not an established base with permanent structures; it was an improvised camp, developed according to the materials they had brought and the terrain available to them.
Ada’s role in the camp’s establishment was the role she had been hired for: she set up the domestic infrastructure. She cooked. She organized the supplies. She began the work of understanding what clothing and equipment would need to be made and repaired as the conditions of the island and the season made their demands known.
The flag on the island — the Union Jack — marked the formal purpose of the expedition in a way that had no equivalent in Ada’s presence there. She was not there for the flag. She was there for the fifty dollars a month, and for Bennett.
## What the First Year Was Like: The Documentary Record
The documentary record of the Wrangel Island expedition’s first year — September 1921 through September 1922 — comes primarily from the diaries of the expedition’s members, several of which are held in the Dartmouth archive. The record is detailed in some areas and sparse in others, and it reflects the perspectives of the people writing it, which means it is more fully documented from the men’s perspectives than from Ada’s in the early months.