What Ada understood about scurvy in the scientific sense is not documented. What she did in practice — prioritize Knight’s access to fresh meat, bring him what she could hunt, try to keep him fed with the foods that the available evidence suggested were helping — was consistent with what we now know about the disease’s treatment. Whether this came from Iñupiaq knowledge about fresh food and health, from general observation, from Knight’s own awareness of his condition and what it required, or from some combination of these, is not clear.
What is clear is that she tried to feed him, and that the gap between what she could provide and what his body needed was ultimately unbridgeable given the island’s conditions.
## The Decision to Walk: What the Men Were Thinking
The decision that Allan Crawford, Fred Maurer, and Milton Galle made on January 28, 1923 — to walk across the frozen Chukchi Sea toward Siberia — was the decision that left Ada and Knight alone on the island. Understanding what went into that decision requires looking at the situation from their perspective.
Lorne Knight was visibly and seriously ill. The group had been on the island for more than a year, far beyond the original one-year plan. The resupply ship had not come. Supplies were critically low. The game that had sustained them was scarcer than it had been. The situation was deteriorating, and the rate of deterioration suggested that all five of them were unlikely to survive the winter if they remained.