## The Four Men Who Sailed: Crawford, Knight, Galle, Maurer
Allan Crawford was twenty years old, a Canadian, selected because his Canadian citizenship gave the expedition standing for a territorial claim on behalf of Britain or Canada. He was young and had some outdoors experience but was not a seasoned Arctic hand.
Lorne Knight was twenty-eight, an American, one of the expedition’s more experienced members by the standards of the group. He had been on previous Stefansson expeditions and was considered a capable outdoorsman.
Fred Maurer was twenty-eight, also American. He had a specific and remarkable qualification: he had been among the survivors of the Karluk disaster in 1914, when a ship frozen in the ice had gradually sunk, killing a number of men and stranding others on Wrangel Island itself. Maurer had been one of the people who survived that earlier ordeal. He knew Wrangel Island, or at least he had spent time on it in circumstances of duress.
Milton Galle was nineteen years old, American, the youngest of the four men. He had typed correspondence for Stefansson and had been included in the expedition for reasons that are not entirely clear from the available record. He was not a polar explorer.
The four men were, in aggregate, inexperienced for what the expedition was actually going to require. Two of them had never been to the Arctic before. One had survived an Arctic disaster that should have been a cautionary reference. The eldest was twenty-eight. None of them had the survival depth that the Arctic, at its harshest, demands.