The boat is also evidence of a specific kind of creative problem-solving. She had not built a boat before. She understood the principle — a frame covered with material, shaped for water — and she built one. The fact that the first one didn’t survive a storm might reflect a design that was improved in the second version, or it might simply reflect the force of the storm. Either way, the second boat existed, and it extended what she could do on the island.
## The Typed Messages: Writing to the Future
In July 1923, Ada Blackjack began keeping a typewritten journal. She had been making handwritten diary entries through much of her time on the island, but the typewritten messages of July represent something slightly different: they were addressed to potential rescuers, dated carefully, and kept as a record that she was alive and functional.
This distinction matters. A personal diary is private, a record for the diarist’s own use or for eventual readers who might not come for years. The typewritten messages were operational communications, documents intended to be found and read by people who came to the island to help. They were Ada’s way of establishing, in the record, that she was there and what her situation was.
The entry from July 23, 1923 — “I thank God for living” — has become the most-cited line from her time on the island, and it is worth thinking about what it says and what it doesn’t say.
It does not say she was happy. It does not say she was at peace with her situation. It does not say she had accepted whatever outcome the island offered. It says she was grateful to be alive — a statement of continued presence and continued functioning, a record made at a specific moment that acknowledged the fragility and the fact of her survival simultaneously.