The polar bears that Ada Blackjack managed with her gun rack and her elevated watch platform are the ancestors of the bears whose maternity dens are now among the island’s most protected ecological features. The foxes she trapped are the descendants of the foxes whose current population is one of the island’s ecological treasures. The island she survived is now recognized as irreplaceable.
## The Karluk Connection: Fred Maurer’s Earlier Experience
Fred Maurer’s presence on the Wrangel Island expedition is one of the historical details that has received less attention than it deserves. He was twenty-eight years old in 1921, and he had already survived one Arctic disaster.
The Karluk was a ship chartered by Stefansson for his 1913-1914 Canadian Arctic Expedition. The ship became trapped in sea ice, drifted for months, and eventually sank, marooning its crew in the Arctic. Eleven people died in the subsequent ordeal; the survivors were eventually rescued after months on the ice and on Wrangel Island. Maurer was among those survivors.
This means that when Maurer sailed to Wrangel Island in September 1921, he was returning to a place where he had survived a previous ordeal. He had been on the island before, in 1914, as a survivor of the Karluk disaster. He knew what Wrangel Island was.
Whether this prior experience informed his decision to join the 1921 expedition, and what it meant to him to return, is not documented in the available accounts. Maurer was twenty-eight years old, had survived something terrible, and was going back.