The decision to join the expedition was his to make, and he made it. His death on the sea ice in January 1923, walking toward Siberia to find help for the people he left behind, came after years of experience with Arctic conditions that might have been expected to warn him away from the enterprise.
What the Karluk connection adds to the story of the 1921 expedition is a specific quality of hubris — not in Maurer individually, but in the enterprise. Stefansson had organized the Karluk expedition and that expedition had been disastrous. One of the survivors of that disaster was now going back to Wrangel Island, on another Stefansson-organized venture. The expedition’s departure was shadowed by a prior catastrophe that had happened in the same organization, involving some of the same participants, in some of the same places.
## The Archive Question: What It Means to Hold Someone Else’s Documents
The Dartmouth College Rauner Special Collections Library is one of the great collections in American academic archival history, and the Stefansson Collection — which includes the Wrangel Island expedition papers — is a significant part of it. The archive holds materials that are essential to understanding the expedition and to understanding Ada Blackjack.
Ada’s diary is in that archive. The diary she kept through the most difficult period of her life, on paper and typed, the record of her months alone and her months with Knight, is held by an academic institution in New Hampshire. It was acquired by the archive as part of the Stefansson Collection — that is, it came into Dartmouth’s holdings through the man who organized the expedition, not through Ada herself.