The contract was for one year. The expedition was planned for one year. The intention was that she would sew, cook, and keep camp while the men hunted and maintained the colonial claim. She was not expected to do the physical survival work. She was hired as domestic support.
What she actually ended up doing, across the next two years, was considerably more than that — and considerably more than the men expected.
## September 15, 1921: Arrival on Wrangel Island
The expedition sailed from Nome on the Silver Wave in September 1921. They stopped briefly in Siberia, where a final attempt to recruit Inuit workers failed, and continued to Wrangel Island. They arrived and went ashore on September 15, 1921.
They raised the Union Jack and declared the island British territory. The flag-raising was the expeditions’s formal purpose, the act that was supposed to establish the British claim. It was a gesture that had no legal standing — Britain had not authorized it, Russia had existing claims, and no international body had been consulted — but it was the gesture Stefansson had sent them to make.
Then the ship left, and the five of them — Crawford, Knight, Galle, Maurer, and Ada — were alone on the island.
The initial conditions were adequate enough. Game was present. The men hunted, and there was food. The camp was established, the work of the first months was the work of settling in. Ada sewed, cooked, and kept the domestic arrangements of the camp. The men brought in game and maintained the physical infrastructure.