Lorne Knight, by the late months of 1922, was showing the early signs of scurvy — the nutritional deficiency disease caused by insufficient vitamin C that had killed sailors and polar explorers for centuries. Scurvy develops when people go without fresh food, particularly fresh meat, for extended periods. Its symptoms progress from fatigue and joint pain to bleeding gums, reopening of old wounds, and eventually death. Knight’s condition was worsening through the autumn of 1922, and the cause was the diet they were all living on.
## January 28, 1923: The Walk Onto the Ice
By January 1923, the situation on Wrangel Island had reached the point where remaining was not clearly survivable. Knight was too ill to travel. Three of the men — Crawford, Maurer, and Galle — decided to attempt a crossing of the frozen Chukchi Sea to Siberia.
The distance was approximately ninety miles across the ice. The intent was to reach Siberia and then make their way to assistance, to bring a ship back for Knight and Ada, to break what had become a two-year entrapment on an island with insufficient food and one very ill man.
On January 28, 1923, Crawford, Maurer, and Galle set out across the sea ice.
They were never seen again.
The sea ice is not a stable surface. It moves, cracks, piles, and shifts with the currents and winds beneath and around it. The crossing of ninety miles of pack ice in Arctic January is among the most dangerous things a person can attempt in those latitudes, and the three men who left the island that day did not survive it. Whether they fell through ice, became lost, suffered from exposure, or met some other end is not known. No bodies, no camp, no written record of their journey was ever found.