Ada Blackjack and The Cat
Ada Blackjack with her son Bennett in 1923, public domain (Wikimedia Commons)
It’s been a hot summer. So instead of talking about the craft of writing or avoiding AI slop, let’s take a break and go north… way north.
This month’s post is about the book Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in The Arctic by Jennifer Niven (Hyperion, 2003). Ada Blackjack was an Inuk (Iñupiaq) woman from Nome, Alaska who supported four men on the Wrangel Island expedition organized by Vilhjalmur Stefansson in 1921.
Arctic explorer and ethnologist Stefansson gave lectures on how “‘a family can now live at the North Pole as comfortably as it can in Hawaii’” (p. 19). To prove his point, the Canadian-American wanted to settle Wrangel Island and claim it for Canada, despite the fact it was already claimed by Russia.
Wrangel Island sits inside the Arctic Circle north of Siberia, about 600 miles northwest of Nome, Alaska as the crow flies. It’s a place not even Indigenous people lived, much less anyone else. But as you can probably tell, Stefansson wasn’t bothered by facts or details.
Stefansson gathered four eager young men and sent them off to live on Wrangel Island for at least a year, preferably more. (Stefansson himself conveniently stayed in America and continued his speaking tours.) The men first stopped in Nome to gather supplies and recruit Inuit (Eskimos was the term back then) to go with them, especially women who knew how to sew. Making warm clothing would be essential.
Only Ada Blackjack was desperate enough to ignore her reservations about such a strange trip. Divorced and struggling, she needed money for her only child, Bennett, who suffered from tuberculosis and needed constant care. She had placed him in an orphanage while she worked.
Before I learned all that, I opened the book’s first pages and took in the black-and-white photograph of the expedition’s members and read their names, as listed below:
- Allan Crawford—commander; Toronto, Canada (age 20)
- Lorne Knight—second in command; McMinnville, Oregon (age 28)
- Fred Maurer—third in command; New Philadelphia, Ohio (age 28)
- Milton Galle—assistant; New Braunfels, Texas (age 19)
- Ada Blackjack—seamstress; Nome, Alaska (age 23)
- Victoria (“Vic”)—expedition cat
Wait! What? “Expedition cat”?!
I looked at the photo again—and there she was, barely visible on Milton Galle’s lap: a cat.
The 1921 Wrangel Island Expedition team, public domain (Wikimedia Commons)
As I read the book, I learned that on August 18, the four adventurers boarded the Victoria and set sail from Seattle to Nome. Niven writes:
Since the beginning of seafaring history, cats have been considered good luck on voyages, and have earned their passage by hunting the rats that live in the dark crevices of ships… And now the chief steward of the Victoriapresented them with a tiny gray-striped furball with pert ears and big eyes… [T]he steward felt that Mauer and the others should take her with them to bring them luck on their trip north. They dubbed her Victoria, Vic for short, and they vowed to look after her and keep her safe. (p. 53)
In fact, Fred Maurer had previously gone on another Stefansson expedition in 1913, which Niven wrote about in another book The Ice Master. Out of twenty-five people, he was one of eleven survivors, not including the black cat he brought home with him. Nigeraurak, or Nicki for short, lived with Fred’s mother, Mary Maurer, when Fred ventured yet again into the frozen north. (A picture of Mary holding Nicki is in the book, along with other adorable pictures of Vic.)
I love cats. I know they’re amazing. But surviving in the arctic on an ill-planned expedition for over a year? Even I was amazed.
I had to research this—and discovered that bringing cats on polar expeditions wasn’t as extraordinary as it seems. One expedition cat even kept a diary of his adventures, later “ghostwritten” [insert wink] by Caroline Alexander titled Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition. (Mrs. Chippy was a male cat, but the humans didn’t know that until the name had already stuck. I haven’t read that book yet but it’s definitely on my list.)
Back to Ada Blackjack, she and the team battled the elements, and without giving away any spoilers, when the survivors were finally rescued in 1923, Vic was too. Further proof that us humans—and our cats—really are amazing!
To learn the rest of the story, I highly suggest checking out Ada Blackjack and going on an adventure.
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