Ada Blackjack Surviving the Arctic Alone

Now, if you have been one of the people swept up in the TV show Alone, you are going to love this episode because Ada Blackjack is a woman who makes the Alone contestants look like amateurs. Ada Blackjack was stranded on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean for more than 2 years. Her four male explorer companions all perished in the harrowing conditions. Not only that, when she arrived on Wrangel Island, she had zero survival skills. Everything she learned, she taught herself after the men had disappeared and died.

Before we get into Ada Blackjack’s backstory, we have to understand a little bit about who was responsible for sending five relatively inexperienced people to an island with harrowing Arctic conditions. It was the early 1900s, and Arctic exploration was big business, especially the money you could make for speaking tours and selling books about your explorations. A chap called Vilhjalmur Stefansson – actually, he was originally William Stevenson, but he changed it to Vilhjalmur Stefansson to sound a little more exotic – had done a fair bit of Arctic travel, albeit with Inuit guides to help with his survival. He was trying to sell the idea of the “friendly Arctic”. He even published a book of the same name.

Part of the plan was to hire some Inuit people in the Alaskan town of Nome. So, the men arranged for a group of experienced Inuit hunters and guides to accompany them, as well as a local Inuit seamstress – with absolutely no survival skills – called Ada Blackjack. The only problem was, when the day came, the guides did not turn up, only Ada Blackjack, who in 1921 was dubious about going to live alone on an island with 4 white men for a year. Regardless, she desperately needed the money to care for her ill son, so she agreed to go. Two years later, when the rescue ship was finally able to make it through the harsh weather conditions, she was the only one still alive. What I want to know is, how did Ada Blackjack teach herself to survive in the harsh Arctic conditions and manage to learn to shoot, hunt, and trap to get back to her beloved son Bennett?

Wrangel Island, which is located about 150km off the northeast coast of Russia, had previously been claimed as Russian territory. Stefansson decided that he wanted to claim ownership of the island. In 1913, he had organized a failed Arctic expedition, where the survivors ended up stranded on Wrangel Island for 9 months. Wrangel Island’s biome is an Arctic Tundra, that means that temperatures are about 0 degrees for at least 10 months of the year. And in winter, for at least a month, the island is in complete darkness as the sun does not even come up. For the record, 11 people died on this expedition, but 6 years later, apparently Stefansson thought it was a good idea to send four more men to live on the island for a year. He wanted to claim the island as Canadian territory, but Canada said they were not interested. He instead thought he would claim it as British territory. Britain never agreed to this, but he went ahead and organized the expedition anyway. To be clear, Vilhjalmur Stefansson was not going on the expedition; he was very busy instead doing his speaking tours promoting the “friendly Arctic.”

Ada Blackjack was born Ada Delutuk in 1898 in a small village in Alaska, but after her father died, she was institutionalized into a Christian missionary school where she learned to read and write to a third-grade level, and she also learned skills such as sewing and cooking “white people’s food.” These missionary schools were a very similar concept of the missions that the Australian First Nations Stolen Generations were sent to.

This is how Ada became involved in the Wrangel Island expedition. She was promised $50 a month to accompany the men on the mission for a year, and that was a lot of money for an Inuit woman to be able to earn in the space of a year, especially as she would not have any living expenses in the meantime.

When Ada was 16, she married a local dog musher called Jack Blackjack. Jack was not a particularly nice man. He was an abusive alcoholic. Nevertheless, she had 3 children with him, but sadly 2 of her children died. Like I said, Jack was a bit of a dirtbag, and he abandoned her and her 5-year-old son Bennett in an isolated place called the Seward Peninsula. She was forced to walk, carrying her son 65km, back to the town of Nome. Here she found work as a seamstress, but as her son Bennett suffered from tuberculosis, a serious infection that affected the lungs, she placed him in an orphanage and vowed that she would find the money to get him out and pay for the medical care he needed.

Because Ada was brought up in a Christian mission and was not exposed to her Inupiat culture, she had absolutely no survival skills. She was afraid of guns and absolutely petrified of polar bears.

When she first arrived on Wrangel Island, she suffered a case of what was called Arctic Hysteria. She refused to work and tried desperately to make one of the explorers marry her. When they created a second trapping camp to send the object of her affection to, she would hike ten miles to be with him. The methods of punishment that these men used on the 23-year-old Ada were extreme and cruel. They locked her outside in the freezing temperatures and tied her to a pole so she would not run away. She was also desperately missing her young son Bennett. Eventually, her bout of mental illness subsided, and she began working and contributing to the camp by sewing socks and gloves for the explorers and making meals with the supplies they had brought along with them.

Now the island is only accessible for a few weeks a year, due to the ice freezing over, and for some reason, Vilhjalmur Stefansson advised the expedition to only take 6 months of supplies. I guess he believed that the friendly Arctic would provide for them. The problem was that the Arctic was not so friendly after all. The long dark days of winter coupled with the survival inexperience of the 4 men were a recipe for starvation. After a year, when the supply ship was expected – I must mention that the name of the ship was the Teddy Bear – the weather was exceptionally bad and the supply ship was not able to get through, and so the party of 5 were stuck on the island for another year. Things went downhill from here. One of the men, Lorne Knight, contracted scurvy from not getting enough nutrients. Knight kept detailed diaries of his symptoms and let me tell you they are extremely unpleasant. Toward the end of his illness, he was confined to his sleeping bag for 5 months and Ada cut a hole in the sleeping bag so he could go to the toilet.

In the meantime, on the 29th of January 1923, the other 3 men decided to set off across the frozen ocean to East Cape, Siberia. These three men were never seen again. So, for the next 7 months, Ada was in charge of cooking, hunting, gathering, collecting firewood, and looking after an invalid man who was too weak to leave his sleeping bag. The first thing Ada had to do was learn to set the traps. She also began to keep a diary. Her first entry was dated the 14th of March and reads, “The first fox I caught was on Feb. 21st, and then the second on March 3 and 4th, 5th, that makes 4 White foxes and then on March 13th, I caught three white foxes, that makes seven foxes altogether.” She caught many foxes and ensured that Knight was getting the best parts of the animal, but because of the deterioration of his gums and loose teeth, he struggled to eat. She also suffered from illnesses, such as swollen eyes and headaches, and during these times, she wrote in her diary, that she wanted to make sure that her son Bennett was given all of her belongings and was well looked after.

As Knight’s health deteriorated, he stated saying cruel things to Ada, such as her husband was right to beat her up and that no wonder her two children died because she couldn’t even take care of him. Regardless, she kept on caring for him. By the middle of May, Ada decided she needed to overcome her fear of guns and learn to shoot. She took one of the guns and used an empty tea tin as a target. She kept practising and within two weeks, she had shot her first bird. She also crafted a rest for her rifle to make the process of seal hunting easier.

On the 23rd of June, Lorne Knight died, and Ada was all alone on the island. The ground was too frozen to dig a grave for him, so she made a barricade of boxes around his body to protect his corpse from polar bears, and she moved into the supply tent.

On the 27th of June, she managed to kill her first seal. The next day, she stayed at the camp to clean the seal skin, and she was the camp was visited by a polar bear and her cub. She was deathly afraid, but she managed to shoot some shotgun rounds to scare the bear away.

Her shooting skills steadily became better until she was a crack shot, and she brought in a reasonably steady stream of food for herself, including seagulls, reindeer, seals, ducks, and bird eggs. Being a seamstress, she made herself a reindeer coat, and she even created a seal skin boat so she could go fishing and carved oars for herself. By the end of her stay, she only weighed 40 kg or 90 pounds.

On the 20th of August 1923, Ada heard a noise that she thought was a walrus. After two years, it was a rescue ship, and she was finally able to be reunited with her son Bennett. I would like to say that things went smoothly from here, but of course, being an Inupiat woman in the 1920s, her diaries were taken, and she was exploited by both the men who found her and the man who organized the mission. If you want to do a deep dive into her story, I highly recommend the book, Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic By Jennifer Niven.

Now I would like to play you a song inspired by Ada Blackjack. The song was originally written for the Tarenorerer episode, but I thought the chorus really fit Ada’s vibe too, so I rewrote the verses. So this is “Underestimate Me,” the Ada Blackjack remix.