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Praise for Ada Blackjack The Christian Science Monitor Foolish optimism kills explorers "Ada Blackjack: The True Story of Survival in the Arctic" represents a kind of sequel to "The Ice Master," which described Stefansson's earlier effort to discover a new continent beneath the North Pole. Though that 1913 voyage ended in disaster, eight years later, he was ready to risk more lives in another arctic adventure. The results were similarly deadly.
With their food running critically low by January 1923, Crawford, Maurer, and Galle decided on an attempt to reach Siberia. Knight, suffering from severe scurvy and having failed an earlier attempt, was left with Blackjack. It is here that Blackjack's story takes center stage. Although she was an Inuk, she had no experience in hunting and Arctic survival. Her life had been spent largely with whites in the ramshackle towns of Alaska. But as Knight's condition grew increasingly dire, Blackjack was forced to learn those skills on the job, and eventually the diminutive woman did well enough to provide food for both of them. The pair waited desperately for the return of their three colleagues until Knight finally succumbed and Blackjack was left to fend for herself. The vivid imagery Niven paints of the desperate struggle for survival on the island gives way to the story of personal politics surrounding the aftermath. The last third of the book details the battles by Stefansson, who comes across as little more then a tireless self-promoter, to protect his belief in the Friendly Arctic. Stefansson's detractors - including the man who led the 1923 relief expedition - were determined to discredit him. The families of the men who were lost, of course, want answers. And caught in the middle of this tragedy is Blackjack - praised at first for surviving the doomed project and then vilified before having her reputation restored. "Ada Blackjack" is a winning account of the expedition and how one woman overcame enormous odds to survive. Niven does a superb job of re-creating harrowing events and weaving them into a narrative supported by official documents and excerpts from the diaries of the five who ventured to Wrangel Island. Although Blackjack herself, a shy and retiring woman, was reluctant to talk about what she experienced on the island and her life afterward, she's found a stirring biographer in Niven. Washington Post Alone with a Corpse and a Cat Named Vic With Ada Blackjack, Niven picks up where she left off. Surprised to learn that one of the survivors of the epic journey she described in her fine debut, The Ice Master, returned on yet another ill-conceived expedition to the very spot where he'd barely escaped death (this time to die), Niven learned that this stoic, pillar-of-the-community type, Fred Maurer, had been accompanied on the later voyage by a pint-sized Eskimo woman rumored to be a prostitute. Women are rare in the annals of polar exploration, so Niven was intrigued: Who was she? The 23-year-old Ada Blackjack, it turns out. And while the gossip about her whoring seems sexist bunk, what's certain is that she was the only one of five to make it back alive from two years' hard luck on Wrangel Island, a desolate spit of land in the East Siberian Sea that's locked in pack ice each winter. As Niven tells it, Maurer and three other men signed up with explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson to spend 12 months on Wrangel Island, beginning in September of 1921. A larger-than-life figure who emerges here as more P.T. Barnum than Roald Amundsen, Stefansson (né William Stephenson) had an idea that Wrangel could become an important air base. Although Stefansson didn't plan to make this trip himself, he assured his recruits they would find the Arctic "friendly," even bountiful. Still, they should take along an Eskimo or two to help them through the winter. The problem: The one Inuit who consented to join them was Blackjack, and she'd grown up in Nome, Alaska. She could sew, but she had never learned to live off the land, and she really agreed to go only because she desperately wanted money (to retrieve her son from an orphanage) and a new husband. The young explorers took her anyway, and when things went horribly wrong, she ended up alone for months with a corpse and a cat named Vic. Unwilling to give up, she read from a Bible, prayed, typed up notes on a typewriter and taught herself to trap fox, hunt seal and duck, and even fashion a umiak (a skiff) from driftwood, canvas and animal skins. Once rescued, she received a (fleeting) hero's welcome as the female Robinson Crusoe. Niven convincingly shows that Blackjack is every inch a folk hero, and the book succeeds as a sure-footed novelization of her forgotten story, spiked with occasional references to original sources -- including her diary -- that Niven recovered. An extensive fifth section of the book takes on another project: how Blackjack's story played. As Niven makes her way through the fog of bad press -- at one point a New York paper accused Blackjack of murder -- she becomes less narrator than critic, and Ada Blackjack evolves from an engrossing fireside yarn to an equally engrossing parsing of legal and media machinations. San Francisco Chronicle Reviews in Brief Jennifer Niven uses a wealth of previously unpublished material to construct Blackjack's story: Abandoned by her husband and too impoverished to provide for her tubercular son, Blackjack reluctantly agreed to join the Arctic expedition despite having no previous outdoor experience of any kind. The first half of Niven's tale is dedicated to the planning and execution of this mission, and it reads like a grim catalog of mistakes: The four young men are inexperienced, in some cases woefully so; the trip is underfunded and poorly planned; Wrangel Island itself is a disputed piece of property under no nation's formal jurisdiction. The reader will be likely to be less forgiving of Vilhjalmur Stefansson (né William Stephenson), the expedition's organizer, an explorer-cum-swindler whose high-flown rhetoric convinced his naive followers that everything was taken care of. Once on Wrangel Island, Blackjack proves to be an unlikely heroine -- moody and sometimes childishly willful, she nevertheless survives for two years, teaching herself to shoot and trap even when weakened by malnutrition. Niven's account is always alive to the human dimensions of this nearly forgotten tragedy. But it is in the second half of the book where the real lessons are. After her return home, Blackjack becomes embroiled in years of controversy and bitter disputes as Stefansson and others falsify documents and hide evidence as each tries to foist the blame on someone else. Blackjack finds herself vilified in the press; seeking only anonymity, she is dragged before the public eye, manipulated by her advocates as much as by her detractors. Niven's book seems like a noble attempt to set things straight, but it's a shame that it couldn't have happened during the protagonist's lifetime. Nowadays, we might know better than to trundle off into the wilderness on nothing more than a handshake, but we can still use Niven's reminder that history is too often written by the winners. San Diego Union Tribune Marooned: Gripping 'Ada Blackjack' is a real survivor tale "An adventure is a mistake," Alaskan John Schandelmeier told me. John is a hunter, trapper, bush pilot and two-time winner of the thousand-mile Yukon Quest dogsled race that runs between Fairbanks, Alaska, and Whitehorse in the Canadian Yukon. I was interviewing him on the first day of my three-month stay in the Yukon. Alaskans have a different attitude toward danger than those of us from kinder climates. They believe that death is the inevitable result of risk and survival the measure of planning and skill. Jennifer Niven's new book is animated by a discourse between these two attitudes. The tale of 23-year-old Ada Blackjack's endurance alone in the Arctic is a genuine Schandelmeieran adventure: The story of how one woman managed to survive an Arctic expedition that was based on the fatuous notion of a benign Arctic and riddled with foolhardy mistakes. In 1921, seven years after Schackleton's rescue of his marooned Endurance crew in Antarctica and eight years after Vilhjalmur Stefansson abandoned his crew on the ice-locked Karluk, Stefansson attempted to send a second expedition to desolate Wrangel Island. Ada Blackjack, a city Inuit raised in Nome with none of the legendary winter survival skills of her ancestors, was hired on as seamstress. Stefansson had a theory he called the "Friendly Arctic." The North was a hospitable place, he claimed: "given a healthy body and a cheerful disposition ... a family can now live at the North Pole as comfortably as it can in Hawaii." Stefansson was wrong but Stefansson prevailed, at least until Niven came along to chronicle the tale. "Ada Blackjack" is a well-told tale, a gripping page-turner of a read. Blackjack went on the journey with no forethought, training or preparation. For six months, in conditions of extreme hazard, Blackjack managed to take care of herself and a scurvy-ridden compatriot whom she disliked and feared. She taught herself to hunt, shoot, tolerate loneliness and desolation. It was an incredible personal victory. Minneapolis Star Tribune Ada Blackjack an enthralling story of survival Jennifer Niven, author of the acclaimed The Ice Master, weaves together another graphic account of Arctic exploration in her new book, Ada Blackjack. The 1921 expedition to Wrangel Island, a subzero wasteland north of Siberia, seemed ill-fated even before it began, despite sponsorship by famed explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Niven's enthralling and meticulous sketches of the campaign, culled from journals, diaries and government documents and accompanied by stunning photographs, describe even the seemingly trivial worries the men had before departing. Stefansson, whom the four explorers idolized, is wonderfully characterized as an elusive curiosity; his involvement in the Wrangel expedition is increasingly ambiguous, and Niven ominously quotes his stubborn assertions that "the polar regions were a state of mind, that they were a friendly place to live in for the man who used common sense." Boston Globe Of Frostbite, Scurvy, and Skepticism Compellingly researched and told with novelistic flair, Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic, by Jennifer Niven, is as brilliant and multifaceted as sunlight on new snow. In the 1920s, famed Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson made it his secret mission to claim desolate Wrangel Island for the British. With false assurances that he would lead his crew, Stefansson put together an unseasoned group of four young men and a diminutive 23-year-old Inuit named Ada Blackjack, who was so desperate for money for her sick son that she willingly signed on as seamstress. Blackjack might seem an unlikely choice, but she was one of the most important expedition members because Arctic survival depended on warm, watertight clothing. Almost immediately, the trip was a disaster. The cold was vicious, the brutal landscape unconquerable, and Ada fell prey to a kind of ''Arctic hysteria" and refused to work. Supplies ran out almost as fast as Stefansson's money, forcing three of the men to strike out for Siberia. It was up to Ada to care for the remaining man, Lorne Knight, now dying of scurvy, and to teach herself to hunt seal, trap fox, build a boat, and even fight polar bears. When Knight died, the astonishing Ada carried on alone for six more months until she was rescued. Immediately, she was heralded as a female Robinson Crusoe. But Ada never saw herself as any sort of a hero, and refused to speak, frustrating the press, who, knowing a good story when they saw one, began to portray her as a marriage-hungry harlot. It was only when they blamed her for Knight's death that Ada finally gave her account. The stories we choose to believe tell a lot about ourselves. Blackjack was scorned because it was hard to accept that a woman could do what four men could not, but her diaries, and her own account, are revelatory. Booklist (starred review) Niven's first book, The Ice Master (2000), was a thrilling chronicle of an Arctic exploration mission gone horribly awry. In many ways, Ada Blackjack is a follow-up, as several of the same characters and problems recur. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the scientist whose carelessness was largely responsible for the ill-fated voyage of the Karluk, once again embarks on a haphazard mission. This time, his aim is to send a colonizing party to frozen Wrangel Island, intending to claim it for Canada. Four eager young men volunteer for the trip and try to hire Eskimos to hunt, sew, and cook for them, but only one signs up: 23-year-old Ada Blackjack. The group manages to survive on Wrangel for a year, but then an expected supply ship fails to reach them, and their situation quickly becomes dire. Three of the men set off for Siberia to get help, leaving an ailing colleague and Ada to fend for themselves. Using the diaries of the men and Ada, Niven vividly re-creates the frozen land, the struggles of the group, and Ada's ups and downs after her return. This exhilarating account is essential reading for adventure-story fans. Publisher's Weekly
Library Journal We are all enthralled with the drama of disastrous adventures that inevitably fall apart. Niven follows up her first book in this vein, The Ice Master, with a sequel of sorts in which the same incompetent leader of a tragic Arctic mission organizes a second expedition to the same area in 1921. The book's focus... is on a 23-year-old Inuit woman named Ada Blackjack, who was hired as the team's seamstress and was destined to be the only survivor of the misbegotten venture. Niven builds a solid and suspenseful tale around the framework of records and diaries to reveal an obscure woman's accidental heroism. |
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