Knight's Role on the Expedition
Focusing on Christmas 1922 & surrounding diary entries
By Grace Beilstein
Knight's Role on Wrangel Island
The Last Living Christmas on Wrangel Island: 1922
Entries December 23-27, 1922. Read Knight's unedited writing below.
Mss-90-01-01-148
Lorne Knight Diary from Wrangel Island, page 148 of Volume 1. Documents December 23-17, 1922 on Wrangel Island.
Lorne Knight on the Expedition & his lasting narrative
Knight served as second-in-command on the Wrangel Expedition, but took on a lot of leader-like responsibilities because of his extensive previous experience on Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic expedition (1915-1919).
The end of volume 1 of the recovered Lorne Knight Diary and sparse writings from early in the calendar year of 1923 that begin volume 2 reveal an unraveling picture of the group and their cohesion on the island.
I chose to focus on a particular page in Knight’s diary that documents December 23-27, 1922. Knight writes about his disagreement with the other expedition members on which day it actually is, “Alltho my entry says Dec. 24 the others have Dec. 25/ so we celebrated (?)”
As for their dividing up of work tasks, Crawford and Knight share much of the repair work and upkeep associated with their stay on Wrangel Island, especially through the winter. Knight mentions repairing the sled himself on December 26 in the diary, and both men collaborated to make sure a tent was ready for them to venture West in search of Siberia once desperately in need of relief supplies at the end of 1922. Knight’s diary accounts paint the picture of Arctic expedition leadership as the labor-intensive role that it was – likely a large contrast to the way the public at the time saw the role of expedition leaders.
With such a lean crew – Crawford, Knight, Galle, Maurer, and Ada – each member needed to contribute to their survival mission, though they would ultimately fail, with the splintered off group of Crawford, Galle and Maurer perishing after leaving Wrangel camp.
Knight’s writings become noticeably less detailed and more frantic over the course of volume 1, and he became too unwell with scurvy to continue on with volume 2 past the first days of January. Considering him as the first-person author of this key text about day-to-day Wrangel life clearly casts some doubts about objectivity, especially in the middle sections that mention punishing Ada. Ada’s own diary, which another group explores within this exhibit, is a crucial source for comparison and extension to understand the happenings between January and June 1923. Knight’s specific contributions during the expedition live on in large part to his ability to pen them to the page himself; we as readers can hear his voice clearly through the past century.