They had navigated the waters around the island in skin boats.

They had survived the same conditions that killed Crawford, Maurer, Galle, and Knight.

They had done it for millennia.

The island that Vilhjalmur Stefansson had proposed to claim for the British Empire — as though it were unclaimed, as though no one had been there — was an island with a human history measured in thousands of years.

The knowledge of how to live there, how to hunt its game and navigate its waters and survive its winters, had existed in Indigenous communities long before any European ever saw the island.

The four men who died on Wrangel Island died without that knowledge.