The boat was lost in a storm at some point during the expedition.

Ada, needing a vessel to hunt seals effectively — seals in the open water could not be approached on foot, but could be hunted from a boat — decided to build one.

What she built was a version of what Iñupiat communities had built for thousands of years: a skin boat, using driftwood for the frame, canvas and animal skins for the covering.

The Iñupiat called their open-frame skin boats umiaks, and the knowledge of how to construct them was one of the defining technologies of Arctic Indigenous civilization.