What he did not fully account for was that this knowledge was not casually transferable, that it represented thousands of years of accumulated adaptation, and that sending a handful of young men with six months of supplies to claim a remote Arctic island was not the same thing as actually possessing that knowledge.

The Four Young Men — And The Woman They Almost Left Behind

When Stefansson began organizing the Wrangel Island expedition in the summer of 1921, he recruited four men:

Allan Crawford was twenty years old, a Canadian whose father was an acquaintance of Stefansson’s.

He was named nominal leader partly to give the expedition Canadian standing for a territorial claim.

He had minimal Arctic experience.

Lorne Knight was twenty-eight, an American who had previously been on one of Stefansson’s earlier Arctic expeditions.