Marooned in the Arctic: Ada Blackjack's Extraordinary Life

In 1921 a top secret expedition of four Canadian men and one Inuit woman set out to occupy Wrangle Island in Siberia to claim it for Britain. Several Inuit families who were to go were no shows, but Ada Blackjack desperately needed the $50 a month salary and decided to go alone. Her son had tuberculosis and as a single mother Ada needed to find money for his medical treatment.

Ada was born in 1898 near Solomon, Alaska. Her father died when she was eight and her mother sent her to a Methodist mission in Nome. She was taught English, basic reading and writing skills, and the Christian religion. Ada never learned traditional Inuit skills, except for having a skill of turning animal skins into clothing. That was her purpose on the expedition.

At sixteen Ada married  Jack Blackjack and they moved to the Seward Peninsula. Ada suffered six years of abuse and starvation from Jack. Two of their children died, Bennett developed tuberculosis, and Jack deserted the family. Ada divorced Jack and took Bennett to Nome where she cleaned houses and sewed to support them. Bennett needed medical care which Ada could not afford and she took him to the Methodist orphanage for care.

Ada heard that the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson was organizing an expedition. He had hired Errol Lorne Knight, Frederick W. Maurer, Milton Galle, and Allan R. Crawford to carry out the secret mission. Stefansson told the men that the Arctic land could support a comfortable life, that game was abundant, and settlement by Europeans the goal.

Marooned in the Arctic by Peggy Caravantes tells the story of  the doomed expedition. All four men perished, and Ada had to survive alone until she was rescued two years after her arrival. Caravantes points that the men were totally unprepared and overly optimistic. They failed to provide adequate food for the long winters. They had forgone buying the boat needed to reach the ice floes where their prey could be found. As the men fell ill with scurvy and starvation, Ada learned to set trap lines and shot a rifle, chop the wood, and nurse the men--all while suffering loneliness, cultural isolation, fear of polar bears, homesickness for her son, and scurvy.

After Ada's rescue she faced pubic notoriety and the pressure to provide answers to the men's fate. She was lionized and dehumanized, had another son, fell ill with tuberculosis, and died in poverty in 1983.

Ada's story has all the elements of a great story. Adventure, pathos, racism, strength, maternal love, cultural imperialism, and Arctic exploration. Caravantes has done her research. But this book meant for ages 12+ lacks emotional connection, vitality, and excitement. It reads like an encyclopedia article with too much telling. The characters don't live. For instance, we are told that the ill and dying Knight wrote a melancholy letter but we don't know what he said.

The book has sparked an interest and I want to know more about Ada.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The True Story of Ada Backjack, the "Female Robinson Crusoe"
by Peggy Caravantes
Women of Action
Chicago Review Press
$19.95 hard cover
Publication March 2016
ISBN: 9781613730980

Help! & Tidbits & News & Old & New

Help! I bought these handkerchiefs on eBay a few years ago and have been trying to find out WHO these kids are! Jennie, Mortimer, and Jerry. Ring any bells? I was sure I would find they were movie or radio characters.

A friend found this in her mother's sewing room. She wondered what it was. 

 It is marked "Pat. May 22 1900".

I Goggled it and found one that sold on Etsy. The seller had attached information from the patent. It was a seam ripper! Read an article about the inventor and how it was used at American Scissor Stories. Now I want one.

Sunetra from my weekly quilt group made Woven Rust from The Fiona Quilt Block book. She loves it and wants to make another.

I bought two handkerchiefs from eBay, both mint with tags and minor age stains.

Pine Woods Press is writing a book about Lake Superior light saving stations and found my post The Shipwreck Coast, Girl, and a Lamp. My husband's grandmother spent time at Crisp's Point and Vermillion Lighthouse when a teenager. She helped with the children. She received a post card of Capt. James Scott, the Crisp's Point life saving station keeper, and it will appear in the upcoming book! Meantime they are sending me their first publication Storms and Sand about Big Sable Point shipwrecks.

Capt James Scott, dated Sept. 1911

My Shiba Inus both are getting older. They have heart murmurs and now Suki is showing elevated levels for borderline kidney troubles. Poor dears. Suki is about 14, and Kamikaze about 11. Both spent their early years as breeders in puppy mills before being rescued and adopted by us.

Suki

Kamikaze

March has brought snow....the snow we were supposed to get in January. Sigh. 

Meanwhile I finished a quilt started in 1996. I made the Biblical Block Sampler  by Rosemary Makham before I had the skill set for it. It didn't fit together. Several years ago I took it apart and turned it into two smaller pieces. This part was the central Pine Tree.

Multiple Listings by Tracy McMillian

Life is good for Nicki. She has an incredible job in real estate that supports her and her son Cody in a solid upper-middle class lifestyle. Her boyfriend Jake is young, handsome, daring, and attentive. She and Jake have started building a restaurant and have put money down on a beautiful new house.

Then Nicki's life unravels. It starts with her father Ronnie showing up at her door, newly released from prison and in need of a place to stay.

Ronnie and Nicki speak in alternate chapters, allowing the reader deep insight into their perceptions and emotional life. Ronnie must come to terms with his past and how it has affected his relationships. He really wants to be a better man. But it's hard when you know just how to read and manipulate people--especially women who find him irresistible. Nicki has her own baggage with a dad in prison and a disconnected mother turning tricks for drug money. She chooses the wrong men and does not understand her teenage son. What she has to learn is that Ronnie is just what she needs in her life.

Multiple Listings is relationship author and screenwriter Tracy McMillan's first novel. The characterization is great and the plot moves along quickly. Early on I thought I knew how it would end, and it did end that way, but there were interesting twists to keep up my interest. It can get preachy, especially with Ronnie wanting to use his hard-earned wisdom to save the world. But I bet a lot of women will find the lessons valuable and affirming. We want Ronnie to make it outside of prison and for Nicki to allow herself to trust again. Cody is pivotal, for he badly needs a man to understand him and Ronnie knows what he is thinking even before Cody knows what he is thinking.

How long before this book becomes a movie? I wouldn't be surprised.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"Inspired by the author's life and imbued with wit and profound insight into relationships, Multiple Listings speaks poignantly--and often hilariously--about the ties that bind families of all types together."

Multiple Listings
by Tracy McMillan
Gallery Books
Publication March 8, 2016
$26.00 hard cover
ISBN: 9781476785523

Quilt Display, Gifted New Handkerchiefs, 1857 Update

My quilt guild has a display at the Royal Oak Public Library. This was my library when I was a girl & teenager, so it is so special to share some of my quilts there! I helped set up the display last night during a snow storm.

I brought my quilt based on the Morning Glory fairy in A Year With the Fairies by Anna O. Scott. It is mixed media using crayon tinting, embroidery, appliquéd silk flowers, beading, and a sheer net overlay. The pink fabric is silk.

 My handkerchief border quilt includes embroidery based on a 1930s greeting card vintage buttons.

A part of my Redwork based on illustrations from Reggie's Christmas can be seen on the shelf below. The book was read by my mother-in-law who got it from her uncle James O'Dell.

The left quilt below is a folded bow-tie. The doggies are wool appliqué on cotton.

 So many cute things were offered for the display, small quilts and pot holders.

 Scott T. Dog uses reproduction 1930s fabrics.

Yesterday morning at my weekly quilt gathering's show and tell I saw a quilt based on The Fiona Quilt Block by Carolyn Perry Goins. I will have a photo later. And a lady gave me some handerchiefs from her collection.

AND, between my morning group and the late afternoon gathering I met with a lady to guide her in making her first handkerchief collage! She had a wonderful heirloom collection of laces, trims, and dress pieces from her mother and grandmother. I want to go back and get photos!

I finished six blocks of the 1857 Album from Sentimental Stitches. 

Little Hazel from Esther Aliu has been showing up on her Facebook page in extraordinary manifestations! The interpretations are remarkable! I eagerly await the next part to be released!

When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping Our Future

"Today, we stand at the very edge of a vast, uncharted digital landscape, where our collective memory is stored in ephemeral bits and bytes and lives in air-conditioned server rooms. What sources will historians turn to in 100, let alone 1,000 years to understand our own time if all of our memory lives in digital codes that may longer be decipherable?" from the publisher's website

After seeing When We Are No More by Abbey Smith Rumsey on NetGalley I couldn't stop thinking about it--the topic was too fascinating. I was thrilled to be granted the book.

Rumsey carefully builds her story, considerings how humans have remembered since Adam and Eve, through the revolutionary development of writing cuneiform on clay tablets, to the proliferation of books via the printing press, the establishment of libraries, to the digitalization of knowledge. She shows how each advancement brought change and challenges as humanity coped with how to store, access, and control the ever growing data bank of human knowledge. Then she presents the challenges presented by the digitalization of knowledge and the precariousness of a digital cultural memory.

Humanity must find the thin line between the distraction of novelty and amnesia and loss of past wisdom which we may need when facing future challenges. Issues of privacy and copyright law vs. the ideal of an open Internet, and the commercialization of data are also issues needing to be addressed. With the overwhelming amount of digital data, deciding what we can 'afford' to lose, and what must be preserved, becomes a major concern.

The book is written in three parts.
Part One: Where We Come From looks at human memory, the development of writing, the printing press, and the library.
Part Two: Where We Are considers Materialism, Science, how we remember, imagination, and mastering memory in the digital age.
Part Three: Where We Are Going considers the questions that we must answer that will ensure a continuation of cultural memory into the future.

Rumsey had created a beautifully written, important book.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping Our Future
Abbey Smith Rumsey
Bloomsbury Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2016
$28.00 hard cover
ISBN:9781620408025

A Hell I Dare Hardly Imagine: Ernest Greenwood and the Death March to Ranau

Sjt Ernest Greenwood, about 1939

My first cousin 2x removed, my great-grandfather's sister's boy, was a Japanese prisoner of war at the Sandakan prison camp in Borneo. In 1945, knowing the Allies would soon land on Borneo, the Japanese moved the starving prisoners inland to the small village of Ranau. The Death March from Sandakan to Ranau is one of the most notorious and horrific war crimes. All 900 British soldiers died. The only survivors were eight Australian men who escaped into the jungle to be helped by the local natives. Sjt. Ernest Greenwood of the Royal Artillery, at age 29, died on June 11, 1945 having gone though a hell I can't bear to imagine.

Ernest was the only child of Alice Jane Greenwood born June 11, 1893 to William and Elizabeth Greenwood of Bacup, Lancashire, England. Read more about my Lancashire Greenwood family here. The Greenwoods worked in the cotton mills. The 1911 census shows Alice as Elise Jane, age 17, working as a machinist making underclothing.

Ernest was born June, 1916 to Alice, who was not married. I have found little else about Alice or Ernest. Until military records of Ernest's death. The information in the records is brief:

Sjt. Ernest Greenwood of the 7 Coast Regt. of the Royal Artillery died on June 11, 1945 on Borneo, was born June, 1916, son of Alice Jane Greenwood of Waterfoot, Rossendale, Lancashire. He is buried in the Labuan War Cemetery on Borneo.

Waterfoot was a mill town on the road between Bacup, where Alice was born, and Rawtenstall.

After the fall of Singapore about 3,500 British and Australian prisoners were taken to three POW camps in Sandakan, Borneo. They were to build an airstrip. At first they were treated humanely. When it was discovered the POWs had a radio and were in communication with locals there were repercussions with executions and the removal of all officers to another POW camp. Formosan guards were brought in; there began a regime of beatings, torture, and starvation.

In the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai the character played by Alec Guinness is shut in a cage in the blinding sun and left without water. That also happened at Sandakan. I am also reminded of Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides about the Bataan Death March in 1942 where 7,000 to 10,000 POWs died in 1942. What Ernest endured was like that.

By September 1944 the British bombing of the airstrip at Sandakan made the Japanese abandon it. The POW were now of no use to the Japanese. Food was getting scare. By January 1945 the prisoners were no longer given food, surviving on what rice they had hoarded and salvaging what they could, eating what they noted the jungle animals ate.

When the Japanese knew the Allies would be landing on Borneo a plan was made: the POWs would be their slave 'mule packs' as they removed deeper into the jungle, to a small village 164 miles away--Ranau. It was to be a death march. As groups of prisoners left on their march to death, the remaining POWs at Sandakan were dying, corpses piling up. The Allies did nothing.

On the march the shoe-less prisoners had to hack through the jungle, climb mountains, and cross turbid rivers during the Monsoon. With only four days food allowance they marched for weeks. Prisoners carried 44 lbs of rice they would not eat. When a prisoner died his load was added to a survivor's load.

The men suffered from beriberi, malaria, dehydration, dysentery, sores, and gangrene. There were leaches, snakes, and fire ants, cuts from the undergrowth. Prisoners were turned into 'walking larders' as the guards resorted to cannibalism to survive. Prisoners who stopped or were too ill to carry on were shot.

The prisoners that remained at Sandakan continued to starve, suffer, and die. On August 17 the Japanese shot the last 40 survivors--14 days after Japan's official surrender.

Ernest died in June, 1945, just a few months before the end of the war. Of the 2,000 Australian soldiers of the 2nd A.I.F. and 750 British soldiers who left Sandakan only 6 Australians survived the death march. None survived Sandakan.

Plans had been drawn for a rescue operation of the Sandakan camps but were never implemented.

Read a survivor's story at a 1999 New York Time article here. Read about the Australian soldiers who survived here. And here read more of the survivor's stories. Read a military historian's article on the Death March and how the Allies failed to save the Borneo POWs here.

The Japanese in charge of Sansakan faced war crimes tribunals; eight men were hung and 55 imprisoned. The overall commander of the camp evaded the tribunal--he committed suicide.

Labuan War Cemetery in Malaysia is the resting place of the men who perished on Borneo. Including Ernest, my distant cousin.

"It is only in real life that I resort to fiction": Constance Fenimore Woolson

A successful novelist and short story writer in her lifetime, she died in fear of the poverty that awaited her golden years. Jilted by her Civil War soldier hero she found consolation in the intellectual intimacy shared with novelist Henry James. She longed for a home and spent her life as an expat wandering Europe and visiting exotic locales. She is the one of most successful and acclaimed female American novelists that you have never heard of: Constance Fenimore Woolson.

I was 'granted my wish' for Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist by Anne Boyd Rioux through NetGalley. I had never heard of Woolson (1840-1894) before.

Born in Cooperstown, NY ( which was founded by her grandfather), Woolson's great-uncle was the famed novelist James Fenimore Cooper. After the death of Woolson's three sisters the family went west to start over in Cleveland, OH. The family vacationed on Michigan's Mackinac Island, which became the setting for her first novel, Anne. It is also where she met the man she would love and lose, Zeph Spalding.

Although she wrote as a girl it was not until the death of her father, and the resulting fiscal necessity, that she began to write and publish. As a 'surplus woman' after the loss of so many men during the Civil War Woolson needed to find a way to support herself and her widowed mother. There were enough teachers and governesses.

It was a time when female writers faced a wall of prejudice; it was commonly believed that women did not have the necessary intellectual abilities to write. And when they did write they were expected to offer moral tales to educate the young.

Her middle name "Fenimore" drew attention and Harper and Row agreed to publish her stories. Seeking inspiration in the world brought Woolson to New York City, Florida, Charleston, Asheville, and finally to Europe.

Woolson faced hearing loss (as did her mother) and suffered from depression (as had her father and brother). She developed pain and loss of feeling in her arm from writing. She would not leave Harper & Row for better money but could not save enough money to buy a permanent home. She rarely allowed her loneliness, fear, or pain to show. She wrote, "In my fiction I never say anything which is not absolutely true (it is only in real life that I resort to fiction)."

Woolson is most known for her deep and private relationship with Henry James. Yet even James was shielded from her inner despair. Her last days were spent in deep pain, taking enough morphine to dull it but also robbing her of sleep. Woolson fell, or jumped, from her balcony and died at age 54.

Rioux's compelling presentation of Woolson's complicated personality brings the author to life.
Now I can not wait to read the companion book of Woolson's short works, Miss Grief and Other Stories edited by Rioux, author of this biography.

I received a free ARC through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist
Anne Boyd Rioux
WW Norton & Co.
$32.95 hard cover
Publication Date: February 29, 2016
ISBN: 9780393245097

"Biography at its best aims at resurrection. Anne Boyd Rioux has brought the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson back to life for us. Hurrah!" —Robert D. Richardson, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning William James: In the Maelstrom of American Moderni