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Norwegians want sunken ship “Maud” back from Canada
last update: Jul 20, 2011 04:47 PM
From a “Globe and Mail – Canada” article: The ship has sat at the bottom of an Arctic fjord in Canada for the better part of a century, but now there is an international tug-of-war going on over who owns it.
The Norwegians, who really own it, believe it should be given back, but the people of Cambridge Bay in Nunavut say it’s part of their heritage and should remain in its icy grave. In addition, the Norwegians would need permission to move it from the Heritage Ministry, which has given no indication where it stands on the fate of the sunken ship.
The “Baymaud” was designed by famed polar explorer Roald Amundsen of Norway for a voyage to the North Pole, and was originally named the “Maud” after one of the country’s former queens.
Amundsen made his name as the first person to reach the South Pole, and even if the Maud did not reach the North Pole as he’d hoped, it still made a famous crossing of the Northwest Passage and a host of important scientific discoveries. So it is special to the Norwegians, who intend to build a museum to house it.
However, the Cambridge Bay residents, or at least a good number of them, say they have been looking at the top of the Baymaud for 80 years. After Amundsen abandoned it in 1925, it was purchased by the Hudson’s Bay Company which used it as a floating warehouse. But the winter ice took its toll and it sank in the bay where it was anchored in the winter of 1930. Only a small area of the ship’s starboard side was left visible above the waves.
Sixty years later, the Norwegian community of Asker, a suburb of Oslo, bought the ship for $1 from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The intent was to raise it and return it to the port where it was built.
Read:
Globe and Mail, Canada – 18th July 2011
