Norwegians check out the Maud in Cambridge Bay

On Aug. 4, Jan Wanggaard saw the wreck of the submerged Maud for the first time.

Seeing it was “incredible,” said Wanggaard, who recently travelled from Norway to Nunavut’s Cambridge Bay to visit the remains of the ship once sailed by Norway’s polar hero, Roald Amundsen.

The ship, now little more than timbers, was in “in good shape” for having spent the past 80 years half-immersed in water and ice, he said.

While in Cambridge Bay, Wanggaard, manager of a project called “Maud Returns Home“, wants to rally support for his backers’ plans to bring the Maud back to Norway.

They want to raise the Maud with balloons, drag the hulk over to a barge, put it into a kind of “cradle,” raise it out of the water, slowly, to avoid any stress, and then tow it back to Norway — a 7,000-kilometre journey, Wanggaard said.

The Maud would be exhibited at a futuristic museum in Asker, a suburb of Oslo.

That’s a plan that so far has met some resistance from people in Cambridge Bay.

A group of Cambridge Bay residents wants to keep the sunken hulk of the Maud — better known to them as the Baymaud, the name given to it by the Hudson’s Bay Co. — right where it is: in the waters outside their community.

They formed a committee called “Keep the Baymaud in Canada” and have circulated a petition that says the Baymaud, which sunk near today’s community of Cambridge Bay in 1930, is “an archaeological site that needs to be protected as she is where she is.”

The petition notes that the Baymaud also served as a supply vessel and a floating warehouse, then later as a wireless radio station, broadcasting from the Arctic to what is now the CBC.

“While we don’t deny the importance of the Maud to Norway, one also cannot deny the fact that she is a Canadian archaeological site that has been here since 1930 and should not be removed,” the petition reads.

Wanggaard plans to spend at least two weeks with a fellow Norwegian diver surveying the hulk, and trying to gain more support from the local population for the “Maud Returns Home” project.

So far, so good, Wanggaard said Aug. 5: “I think the more we tell them about it, the better it sounds to them.”

Being in Cambridge Bay has opened a new, more positive communication with people in the community, he said.

“It’s completely different, and this is why we are here,” he said.

During his stay in Cambridge Bay, Wanggaard will meet with representatives from the Kitikmeot Inuit Association and with members of the public at a yet-to-be-scheduled meeting in town.

“We have to present our plan,” he said, adding that he’d like to see people in Cambridge Bay be involved in his project.

Wanggaard hopes to leave the community with a good idea of how the Maud can be safely moved off the seabed on to the barge — and develop a plan and a cost for moving it next summer to Norway.

Before that can happen, the project promoters must apply and receive an export permit from the federal government.

The Maud ended up in Cambridge Bay due to a failed expedition by Amundsen, who in 1906 was the first European explorer to sail through the Northwest Passage.

Amundsen left Norway in 1918 with the Maud, planning to drift with the ice across the Northeast Passage westwards and over the North Pole.

But his crew never got into the westward current, although the expedition did produce some excellent scientific results — mostly after Amundsen had given up and left the ship.

Creditors sold the Maud in 1925 to the Hudson Bay Co., who renamed it the Baymaud.

The ship, which ended its days as a floating warehouse and radio station, sank at its mooring in 1930.

In 1990, the Hudson’s Bay Co. then transferred the ship’s ownership to Asker for $1.

This past June, the municipal council of Asker decided by unanimous resolution to transfer the ownership of the Maud from the Asker Kommune to the investment company Tandberg Eiendom and its project group “Maud Returns Home.”

But without an export license, the [Bay]Maud can’t be brought out of Canada.

This is how the wreck of the Maud or Baymaud looks today in the waters off Cambridge Bay. (FILE PHOTO)