The Calanus: renowned ship now a forgotten ruin

ARTHUR JOHNSON

For years, it’s been a familiar eyesore on Iqaluit’s beach — a 45-foot wooden ship, suspended in a rusting cradle.

This pile of firewood and scrap metal is the good ship Calanus, which once enjoyed the same celebrity in the annals of Arctic marine science as the Queen Mary or the Queen Elizabeth II among luxury ocean liners.

But while the big cruise ships enjoyed a popular renown, the fate of the Calanus was such that its exploits were quietly celebrated in scientific papers and journals, and its historical importance known to a small group of men.

Many of the men who championed the Calanus and sought to preserve her have died in the past decade or so, and almost 30 years of neglect have rendered the little ship unseaworthy and prohibitively expensive to refit.

What’s more, the Calanus has long since been forgotten and abandoned by her original owners, the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and by the city of Iqaluit, which once flirted with the idea of restoring her as a sort of floating museum of Frobisher Bay history.

With no deep-pocketed champions to rescue her, says local history buff Robert Eno, it would be a kindness if municipal authorities “either set her afire or take her out in the open water and scuttle her.”

It’s a painful conclusion for Eno to reach, for he knows every detail of the Calanus’s history, from the time she was built after the Second World War, her many voyages on Arctic waters with scientists engaged in historic marine life research, to her sad retirement to Iqaluit’s beach in the late 1970s.

Before the Calanus, there had been other ships devoted to marine research in the Arctic, beginning with the Neptune, the first Canadian vessel to observe conditions in the Arctic. The Neptune first sailed into Hudson Strait in 1884. Several other ships were employed by marine researchers in the Arctic from the turn of the century to the 1930s.

But after the Second World War, according to retired marine scientist Ed Grainger, interest in the Arctic began to increase. In an article published in the journal Arctic in 1995, Grainger wrote that despite the “fine pre-war efforts” at scientific exploration “it became clear that we knew sadly little about our arctic waters and their plant and animal content.”

So it was that Max Dunbar, a marine biologist with McGill University in Montreal began to plan a ship uniquely suited to Arctic scientific exploration.

Dunbar, who ran a marine science lab at the university under the auspices of what later became Fisheries and Oceans Canada, wanted a ship “equipped to carry heavy trawling gear and plankton nets, to provide laboratory space, and to accommodate a small crew on cruises lasting up to several weeks.”

He specified a ketch-rigged schooner equipped with a 77-horsepower diesel engine. The vessel was designed by German and Milne, a Montreal firm of marine architects, and built by the Industrial Shipping Company in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia.

The Calanus, named after a tiny crustacean found in almost limitless quantities in polar waters, was shallow keeled with a rounded bottom, so she could travel close to shore in a few feet of water, yet be seaworthy in rough weather. Her tub-shaped design was intended to allow her to be lifted by heavy ice pressure.

That’s exactly what happened in 1953, four years after the Calanus went into service. The ship and crew were in Hudson Strait with the vessel when, as Grainger described it, “an immense floe with a high overhang struck; it pressed against the port quarter, hooked itself over the gunwale, and forced the boat downward.

“At the same time, another floe moved against the starboard bow near the water line and lifted that side of the vessel. As the starboard bow rose and the Calanus heeled farther and farther to port, there appeared to be no way to prevent her loss.”

But a patch of clear water appeared directly astern, the skipper reversed the engine and backed the ship off the starboard ice and out from under the port ice to open water. “Most vessels,” observed Grainger, “would not have survived that 1953 night in Hudson Strait.”

During her many voyages, the Calanus enabled scientists, including Dunbar and Grainger, to carry out historic research. When based to berthed at Igloolik, beginning in 1955, the Calanus served as the base for the first year-round studies of water properties and plankton and the walrus to be carried out in the Arctic.

On earlier expeditions about the Calanus, scientists studying plant and animal life in Ungava Bay were able to conclude that marine fish, with the possible exception of Atlantic cod, were unlikely to be commercially important in the bay, but shrimp held much more commercial promise.

By the Seventies, government and bureaucratic priorities had shifted. There was little enthusiasm for Arctic marine research. “Government funding became gradually more difficult to obtain,” Grainger wrote, “and the Calanus was left unused for longer and longer periods.”

Finally, in the late Seventies, she was all but abandoned by the federal government. Her last active season was financed by an oil company studying environmental conditions off the east coast of Baffin Island.

In the early Eighties, the municipality of Iqaluit briefly considered the notion of refitting the Calanus, by then stranded on the beach, as a maritime museum, but soon abandoned the idea. It was then that Bill MacKenzie, Iqaluit’s noted eccentric and packrat, bought the Calanus, with a dream of once again making her seaworthy.

He teamed up with Robert Eno, who shared his enthusiasm for the venerable little schooner. Eno consulted a ship surveyor, who delivered the bad news: it would cost between $500,000 and $750,000 to restore the Calanus.

At that time, Eno said in an interview this week, the ship’s hull, built of yellow birch below the water and oak above, was still in fairly good shape. “But everything else, including the electrical and mechanical systems, would have to be completely gutted.” Sadly, he said, “Nobody has the resources to restore the Calanus, unless you’re a drug dealer or filthy rich or both.”

MacKenzie, he said, had hoped to sail the Calanus back to his native Scotland, but simply gave up. When MacKenzie died without a will in 2002, his estate, consisting of a lot of odds and ends he’d accumulated over the years, including the Calanus, was put up for sale by the public trustee.

The Calanus was bought by a local outfitter who has not disclosed his plans for the vessel. Eno, for his part, is embittered by the neglect of a ship that played such a huge role in the history of Arctic marine science.

“She was in good shape when they pulled her out,” he said. “It’s a damn shame to leave a ship like that rotting on the beach.”