Sunday 19 August 2018

Maud,

as ships go an unlucky one, 



in 1918, polar explorer Roald Amundsen set off on a research voyage to reach the North Pole via the Northeast Passage, on a ship he'd commissioned and named Maud, the expedition was one disaster after another, but the unfortunate life of the Maud was only getting started, from Alaska, the idea was to drift the ship over the North Pole, but poor ice conditions ultimately forced Maud south to Seattle to undergo extensive repairs,once Maud was repaired, rather than try to ice drift again, Amundsen got distracted by the idea of flying an airplane over the North Pole and instead used Maud to haul aircraft to Alaska for the attempt, it never worked out, and by 1925 Amundsen was broke and forced to sell the ship to the Hudson’s Bay Company, the firm rechristened it the Baymaud and used it as a floating warehouse and later a radio station, one of the first in the Arctic, and then the ship gave up and sank in the pack ice in 1930 in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, the ship lay at the bottom for 86 years, but here is the good news, 

the ship has been recovered and has been made into a museum at a port in Norway, after several years of preparation, the ship was raised from the seabed in the summer of 2016. In 2017, the crew worked to prepare and stabilize the ship for an Atlantic crossing, towing it to western Greenland. According to the Maud Returns Home project’s Facebook page, the ship began its final journey to Scandinavia in June, reaching the waters of Norway on August 5 and finally making it to Vollen in Asker, where it will have its own museum, on August 7, “It feels absolutely fantastic to know that Maud is finally back in Norway after nearly 100 years,” Jan Wangaard, manager of the project, tells The Local.no. “It brings joy to our hearts to see Maud, still proud after all these years, see her old homeland once again.”you can read the story of Amundsen's jinxed ship at Smithsonian, and a nice read it is too.


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