New group wants Amundsen ship to stay in Canada

CBC News -

A group of citizens in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, is fighting to keep the wreck of the Maud, a ship that once belonged to famed polar explorer Roald Amundsen, from being lifted out of Canadian waters and taken to Norway.

The Maud, also known as the Baymaud, has been sitting partially submerged in the shallow waters near Cambridge Bay, a remote community of about 1,500, for the past eight decades.

About 20 residents have recently joined the Keep the Baymaud Committee to fight a Norwegian's group's efforts to take the shipwreck back to Amundsen's home country, where the explorer is a national legend.

Committee chair Vicki Aitaok said losing the Maud would be a huge loss for Cambridge Bay, since the wreck is a major tourist attraction there.

"We take 300 people or more every year there," Aitaok told CBC News on Thursday.

Amundsen, who in the early 1900s led the first successful sailing expedition through the Northwest Passage, had sailed the Maud to the Arctic in the hopes of reaching the North Pole.

But Amundsen's attempts were unsuccessful and the Maud was seized and eventually sold to the Hudson's Bay Company. Renamed the Baymaud, the ship was used as a floating trading post before it sank around 1930.

Maud Returns Home, a Norwegian group that is backed by a development company, says it wants to salvage the wreck and move it back to the town in Norway where Amundsen had the Maud built a century ago.

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