Part 18 (1/2)

have suddenly listed to starboard, for there was little sign of it there either.... Rather than order the s.h.i.+p to be unloaded of a hundred tons or so of vital cargo, they [the inspectors] seemed to have arrived at a remarkable conclusion: the Nascopie was a s.h.i.+p that listed on both sides at the same time.” Fully loaded, the s.h.i.+p would sound her siren and, her pennants flying, cast off lines and steam half-astern to midstream. With all the s.h.i.+ps in barbour blowing their salute whistles, the Nascopie would puff proudly out to the St Lawrence and set course for Labrador. Aboard would be not only HBC executives and post replacements but also red-coated Mounties, explorers, geologists, missionaries, doctors, nurses, postmas- ters and government administrators of every description.

The ninety-day voyage was a race against tides and weather. None of the three dozen or so ports of call had a dock, so the s.h.i.+p anch.o.r.ed off each post while goods were loaded and unloaded from wooden scows. This could be tricky. The HBC's Archie Hunter recalled putting into Chesterfield Inlet on a rough day: ”When we arrived no one from sh.o.r.e dared venture out to meet us, with the exception of one hardy soul. Out he came battling the white-capped waves in a Lac Seul canoe until he finally made it to the s.h.i.+p. I still remember his introduction of himself, 'They call me Crazy Mac but you ought to see the rest of them ash.o.r.e.”'*

The fox pelts were brought aboard in bales of one hundred, stamped with each trading post's name and a silk-cloth destination label that read: ”Beaver House, Great Trinity Lane, London, England.” The day of arrival was very special as the residents of each settlement read their annual ration of mail. Then the

Crazy Mac had bv this time been north with the HBC for fifteen years without a furlough. He left that season aboard the Nascopie, got off at Halifax, and promptly married a bishop's daughter.

300 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

The Nascopie loading at Charlton Island, 1933

stevedoring started. ”At every port where we stopped,” complained Ernie Lyall, an old Arctic hand, ”we had to work with the crew and hump cargo all the time. I think that's about the time that 'Heavy b.l.o.o.d.y Cargo' got tacked on to the HBC initials.” Local Inult would help out, and some remembered the inagic of those occasions. ”The sight of these great vessels entering the world where we lived made thrills go through our hearts,” recalled Alootook Tpellie, a Frobisher Bay artist and carver. -This was during high tide and everyone worked as a unit, just like a circus setting up the big tents and other things to get ready for the opening night. There was laughter among the people, a sign of happiness which never seemed to stop as long as the s.h.i.+p stayed.” The traders themselves held a less romantic view. The second-best day of the year was when the Nascopie arrived, they said. The best was when she left.

THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 301.

By early September, winter would begin to set in and the stops became shorter, the unloading even more frenzied. Smellie once steamed for an hour past the largest iceberg on record: an ice island a hundred feet high and ten miles long. In those pre-radar days he had to ”smell” the presence of ice in fog or in the dark, and his s.h.i.+p didn't always stay out of harm's way. Smellie had three spare propellers on board, and whenever one was damaged, he would back his s.h.i.+p onto some deserted northern beach at high tide, wait for a tide s.h.i.+ft, then change props.

Heading north through Baffin Bay or into the riptides of Hudson Strait, s.h.i.+ps had no protection from the grey swells, mountains of water thirty feet high, claiming the ocean for themselves.

THE NASCOPIE'S IMMEDIXFE PREDECESSOR was the Pelican, a former British man-of-war and slave-chaser, purchased by the HBC in 1901. The 290-ton auxiliary sloop also beat off a German submarine (on August 26, 1918, off Cardiff) and continued in the Company's setvice until 1920. She was joined in 1905 by the Discoveiy, the heavily reinforced exploration barquentine that carried Captain Robert Falcon Scott's 1901-4 expedition to the Antarctic, which made the lost annual supply voyage to York Factory in 1914.

Many a brave Company crew undertook the annual supply voyage, and the HBC even fought a major naval battle to protect its sea lanes, but many more vessels departed than returned.* The last HBCsailing s.h.i.+p to ply the Bay, the three-masted barque Stork, went down in a storm off Rupert House in 1908. Ice crushed the Bayeski~mo, while the Bayrupert piled up on Hen and

*For Aetails of this epic se,.i eripgement, see Company of Adventarel'S, hardco% er, 1),,iges 12 0- 2 5.

302 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Chickens Reef, on the Labrador coast.* The fifty-six-ton Fort Churchill, a ketch that arrived at York Factory in the late autumn of 1913 with a load of coal from Falmouth, England, was left unattended at anchor some distance up the Nelson River. She vanished during a three-day easterly -ale, onlv to be found two years later washed up on one of the Belcher Islands.

The potential for east-west trade across the top of North Arnerica was first demonstrated in 1930. The 1113C , s schooner Fort James (built in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, as the Jean Revillon) had sailed out of St John's to spend two winters frozen in at Gjoa Haven on King William Island. When the 11BCs western-based supply s.h.i.+p Fort McPherson pulled in and anch.o.r.ed near her, it was the first time the North West Pa.s.sage had been bridged-even if by mo s.h.i.+ps-since Amundsens his tory-making crossing of 1903-6. In 1934, when the Fort James was transferred to the Company's western divl'

sion, she went through the Panama Ca.n.a.l and eventually back into the North; she got as far cast as Cambridge Bay-only two hundred miles west of her 1928-30 win tering place. Had she closed that short gap, the Fort James would have been the first vessel in history to cir c.u.mnavigate North America. Both the Fort James and the Fort McPherson as well as the Fort Hearne were later wrecked in Arctic gales.

The Company's maritime experience in the Western Arctic wasn't much luckier. After several sinkings of chartered and purchased vessels, the HBC decided in

*The H13C manager at ””olstenholme had put away his salary for years to purchase a piano, which went down with the Bayeskimo in 192 5. Two years later lie had saved enough to order a replaceruent, only to have it sink aboard the Bayrupen. He found a ncw hobby.

THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 303.

The Baychimo

1920 to build a s.h.i.+p specially designed for the job, the auxiliary wooden schooner Lady Kindersley. Her ribs were mounted so close together that with planking and sheathing the hull had an overall thickness of neariv twenty-two inches, while her how was reinforced witfi thick metal sheets.

She sailed out of Vancouver on June 27, 1924, carrying not only a year's worth of HBC re-supplies but also a powerful government radio transmitter, due to be installed at Herschel Island. Imprisoned by the floes and hummocks off Point Barrow, Lady Kindersle-y had to be abandoned after a month of attempting to free herself.

Other s.h.i.+ps were a.s.signed to the west-coast run, but few hulls could withstand the battering of the ice around Maska's northern coast.

Originally built as a Baltic coaster and taken by the British as part of German postwar reparations, the 11BCs supply s.h.i.+p Baycbimo was the largest vessel to trade in the North West Pa.s.sage. The 1,500-tonner succcssfully completed nine expeditions to 304MUESTFOR QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

the Companys eight Western Arctic posts, but on her return Journey in 1931 she got stuck in ice off Point Franklin, near Point Barrow. Since she was carrying a million dollars' worth of fur there was no question of abandoning her, but when the vessel seemed in danger of being crushed, Captain S.A.

Cornwall ordered the crew to set up a temporary shelter on sh.o.r.e, two miles away. Although some pa.s.sengers and 11BC officials were flown out by rescue planes, the captain and sixteen of his crew retreated to their makes.h.i.+ft dwelling to await a change in the weather, so that thev might free their s.h.i.+p. On November 24, a blizzard howled in. It turned so feroclous the sailors had to close off their little dwelling, huddling together for warmth and comfort, taking turns sitting next to the gasoline drum that had been converted into a stove. When they dug themselves out three days later, the Baychimo had disappeared. She was seen a few months after that drifting alone through pack ice by an Inuk travelling from Herschel to Nome.

Two years later, the Baychinio was boarded by Isobel Wylie flutchinson, a Scottish botanist bound for Herschel aboard the schooner 'Trader. The ghostlv Baychimo had been sighted twelve miles off Wainwright, and the Traders captain had brought his little vessel alongside. ”A strange spectacle the decks presented,” Hutchinson later noted in her journal. ”The main hold was open to the winds, but its half-rifted depths still contained sacks of mineral ore, caribou skins, and a cargo of various descriptions.... Writing paper, photographic films, ledgers of the Hudsons Bay Company, typewriter ribbons-all ”-ere here for the taking! In a wooden crate was an unsullied edition of The Times Historv of the Great War in many tomes. Charts of all seas of the world lay scattered upon the decks of the pilot-house.... A breakfast irienu tossed in the doorway indicated that the crew THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 305.

Of the unlucky s.h.i.+p were at least in no danger of starvation, for there was a choice of some six courses.”

The 7~ader's first mate determined that the Baychimo's engines were in perfect condition and that all she needed was to have her spare propeller mounted before she could sail away under her own steam, but the weather closed in and the visitors scrambled off the doomed vessel as fast as they could. The sightings continued. In 1936 Captain Parker of the cutter Northland pulled alongside, and in 1961 she was spotted by a party of Inuit between Icy Cape and Point Barrow. A DEW Line supply superintendent from Vancouver named Don Roderick reported seeing her off Cambridge Bay in 1965.

That Mly s.h.i.+p--manned by ghosts or men-could survive the awesome force of the polar ice pack for three decades seems beyond reason, but the H13c's Baycbimo did just that, and since no one actually saw her sink, she may be out there still ...

SCOTTY GALL, THP HBC TRADE R who had been one of the last crew members to get off the Baychimo, reacted to his s.h.i.+p's fate with the typical aplomb of a good Company man. ”Pity,” he said. ”She still had twenty bales of fur on her.” Gall was back north six years after the Baychimo disappearance on what would turn out to be the greatest sea adventure of his career. In the spring of 193 7, the Hudson's Bay Company decided to establish a connecting link between its western and eastern operations by building a trading facility in the Central Arctic at the bottom of Somerset Island~ on Bellot Strait. The new outpost was to be named Fort Ross, after the two British naval officers, uncle and nephew, who had first explored the area in the 1820s and 1830s.

The Alascopie's itinerary called for her to pick up some Inuit families 306 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Scotty Gall on theschoone7- Aklavik, 1937

at Arctic Bay for resettlement at Fort Ross, then rendezvous with the small (thirty-ton) schooner Aklavik at the eastern entrance of Bellot Strait.*