❖ Exploration Ship MAUD Leaves Seattle (Updated with 5th photo) ❖

"Five of the ten who will be on the Schooner MAUD
when Capt. Roald Amundsen attempts his seven 
year drift through Arctic seas over the North Pole.
L-R: S. Syvertsen, marine engineer
Dr. H.U. Sverdrup, scientist
Capt. Oskar Wisting, navigator
G. Olonkin, marine engineer/wireless operator
Edward Eriksen, seaman.
All are on equal footing on the MAUD."
Photo dated 13 May 1922.
Original from the S.P.H.S.©

MAUD 
Seattle to Arctic Expedition

at Seattle, WA. 1922.
Original photo by James A. Turner

Archives of the S.P.H.S.©

"One of the big stories of Seattle's waterfront in which I had a part was the sailing of the Roald Amundsen exploration ship MAUD for the Arctic ice-pack in a history-making attempt to drift across the top of the world. It was a balmy day in June 1922 when I headed for the waterfront accompanied by a photographer to cover the departure of the famed explorer and his sturdy three-masted motorship.

      The voyage of exploration had been highly publicized and a great throng was at the Union Oil Dock to say bon voyage to Amundsen, his officers and crew.

MAUD
at Union Oil Dock, Seattle, WA.
dated 7 June 1922
Original photo from the archives of S.P.H.S.

      It was estimated that 5,000 persons saw the MAUD shift into the harbor and head down the Sound escorted by a flotilla of Seattle yachts.

      The MAUD was a strange-looking craft with long bowsprit, one tall, and two short masts. The tall mainmast and the foremast carried crow's nests for use by ice pilots; the hull was described as having the shape of an egg cut in half endways.

      The MAUD had as her chief officer, Capt. Carl M. ("North Pole") Hansen, who began his seafaring career as a lad of 11 years. The stocky son of the Vikings now is skipper of the powder boat DUPONT which serves Puget Sound and Southeastern Alaska. He is an active member of the Propeller Club of the United States, Port of Seattle, and is much interested in maritime affairs.
      Captain Hansen is one of Seattle's most colorful mariners. He was the mate of the motorship PATTERSON of San Francisco, trading for furs as far to the eastward in the Arctic as Herschel Island. He was master of the Swenson Company's Siberian fur trader NANUK, later used in filming "The Eskimo", a moving picture of the Arctic. Also, he was skipper of the Seattle purse-seiner PACIFIC QUEEN, which carried a party of scientists on an off-shore fishing expedition for the Peruvian government. The PACIFIC QUEEN visited the storied Galapagos Islands, 700-miles west of Ecuador where Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner played the role of 'Empress' over natives and shipwrecked sailors.
      Captain Hansen spent three and one-half years in the MAUD. Here is the story he told me some years ago of his experiences in the polar regions:
      'On 25 July 1922, we watched the Alaska shoreline fade away in the mists as the MAUD headed for the Arctic ice-pack in which we were to drift across the top of the world. We were in the ice 42-months--three and one-half years--and then gave up the venture.
      I never shall forget the four Christmas days we spent in the Arctic aboard the MAUD. The ship was surrounded by many miles of solid ice, displaying a rugged magnificence, made weird by the Northern Lights that blazed across the sky at night.
      We spent the first Christmas 200-miles northwest of Wrangell Island. It was dark all day except for two hours of dim twilight at noon. The temperature was 42 degrees below zero. Christmas was celebrated with a real Yule tree, candlelight, and a dinner of canned chicken, canned vegetables, several kinds of cakes, cookies, and plum pudding. Seven boxes of Christmas fare had been placed in the hold for seven Yule holidays the officers of the vessel expected to spend in the Arctic ice.
      The MAUD was built in Norway for the Arctic trip, but as a ship for sailing to the ice floes was not much of a success. She was sold to the Hudson's Bay Company soon after our return from the Arctic and operated for several years as a fur-trading schooner between Vancouver, BC and the Far North.
      Crushed in the ice, the MAUD sank in Cambridge Bay off Copper Mine in the Canadian Arctic. She settled on the bottom of the bay and the water over her rails. The grinding floes finished her in a few months.'

Capt. Oscar Wisting,
Navigator, MAUD
Original photo by Price & Carter of Seattle, WA,
from the archives of the S.P.H.S.©
Backdated 3 June 1922

      Capt. Oscar Wisting, the MAUD's skipper, who was master of the Amundsen exploration ship FRAM, used on a cruise to the South Pole, died in his cabin aboard the vessel in Norway. The FRAM had been converted into a floating museum and Capt. Wisting was her caretaker.
      Although the attempt of the MAUD to drift over the top of the world was unsuccessful, Amundsen in 1926 flew over the North Pole in the dirigible NORGE, accompanied by Lincoln Ellsworth, and a crew of 18. The NORGE left Kings Bay, Spitzbergen, 11 May, passed over the North Pole at 2:30 am 12 May and arrived at Teller, AK at 11 pm 13 May.
      Amundsen has been given up for lost since 1928 when he and five companions disappeared while making an airplane search for the lost Italian polar dirigible. In November 1941, a Rome report said Amundsen had been found living among Eskimos in a bay of the North Baffin Sea."
Above text from High Tide. R.H. Calkins, Seattle. Marine Digest Pub., 1952

Another view of MAUD, with Amundsen

preparing to castoff from Seattle, WA.,

for the Northwest Passage Expedition, June 1922.

Photo from the James A. Turner Collection

From archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©.

Underwater photos of the wreck of the Norwegian MAUD at Cambridge Bay can be viewed here.

Scroll down to 30 August 2012 log entry.

      

❖ Wild Flowers of Yellow Island ❖ with Schooner MORNING STAR

Schooner MORNING STAR
  May Day 2012.
Happily snugged in to Yellow Island.
(Yes, she's a schooner. Her main was being replaced.)

NOAA Chart 6379, dated 1972.
 Yellow Island is located on the crease of the folded paper,
nestled near to the inhabited islands of Crane, Orcas, and Shaw.
Click to enlarge this image. Out of date for navigational use.

These photos by Debra Madan are from May Day 2012. The cool spring altered the blooming pattern slightly so many of the species were in color at the same time this year. Here you can see Indian Paintbrush, Chocolate Lillies, blue Camas, Avalanche Lillies, Shooting Stars, Buttercups.... it was a riot of color, unmolested by browsing deer. The entire island, owned by  the Nature Conservancy, has a friendly, informative, live-aboard caretaker who requires visitors to stay on the foot path. They close at 4 pm. 

✪ BOOK REVIEW: The Log from the Sea of Cortez ✪

The Log from the Sea of Cortez
John Steinbeck
(New York: Viking, 1951)

We have a book to write about the Gulf of California. We could do one of several things about its design. But we have decided to let it form itself: its boundaries a boat and a sea; its duration a six weeks’ charter time; its subject everything we could see and think and even imagine; its limits—our own without reservation.
We made a trip into the Gulf; sometimes we dignified it by calling it an expedition. Once it was called the Sea of Cortez, and that is a better-sounding and more exciting name....
      We said, “Let’s go wide open. Let’s see what we see, record what we find, and not fool ourselves with conventional scientific strictures.” (The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Introduction, pp. 1-2).
      And in this way and in this frame of mind did John Steinbeck and his good friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, set out on an off-season fishing boat for a 4,000-mile voyage from Monterey around the Baja peninsula to see what they could see and write about it in the spring of 1940.
It was an uneasy time in the United States for anyone aware of the gathering storm already underway in Europe and Asia. The violence and pointless destruction of war are ever-present in the back of Steinbeck’s mind even as he is escaping from the reach of newspapers and newsreels. “Hitler was invading Denmark and moving up towards Norway; there was no telling when the invasion of England might begin; our radio was full of static and the world was going to hell.” (Steinbeck, p. 7)
Steinbeck’s mind roamed the world and the history of humankind, even as his eyes and hands were occupied with the business of collecting samples. Plenty of marine biology took place on the trip. Thousands of specimens were dipped up in nets, pried off rocks, and harpooned after the boat turned left at the corner of the tip of Baja and made its way slowly north. The log offers full details of the common and Latin names of the specimens, their customary habitats, and their taxonomy (the contribution, no doubt, of  Ricketts, who was listed as co-author on the earlier, unabridged version of the story, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. New York: Viking, 1941). But both as individuals and as members of functional ecosystems, the marine organisms inspired Steinbeck to poetic description, forays into word origins and mythology, analysis of their design and purpose, and philosophical reflection comparing their lives and communities to human ones.
      Aquariums, tanks, and trays filled the hold of the 76-foot WESTERN FLYER. Neither Steinbeck nor Ricketts had ever attempted this sort of prolonged scientific expedition before, and much of the trip was a series of experiments, missteps, and disappointments in trying variously to keep the specimens alive (for observation) or to kill and preserve them without destroying their distinctive forms and brilliant colors. There were problems with equipment—notably, the outboard motor for the small shore boat that refused to work except when removed for inspection and installed in a bucket—and both the still and film cameras produced poor images in the rare instances when there was anyone with dry hands free to use them.
      There were the usual sorts of squabbles you’d expect among a group of men (which included Steinbeck, Ricketts, the boat owner and captain, an engineer, and two Italian fishermen hired in Monterey), sharing a small, hot, and fishy space together for weeks. Tensions grew when the store of liquor ran out and when fresh food or delicacies found their way aboard; crew members were occasionally mutinous about doing dishes, frustrated by faulty equipment and the efforts to collect, or testy from lack of sleep. At one point, Steinbeck dryly admits that, “all collecting trips to unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them.” (Steinbeck, p.10)

      The WESTERN FLYER encountered many Mexicans in its travels. At each port of call or small anchorage, once the locals figured out what the boat was up to, small boys and men alike tied up alongside to sell specimens they’d found or to offer their services as scouts and collectors. Steinbeck is generous in his description of these mostly poor, local inhabitants, noting their common humanity and describing their living arrangements without condescension.
In fact, the main subject of Steinbeck’s account is not the marine organisms they were collecting, but philosophical reflections on the meaning of life, human character, and the characteristics and course of civilizations—including the human tendency to make war and commit murder. He compares the study of tide pool animals to the study of homo sapiens, “We name them and describe them and, out of long watching, arrive at some conclusion about their habits so that we say, ‘This species typically does thus and so,’ but we do not objectively observe our own species as a species....When it seems that men may be kinder to men, that wars may not come again, we completely ignore the record of our species.” (Steinbeck, p. 15)
The voyage offered a respite from the reality of all that. “...the great world dropped away very quickly. We lost the fear and fierceness and contagion of war and economic uncertainty. The matters of great importance we had left were not important.” (Steinbeck, p. 173) At some point, after the boat had gone as far north in the Sea of Cortez as it could go, had filled all its tanks and trays and turned for home, they would have to rejoin that world again. But for now, there was a pause and a chance to concentrate on the matter at hand—the boat, the sea, the creatures swimming and crawling within it. “France had fallen, the Maginot Line was lost—we didn’t know it, but we knew the daily catch of every boat within four hundred miles. It was simply a directional thing; a man has only so much.” (Steinbeck, p. 7)
Near the end of the expedition, Steinbeck observes that, “It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.” (Steinbeck, p. 179) In this way, a person comes to see that “all things are one thing and that one thing is all things...all bound together by the elastic string of time.” But lest the book end on a note too high-toned and philosophical, Steinbeck sums up what the expedition meant to him in the most basic terms. “Here was no service to science, no naming of unknown animals, but rather—we simply liked it. We liked it very much. The brown Indians and the gardens of the sea, and the beer and the work, they were all one thing and we were that one thing too.”

2015, Spring Update. The WESTERN FLYER has been salvaged from the mud of Swinomish Slough and lives on the hard in Pt. Townsend, WA. For an update of the future plans for her please see here.

This is the third in a series of book reviews kindly contributed by mariner, Allison Hart Lengyel of San Juan County, WA.

Her first review was posted 13 Nov. 2011: Leviathan or the Whale by Philip Hoare; Harper Collins, 2008.

The second from her pen, posted January 2012 please see N by E by Rockwell Kent; Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1930. 

❖ ON KNOTS ❖

Knots tied by Spike Africa in the 1970s

Object history from the archives of the

 Saltwater People Historical Society©

"The sailor, from the very nature of his craft, has a dependence upon rope and a consequent familiarity with knots that is demanded of no other workman. It follows that most important knots owe both their origin and their names to the requirements of a ship at sea. So diverse are these requirements that the number of knots devised by the sailor is probably ten times greater than the sum of all other handicrafts combined. Nor is this surprising if we consider that on a full-rigged ship, in everyday use, are several miles of rigging, and an able seaman, of necessity, is acquainted with every inch of this extent.

      Knotting has been an important adjunct to the everyday life of all people from the earliest days of which we have knowledge. There are still primitive races who fasten their huts, traps, canoes, and harness with knotted thongs and withes. But civilized man is no less dependent on knots than his more backward brothers, even though knots today are much less in evidence in sophisticated surroundings.

      Long ago man recognized the decorative possibilities of knots, and 'fancy knotting' is one of the oldest and most widely distributed of the folk arts. But it remained for the sailor to seize upon this art and to develop it into something that is peculiarly his own.

      Aboard ship knotting had reached its flood early in the 19th-c and by mid-century, with the commencement of the Clipper Era, it had begun to ebb. Folk arts flourish best where there are leisure and contentment, and either of these conditions obtained on clipper ships. After the American Civil War the economic situation in the merchant marine was such that all ships were undermanned; sailors had little or no time to spare from their labors, and knotting was pushed into the background.

      At the beginning of the 19th-c it was unusual to find in the forecastle of a sailing ship more than one or two sailors who could read and write. It was a common thing for boys to go to sea before they were 10-yrs old, and cabin boys of 7 and 8-years of age were not unusual. Even ashore, at that time, education was considered unnecessary in the classes from which seamen were recruited. But the isolation of the sea was such that the sailor's inability to read and write was an almost intolerable hardship. In order to keep his mind occupied when off duty, it was necessary for him to busy his hands. Fortunately there was, aboard ship, one material that could be used for that purpose. There was generally plenty of condemned rope with which to tie knots.

      There were two arts that belonged to the sailor: scrimshaw, which was the carving and engraving of whalebone and ivory, peculiar to the whaling fleet, and knotting, which belonged to all deepwater ships, including whalers.

      Jackknife industries also flourished aboard ship, and much of the tattooing of the old days was done in the forecastle. Sailors knitted, sewed, and crocheted; made baskets and straw hats. But the true shellback was more apt to specialize in knots.

      Aboard coasters and fishermen knotting has has never been so widely practiced. There is a fundamental difference between the deepwater and the coastwise sailor. The latter, in common with the fisherman, spends much of his time ashore, making harbor at short intervals. Usually he has a home and family ties of some sort. His excursions on the sea are too brief, and his hours at sea too busy, to encourage handicrafts. But the shellback, if he has a home, generally ignores it when ashore so long as his health and thirst last. Most of the days of his life are actually lived at sea.

      The character of a sailor's knotting depends to a great extent on what branch of the service he is in. It would be impossible in the Navy to hand out rope in sufficient quantity for the large crews that are carried. Generally the men have to be content with log line, fishline, and such small stuff. This has resulted in the Navy's seamen specializing in 'square knotting' or 'macrame.'

      Merchant sailors have been better provided. Although they seldom obtain new material to work with, junk is generally issued, which they 'work up' into foxes, nettles, and twice-laid rope.

      It was the whaleman who fared best; his voyages were longer and less broken, and his ship was heavily overmanned. New whale line was frequently allowed, that had been broken in the whale hunt. This was the best quality rope that was manufactured; and could be worked up into any size material required. But to balance against these favorable conditions was the divided interest of the whaleman. Unless he possessed a special gift for knots he was apt to succumb to the lure of scrimshaw.

      The interest of seamen in their knots was widespread and intense, and often decidedly competitive. Complicated knots were explained under pledge of secrecy; often a knowledge of one knot was bartered for another. I have heard of a sailor who carried an unfinished blackjack in his ditty bag for several voyages until at last he found a shipmate who could teach him the knot. A sailor was judged by his chest beckets and his bag lanyards. A superlative knot tier, in the middle of the 19th-c, stood in the estimation of the forecastle about where the Artist of the Cavern Walls stood in the Cro-Magnon days.

      Very little nationalism is evident among knots. One reason for this may be that the merchant sailor has never been too particular about what flag he sailed under, and in the general shifting about, knots soon became common property. Here and there we have a 'Spanish', 'Portuguese', 'English', 'French', or 'American' knot, but seldom is the application of such a name at all universal. 

      It is impossible to make a distinction between the British and the American contribution to knots. There were English sailors in every Yankee forecastle. But it would seem that English-speaking people as a whole have made the largest single contribution to the subject. At the present time Scandinavian sailors are doing more toward preserving the traditions of marlingspike seamanship than any other seamen.

Above text by Clifford Ashley (1881-1947)
Two pages from the 620-pages of the encyclopaedic reference, 

The Ashley Book of Knots,

Doubleday & Co.,1944

      

      

      

      

❖ ROALD AMUNDSEN and the GJÖA ❖

The First Vessel to Transit the Northwest Passage

1903-1906

Original photo postcard postmarked 1936, San Francisco.

From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society.

"Roald Amundsen, born in 1872, was raised near Oslo, Norway. From early childhood he had had the yen to explore the Arctic regions. Somewhere along the line he read of the explorations of Sir John Franklin and the death of the entire expedition.
       Amundsen began preparing himself for this calling. He practiced daily exercises to produce a super body and strength for the trials of life in the Arctic.
       Together with a companion, he undertook a several-day, cross-the-mountains trip in the dead of winter to become somewhat acquainted with hardships in the frozen north.
       On reading of past Arctic explorers he discovered one flaw in their management organization. The ships had an exploration leader and also a captain on the vessel. Many times the two were at odds. Amundsen determined to avoid this possibility by studying navigation and ship handling. To add to his knowledge, he shipped out on a sailing vessel bound for antarctic exploration.
       Amundsen acquired the GJÖA on credit, and proceeded to outfit her in Oslo. He had sought financial backing both in Norway and Germany but had not obtained sufficient backing. On 16 June 1903 his creditors demanded payment. He was without funds. That night, Amundsen and his six followers slipped the GJÖA's moorings and sailed out of Oslo and into the North Atlantic beyond the reach of his creditors.
       The GJÖA was a one-mast vessel of 74-ft. in length, 11-ft. of beam, shallow draught, and 47-tons. The GJÖA also had a small gas engine, although these machines were not very reliable at that time. Stops were made along the coast of Greenland where additional supplies and 20 dogs were obtained.
       They sailed north and then west through Lancaster Sound, thence south; on 9 September, with winter threatening, they found a small, snug harbor on the south end of King William Island and named it GJÖA Harbor. A shore camp was set up including a building for magnetic observations. For this, Amundsen had made careful preparations. Only coppers nails were used and all other precautions were taken to avoid any object that could affect the magnetic observations. Hunting parties went forth and secured over 100 caribou for winter food.
       Amundsen and party were secure and safe in this snug harbor and finally departed on 13 August 1905, having spent nearly two years there performing scientific studies. During this time, they found the last camp of the Franklin Expedition where those men had perished.
       Amundsen then sailed west through Simpson Strait, between King William Island and an unnamed peninsula jutting north from the continent. This area had been charted by shore parties, but no sounding had been obtained. Three weeks were required for the GJÖA to negotiate this channel, with many times only one inch between the keel and the bottom. At other times they were stuck in the sand.
       On 26 August 1905, when they sighted the whaler CHARLES HANSSON of San Francisco, they realized they had finally completed the Northwest Passage. They had just sailed west through Coronation Gulf, Dolphin and Union Strait, and into the Beaufort Sea. On 2 September they were beset by new ice and had to seek shelter for another winter. They found a location behind several icebergs, only a few miles from Herschel Island where several vessels of the whaling fleet were secured in harbor for the winter. The winter of 1905-1906 was spent icebound. When the thaw came, Amundsen and GJÖA proceeded west past Point Barrow, south through the Bering Sea, the North Pacific Ocean and on to San Francisco. He entered the Golden Gate in October 1906.
       The GJÖA became the first vessel to transit this most fabled waterway--the Northwest Passage. For many years the GJÖA was open for show in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Several years ago, the GJÖA was returned to Oslo on the deck of a steamship and is on display there.
       The adventurous Amundsen went on to be the first man to reach the South Pole. Eventually, he lost his life in the Arctic in 1928 during a attempted rescue of the explorer Umberto Nobile who had crashed in the dirigible ITALIA."
Text by Captain J. Edward Shields,
Poulsbo, Washington.
Writing for the Journal of the P.S.M.H.S.
The Sea Chest, June 1995