Making Monuments to the RMS Nascopie

By Isabelle Gapp

Image Caption: Lorene Squire, Thule, Greenland, 1938. Hudson Bay Company Archives, Manitoba.

Author: Isabelle Gapp

Institution: Interdisciplinary Fellow, Department of Art History, University of Aberdeen

Keywords:
Maritime history, ships, Nascopie, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic, HBC, photography, film, architecture, Lorene Squire, Inuit visual culture, Greenland

Abstract: In 1938, the American photographer Lorene Squire (1910-1942) was commissioned by the Hudson Bay Company magazine, The Beaver, to report on the life and landscape of the Canadian Arctic as experienced from aboard the steamship and icebreaker, the RMS Nascopie (1912-1947). The focus of this essay is one of these photographs which captures not only the deck of the ship and the seemingly innocuous materials strewn across its surface, but also the shoreline of Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat). By introducing the history of this ship through the many visual and material memories that emanated from its decks, I delve into the idea of the ship as a monument. When viewed alongside the countless photographs and paintings taken or created from the surface of the moving ship, this photograph introduces the many lives of the Nascopie, its demise, and what became of its wreckage.

Essay

Beyond the struts of a ladder and below the light of an overhanging gas lamp, the coastal landscape of Qaanaaq (Thule), Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat) appears along the horizon in one of American photographer Lorene Squire’s many Arctic photographs. Occupying a point at the north of Baffin Bay, Qaanaaq is demarcated by nothing more than a scattering of houses along the shoreline. Only the image caption identifies the location. The surface of the ship, meanwhile, is occupied by a sledge protruding across the ship’s edge, a lifeboat affixed by endless rope to the upper level, and a life float emblazoned with ‘Nascopie’ and ‘London’ in capital letters hanging from the rails. This same life float now resides in the collections of the Manitoba Museum.

Taking its name from the Naskapi Nation, meaning “people beyond the horizon,” an Indigenous people native to the sub-Arctic territory St’aschinuw located in Nunavik (modern-day northern Quebec and Labrador), the SS (later RMS) Nascopie was a British-made icebreaker, commissioned by the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) in 1911. It was constructed in Wallsend on Tyne in England and was always intended to be used as an Arctic supply ship. Setting sail a year later, in 1912, the Nascopie serviced HBC outposts in the Canadian Eastern Arctic, including communities within Nunatsiavut, Nunavik, and Nunavut, and Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat). The farthest north the ship ever went was to Robertson Fiord (Siorapaluup Kangerlua) on the west coast of Kalaallit Nunaat.

Over the course of thirty-five years, the Nascopie transported HBC personnel, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, missionaries, Inuit and non-Inuit trappers and hunters, families, tourists, animals (dead and alive), and later the Canadian Government’s Eastern Arctic Patrol (EAP). Founded in 1922, and originally operated from the sealing ship the SS Beothic, the EAP worked to establish and maintain RCMP outposts. During the First World War, the Nascopie was chartered by the French Government as a supply ship, transporting wheat and munitions across the Atlantic. In 1921, it also transported reindeer and their Sámi herders from Alta, Norway to Amadjuak, Baffin Island, and during the Second World War it not only served as a Royal Mail Steamship (hence the designation RMS), but also facilitated the transportation of cryolite ore from Kalaallit Nunaat.

Cryolite is a rare material, with the largest naturally occurring reserve once held in Ivittuut on Kalaallit Nunaat’s southwest shore where it was then shipped to the U.S. and Canada to aid in the smelting of aluminium used in the production of aircraft. The mine was abandoned in 1984. Today, these landscapes are more often centred around a discussion of glacial history and the surface melt rate of the Greenland Ice Sheet (Sermersuaq), although the cryolite mines make popular sights for cruise tourism. Qaanaaq, meanwhile, the backdrop to Squire’s photograph, also remains a site of contentious U.S. claims of sovereignty and defence in the Arctic through the Thule Air Base

In 1937, the Nascopie also became the first foreign ship to reach the Bellot Strait (in northern Nunavut) since 1859, when the British explorer Sir Francis Leopold McClintock had learned of the fate of Sir John Franklin and his missing expedition of 1845-46. Unlike British and American efforts to locate the Northwest Passage, the Nascopie did not arrive on a voyage of discovery but instead sought to reaffirm the HBC and EAP’s Arctic presence. That same year, in 1937, the HBC-chartered schooner Aklavik, became the first foreign vessel to transit the Bellot Strait, indicating the first commercial use of the Northwest Passage. Cinematographer Richard Finnie (1906-1987) recorded the moment the Nascopie met the Aklavik, with footage appearing in his documentary Patrol to the Northwest Passage.

Passengers aboard the Nascopie were fascinated by the romance of it all, harking back to nineteenth-century polar exploration, while the Aklavik’s crew, which included the Inuk fur trader and later ship’s captain Patsy Klengenberg and his family, were the focus of cinematic and photographic interest. Photographs of Klengenberg and notably his daughter Dora Kelly appear within Squire’s archives and were later published in The Beaver. This historic moment was subsequently crystallised in a painting commissioned by the HBC by the artist Thomas Harold Beament (1898-1984). Beament was a naval officer who first visited and painted the Arctic in 1947 following his retirement from the Canadian Royal Navy. Later, in 1946, the Aklavik caught fire, exploded, and sank, killing Klengenberg. The following year, the Nascopie struck an unchartered reef off Beacon Island at the entrance to Kinngait (Cape Dorset) harbour and sank.

As well as being among the most iconic HBC vessels, the Nascopie, alongside the Aklavik, already existed in a long line of ill-fated Canadian vessels. These included the maritime fur-trading vessel the SS Beaver, the Canadian Pacific coast guard ship the CGCS Quadra, the largest ship ever built in Canada the William D. Lawrence, and the DGS Neptune which was famously chartered by the Dominion Government Expedition in 1903-04 to ascertain the geographical extent of so-called Canada. The Neptune also played in a role in attempts to curtail the prevalent centuries-long whaling industry in the eastern Canadian Arctic. A photograph of the Nascopie, taken by photographer Frederick W. Berchem (ca.1902-unknown) whose career spanned the Nascopie and Baychimo, also recorded it rescuing the crew and passengers of the SS Baychimo in 1925. After becoming trapped in pack ice, the Baychimo drifted as a ghost ship through Arctic waters for over thirty years. A photograph of the crew of the Baychimo being rescued was later turned into a collectable postcard.

The sinking of the Nascopie, meanwhile, was captured on camera by Peter Pitseolak (1902-1973), a resident of Kinngait who is commonly regarded as the first Inuit photographer. His images of the slow submersion of the ship below the surface of the sea serve as documentary evidence of the moment the ship became a shipwreck.

Despite what news headlines reported (see the HBC archives in Winnipeg)--implying it sank instantaneously with the crew lucky to make it back to shore alive--it did in fact take three months for the ship to break in half and disappear beneath the water. As such, parts of the Nascopie were salvaged and either returned to the south along with the crew or were incorporated into local Inuit life. Pitseolak built a house from salvaged ships’ timber and the coal intended for the Nascopie’s furnaces was initially used to heat this house. A photograph within the ᐃᓂᖓᑦ ᐃᓚᒌᑦ Iningat Ilagiit collections further includes a photograph by an unknown photograph taken in Igalaalik, Southwest Baffin Island, of the Remains of a winter tent frame, with a porthole window from the Nascopie.

Contemporary Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona (b.1961) also depicts Inuit returning to shore in motorboats, presumably having gathered any surviving cargo that was aboard the Nascopie. Crates, barrels, white, blue, and green tarp fill the boats in her painting Compositions (Titanic, Nascopie, and Noah’s Ark, 2008). It visually evidences this dispersal of the Nascopie’s goods, timbers, windows, and other fittings. These goods were transported to shore over the course of the ship’s slow disappearance below the water’s surface. The image of the Nascopie notably reappears throughout the work of several Inuit artists working in Kinngait: Kananginak Pootoogook (1935-2010) produced a lithograph titled The Wreck of the Nascopie (2010, Dorset Fine Arts), while his niece Napatchie Pootoogook (1938-2002), depicted the ship split in two in her lithograph Nascopie Reef (1989, Dorset Fine Arts) depicts the ship split in two.

Such imagery conveys wider collective cultural meanings and memories of the Nascopie. Not only was the ship incorporated into structures and collections, but also into Inuit imaginings of their past, present, and future coastal environment. Squire’s photograph similarly encourages us to think about the afterlives of the ship, the memories it left behind. Other than the life float, where are the sledge, the lifeboat, the gas lamp now? What did they become? With this photograph, we might not only observe the visual history of the ship but also the objects that in turn became material monuments to the icebreaker.

Further Reading

Dorothy Harley Eber and Peter Pitseolak, People from Our Side: A Life Story with Photographs and Oral Biography (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993).

Isabelle Gapp, “All Aboard the Nascopie: Image-Making, Colonial Modernity, and Coastal Memory in the Eastern Canadian Arctic.” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes. (Accepted, pending publication).

Peter Geller, Northern Exposures: Photographing and Filming the Canadian North, 1920-45 (The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Karla McManus, ““These Diminished Waters”: Conservation, Camera Hunting, and Settler / Indigenous Conflict in Lorene Squire's Wildfowl Photography of Northern Canada,” Journal of Canadian Art History 26, no. 2 (2015): 56-91.

Frank Tester and Peter Kulchyski, Tammarniit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 1939-63 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011).

Making Monuments to the RMS Nascopie

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