After spending 85 years under water at Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, the polar vessel Maud finally returned home this summer. Built for Roald Amundsen’s second expedition to the Arctic, she was specially designed to withstand the crush of Arctic ice, and was launched in Vollen, on the west side of the Oslofjord, Norway, on June 7, 1917. The expedition did not go as planned and in 1925 she was sold to the Hudson’s Bay Company to help pay Amundsen’s debts. In 1926 she froze into the ice in Cambridge Bay, where she sank in 1930.
In 2016, she was raised to the surface and carefully prepared for the trip home. Then in 2017 she was towed through the Northwest Passage to her winter destination of Aasiaat on the west coast of Greenland. In April of this year, she made the last leg of her journey home to Vollen, arriving on August 18. She will be put on display once a preservation process is completed. If you would like to read more about Maud’s journey with Amundsen, and how she eventually made it back to Norway, the Smithsonian magazine has lots of details in an article in its August 13, 2018 issue.