TANDBERG POLAR

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Tug towed explorer ship Maud back to Norway after 100 years

The "Tandberg Polar" has towed the "Maud", the ice-going exploration ship in which the famous Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen tried and failed to reach the North Pole has back to Norway after nearly a century. The wreck of the "Maud" was dragged into the docks in the city of Bergen in the morning of Aug 6, 2018, after a month-and-a-half-long journey across the Atlantic from the harbour in Greenland where it has been resting since it was raised two years ago. Both of Amundsen’s other two polar vessels, the "Gjoa" and "Fram", are already on display at the Norwegian Maritime Museum is Oslo. The people behind the project plan to restore the "Maud" and display the vessel at a new museum at Vollen, the port in Asker where it was built. Amundsen launched the "Maud" in June 1916, by which time he had become a national hero in Norway and a celebrity internationally for leading the first expedition to reach the South Pole in 2011, beating Captain Robert Scott and his team by five weeks. Amundsen planned to let the "Maud" freeze in the Arctic ice, hoping it would then float over the North Pole while embedded in the Arctic ice sheet. But after six years trying and failing to reach the Pole in the vessel, Amundsen instead sailed the North East passage, arriving in Nome, Alaska, where the ship was sold to the Hudson's Bay Company by Amundsen’s creditors. The Hudson's Bay Company, then involved primarily in fur-trading, used the "Maud" as a vessel supply its outpost at Cambridge Bay on Canada’s Northeast Coast, until she was abandoned and sank in shallow water. In 1990, the company, by then a retail conglomerate, sold the half-submerged wreckage of the vessel to the Norwegian County of Asker, on the understanding that it be returned to Vollen. But it was not until 2016 that the vessel was raised and moved to Greenland, and not until June 2018 that it finally left for Norway. The "Maud" will now be towed along the Norwegian coast arriving on Aug 18 at Vollen. Report with photos: https://www.thelocal.no/20180806/polar-explorers-vessel-returns-to-norway-after-a-century