· SCIENCE · 5 min read
The real cargo: Maud and the science that outlived the voyage
Judged by its goal the voyage failed. Judged by what it brought home, it was one of the most important of the century.
The Maud expedition is usually filed as one of Amundsen's failures. Judged by its stated goal, to drift across the top of the world over the North Pole, it was. The ice never gave Maud the long northern drift she was built for. But judged by what she brought home, the expedition was one of the most quietly important voyages of the twentieth century.
The reason was a young scientist named Harald Ulrik Sverdrup. As scientific director he turned the seven years between 1918 and 1925 into an unbroken record of measurement: meteorology, physical oceanography, terrestrial magnetism, atmospheric electricity, the tides of the Siberian shelf. Where Amundsen saw a route, Sverdrup saw an instrument platform drifting slowly through almost unmeasured ocean. He even spent some seven months living with the Chukchi people on the Siberian coast, learning their reading of the ice.
Maud came home in 1925 with a hold full of data that took years to publish. That data did not stay in Norway. By 1936 Sverdrup was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. There, with his student Walter Munk, he turned the physics of ocean waves into something that could be forecast. That forecast was used to choose the morning of the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944.
Maud herself had a harder fate. Sold and renamed Baymaud, she sank at anchor in Cambridge Bay in 1930. She lay there for eighty-six years until she was raised in 2016 and towed home to Vollen, where she had been built, in 2018.
The cargo was always the data. It still is.
This is the voyage Meridian Polar is named for — not the geographic ambition but the scientific one. What Sverdrup recorded by hand, in pencil, in the dark of an Arctic winter, we intend to record continuously, and to give away freely.