by Ric Stryde
Northern News Services

NNSL (Aug 25/97) - Two Northern scuba divers have found the remains of a ship lost 50 years ago in the waters near Cape Dorset.

Paul Beilstein and Christine MacIntyre of Yellowknife were the local contingent of a four-man team that also included former Yellowknifers Tom Roy and Bryan Eaton.

The four experienced divers made the trip earlier this summer to Beacon Island, just off the coast of Cape Dorset, where the Nascopie has been hidden since hitting a unchartered reef in July 1947.

"Very few divers have the chance to be the first to find a wreck," said Beilstein, who runs an outfitting operation. "To actually see it is a really neat feeling."

And the Nascopie isn't just any ship. It played key roles in Canadian history, including bringing reindeer to the NWT and surviving a Second World War battle.

Beilstein had made a similar trip last year but couldn't locate the ship. He said that all his last year's team had to go by was a photograph of the ship sinking in 1947, and other tidbits of consistently inconsistent information.

He said they finally located the approximate area of the ship thanks to a photograph of the reef and the ship just before it went down.

Because they were in Cape Dorset at the same time 10 years later, there was an almost identical amount of melting snow in the crevasse on the rock as was depicted in the photograph. This gave the team a pretty good idea where the ship sank.

During the 1996 dive all they found was pieces of the Nascopie's superstructure. "We basically concluded that maybe it's just all broken up," said Beilstein.

He couldn't resist going back though, so he got together a new team and set out last month.

They looked in the same area this time but found a large hill on the ocean floor. Upon closer inspection they discovered it to be the ship.

"It's really hard to tell what we were looking at, because it was all covered in growth," said Beilstein.

The problem was that after 50 years of being touched only by the ice, which scraped off the top of the ship, all sorts of sea life had grown over the ship, to the point where it actually looked like part of the ocean floor.

This made MacIntyre happy, because her interest in scuba diving is seeing the ocean claim back any wrecks that have settled in her grasp.

Beilstein, on the other hand, enjoys diving on wrecks to examine the boat to indulge his penchant for researching history before seeing them.

The "Nascopie" was built in 1911 to be a supply ship for the Hudson's Bay Company's Northern outposts, but was called upon for other duties as well.

She was the ship that in 1921, because of a decline in the Baffin, took a cargo of 550 reindeer from Norway across the Atlantic and dropped them off between Lake Harbour and Cape Dorset, to resupply the region.

She was also used to transport munitions during the wars, and as a tourist boat for a short stint.

What was perhaps her most amazing moment happened in June 1917. The ship had left Russia, bound for St. John's, when it encountered a German submarine. After both sides had exchanged a few shots, the Nascopie hit and destroyed the submarine's gun mounting. Four shots later she sank the submarine itself.

Beilstein said he wonders why there hadn't been a search conducted for this ship previously, but didn't really mind, because he and his team got to be the first to see it.

To properly honor the vessel the team put together a plaque commemorating the 50th anniversary of the sinking, and placed it on the reef that the ship struck on that fateful day in July, 50 years ago.