NORTHWEST PASSAGE VOYAGE THE ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME
Young RCMP officer spent two winters frozen in place with fellow crew members
Eugene “Dean” Hadley was a 20-year-old corporal when he joined the crew of the St. Roch, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s 31.6-metre schooner that 28 months later would become the first vessel to transit the Northwest Passage from west to east.
He had never been on a ship before.
“That was the big attraction. I’m a Prairie boy,” says Hadley, who is now 98 and the last surviving member of the eight-man crew.
The historic Arctic voyage from 1940 to 1942 was a grand and, at times, frightening adventure. It was the first of many for the man whose curiosity took him to the one of the most remote places on Earth and engaged him in space travel.
Nothing had prepared the young Hadley for the St. Roch, or for three summers and two long winters frozen in place. Certainly not his RCMP training, where riding horses, not sailing, had been a key component.
Hadley began his career in the crime lab, recording autopsy results using skills he learned at the Weyburn School of Commerce. It was during that posting that the St. Roch’s first radio operator arrived from the Arctic for retraining.
“I thought, ‘Gee whiz, all the things you dream about. There it is,’ ” says Hadley, who along with the St. Roch was inducted last week into the Vancouver Maritime Museum’s North West Passage Hall of Fame.
“Crowded was the first word that came to mind when I saw the ship (in Vancouver harbour).”
As we tour the ship — a national historic site housed within the museum — Hadley talks about what it was like on board.
“Standing here looking out at the fo’c’sle, can you imagine being out there on the Pacific with the ocean coming over the top? The whole front end was buried in water.
“(From the bunks in the forward cabin), the guys would wait until the boat would come up so they could open the door without drowning . ... They’d run like hell to get over the well deck before the next wave.”
Below deck, Hadley points to a spot on the floor.
“When ‘Frenchy’ Chartrand died, he collapsed and fell right here. The guys were having breakfast and I came down here to see how he was doing because I knew that he’d had (a heart) attack before . ... This is where he breathed his last.”
That was the first winter when St. Roch was stuck in the ice in Paisley Bay.
The skipper, Sgt. Henry Larsen, and another crew member, Pat Hunt, went by dog team on a 600-kilometre trip to fetch a priest. Chartrand was then buried on Boothia Peninsula.
Albert Chartrand was the only crew member ever to die on the St. Roch or under Larsen’s command.
Larsen was the oldest on the ship; Hadley, the youngest. They had long conversations and Hadley remains awestruck at Larsen’s navigational skills. He had only a sextant with no charts or maps to rely on.
As for the young radio operator, he had built and designed radios, learned code, and was a ham radio operator as a kid. He knew a bit about radio transmitters and had done a fair bit of reading. But, he says, “I didn’t expect anything as ancient as what they had (on St. Roch).”
Tuning St. Roch’s Marconi 100W4C was more art than science.
“You tuned it by adjusting where the clips were on the coil on the top and it was sensitive enough because of the size that when we went from Victoria to Vancouver you had to retune it because it was 15 kilocycles off because of the temperature change.”
Before Hadley disembarks St. Roch, he insists that museum staff get the key and unlock the engine room where he ran his hands fondly over the engine.
“I was one of these curious kids. I could repair a diesel truck. I wasn’t qualified, but I sure was interested.”
Watching the two crewmen in charge of the engine overhaul it helped relieve Hadley’s boredom and frustration during the long months on the tiny ship.
“When you have nothing to do, it’s a terrible burden. If you’re a person who likes to do things, that’s another kind of a burden. And if you’re a person like myself, who thinks about new things ... then there’s no place you can go to get the stuff to do it with.”
The only book that Hadley had taken with him was a 1919 British book of rules and regulations for radio operators.
“It took a long time to work through it,” he says. “But it was helpful ... because who in Hannah is going to teach you how to tune a radio?”
But the boredom was also breached by fear as St. Roch sailed into the unknown and uncharted waters.
The ship and its crew spent the winter of 1940 at the entrance to Prince of Wales Strait in Walker Bay. Released from the ice in July 1941 and following their instructions, they pressed eastward.
By early September, the ice was once again thickening.
“We’re in an area where we’d already discovered that as you’re going along, the boat will stop. Why? Because you’ve been going along a kind of a tunnel at the bottom and you’ve come to the end of the tunnel.
“So, now you have to back up until there’s some way out of that thing to try to move.
“And that was the routine we were going through when we get up to a kind of a bulge in the (Boothia) peninsula. Just below it is this big bay.”
The ice pushed them along into Paisley Bay with the St. Roch rolling so that they knew the ship’s bottom was not in the water.
“It keeps on pushing and we wind up on the other side of the sand bank and, by this time, we’re as close to the shore as we are to the front of the boat. It’s 4 o’clock in the morning and you can’t see a damn thing ...
“And so we’re there. The boat gets straightened up. With the small boat and an anchor we pull ourselves a little bit further from the shore. That’s how we got to be there that winter.”
It wasn’t until the following August that they forced their way out of the ice, going north through Bellot Strait, which separates Somerset Island from the Boothia Peninsula, which is the northernmost point of mainland North America.
It is a treacherous, two-kilometre-wide passage.
“We start through Bellot Strait and these ice blocks follow us in. Now, we get in there partway and there’s this bigger chunk of ice that caused some stir. All of a sudden, there’s this ice bridge all across the strait, on top of which is a dead whale and some other stuff that I didn’t recognize.
“The ice has stopped moving, but there’s still more coming in from behind. So, we try the engine and the boat would not go this way and it wouldn’t go that way.”
“We should have been out of there a year earlier,” says Hadley. “But Mother Nature didn’t understand.”
When the ship reached Halifax, Hadley left St. Roch.
He has never gone back to the Arctic.
“Why would I want to do that?” he asks.
But he appreciates the significance of what he was part of.
“It was important for anybody to be able to do it (go through the Northwest Passage). There were no maps. There were no charts. Nobody knew what the vegetation was. They didn’t know it was a big swamp in the summertime and a frozen-up swamp in the winter time.”
As importantly, Hadley says it helped establish Canadian sovereignty in the resourcerich Arctic, which is even more important now than ever to countries like China, which he says “want that territory up there as badly as Canada does.”
In 1942, Hadley resigned from the RCMP, enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and served through the remainder of the Second World War. He received an engineering degree at the University of Toronto, returned to the RCMP, and eventually became the senior non-commissioned officer in its communications division.
But ever curious, Hadley moved on to the private sector, working for an American aerospace company and eventually on NASA’s Apollo space program. There, he helped configure the navigational control panel and set the specifications for the first lunar landing craft.
Hadley’s father had been a skilled watchmaker. In their Weyburn home, there was an apple box filled with railroaders’ pocket watches that Hadley’s father could take apart, wash, lubricate and put back together in 20 minutes. His precocious son tried it one day.
“I had three wheels left over. I took it apart, put it back together again and I had three wheels left over. I took it apart, put it back together again and had four wheels left over.
“Finally, I went to my dad and he took a look at it, dropped it in the trash and he said, ‘Next time, when you take something apart, pay attention.’
“Ever since that day, I have remembered that if you take something apart you better remember what you did because you may be the only person there to put it back together.”