WINNIPEG – It’s not just the sight of a 17th-century ship, standing erect indoors, that strikes visitors to the Nonsuch gallery in the Manitoba Museum. Other senses are engaged as well – the piped-in sound of waves, the smell of old rope and wood, and even seaside-worthy sticky humidity, very much at odds with the dry Prairie weather. The gallery transports visitors to another time and place – a key moment in the development of what would become Western Canada.
The full-size replica of the two-masted Nonsuch stands in an immersive gallery, made up to look like the bustling waterfront of Deptford, England, in 1668. The sound of seagulls and waves plays in the background and faux storefronts along one wall are made to look like merchant outlets of the era, complete with dim lantern-style lighting and wooden signs.
Humidity in the gallery is kept very high to help prevent the ship from deteriorating, with the added benefit of giving visitors the damp feeling associated with a port community.
The replica – a two-masted wooden ketch equipped with ropes and pulleys that look authentic – appears large indoors. But at just 16 metres long, it makes visitors wonder how a crew of a dozen men could survive in such a small space during a perilous, 118-day journey across the North Atlantic and into the unknown frozen wilderness of the Hudson Bay coastline.
“I hope people really get that sense of awe and the sense of being on a ship in the open water and how terrifying that could have been, and just really embrace how Canada came to be,” said Amelia Fay, curator of the section of the museum that includes the Nonsuch gallery.
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The original Nonsuch led to the creation of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the growth of the western fur trade. The ship left England in June 1668 in pursuit of a northern alternative to the established fur trade route that relied on the St. Lawrence River.
The crew made it to the eastern shore of Hudson Bay and, after surviving a winter in the northern wilderness, returned home with beaver pelts.
The investors behind the mission created the Hudson’s Bay Company and moved to expand the fur trade.
The replica Nonsuch is remarkably hands-on. Visitors can go aboard the vessel and see the tiny sleeping quarters the crew endured for almost four months. Walking from bow to stern only takes several seconds. Guests can also walk around the hull of boat. It sits on the gallery floor, which is painted to look like a shore at low tide, complete with logs and debris.
The replica was built in 1970 for the 300th anniversary of the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was towed across the Atlantic for the re-enactment of its best-known voyage because sailing such a small vessel nowadays on the open sea is considered too dangerous.
The Nonsuch is so small that people often think it is not a full-scale replica, Fay said. But there was a reason for the original ship’s diminutive stature.
“When you think about crossing the North Atlantic, it’s terrifying. I wouldn’t want to do it in this size of ship, but its size served a very important purpose in that the crew could actually haul it up (out of the water) to over-winter,” Fay said.
The Nonsuch gallery is just one of many sections of the Manitoba Museum, which attempts to cover the province’s broad history and geography. Walking through the museum, the galleries are lined up for the most part in chronological order – starting with prehistoric fossils, going through the traditions of First Nations inhabitants, right up until a 1920s-era town site with a sidewalk, two-storey buildings and a functioning old-time cinema.
The landscapes of the province’s different regions are represented as well. A section on the sub-Arctic includes a photo display of the midnight sun on a summer’s day. The parklands gallery includes bison, wolves and other majestic animals.
A visit to the museum can easily take two hours or more to complete, and there are additional features in the building’s basement – a science gallery and planetarium with a recently upgraded projector system.
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