Syd Dumaresq has spent his professional life drawing buildings. As president of SP Dumaresq Architect Limited, the Halifax firm his family has run since 1870, he is a fourth-generation architect whose lineage — great-grandfather J.C. Dumaresq, grandfather Sydney Perry Dumaresq, father Phil Dumaresq, and Syd himself — has cumulatively designed more than 100 buildings in Halifax over the past century and a half. He graduated from McGill in 1969, is a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and once served as president of the Nova Scotia Association of Architects.
On the afternoon of Sunday, October 5, however, Dumaresq will be talking about ice, not architecture. At 2:30 p.m. at the Ocean Swells Community Centre in Northwest Cove, he will present "The Search for the Northwest Passage," an account of his recent cruise through Canada's fabled Arctic sea route. The event is hosted by the Athenaeum Society of Nova Scotia and is free and open to all.
The Northwest Passage is the sea lane connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Arctic Ocean, threading the waterways of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. For centuries European explorers chased it as a possible trade route to Asia, and generations of expeditions were blocked by ice, by the bulk of the continents, or by both.
The story Dumaresq tells is, by his own account, largely the story of what was known and not known in 1845, when Captain Sir John Franklin set sail from England aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Franklin's expedition — 129 officers and men — was assigned to traverse the last unnavigated sections of the passage and to record magnetic data that might aid navigation. Both ships became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island, in what is now Nunavut. After more than a year trapped, Erebus and Terror were abandoned in April 1848, by which point two dozen men, including Franklin, had died. The survivors, led by Franklin's second-in-command Francis Crozier and Erebus's captain James Fitzjames, set out for the Canadian mainland and vanished.
Pressed by Franklin's wife Jane and others, the Admiralty launched a search in 1848, and the decades of rescue missions that followed turned up artefacts, graves, and eventually the wrecks themselves — but no survivors. Dumaresq's talk traces those failed searches and then the two men who finally did it: the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who completed the first successful passage by ship between 1903 and 1906, and the Canadian RCMP officer Henry Larsen, who made two back-to-back passages aboard the St. Roch in the 1940s. As Dumaresq has joked when giving a version of this talk before, audiences should expect "lots of dramatic and terrifying landscape, but not much Architecture."
The Athenaeum Society itself has a story worth telling. It was founded by a small group of South Shore residents who noticed how many active and retired university professors and other experts were living in the area, and who wanted a way to put that knowledge in front of a wider audience.
Based in the fishing village of Northwest Cove, the society has drawn more than 350 members over the years. Dues are kept to $20 a year, and there is no charge at all to attend a presentation, which typically draws around 50 people. Meetings are held at the Ocean Swells Community Centre — a low white building beside a small white church at 2724 Highway 329 — on the third Sunday of each month, except July, August and December, always at 2:30 p.m. Presentations run about an hour, followed by a question period and then a social hour with coffee, tea and desserts.
The Ocean Swells centre serves the wider Aspotogan Peninsula, offering recreational, educational, cultural and social programs, and counting the Athenaeum Society's monthly meetings among its regular activities. It is the kind of small community hall where a retired professor, a working architect, or anyone else with something to say can simply stand up and say it.
That is essentially the appeal of the October talk. Dumaresq is not an Arctic historian by trade; he is an architect and an amateur historian who went on a cruise and came back with a story. The passage he will describe has become, in the twenty-first century, increasingly ice-free — a change that has stirred speculation the route may one day be clear enough for regular commercial shipping. But the history he is tracing is the older one: the centuries of ships that went looking for a way through and did not come back, and the two that finally did.
Admission is free and all are welcome. More information is available at athenaeumns.org.