Sachs Harbour Youth Visit the ship.

We recently gave a tour of the ship to two young men from Sachs Harbour, Kevin Gully and Kyle Anthony Donovan. They remarked on how great it was that the ship seemed virtually unchanged from when she was built. They toured the main salon which used to be the cargo hold for either the furs outbound from Banksland or the winter’s supplied inbound from the Delta and the pilot house as well as on deck.

The men had heard of North Star and one of them remembered hearing stories of Peter Sydney climbing to the top of the mast with just his trousers on just for the thrill and adventure of it all. They sadly reported that the Fox, North Star’s sistership, who has been on the beach since 1961 has been terribly vandalized and covered with graffiti. This, of course, is one of the reasons that Fred Carpenter was eager to sell the ship as he foresaw the same thing happening to North Star. They also said that Fred and Agnes’s White Fox Hotel has been vandalized by some of the local youth with graffiti and the windows all broken. Very sad but indicative of not only boredom but a lack of knowledge and respect for those that came before them and their incredible history on Banksland.

Hopefully, my book, North Star of Herschel Island, might in some small way help some of the Bankslander youth to re-connect with the past and to have more pride in their history. I know that some of them do, including our two visitors this week.