Coats Island in Hudson Bay is the definition of remote. [Google Maps]
A. T. Gifford set sail from Cape Fullerton in 1915. In 1921, two skeletons were found on Coats Island. [“Canada Relief Map 2” by MapGrid / Wikimedia Commons] Name places and ship route added by author.
Updated on 20 August 2026 | Shipwrecked sailors have faced grisly deaths, but few have been as protracted and desperate as that suffered by Capt. Arthur O. Gibbons, skipper of A. T. Gifford, and a member his crew, in the northernmost reaches of Hudson Bay, Canada’s vast inland sea.
Captain Gibbons’s ship, an 86-ton schooner with an auxiliary gasoline-powered engines, was built in Essex in 1883. Its hailing port was Provincetown, though it was owned Ferdinand Nicolas Monjo of Stamford, Conn. He was the head of the Monjo Company of Manhattan, a wholesale dealer in furs from the arctic region of Nunavut. Monjo competed in the fur trade with the enormous Hudson’s Bay Company.
On 13 June 1915, Gifford set out from New Bedford, bound for Hudson Bay with provisions for the Monjo Company outpost at Cape Fullerton, overseen by Capt. George G. Cleveland. That outpost lay just shy of the polar zone at 64 degrees north. The ship was to return with the furs that had been piling up at Cape Fullerton over the past year.
Captain Gibbons was from Norwich, Conn. By far the shortest in the 15-man complement aboard Gifford, he was an experienced whaler who had made several voyages to Hudson Bay. Thomas Stokes served as mate, Thomas Sullivan as steward. The crew included Joseph Gomes, Jack Gorton, Jack Morgan, and William Van Patten. The ship itself carried enough supplies for a yearlong trip.1
Gifford successfully reached Cape Fullerton in the early fall, unloaded its cargo and took on the precious furs. It departed the Monjo Company station on 23 September 1915.
What happened next is a story no one can tell for sure. Nothing at all was known of Gifford‘s fate until 1919, when Christian Leden, leader of a unrelated expedition, returned to New Bedford with news that he had actually seen Gifford after its departure from Cape Fullerton.
“Captain Gibbons told him that the engines of the Gifford broke down on the way to the bay,” The Standard-Times of New Bedford reported. “He had been six weeks caught in the ice and was then trying to get out. Mr. Leden said that the Gifford was not built for work among the ice, and that she was probably crushed in trying to get out through the [Hudson] straits.”2
Crushed? Or burned? In September 1923, Captain Cleveland — the Monjo Company agent whose supplies Gifford had replenished — came back to the United States for the first time in a dozen years. He shared an amazing tale with members of the New Bedford Whaleman’s Club, as related by the Springfield Evening Union: While cruising in the bay in 1921, Captain Cleveland called at Coats Island (Appatuurjuaq), on which the Hudson’s Bay Company maintained a station, about 185 miles from Cape Fullerton.
“There he found an overturned fishermen’s dory, and beneath it two skeletons, one that of an exceedingly small man, and the other that of a medium-sized man.”
“As Capt. Gibbons was the smallest man in the Gifford’s crew of 15, Capt. Cleveland became almost sure the skeleton was that of the lost skipper. When he found beside the skeleton a revolver, which he identified as one owned and carried by Capt. Gibbons, his worst fears became confirmed.”
“Capt. Cleveland learned that at the time the schooner was scheduled to pass through Hudson Straits, Eskimos had seen a vessel burning at the water’s edge. He believes that Capt. Gibbons and a companion started out in the dory to reach the nearest post of the Hudson’s Bay Company.”
“Reaching [Coats] Island, winter set in, and the men were forced to camp 70 miles from their goal. They lived on small game, rabbits and birds, and died beneath their dory sometime in the winter of 1915-1916. The bones of many small animals near the dory would seem to bear out Capt. Cleveland’s theory. Evidently the other 13 members of the crew perished in the same manner as did those whose skeletons were beneath the dory.”3
1 “Fears for Schooner,” The [New Bedford] Standard-Times, 2 November 1916, Page 2.
2 “Sch. Finback Comes Into Port,” The [New Bedford] Standard-Times, 14 July 1919, Page 1.
3 “Bones of Lost Sailors Found,” Springfield Evening Union, 21 September 1923, Page 2.