Northwest Passage Exploration Ship Found 80
Kittenman writes: The BBC (and several other sources) are carrying the news that the Canadian government has found the sunken remains of one of Sir John Franklin's ships (either the Erebus, or the Terror), that went missing in the 1840s, causing sensation in Victorian London. Sir John and his entire crew were never seen alive again. The search for traces of the expedition went for over ten years in the 19th century, partly led by Sir John's widow. The discovery has been called the biggest archaeological event since the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb.
History rules (Score:4, Interesting)
September 9th, 2014
One of two ships from British explorer Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage has been discovered off King William Island in northern Canada. The ship appears to be in excellent condition. It’s standing straight up, with the bow five meters (16’4) off the sea and the stern four meters (13’1). The sonar image indicates that the deck is largely intact. Even some of its structures are visible, including the stumps of the masts that were sliced off by ice when the ship went down. With the deck still in place in the frigid Arctic waters, archaeologists are optimistic that there will be well-preserved artifacts still inside the ship.
It’s the sixth time since 2008 that Parks Canada has led a search of the Arctic seabed for the Franklin ships. This year the search area was the Victoria Strait, between Victoria Island and King William Island in the Nunavut territory. It was the largest search yet, a partnership between private and public organizations including Parks Canada, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the Arctic Research Foundation, the Canadian Coast Guard, the Royal Canadian Navy and the government of Nunavut. They also had new technology on their side. Parks Canada recently acquired a remotely operated underwater vehicle which played a key role in identifying and documenting the wreck.
A team of Government of Nunavut archaeologists surveying a small island southwest of King William as part of the expedition has also made significant discoveries: an iron davit (part of the boat-launching mechanism) from a Royal Navy ship and a wooden object that archaeologists believe could be a plug for a deck hawse (the pipe through which the chain cable was threaded). The davit bears the telltale “broad arrow” marks of the Royal Navy and the number 12. These artifacts were found on September 1st, six days before the sonar encountered the ship. The discovery reinforced that the marine search was in the right area.
It’s not clear at this point which of Franklin’s ships it is. Sir John and 128 crewmen set out on his fourth Arctic expedition with two ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. He was 59 years old and it had been 20 years since his last trip to the Arctic. The ships were provisioned with enough tinned foods to last three years (unfortunately the cans were poorly soldered and lead leached into the food) and outfitted with steam engines and iron cladding to help the ships break through the year-round ice.
European witnesses — crew from the whaler Prince of Wales — last spotted the ships moored to an iceberg off Baffin Island on July 26th, 1845. Historians believe Franklin wintered on Beechey Island only to become trapped by the ice off King William Island in September of 1846. The crew left the icebound ships and tried to make their way south on foot, but disease, starvation and lead poisoning ultimately claimed all of their lives.
Finding out what happened to Franklin and his crew became a cause célèbre. Thirty-nine expeditions were launched over the next 50 years to find some trace of Franklin’s expedition. The first clues were found in 1850 on Beechey Island, including the graves of three crewmen. A later expedition found a letter on King William Island noting that Franklin had died there on June 11th, 1847. In 1854, Inuit hunters told Scottish explorer Dr. John Rae that they had witnessed Franklin crewmen dying while walking on the ice and that the few survivors had resorted to cannibalism. Osteological analysis of remains found on King William Island in 1997 confirmed that they had indeed been cannibalized. Franklin’s body was never found.
The search for the ships has taken on new urgency in the past few years as melting ice has increasingly opened the Northwest Passage to shipping. The statement on the find from Prime Minister Stephen Harper emphasizes the significance of the find as the historical foundation of “Canada’s Arctic sovereignty.”
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http://www.thehistoryblog.com/ [thehistoryblog.com]
Who names those ships? (Score:5, Interesting)
Names like HMS Erebus and HMS Terror are kind of asking to sink with all hands on deck, aren't they?
Must be British humour or something...
Re:Who names those ships? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who names those ships? (Score:4, Insightful)
They were on an exploration mission with a pair of ships named Darkness and Terror.
Re:Who names those ships? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who names those ships? (Score:5, Funny)
Google wasn't around in 1979
Re:Who names those ships? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but HMS Please Don't Hurt Me doesn't have the same kind of ring to it.
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Not compared with the Daring, the Audacity and the Suicidal Insanity.
/ please correct these?
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I've seen half-serious suggestions that, should Scotland gain independence and create its own navy, all its ships should be named after Culture spacecraft [wikipedia.org]...
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Not compared with the Daring, the Audacity and the Suicidal Insanity.
/ please correct these?
No worse than the HMS Terrible.
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Who cares about the ring, when the HMS She's One Of Ours, Sir! can easily get a round or two off before the confusion is sorted out on the opponent's deck?
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I like this! :D
Re:Who names those ships? (Score:5, Interesting)
These ships are as much a part of US history as they are of Canadian.
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I think the names were to make the ships scary to other people, not the crew.
Volcanoes (Score:3, Informative)
These two vessles started off their military life as Bomb (Motar) ships which were traditionally named after Volcanoes, in this cases Mounts Terror & Erebus in Antarctica. (Unsurprisingly Wikipedia is wrong to claim Erebus was named directly after the Greek deity)
The nature of Mortar ships means they were built with disproportionately strong hulls for their (Ketch) size making them particularly suitable as Polar exploration vessels as the age of strife subsided.
Re:Volcanoes (Score:4, Informative)
Biggest archaeological event? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no archaeologist, but I doubt most archaeologists would claim this discovery ranks that highly. The person making the claim is an expert on the Franklin expedition, so he's bound to be a bit biased. It certainly sounds interesting, but we know a lot about Britain in the 1840s. I think the bigger archaeological discoveries involve civilizations we don't know much about.
Re: Biggest archaeological event? (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh, what about:
1) the finding of the undisturbed royal tombs of the 21th and 22nd dynasties in Tanis in 1940?
2) the finding of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945?
3) the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls near Qumran around ~1950?
4) the finding of an extremely well preserved chalcolithic European in 1991?
5) the finding of Qin Shi Huang's Teracotta Army in 1973? (Which is probably nothing compared to what we'll find in the undisturbed tomb one day.)
Perhaps also, sort of: 6) the discovery in 1973 that the corroded lump of rock found in ~1900 and lying in a Greek museum for decades is actually an Ancient Greek mechanical astronomical computer.
And besides these "grade A+ finds", could also point to "regular" "grade A finds" like Gobekli Tepe, the Staffordshire hoard, the aspherical Viking lenses found at Visby, etc. etc.
Re: Biggest archaeological event? (Score:5, Interesting)
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or titanic!!
Re: Biggest archaeological event? (Score:4, Insightful)
On the one hand we have the Titanic which sunk in 1912, we know virtually everything about, it's design, it's passenger list etc. Heck we even have film footage of it [britishpathe.com].
On the other hand we have the Marry Rose which sank in 1545 and (according to Wikipedia) "The surviving section of the ship and thousands of recovered artefacts are of immeasurable value as a Tudor-era time capsule. [...] The finds include weapons, sailing equipment, naval supplies and a wide array of objects used by the crew. Many of the artefacts are unique to the Mary Rose and have provided insights into topics ranging from naval warfare to the history of musical instruments.".
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I'm not saying finding the Titanic wasn't important but archaeologically speaking it is far less important than the Mary Rose.
Finding the Titanic was more an engineering feat than an archaeological feat. the Titanic was in 3,800 metres of water (21 KM from it's reported 1912 position) and sonar was pretty useless (Ballard found the Titanic in the same way he found lost nuclear subs for the USN, by looking for debris on the ocean floor).
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Really? The Monitor? Did you just suggest an Arctic expedition that vanished ~170 years ago and claimed 128 lives is of less archaeological importance than a ship that capsized in a storm while under tow?
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To my understanding, archaeological importance is about what we can learn from the discovery. So first a disclaimer; I do not know how much man has learned from recovering the Monitor, and nobody knows at of this moment what we will learn from investigating this ship (finding it in itself is not that big a deal).
The Monitor (and the Virginia (ex Merrimack)) changed the way wars was fought at sea. Thus it is one of the most important historical objects of naval warfare. (although it had
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Monitor had a bunch of sister ships.
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Did you just suggest an Arctic expedition that vanished ~170 years ago and claimed 128 lives [...]
To be fair, the lives lost weren't due to the sinking, but due to the trek they were forced to make over the ice. IIRC, recovered tin cans from the first campsite, and testing tissue from the excavated remains of three buried crew members showed that lead poisoning was likely a huge factor in the decisions that led to most of their deaths.
Not sure if the ship itself will yield any further clues as to the conditions that lead to the tragedy (aside from knowing precisely where it was stuck in the ice, anyway)
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Seriously. How can a 19th century ship be compared in importance to, say, the Dead Sea Scrolls?
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Possibly because the disappearance of the Franklin expedition lead to one of the largest maritime searches in history.
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Possibly because the disappearance of the Franklin expedition lead to one of the largest maritime searches in history.
Imagine if CNN had existed back then....
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With regard to that, I'd highly recommend Fatal Passage by Ken McGoogan, which is a biography of arctic explorer John Rae, who conducted the search for the Franklin expedition (and probably could have rescued them if things had worked out just a little bit differently) and discovered the final link in the northwest passage that Amundsen used 50 years later.
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For some reason your comment made me think about Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 [wikipedia.org] and the search for it. Maybe it'll be 100 years before someone finds it and it'll be a new archeological find.
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Re:Biggest archaeological event? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm no archaeologist, but I doubt most archaeologists would claim this discovery ranks that highly. The person making the claim is an expert on the Franklin expedition, so he's bound to be a bit biased. It certainly sounds interesting, but we know a lot about Britain in the 1840s. I think the bigger archaeological discoveries involve civilizations we don't know much about.
True, I'd rate this [wikipedia.org] wreck much higher. It told us a wealth of things about ancient trade routes, the nature of cargo, how it was stowed, ship design in 3400BP, ... the list goes on, and they were all things that were mostly just make educated guesses at before. Then there is this [nationalgeographic.com] a 1500 year old Roman transport just sitting there perfectly in tact. It makes you wonder what else is sitting there on the bottom of the Black Sea perfectly in tact: A Greek or Roman trireme, still sitting there with the oars in place and two Ballistas still standing on the deck? A Phoenician transport with it's cargo of perishables still in tact? A bronze, copper or even neolithic period merchant vessel? Something much, much older?
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The main thing is to find it quickly and get grant funding to root around in it. Move important parts from the site to modern steel and glass buildings, and record everything about it all on paper and (better yet) on hard drives that will be obsolete in a decade.
Yes, it's essential that we find and explore all historical relics, because history has ended and it's just a matter now of summing everything up.
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It certainly sounds interesting, but we know a lot about Britain in the 1840s.
Surprisingly, there's a lot of stuff we don't even know about World War II. As to the 19th century Britain, I remember that our notion of certain first major steam-powered factories had to be re-evaluated once it was found during archaeological expectations that they don't match the physical evidence.
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The reason its an archeological marvel is no archeologists have had access to it to rip it apart and muck it up. A hundred years from now archeologists will wish it hadn't been discovered and mucked up because THEY will have non-invasive capabilities we only wish existed today.
Anything that represents a 'time snapshot' that no other scientists have had access to is valuable to an archeologist. So long as he/she gets to it first.
Shipping Claims (Score:5, Interesting)
The real thing to take out of this article is the political angle: Canada funded the expedition in the hopes it somehow gives more weight to their claims over the shipping lanes invariably opening up as the arctic ice cap disappears.
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... shipping lanes invariably opening up as the arctic ice cap disappears.
I think you missed the underlying reason. This is just another facet of the elaborate internationally coordinated "global warming" hoax. Once they convince you the ice caps are melting then it is a slippery slope down to allowing Fluoride in our drinking water or believing men landed on the moon or even believing the Earth is round.
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The real thing to take out of this article is the political angle: Canada funded the expedition in the hopes it somehow gives more weight to their claims over the shipping lanes invariably opening up as the arctic ice cap disappears.
A process only aided by the Conservatives extreme reluctance to do anything about global warming. It's actually kinda brilliant.
Step 1) Deny climate change
Step 2) Northwest passage opens up
Step 3) Profit!!!
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How about a tat on your tit?
I thought we already knew... (Score:2)
The HMS Terror bombed Baltimore (Score:1)
The HMS Terror started as a bombard ship in the war of 1812. It was one of the ships that bombed Fort McHenry, the 200th anniversary of that battle was yesterday. And that battle was the impetus for Francis Scott Key to write the "Star Spangled Band". The hull of bombard ships was heavy reinforced to support the big mortars on board. It made them perfect for arctic exploration. Kind of a neat coincidence.
Wrong Passage (Score:3)
I think they mean the "Canadian Northwest Passage" as it was renamed by the Parliament/Ottawa in motion M-387 that passed unanimously 2 December 2009.
Pentangle (Score:2)
Treasure! (Score:1)
More importantly, there was a clue to a treasure map found on board. Ben Gates is being called in to analyze.
Just Northwest of King William Island (Score:2)
maybe I'm the only one who cares most about how far they got ... maps here [wikipedia.org] and here [bbcimg.co.uk].
This is a metric for Malaysia Air (Score:2)
Stuff that sinks in the ocean tends to be lost for a long time. Absent a tedious, obsessive magnetometer scan of the Indian and Antarctic Oceans, I would expect the missing airliner to be undiscovered for rather longer than these British ships.
Oh, good... (Score:1)