The Second Ship
Sep. 13th, 2016 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen one of the two ships of the lost Franklin expedition was found underwater two years ago and then identified as HMS Erebus, I took note of comments about this matching Inuit testimony that also suggested the other ship of the expedition would have been crushed in the ice and sunk. While I could suppose efforts would continue to find HMS Terror, it was easy enough to imagine a jumble of shattered timbers in a deep channel wouldn't be easy to locate.
This morning, though, there was an article on the front page of my newspaper (not quite as large as the first article two years ago) that proclaimed Terror had been found not that far from Erebus, and that it was in even better shape than its fellow ship. Once again, local reports helped, although this one was rather more recent. The further twist to a narrative I was familiar with years before of the doomed crew abandoning their long-frozen-in ships and struggling south to die, victims of an unwillingness to adopt native skills, is certainly intriguing, but it does point straight back to the hopeful speculation I saw at the first discovery of the chance of written records managing to survive underwater. There's always the next Arctic summer, of course.
This morning, though, there was an article on the front page of my newspaper (not quite as large as the first article two years ago) that proclaimed Terror had been found not that far from Erebus, and that it was in even better shape than its fellow ship. Once again, local reports helped, although this one was rather more recent. The further twist to a narrative I was familiar with years before of the doomed crew abandoning their long-frozen-in ships and struggling south to die, victims of an unwillingness to adopt native skills, is certainly intriguing, but it does point straight back to the hopeful speculation I saw at the first discovery of the chance of written records managing to survive underwater. There's always the next Arctic summer, of course.