HMS Erebus

Ship lost for more than 150 years is recovered



"The ship is standing upright in very good condition. It's standing in about 11 meters (36 feet) of water," he said. "This is definitely of the utmost importance. This is the ship that sailed the last leg of the Northwest Passage."

The Investigator was one of many American and British ships sent out to search for the HMS Erebus and the Terror, vessels commanded by Franklin in his ill-fated search for the Northwest Passage in 1845.

Wow.

Considering the usual subject matter of this forum and the name of the vessel involved, I feel obligated to make an inquiry: was Sandy Petersen involved?

Guess the water sector was tagged to Damage -10 or 20% health.

Seriously, though, this is pretty cool stuff. Kind of odd how well preserved the Investigator is, actually. Makes you wonder if the other two ships are the same way or not.

Xaser said:

Considering the usual subject matter of this forum and the name of the vessel involved, I feel obligated to make an inquiry: was Sandy Petersen involved?

And here I was drawn to this thread specifically to make fun of the ignorants who would be thinking the ship had been named after a Doom level... :p

(Rather than, you know, Greek mythology)

But the ship that was found was not the Erebus, it was the Investigator.

Xaser said:

I feel obligated to make an inquiry: was Sandy Petersen involved?

Apparently the ship is still intact so we can assume it's up to par with the quality of other ships, eliminating the possibility that Sandy "vagina" Peterson has had his chubby hands on it.

Gez said:

And here I was drawn to this thread specifically to make fun of the ignorants who would be thinking the ship had been named after a Doom level... :p

This is proof of Doom's awesomeness. It's so great that they named a ship after the level over 100 years before the game was even made. Take that, Halo. :P


As for the ship, it's "odd" how it managed to not be discovered for so long despite being so close to shore. Of course, not every inch of the planet is populated by us humans and I doubt penguins care enough about shipwrecks to report them to the local authorities.

(And yes, I know that penguins don't live in Canada, but when I think of Canadians I think of Linux users because I have incredibly strange mental associations. Xaserian Canada has penguins, anyway.)

I can't believe something like that is still around, with all the shifting ice and what not. Thats a (mostly) wooden ship surviving while surrounded by moving ice, compared to the Titanic, a steel-hulled ship, managed to hit a single piece of ice and become an aquatic habitat.

Xaser said:

but when I think of Canadians I think of Linux users

So I'm not the only one? O.o

On 28 November 1979, the fourteenth flight of TE901, operated by a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 registered ZK-NZP, collided with Mount Erebus on Ross Island, Antarctica, killing all 237 passengers and 20 crew on board. The accident is commonly known as the Mount Erebus disaster.

The chances of finding the two original ships are presumably somewhat worse - they have been searched for very extensively, and the decisions made by their crews were probably quite irrational, given that there is very strong evidence for cannibalism and brain damage (due to lead poisoning from their canned food). At any rate, they did make some irrational decisions once they had become stranded.

BTW, I heard in Svalbard recently (when on the way to Pyramiden) about another instance of suspected lead poisoning with similar consequences, also from canned food, involving the "Swedish House" incident. This has only been discovered in the last few years.

Incidentally, Mt Erebus and Mt Terror in Antarctica are named after these ships (before they were lost). I have lots of pictures of Mt Erebus, including some that must include that crash site. Edit: here's one:

<a href=http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/4996/p1100332p.jpg><img src=http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/4996/p1100332p.th.jpg></a>

The crash site was somewhere under Fang Ridge, which is the area of dark rocks - the ridge is seen from a different angle on the left hand side of the picture here.

Xaser said:

As for the ship, it's "odd" how it managed to not be discovered for so long despite being so close to shore.

The ship is underwater, I doubt too many people are going swimming up there.

Akira_98 said:

Thats a (mostly) wooden ship surviving while surrounded by moving ice, compared to the Titanic, a steel-hulled ship, managed to hit a single piece of ice and become an aquatic habitat.

The Investigator was toughened up especially for the arctic voyage - these were not dainty little sailboats built for weekend excursions. The HMS Erebus and Terror were originally war ships built to withstand bombardments. These were very tough boats, and that was before they added even more bracing for the arctic voyages. As long as the hulls are intact, most of the pressure should "go around" the ship. This is different than the Titanic, which scraped it's side along a jagged iceberg at high speeds.

Thanks to National Geographic in the 80s I will be forever haunted by the images of the frozen bodies they found from Franklin's crew. :D

The Wikipedia article makes an interesting point about how Erebus and Terror might have drifted into the Atlantic on an ice floe and might never be found as a result. It's funny how big Canada is. We're always finding things lost for decades or centuries. I was at an aviation museum last year and they were busy restoring a crashed plane from WWII they had found decades after the fact. We have tons of land up north and it's not clear we have any method of defending it should the need arise.

Spending three years on a ship stuck in some ice in the arctic sounds like hell.

You don't have to have a particularly large area to keep finding stuff in it. I've recently heard on the radio some guy explaining that we'd keep finding WW1 landmines and unexploded bombs in Europe for easily five centuries -- based on estimations about the total number produced, the total number found, and the rate at which they're found, just a few every year or two.

That's frightening. And I suppose you're quite correct. Another aspect of Canada is most of it contains absolutely nothing. Most of our population is in a few areas and we have had very little war over most of our land. We do have a pile of Cold War installations, but they're obviously not lost.

Europe is interesting in that there is so much history that nobody can ever remember where it all is. Even the Vatican, which has been a pretty constant organization for 1500 years, keeps finding things in the basement they didn't know they had.

Technician said:

Wow.

at the post or at the discovery?

There was some plane that crashed in a glacier in the 1930's that was only found in the 2000's when the wreckage had made it's way down wasn't there?

Also speaking of lost WW1 things in Europe, i think a huge amount of explosives intended to be detonated under a German trench, but which didn't go off, is still missing somewhere in Belgium or France.