Ship found in Arctic 168 years after doomed Northwest Passage attempt | Hacker News Reader

Ship found in Arctic 168 years after doomed Northwest Passage attempt

theguardian.com

155 pointsjonah73 comments

There was an earlier excavation of some of the frozen corpses as well and they were taken to laboratories to be studied. After thawing some of the gut bacteria, some were still alive. One of the scientist was smart enough to experiment with how the old bacteria handled modern antibiotics. Strangely many already had resistance[1]. And this discovery was largely unreported.

[1]http://tinyurl.com/z9sy2qn

I wonder if you (or anyone) know where to find the study?

I found the researcher herself, but none of her publications seem to be about this

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kinga_Kowalewska-Grocho...

> Strangely many already had resistance

Keep in mind that modern antibiotics were created partly because at the time plants with antibiotic properties were being used so heavily that they were already becoming endangered. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldenseal

Reminds me of when the military dug up corpses from the artic so they could get at the 1917 Spanish flu

Link?

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about it for the New Yorker in 1997.

http://gladwell.com/the-dead-zone/

Fascinating, but can someone explain why the text reads

  I–PERMAFROST
  
  On September 24, viagra 1918, three days after setting sail ...

What does that "VIAGRA" (on a small caps font) do there?

Looks like the blog was hacked at some point, and what you are looking at is old SEO spam.

Note that it links to buyviagraonlinefree dot net.

I've never heard of this before, but a quick Google revealed this article (along others), which is probably what 2AF3 is referring to. Not sure of the military connection.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1999-11-18/news/9911180290_...

In case anyone else was confused, those corpses retrieved and studied in the above article were bodies buried from the same expedition, not bodies recovered from the sunken ship. Thanks for sharing the clipping though, very fascinating.

Yes the dug up bodies were from men who died during the expeditions first season, which had actually gone pretty well.

Unfortunately, they anchored the ships for the winter, shortly after those men died, in pretty much the worst place possible, on the western side of King William's Island.[1]

This is a spot where all the pack ice from the north west flows to, forming a huge towering jumble of ice. They fully expected their ships to be iced in for the winter, this was normal.

They expected to get underway again once the ice cleared in the spring.

But the winter was exceptionally harsh and the ice so thick that they remained trapped for much longer than they expected.

[1] Known as King Williams Land in those days, the remaining portion of the northwest passage, ironically, was just to the south of where the doomed ships were iced in. It would be John Rae (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rae_(explorer) ) who would truly discover the final link.

this isn't related to anything, but out of personal curiosity can you tell me whether you are a manager? (you can mail me at the link in my profile, if you don't want to reply here for whatever reason). I'm just curious and have no follow-up either way. thanks.

I am not a manager. Why do you ask?

Thanks for the reply! I got downvotes before I removed the context, it doesn't matter and I removed that part (but I don't want more downvotes so I don't want to say, plus it doesn't matter.)

You can mail me if you want to know.

There's a fun Dan Simmons book "The Terror" that tells a (very) fictional account of what happened to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror_(novel)

I concur that the book is indeed a very entertaining read. It describes the ships (which btw were steam powered and had central heating) and the dreadful conditions that the sailors faced in great detail. Dan Simmons is a good storyteller.

Sea travel in general was apocalyptically bad for sailors until about 1910. I don't think people realize how dangerously shitty it was for people.

Reading about the ww2 Arctic convoys has the same feeling.

I can recommend Three Corvettes by Nicholas Monsarrat - the author of The Cruel Sea - it is his account of his experiences at sea during WW2.

One of the few books that has moved me to tears.

It's true. Getting shot at by German submarines and bombed by planes did bring the danger level up to what typical sea travel was like a hundred years earlier:

"Ten men were thrown overboard, around fifty died of scurvy or starvation, and twenty were killed when a drunken brawl got out of hand."

"So it was a good trip?"

I picked this up after seeing it recommended on HN before. It was definitely not a genre I read very often, but for some reason I found it completely captivating. Loved it!

edit: it also made me much more excited for this discovery than I would have been otherwise!

I was hoping someone would mention this.

Usually I don't read historical fiction, but that book about this ship is amazing. It was 2007's Amazon customer pick for #1 book.

You may also be interested in Batavia's Graveyard. Fascinating & gruesome account of a Dutch ship's voyage to Java. The descriptions of the personalities and motivations of those willing to undertake such a risky voyage, were in many cases like a gamblers last throw of the dice.

Very well researched, about 1/3 of the book is references/footnotes.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0609807161

There's also Mordechai Richler's 'Solomon Gursky Was Here', which recounts its eponymous protagonist's grim experience as a member of the expedition. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Gursky_Was_Here)

If only Stan Rogers had lived to see it...

"Ah for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage / to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea..."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage_(song)

My father's comment, upon reading the article:

"And if they had a barge lent by a friend, they could tie their cables fore and aft and gird her all around ... and hit the air and then take up the strain ... etc."

His brother Garnet has. Great singer too.

"If you could lift this boat out of the water, and pump the water out, it would probably float.”

That is a fascinating possibility.

btw title should be amended "found by European explorers". Or change the date to 162 years, since it was discovered by an Inuit gentleman six years earlier?

There is some precedent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)

It is worth a trip to Stockholm to see the Vasa. The photos on Wikipedia do not do her justice.

I can confirm this. It's one of the most impressive museums I've ever been to.

The whole thing is also a living example of lessons about project and product management: how uncontrolled requirements made by the major stakeholder (in this case, king Gustaf Adolf) changed the project scope (so many guns were ordered to be fitted that the ship had to have two gun decks, with too high center of gravity) which then caused a major technical disaster (it capsized in wind). And then starts the hunt for a scapegoat.

The best part is that a local hunter found the boat six years ago. That's awesome.

That is one of the problems with hunting, you are more likely to find things that other people won't and sometimes its very unpleasant. Humans like to stash their sins in the wild.

"Given the location of the find [in Terror Bay]"

I tried hunting around online to find out how Terror Bay got its name after I saw this article on another site last night, but I couldn't find anything. Makes you kind of wonder whether the location of the wreck was known at some point, but nobody bothered to write it down.

It was, it was just thought to be in a different part of the bay (if I understood things correctly), 96km north of where it actually was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition#L...:

"Over the next 150 years, other expeditions, explorers, and scientists would piece together what happened next. Franklin's men wintered in 1845–46 on Beechey Island, where three crew members died and were buried. Terror and Erebus became trapped in ice off King William Island in September 1846 and never sailed again. According to a note dated 25 April 1848, and left on the island by Fitzjames and Crozier, Franklin had died on 11 June 1847; the crew had wintered on King William Island in 1846–47 and 1847–48, and the remaining crew had planned to begin walking on 26 April 1848 toward the Back River on the Canadian mainland. Nine officers and fifteen men had already died; the rest would die along the way, most on the island and another 30 or 40 on the northern coast of the mainland, hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost of Western civilization."

So, the location were the ships were abandoned was roughly known.

So, in conclusion, Terror Bay was so named because of the British Navy's propensity for badass ship names. See also: HMS Firedrake, HMS Warspite, HMS Arrogant, HMS Destruction...

Boaty McBoat...

I wondered about the same thing. Weird it's not remarked on more in the article.

It does say the local people knew about the ships at the time.

The local Inuit have known that the ship was here for a very long time. The nearby island is called "the big boat is here" or "the boat sank here" in Inuit. lol.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-ed...

A years back I became fascinated with 19th century Artic exploration through reading Fergus Fleming's excellent book Barrow's Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Outright Lunacy.

I was therefore rather surprised to find that one of the bodies from the Franklin expedition, of Lieutenant John Irving, is buried not far from where I live in central Edinburgh:

http://edinburghwalks.com/2014/11/30/heroism-cannibalism-and...

Thanks for the link. I love reading books about early adventurers who first explored our planet.

My favourite so far has been Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage about Shakleton's semi-doomed voyage to Antarctica where they survived an entire winter after their boat got stranded in ice. Mostly by eating seals... and their sled dogs at one point.

https://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Shackletons-Incredible-Alfr...

Here's a good one. No cannibalism, but it's got outlandish conveyances, skeletons, recovered manuscripts...

https://www.damninteresting.com/andree-and-the-aeronauts-voy...

I can recommend this one: The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009) by David Grann.

"It tells the story of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon while looking for an ancient lost city. For decades, explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of his party and the Lost City of Z. Perhaps as many as 100 people perished or disappeared searching for Fawcett over the years. Grann made his own journey into the Amazon, revealing new evidence about how Fawcett died and showing that Z may have really existed right under his feet." [0]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_City_of_Z_(book)

Or you can read South, and read Shackleton's own words https://www.amazon.com/South-ENDURANCE-Expedition-Ernest-Sha...

Fantastic book and would be in the top reads I've ever had. Super cheap from Penguin too.

I suggest In the Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides. More bad luck for Arctic explorers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Kingdom_of_Ice

Also, The Man Who Ate His Boots which covers some of Franklin's earlier overland exploration. https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Ate-His-Boots/dp/0307276562

Folks - off topic but if we're talking about incredible (really unbelievable in today's context) adventure books I'll nominate Aspley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World [0]. A. C-G was the youngest member of Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated second journey to the Antarctic. And no, the worst journey was not the southern journey in which all five members died on return.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World]

I've always suspected that tuberculosis played a large role in the demise of the expedition. We're pretty sure that some crew members had it and in the close quarters of the ships it's very likely to have spread unchecked. Combined with the obvious lead poisoning and the possibility of scurvy the expedition had very little chance of success.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279489/

What's the source/cause of the lead poisoning?

Canned food afaik. The seals contained lead back then.

Right. The soldering used lead and was poorly done.

Here's a documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLqU8HP8r1o [YouTube]

Imagine there would be a sole frozen survivor. No cars, no trains, no airplanes, no phones, etc.

Lord have mercy on the frozen man.

Does it have a pair of glasses that are the key plot device in a Michael Bay movie?

Underrated comment.

Isn't there a cruise ship trying to make the northwest passage next year?

It's cleared dramatically as the Arctic sea ice is melting. The wiki has satellite pics, it's pretty dramatic

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage

Despite the obvious CO2/warming reasons, wouldn't these research vessels/cruise ships cause more ice melt as well? (Breaking up the ice causing faster melt)

The Arctic is pretty big and there aren't many research boats. There are only a few dozen icebreakers in the world.

https://news.usni.org/2013/07/23/u-s-coast-guards-2013-reive...

It didn't clear at all last year though if i'm not mistaken.

And based on this: https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/ It's already closed up again.

One has already made it this year: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-crystal-serenity-nor...

Good thing this won't be a problem anymore.

Thanks to all of the hard work of the energy extraction industry, future generations will never have to deal with the lack of a Northwest Passage. They will, however, have to deal with a coral shortage.

s/shortage/extiction/

s/extiction/extinction/

True that :)

So, how did this ship attempt to sail this route 168 years ago if there was no energy extraction industry?

They suspected there was a free water passage because the coast was well known on both side. But the interior of the land was terra incognita, and that was the point of the expedition : finding the passage and going through it if it existed.

However, when Roald Admunsden crossed for the first time the North West passage a few years after the Franklin expedition was lost, it was not by boat, but with sleds...

From my understanding, given the size of the Terror and Erebus, the Franklin expedition could not have crossed the NW passage anyway at that time.

Because the route was occasionally navigable, dependent on season and weather; but if trends continue, the route will be consistently navigable.

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