A long, heavy rope line running through a hole in the ships deck suggests an anchor line may have been deployed before the Terror went down.
If true, that sets up the tantalising possibility that British sailors re-manned the vessel after she was abandoned at the top of Victoria Strait in a desperate attempt to escape south.
Ping of interest
HMS Terror. I wonder how it got that name.
A suicide mission in frozen hell, in ships named Terror and Erberus.
Is this the ship whose sailors were poisoned by canned food and died horrible deaths? One was perfectly preserved in the ice...
I’ve just completed reading Ken McGoogan’s “Fatal Passage”. It is about John Rae, both an Hudson’s Bay Company man and from the Orkney Islands in Scotland who discovered the true fate of Sir John Franklin and his expedition, yet he was mocked and criticized in proper British society for doing so.
The Franklin expedition was a very unfortunate episode, with the insistence on using Royal Navy personnel when HBC men and their native guides could possibly more safely and with better knowledge of the area explored and discovered the Northwest Passage route (as John Rae did and was ultimately vindicated as so by Roald Amundsen). Franklin had recently been the governor of Van Diemen’s Land (modern day Tasmania) and clearly was not suitable for this sort of ambitious feat.
The Canadians found Erebus a couple of years ago in the same neighborhood, also well preserved. Amazing finds.
So a little Bondo and on its way again?
Pretty neat find. Any ship that has been under water for that many years would not live up to my understanding of “pristine”.
bump to read later
They should have taken a Toyota Highlander and martini’s and gone to the North Pole like these guys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNkvASxfEWQ