Canadian team finds 19th Century HMS Investigator wreck

Source: BBC

Canadian archaeologists have located a British ship abandoned in the Arctic while on a 19th Century rescue mission.

Parks Canada researchers found the HMS Investigator in Mercy Bay this week.

Canada's government says the discovery bolsters its claim to sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, which is feared threatened by increased shipping.

The Investigator was abandoned while searching for the Franklin expedition, itself lost with all its crew during a mission to discover the passage.

"It's an incredible site," Canadian Minister of the Environment Jim Prentice told the BBC by telephone from Mercy Bay. "You're looking at what people have not seen in 156 years, which is a remarkably intact British sailing vessel."

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10793639

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...Here's a slightly more romantic story in the http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/canada/7915562/Lost-Arctic-ship-found-150-years-after-it-was-abandoned.html">Telegraph.

We were homeward bound one night on the deep
Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep
I dreamed a dream and I thought it true
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew

With 100 seamen he sailed away
To the frozen ocean in the month of May
To seek a passage around the pole
Where all poor sailors do sometimes go.

Through cruel hardships they vainly strove
Their ships on mountains of ice was drove
Only the Eskimo with his skin canoe
Was the only one that ever came through

In Baffin's Bay where the whale fish blow
The fate of Franklin no man may know
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
And Lord Franklin among his seamen do dwell

And now my burden it gives me pain
For my Lord Franklin I'd sail the main
Ten thousand pounds I would freely give
To know Lord Franklin, and where he is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4RHYJdcE4&feature=related

it had been a bit more recent then.

cho: Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
Westward from the Davis Strait 'tis there 'twas said to lie
The sea route to the Orient for which so many died;
Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones
And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones.

The Inuit expanded from West to East, eventually occupying and regularly traveling across an enormous area from Alaska to Greenland. They obviously knew how to cross the region, and did, because they started horning in on Viking territory in Greenland around 1100 ACE.

Isn't that the discovery of the Northwest Passage, and wouldn't that discovery place the sovereignty of the region under the control of the First Nations who settled the region and regularly navigated the passage? Why are the Canadians relying upon a claim based upon a failure to navigate the passage when they have a perfectly good cadre of citizens whose ancestors cranked back and forth across the area before chump Europeans invented a boat good enough to fail?

Want to read a strangely compelling novel about the Franklin Expedition? Read Dan Simmons' The Terror.
http://books.google.com/books?id=sm8FQgAACAAJ&dq=Dan+Simmons&hl=en&ei=LkxRTKWHDMrVngeZ8ui4Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCwQ6AEwATgK

I would also recommend a non-fiction work on a British explorer in Norther Canada who not only explored by ship, but lived among the native tribes and accompanied them on some extremely long treks:

Ancient Mariner:
The Arctic Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Inspired Coleridge's Masterpiece
http://j.mp/bkV2Kp

Hearne (1745-1792) is a compelling subject: a learned man with a passion for Voltaire, and a sailor of some repute in the Seven Years' War, he went on to work for the Hudson Bay Company at its northernmost base, from where he set off on a three-year exploration of northern Canada, a journey he recorded in meticulous detail. ...Moving from England's bustling ports to the frozen tundra, from disease-wracked trading posts to London's coffeehouses, this work is a swift epic in its own right, providing a snapshot of a delicate world on the cusp of irrevocable change
Pubclisher's Weekly

Thanks.

I've read a bunch of stuff in the past few years on the age of exploration, and it's astonishing, especialy a couple of titles by Giles Milton:

-White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves
-Nathaniel's Nutmeg (about the English-Dutch s)pice wars in Southeast Asia)

I am about to order another one of his, Paradise Lost, Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance

The book on Hearne dwells a lot on the European struggle to survive in extraordinarily harsh conditions with primitive technology, and on Native American culture. Hearne witnessed parts of Inuit society no other European did, including a bloody, senseless raid on another tribe that bothered him for years. It reflects a lot of things in the movie "The Fast Runner."