Parks Canada are posting some very interesting information now about HMS Investigator and their researches into her this summer. I'd direct you to their website here, where there are several things of interest. Firstly, the team doing the research have posted regular audio-blogs, keeping us up to date on what they have found. It certainly seems as though the Investigator is in a remarkable state of preservation.
From my own interest, one of the most significant things they have found is a large copper, towards the bows, which they think is associated with the ship's water system. From their reproduction of the plan of HMS Investigator here, it seems that like the Erebus and the Terror she was fitted with a Sylvester warm-air stove for heating and a Fraser galley for cooking. (Incidentally, the plans which Parks Canada reproduce of the Erebus and the Terror pre-date their conversion into polar discovery ships. That's not surprising - the plans of the Erebus and Terror from that time are rather confused and difficult to interpret in black-and-white, as they contain information from several different time periods put on the same plan in different coloured inks.) The Fraser galley was filled with water and used this as means of transmitting heat to the coppers (boilers) in which food was heated. So it may be that what they have found is one of these coppers. The Investigator, like the Erebus and Terror, seems to have been fitted with a tank above the Fraser which was used to provide water, with heat from the Fraser being used to melt ice in the tank. It looks as though the flue from the Sylvester passed through the tank and also helped melt ice placed in it. What appears to be MISSING from the Investigator is the (lead?) pipe which can be seen on the plans of the Erebus and Terror linking the Fraser stove with the ice-tank. See here for a close-up of this pipe in Peter Carney's reconstruction, or a general reproduction of the arrangement in my 2008 paper here.
So it is early days, but it appears that Parks Canada are already providing important information on the make-up of this critical fresh water system on Royal Naval Arctic ships of the Franklin era, and also pointing some evidence to suggest that the Erebus and Terror's systems might have contained a lot more lead than those on other ships.
Whether this is exactly right 'no man can say', but I commend Parks Canada for providing us with access to their researches and suggest that anyone interested returns to their website regularly. I know I will be!
Oh, and Glenn Stein, FRGS, who is now part of the Parks Canada team, is also posting some really interesting historical background.
William,
ReplyDeleteThanks for this -- I hadn't seen these podcasts at all -- the PC site is oddly organized, and though I'd checked the page on the Investigator repeatedly, had no idea these weekly podcasts existed!
Funnily enough I didn't spot them until I read YOUR post about the picture, Russell. Talk about collaborative working!
ReplyDeleteNew to your blog, so hello! Here's a new article from the Vancouver Sun about the Parks Canada Investigator project in case you haven't seen it.
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