Starting My Treasure Hunting In England

It took more than ten minutes for Liang En and the others to successfully report to Nelson all the contents in the found logbook related to the situation on Beech Island.

"Thank you so much. You have helped me a lot." Nelson's grateful voice came from the receiver of the Maritime Satellite phone.

He is still searching for targets along the eastern coastline of Beach Island. He has cleared two suspicious locations before, but in the end he found that they had nothing to do with the scientific expedition team, but were only traces left by Canada's official Arctic patrol.

With the information provided by Liang En and the others, he was able to rule out most of the suspicious areas, greatly reducing the originally planned workload and giving him a correct direction of action.

After the phone call, Liang En continued to talk about this tragic adventure story. Their expedition started very smoothly, and they even went deep into the Arctic Circle and spent a winter safely on Beechey Island. But then things started to happen quickly. deterioration.

When the ice melted in the summer of 1846, they traveled 350 miles west to the western part of Saddle Island and the Busia Peninsula, but were subsequently trapped by ice floes near King William Island. At this time, they found signs of food spoilage, which alarmed the members. Very uneasy.

"Didn't they prepare food that can last three years? Moreover, both the team leader and the team members are veterans familiar with operations in the Arctic Circle. How could the food spoil after only one year?"

Joan, who had accompanied Liang En to check out a lot of information before, asked in confusion. At least she felt that even with the technical level of her time, it would not take a year to bring biscuits and dried meat to this low temperature place. There is a food crisis.

"It must have been the advanced technology of the time that harmed them." Liang En turned the logbook to the one about material reserves for the photographer to take a picture of, and then picked up a pile of empty cans placed in a box next to it. one said.

"We will notice that they carried a large number of cans during the voyage. These cans were mainly canned meat and juice cans to supplement nutrition and vital vitamin C for the crew."

"But you see, this can is very different from our current cans." Liang En pointed at the seal of the can and said, "This is not directly fixed with a crimping machine like modern cans, but welding."

"You know, even today's machine welding often has leakage problems, let alone manual welding in that era, so I suspect that most cans have leakage problems."

"This is easy to verify. We just need to deal with the sealing areas of these empty cans a little." Pierce quickly thought of a very simple verification method.

So in the next ten minutes, they used sand wheels and files to simply clean off the rust on the welding joint of the can, and saw clues from the welding joint:

At least seven out of ten cans have leaks or desoldering at the welding points. Even if we exclude problems caused by more than a hundred years of time, at least 1/3 to half of the cans have been replaced since the day they were manufactured. There is a fatal flaw of loose sealing.

"If the ship is old enough, these cans may still be enough for human consumption, but the worst thing is that there is a complete heating system on the ship." Liang En concluded in response to this inspection result.

"So under the combined effect of temperature and humidity, these flanges rotted much faster than the expedition had previously expected, especially unlike meat with substitutes, the loss of juice was fatal to them."

"I guess the reason for the other party's panic is most likely related to the serious damage to the juice cans, because without vitamin C, people will soon die from scurvy."

After explaining this problem, everyone turned their attention to the voyage diary again. Since the ship was trapped on the ice near King William Island, the situation has become worse and worse.

Because they encountered a bad situation that they had never imagined: two winters were connected together, and the ice that was supposed to melt in the summer of 1847 did not melt.

On June 11 of this year, Franklin, the 62-year-old leader of the expedition, died of illness. Before his death, he was still full of confidence. He firmly believed that within a few days, the ship would break free from the ice and sail westward freely. , automatically enters the Pacific Ocean.

But the surviving crew members could not be as optimistic as he was. Records show that due to lack of enough food and the spoilage of canned juice, people lacked vitamin C and began to develop scurvy, and some people died one after another.

Under this desperate situation, the expedition team survived until the spring of 1848, when the temperature had just risen. The remaining 105 crew members, led by Franklin's deputy Captain Crozier, abandoned the ship and looked for a way to survive.

According to the report, the ship had been trapped in the ice since September 1846. It abandoned the ship on April 22, 1848, and 105 people disembarked. As of the date of recording, 24 people had died.

At the same time, the end of the report indicated that the rest of the group would head (south) towards the Buck River on April 26, which was consistent with the information that Liang En and the others had received from the local natives about the Irish explorer.

Judging from the diary, when the expedition arrived in Liang En and found the ruins, more than 1/5 of its members had been lost. At the same time, they had experienced tremendous mental and physical torture and were exhausted and extremely weak.

As the recorder of these notes, Crozier sealed and hid the logbooks and naval reports out of despair, hoping that one day someone would discover them, instead of becoming a soul wandering away from the nameless and cold hell of his homeland.

The diary record ended abruptly here, and the fate of the expedition team was as Captain Crozier had predicted, disappearing forever on this ice sheet, and then disappeared for more than a hundred years.

After reading all these contents, Liang En also felt that several new cards appeared in his mind, but at this time he did not care about counting the cards, but focused on the next thing.

After three minutes of silence for these bravest human explorers and putting away these things, everyone quickly discussed the contents of this navigation manual.

For them, the difficulty of finding the ship has suddenly dropped a lot. At least this ruins and the navigation notes helped them roughly define a range.

So starting early the next morning, they began to observe the coastline on a larger scale, because most underwater archaeological investigations begin with searching for information and onshore surveys.

This search work is mainly carried out by helicopters and Ravens. The helicopters are responsible for fast movement and large-scale searches, while the Ravens are responsible for more detailed searches.

This kind of cooperation is much faster than relying solely on human speed. The day after obtaining the navigation records, Liang En and the others successfully discovered a series of valuable discoveries during the search of the coastline.

Among the most important signs are the disappearance of polar bears and the appearance of remnant features of human activity, including the remains of tent circles and small piles of rocks indicating stockpiles.

One of the most important discoveries was an iron rod more than 5 meters long, stuck in a rock crevice. After pulling it out, I found a broad arrowhead and the logo of the Royal Navy carved on the bottom of the iron rod.

The appearance of this thing is likely due to the crushing of the ice, which caused part of the hull to break, and as a result, part of the mast, rigging, ropes and sails drifted and scattered on the sea ice. This also often means a shipwreck is nearby.