N-M Chapter 372 The Brave Explorer
Chapter 372 The Brave Explorer
Chapter 372 The Brave Explorer
It took more than ten minutes for Liang En and the others to successfully report to Nelson all the contents related to the situation of Beech Island in the found logbook.
"Thank you so much, you have done me a great favor." Nelson's grateful voice came from the microphone of Inmarsat's phone.
He is still searching for targets along the eastern coastline of Beech Island. He has cleared two suspicious locations before, but in the end it was found that they had nothing to do with the scientific expedition team, but only traces left by the official Canadian Arctic patrol.
With the information provided by Liang En and the others, he was able to eliminate most of the suspicious areas, greatly reducing the workload of the original plan, and pointing him to the correct direction of action.
After the phone call, Liang En continued to talk about this tragic adventure story. Their expedition started very smoothly. They even went deep into the Arctic Circle and spent a safe winter on Beech Island. But then things started to speed up. deterioration.
When the ice melted in the summer of 1846, they traveled 350 miles westward to the west of Saddle Island and the Busia Peninsula, but were then trapped by ice floes near King William Island, when they noticed signs of spoilage in their food, which alarmed the members. Very disturbed.
"Didn't they prepare food that could last three years? Moreover, both the team leader and the team members are veterans who are familiar with operations in the Arctic Circle. How could the food spoil after only one year?"
Joan of Arc, who accompanied Liang En to review a lot of information before, asked puzzledly. At least she felt that even with the technical level of her time, carrying biscuits and jerky in this low-temperature place would not be enough for a year. There is a food crisis.
"It should be the advanced technology back then that killed 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 that were placed next to him. one said.
"We will notice that they carry a lot of canned food during the voyage, which is mainly canned meat and canned juice, 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 to the seal of the can and said, "This is not directly fixed by a crimping machine like modern cans, but by welding."
"You know, even today's machine welding often has the problem of missing welds, let alone purely manual welding in that era, so I suspect that most cans have leaks."
"This is very easy to verify. We can fix the sealing of these empty cans a little bit." Pierce quickly thought of a very simple verification method.
So in the next 10 minutes, they used a sand wheel and a file to simply clean off the rust on the welded part of the tank, and saw the clues from the welded part:
There are at least seven out of ten cans with missing soldering or desoldering on the welding points. Even if the problems caused by more than 100 years of long time are excluded, at least 1/3 to half of the cans have existed since the day they were manufactured. There is a fatal flaw of poor sealing.
"If the ship is old enough, these cans may still be barely enough for human consumption, but the worst thing is that there is a complete heating system on board." Liang En concluded to the inspection results.
"So under the combined effects of temperature and humidity, these rotting franchis far exceeded the expedition's previous expectations, especially unlike meat with substitutes, the loss of juice is fatal to them."
"I guess the reason for the other party's panic is probably related to the serious damage to the juice cans, because without vitamin C, people will soon die of scurvy."
After explaining the problem, everyone turned their attention once again to the logbook, which had gone from bad to worse since the ship became stranded on the ice near King William Island.
Because they encountered a bad situation that they had never thought of: two winters were connected together, and the ice that should have melted in the summer of 1847 did not melt.
Also on June 6 of this year, Franklin, the 11-year-old expedition leader, 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 floes and sail westward freely. , automatically enters the Pacific Ocean.
But the surviving crew members were not as optimistic as him. The records showed that due to lack of enough food and deterioration of canned juice, people lacked vitamin C and began to develop scurvy, and some people died one after another.
In this desperate situation, the expedition team survived until the spring of 1848, when the temperature had just risen, and the remaining 105 crew members, led by Franklin's deputy, Captain Crozier, abandoned the ship to find a way to survive.
According to the report, the ship had been trapped in the ice since September 1846. On April 9, 1848, the ship was abandoned, and 4 people landed. As of the recording day, 22 people had died.
At the same time, the final report indicated that the rest of the people would head towards the Buck River (southward) on April 4, and this coincided with the information that the Irish explorer Liang En and the others had found before obtained from the local aborigines.
Judging from the diary, when the expedition team arrived at Liang En and they found the ruins, more than 1/5 of the members had been lost, and they were exhausted and extremely weak after experiencing tremendous mental and physical torture.
As the recorder of these notes, Crozier sealed and hid the logbook and naval report in desperation, hoping that someone would find them one day, instead of becoming a soul wandering in the bitter cold hell far away from his homeland.
The diary records came to an abrupt end here, and the fate of the expedition team disappeared on this ice field forever as Captain Crozier had predicted, and then disappeared for more than 100 years.
After reading all these contents, Liang En also felt a few new cards appeared in his mind, but at this time he didn't care about counting the cards, but focused on the next thing.
After a 3-minute silence for the bravest explorers of mankind and putting away these things, everyone quickly discussed the contents of this navigation manual.
For them, the difficulty of finding ships has dropped a lot now.At least this ruin and the navigation notes helped them roughly delineate a range.
So from the early morning of the next day, they began to observe the coastline on a larger scale, because most of the underwater archaeological investigations began with searching data and land surveys.
This search work is mainly carried out in cooperation with the helicopter and the raven. The helicopter is responsible for fast movement and large-scale searches, while the raven is responsible for more detailed search work.
This kind of cooperation is much faster than simply relying on human speed. On the second day after obtaining the navigation records, Liang En and the others successfully discovered a series of valuable discoveries during the search of the coastline.
Foremost among these are the disappearance of polar bears and the appearance of remnants of human activity, including the remains of tent rings and small stone piles indicating stockpiles.
One of the most important discoveries was the discovery of an iron rod more than 5 meters long stuck in a crack in the stone.After pulling it out, it was found that a broad arrowhead and the logo of the British Royal Navy were engraved on the bottom of the iron rod.
The appearance of this thing is likely to be due to the crushing of ice, which caused parts of the hull to break up, and as a result, part of the mast, rigging, ropes and sails drifted and scattered on the sea ice.It also often indicates that a shipwreck is nearby.
(End of this chapter)