EUREKA!

Published 7:00 pm Thursday, January 21, 2016

notforsale

The Moose State has been giving up her secrets of late with an exciting discovery: the location of the remains of a lost whaling fleet, found off Alaska’s arctic coast. The 33 ships were abandoned in 1871 after becoming ice-locked, and the incident is depicted in a Harpers Weekly 1871 illustration, courtesy of the Robert Schwemmer Maritime Library.

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration article online (http://tinyurl.com/icedin33) says: “The ships were destroyed in a matter of weeks, leaving more than 1,200 whalers stranded at the top of the world until they could be rescued by seven ships of the fleet standing by about 80 miles to the south in open water off Icy Cape. No one died in the incident but it is cited as one of the major causes of the demise of commercial whaling in the United States.”

It probably didn’t help the business, either, that to make room for the survivors, the rescuing ships had to jettison their valuable cargoes of whale oil, bone and whaling gear.

NOAA has searched for the remains of the fleet on other occasions, and has already found gear salvaged by the local Inupiats, and timber wreckage. But this time, Eureka!

“Using state-of-the-art sonar and sensing technology,” the article says, “the NOAA team was able to plot the ‘magnetic signature’ of the two wrecks, including the outline of their flattened hulls. The wreck site also revealed anchors, fasteners, ballast and brick-lined pots used to render whale blubber into oil.”

Thanks to NOAA, an arctic maritime history mystery has finally been solved.

— Elleda Wilson

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