Scientists wrap up Arctic:

HMS Investigator exploration

Don Martin

After spending two weeks huddled in tents on a remote and increasingly frigid Arctic Ocean shoreline, Parks Canada scientists have ended their HMS Investigator investigation. For now. Forecasts of winter-like weather sent the team who discovered the 155-year-old historic shipwreck heading home on Monday, a day earlier than scheduled, to plot another Arctic odyssey later this month.

The nine-member Parks Canada team left after turning the barren slopes around the bay into a maze of flags pinpointing three British sailor graves and cached material left behind from a 69-member crew who suffered starvation and disease after two agonizing winters trapped in Mercy Bay ice. They abandoned the Investigator in 1854 and walked to their rescue by ships at nearby Melville Island, becoming the first crew to traverse the Northwest Passage.

Hours of sonar scanning and video footage of the well-preserved wreck, located July 25 in about 12 metres of water, have been collected. The best images will be posted on the Parks Canada website Tuesday, or here now at nationalpost.com.

It was a giddily successful two weeks of underwater discovery, shoreline mapping and a bonus study of ancient Thule village sites on the far side of Mercy Bay.

So was it worth the cost, estimated at $100,000, despite the protestations of some readers and editorial writers?

Hell yeah. That’s barely two-thirds the annual salary of a basic backbench Canadian MP and less than prime ministers spend on a short foreign trip.

Never mind finding a flagship of Canadian history in the north, it also waves the Maple Leaf in an increasingly open waterway which, as of July 1, requires all foreign ships to register with Canadian authorities before proceeding into the passage. It was a leading item in Britain media and the discovery was big news in dozens of other countries. “I firmly believe they’re going to appreciate what we found here and I’m sure the public would want us to continue bringing these kind of discoveries to the public eye, not only the underwater sites but the land ones,” says marine archaeologist Jon Moore, who was on the Zodiac when the discovery was made. “Why wouldn’t they? It’s fascinating.”

Environment Minister Jim Prentice angrily disputes any suggestion there was little taxpayer value for the effort.

“This was important history being discovered and the team of archaeologists at Mercy Bay are among the most talented, dynamic and committed Canadians I’ve ever met,” he said. “As long as I’m the minister, I intend to support them in any way I can.”

The next mission for the team will be much more dramatic if it’s successful.

The two Franklin expedition ships, Erebus and Terror, vanished without a trace a few years before the Investigator was dispatched to find them and are considered the Holy Grail of marine archaeology.

There’s only anecdotal evidence of a possible shipwreck location, so the search from a Canadian coast guard vessel will have a needle-in-haystack feel to it.

Given narrow-minded complaints about the modest cost of finding the Investigator shipwreck too quickly, one can only imagine the petty howls if the next one fails to find anything at all.

National Post