One Warm Line!

NPR had an excellent interview about finding one of the Franklin ships,  and not just excellent because Stan Rogers sang the coda.

This find really makes me redicioulously happy. The search for the Northwest Passage played such a large part of the white settlement of my home.  The logbooks from the Cook expedition (for which Cook Inlet is named), once distributed, shoed the Americans how much the Chinese would pay for furs, doing more than any other book to bring sailing vessels to the North Pacific.  And the Franklin expedition itself?  One of the more complete accounts we have of the early US history of my home town is Lady Franklin Visits Sitka, 1870, an account by Sophia Cracroft of her and her aunt (Lady Jane Franklin) looking for evidence of what happened to the Franklin expedition.

According to one of the many, many articles I have read on this, the British Navy gave the ships to the Canadians about 10 years ago, so there is clear title to the find, and should be very little red tape involved. The ship is fairly well preserved, and it us strongly suspected that much of what was left inside should have remained intact.

Just imagine… just imagine if there were a copy of the logs somehow sealed against the water for 160 years.  I don’t honestly suspect such a treasure, but just imagine if it were there…

Wherever the Canadians end up putting the presumptive museum will very quickly end up on my list of places to visit.