Divers Recover Artefacts from 19th-Century Ship in Artic Waters

A team of scuba divers have brought back a collection of items from a 19th century shipwreck that lies eight metres beneath the freezing Arctic waters near Banks Island in the Beaufort Sea.

The artefacts came from the merchant ship, HMS Investigator, and included copper hull plates, a British marine musket, and a pair of shoes. The ship had made two previous voyages to the arctic in the search for Franklin's expedition but it was abandoned in 1853 after getting stuck in the ice.

The team of archaeologists collected the items during a scuba diving trip in July, 2011 and they believe the findings will tell them more about the lost Franklin expedition in 1845.

Marc-Andre Bernier, the Chief of Underwater Archaeology Services, spoke at a news conference last month.

"I've been doing this for over 20 years," he said. "This was probably the most phenomenal and exciting project — for all of us.

"To dive on that shipwreck that is literally frozen in time ... and having this phenomenal ship in front us standing proud on the bottom with artefacts on the deck was for us totally unprecedented.

"It was one of the highlights of our careers."

The Beaufort Sea is not the usual choice for scuba diving holidays but the veteran staff from Park Canada were delighted with the discovery, despite it being located in one of the coldest scuba diving destinations in the world.

During the scuba diving trip in the arctic waters, divers decided to retrieve 16 pieces from the ship in order to protect them from damage and to evaluate their condition.

The hull plates are thought to be of archaeological value and will help identify pieces that have been found elsewhere, and perhaps provide more information towards Franklin's lost ships.

The HMS Investigator was found by a team of scientists, surveyors and archaeologists from Parks Canada last year in Mercy Bay, sitting upright in silt, eight metres underwater without its three masts.

Franklin's ships, HMS Erebus and Terror, have not yet been located but explorers are managing to shrink the search area by 150 square-kilometres every year.

Speaking about Franklin's ships, which are believed to have drifted from their last known locations, Bernier said: "These are national historic sites. They are the only national historic sites for which we don't know the location. So we take this as a responsibility and we are trying to locate, basically, our only unknown historic sites."