Saga of the Northwest Passage & Diving the HMS Investigator

It was well past midnight this past July and the round-the-clock Arctic sun was shining on Mercy Bay. Exhausted Parks Canada archaeologist Ryan Harris was experiencing a rare moment of rest on the rocky beach, looking out over the bay’s dark, ice-studded water. Around him, a dozen red-and-yellow tents lined the shoreline—the only signs of life. Every day for the previous two weeks, work had started by mid-morning and continued nonstop for 16 hours. Night and day had little relevance in the murky, near-freezing waters. Along with Parks Canada’s chief of underwater archaeology, Marc-Andre Bernier, Harris has overseen more than 100 dives at this remote inlet of Banks Island in Aulavik National Park, exploring the wreck of HMS Investigator, a British vessel that has sat on the bottom of the bay for more than 160 years.

Harris and a small team of archaeologists had discovered Investigator in 2010 and returned in 2011 with a larger team to dive, study, and document the wreck, which holds a critical place in the history of Arctic exploration. Twenty-five feet below the surface, Investigator sits upright, intact, and remarkably well preserved. Silt covers everything below the main deck, entombing the officers’ cabins, the ship’s galley, and a full library. The archaeologists had intended to leave the wreck and its artifacts where they had lain since the polar ship was abandoned, trapped in ice, on June 3, 1853. Artifact recovery was not part of their original plan, but that plan changed after their
first few dives.

The team was instantly surprised by the number of artifacts they saw—muskets, shoes, and hunks of copper sheathing rested on Investigator’s upper deck, dangled off the hull, or lay haphazardly on the sediment. Leaving these artifacts behind in Mercy Bay would have made them vulnerable to the icebergs that regularly scour the bay’s floor, including the ones the six man dive team had been dodging since their arrival.

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