HMS Beagle (Possibly) Found

With the Beagle 2 lander lost on Mars, good Beagle-related news has been lacking, until now. British paper The Observer is reporting that the original HMS Beagle, the ship Darwin travelled on during his famous voyage, may have been found. Marine archeologists believe they have found the ship, which has been resting at the bottom of some Essex marshes for the last century.

Comments

Re:And this means what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Finding the Beagle is just historic curiosity. It remained in service for something like fourty or fifty years after Darwin's voyage, first as a coast guard ship, and was later permantly docked as a customs boat. I've heard it was even sold or rented as a houseboat for a while. Even if they recover the ship intact, there won't be any indication that Darwin ever set foot on it.

Re:What the hell was...

[ehiris]

I think we may have solved the mystery of all the crap that goes missing down there.

That "mystery" has already been solved. Statistically there are less ships and aircrafts gone missing there then in other regions of the Atlantic. For example the Atlantic is a lot more dangerous close to the Spanish coast.

Evolution: It's Not Just for Liberals

[handy_vandal]

but I thought it was relevant to the general conversation for you liberal, anti-war zealots out there who actually believe the theory of evolution.

What about conservative American patriots who actually believe the theory of evolution? Not all conversative American patriots are troglodytes, you know.

-kgj

This is the golden age of shipwrecks

[ianscot]

The two superpowers had their various deep benthic submersibles that they've used for stuff like tapping each other's deep-sea cables and pulling up each other's dead subs and so on. (You might want to Read "Blind Man's Bluff" for an okay popular history of that stuff.) Now that the cold war's over, there are private markets for the technology, and the navy's happy to lend its stuff to Robert Ballard to poke around the Meditteranean, looking for history.

Underwater archaeology's taking off as a result. We've had an amazing run of shipwreck-finding, haven't we? Heck, let alone shipe -- we get Black Sea villages that've been preserved in anaerobic environments since "THE flood." All sorts of sailing vessels. Nazi subs. It's a great time to be looking for ships down there. Go down off of the canaries, and you almost have too many ships to choose from.

(William Broad's "The Universe Below" is a decent run through the military history of this stuff, and concentrates more on the shipwrecks side than, say, Richard Ellis's "Deep Atlantic." Broad also considers the legal and ethical problems -- who does a shipwreck from 1500 belong to? Ellis is more about the biology, which is cool too.)