The discovery of the Terra Nova shipwreck and Echo the elephant
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We did something that no one else had ever done.
There was such an excitement and energy about this moment. It opened the door for everything that rapidly followed. Witness history. History as told by the people who were there. I was walking in space, the first man ever to do so.
I felt almost insignificant, like a tiny ant compared to the immensity of the universe.
Witness history from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Hello and welcome to the History Hour with Max Pearson, this week's BBC World Service Witness History Stories. Coming up, the long journey that finally took Picasso's Guernica to Spain. We are standing before a tragedy, and if it were possible to capture what it says, it would freeze the blood in our veins. Plus, the invention of the vape, lessons from a famous elderly elephant, and the man behind the rise and rise of new Nordic cuisine.
My ambition was not to build a world-class restaurant. My ambition was to truly impact the everyday cooking culture in Denmark and why not in the Nordics.
That's all coming up later, but before that we've got a good old-fashioned shipwreck story. In 2012, a team of researchers discovered the wreck of one of the most famous polar vessels. The Terra Nova had played a significant part in the history of exploration, most notably as the ship that took Scott of the Antarctic on his doomed early 20th century expedition to the South Pole. The oceanographer Leighton Raleigh has been telling Megan Jones how he and the rest of his crew used sound waves to find the hidden wreck. It was amazing to start that. There was this sense of, wow, we're here, we're finally doing it. There was a palatable excitement on board, but there was also this worry about, would we find it?
It's four o'clock in the morning on the 12th of July 2012. A group of around 30 scientists, technicians and crew are on board the Falkor, a new research vessel from the Schmidt Ocean Institute. They're travelling from Newcastle, a city in England, to the United States via Greenland. In the distance you can see all these mountains covered in snow and it's truly picturesque. The sea was flat calm and there was icebergs drifting on the current, some really big ones. And that got us worried. Oceanographer Leighton Raleigh, who's from Cardiff, the capital of Wales, is part of the Still Half Asleep group. This is the ship's first long voyage, so they're testing some of the technology in an area around 12 by 5 nautical miles, which is about 20 by 10 kilometres.
Every mission that we do in the deep ocean, we generally find new species. It's pretty cool. There is so much that we don't know about the deep ocean. It's not a coincidence they've picked this spot, though, as it's also where they think the shipwreck of the Terra Nova might lie. We were able to get records from the US Coast Guard and slowly narrowed down the location of where that wreck was. A wreck no one's laid eyes on since it sunk almost 70 years earlier. But before that, the Terra Nova was one of the finest polar vessels of its time. Let me give you some quick facts about her. She was built way back in 1884 in Dundee, Scotland, with a thick wooden frame and was about 57 metres long. That's about 187 feet.
Her most famous passengers, Captain Robert Scott and his team. In 1910, she set off from Wales and dropped them off in Antarctica for their South Pole expedition. And although they made it to the pole, they were beaten there by a Norwegian team. On the way back, Scott and his men died, never making it back to the Terranova. The ship kept sailing for decades, but was damaged by ice while carrying supplies to the United States during World War II. In 1943, after nearly 60 years at sea, she sank. Today, Leighton and the team might finally get to see the shipwreck. He's ready and dressed for the occasion. It's amazing you brought this up. Someone had bought me this sailor's jacket, a very distinct sailor's hat and a pipe.
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