18 September 2022: Last week of "official" summer, friends and yet the weather continues picture perfect.... soon enough, we fear, the snow will fly (global warming notwithstanding!) and we'll be dreaming of warm sunny days, past and future. For now, though, a piece from ABC Australia that is kind of near and dear to your 'umble scribe as, about 10 years (maybe 15?) I wrote a book entitled When Fortune Frowns which told the story of HMS Pandora and her travails in the Pacific fetching the Bounty mutineers. In connect with research on that subject, I was privileged to visit the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville (Australia) and see "behind the curtain" courtesy of the Chief Archeologist and Senior Diver, Peter Gesner, in the exploration of the wreck of Pandora. It was an amazing experience. In addition to the images accompanying the ABC Australia article I have included some of my own from my visit to the museum.
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Thousands of underwater films, photographs, hand-drawn maps, field journals and other unseen [ed: I have seen much of it!] archive material are being digitised to bring to light the untold story of the discovery and excavation of the Pandora wreck 120 kilometres east of Cape York.
Curators at the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville believe it's the first time a digitisation project of this scale has been attempted in Queensland.
"This is a once in a lifetime chance to have it all digitised and the fact that it can then be publicly available is just incredible," said the museum's senior curator of maritime archaeology, Dr Maddy McAllister.
HMS Pandora was a 24-gun Royal Navy warship dispatched to the South Pacific to hunt down the mutineers of HMS Bounty, a story etched in seafaring folklore.
Pandora hit the far northern Great Barrier Reef and sank in 1791, taking 35 men down with her.
For almost 200 years, the wreck lay undetected in the Torres Strait until its discovery in 1977.
Australian researchers have been collecting artefacts and information from the site for more than 40 years.
"My favourite piece from the archive collection is the hand drawn site plan from 1986 from the excavations," Dr McAllister said.
"It shows a cannon, jars and hairbrushes, some of the really incredible personal objects that we have in the collection.
"Maritime archaeologists record and record and record lots on information when they are excavating a site."
The Surgeon's watch (author's collection)
The Museum of Tropical Queensland
holds the world's largest collection of artefacts from the shipwreck, with more
than 6,000 stored in archives.
the Captain's stove (author's collection)
"It's making it accessible to
people who don't have the chance to come into the museum or maybe don't have
the opportunity to look at that sort of content," said the museum's
assistant curator of anthropology, Sophie Price.
The museum hopes to complete the digitisation project by mid-2023, but it is painstaking work to convert material stored on outdated devices like floppy disks and analogue slides.
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This is truly a labor of love, as the collection is amazing and extensive. More artifacts would have been recovered had the team not found 3 bodies (skeletons) which they recovered, identified, and reburied, effectively shutting down the site for further exploration. Should any of our readers wish further information on this story (yes, here comes the crass commercialization) please read When Fortune Frowns by William H White - available in paper or digital through Amazon.com.
Until next time.
Fair Winds,
Old Salt
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