FRIDAY SURPRISE: Dive! Dive! Dive!

Friday, August 29, 2008 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Completely irrelevant, History

Many years ago, I worked with a fellow who'd been raised on the east side of London. His stories about the Thames were romantic and intriguing: you could, he swore, walk along the banks of the river and pick up small items - clay pipes, etc. - that dated back four or five centuries. That wasn't surprising, he said, in a land where a 300-year-old house might be the new one on the block.

I never made it to England to find out if what he said could really be done, but there's no doubt of the history of the country. In our little land we get excited about something that is a mere century old, but in England that probably wouldn't rate a yawn.

Given that the Thames is so historically important, and that it flows through one of the most densely populated areas of the planet, its treasures should be well known. That, however, is not the case. A recent salvage expedition in the Thames Estuary - which is the area where the Thames runs into the North Sea - netted some seven forgotten shipwrecks, ranging from 1940 all the way back to 1665.

The interesting thing to me is that the operation was carried out in waters "up to" 16 meters deep - that's only about 50 feet. You'd think that some of those wrecks would have presented navigational hazards over the years, thus charted and hardly in need of discovery. It's when you combine the size of the Estuary (it's huge), the water visibility (roughly zero), and the extreme tides (up to 13 feet!), you begin to see how such things might get lost.

Check out the article in the UK Daily Mail.

-=[ Grant ]=-
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